What We Eat When We Eat Alone - Deborah Madison [33]
While I’m trying to grasp exactly where this is going, our acquaintance reveals that he is in possession of the most essential ingredient for all good cooks—a garden.
“Next,” he continues, “I look out in the garden to see what’s there. Sometimes we have wild sorrel, two or three kinds. If I’m lucky there will be horse mushrooms. But generally I want a bit more greenery, like cabbage. I chop it and eat it raw with a bit of olive oil and untoasted caraway seeds. I may put some of the seeds in the pan when I’m cooking the sorrel,” he muses. “And I’ll probably fry the chop with some onion, then have more chopped onion on the side. The chile is going in the marinade, and some of it’s going on the chop as I fry it.”
We’ve lost track of the dish, but I think we’ve ended up with a lamb chop with tingle-and-burn spices, a dab of sorrel with caraway seeds, raw chopped onion, and some cabbage on the side. No parsnips, after all. Dessert, once he gets there, is ice cream with maple syrup. Whew!
We happen to know a few men who are both artists and ranchers, and a few others who combine writing and farming, difficult and generally low-margin careers, all, with few exceptions. One is artist-rancher James Turrell. James has been known to call himself a “light heavyweight.” An artist who uses light as his medium, James injects light from lunar and solar sources into the interior of a spent volcanic cinder cone called Roden Crater. His cattle roam on thousands of dry-grass acres in the general vicinity of the crater, and artists from all over the world have made the pilgrimage to this extinct, bicolored volcano. When we stopped by to visit a few years ago, he served us beef for dinner and beef for breakfast as well as lunch the next day. Ranchers’ fare. I’ve learned through doing vegetarian cooking classes for the wives of Texas ranchers that the beef-beef-beef menu is not all that uncommon.
James’s favorite beef dish is smoked beef with special sauce. “I resort to the smoking and basting thing,” he confesses. “Fire up the smoker in the afternoon. Put on the meat. I like tenderloin. Flank and brisket I like as well, but tenderloin is all I eat. I’ll have a salad with crumbled blue cheese. No potato. I stay away from the carbs. And no steak sauce compares with whiskey.” And that’s the special sauce. It can go on the meat or in the mouth. Or both.
Another rancher, Hugh Fitzsimmons—who is not an artist but who was once a high school history teacher—raises bison in south Texas. Hugh says, “When I eat alone I usually have a bison burger on an English muffin.” That’s not so surprising; he loves bison and he has a freezer full of it. But there’s a trick to cooking it that Hugh has taught us.
“Go low and slow,” he intones. “Don’t hurry, and keep that heat turned way down.” That way this very lean meat retains its tenderness. And that goes for all the other bison cuts he’s been known to cook as well. (Incidentally, Hugh’s bison isn’t just any old buffalo. In 2007, Thunderheart Bison was the blue ribbon winner in the Gallo meat and charcuterie show in New York.)
Kaftes, or keftes (spellings vary by region), are basically meatballs wrapped around skewers and then grilled. Sari Abul-Jubein, the owner of Casablanca restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, rustles up kaftes for his solitary meals. He seasons ground lamb with minced onion, cumin, allspice, chopped parsley, and pine nuts. They are really very good and not nearly as dense as other meat dishes.
“You make balls of the meat and squeeze the liquid out of them, skewer them, then put them on the grill,” explains Sari. “They make a meal that’s great to share with others or to enjoy alone. I have a salad with them, a tomato salad with onion, mint, olive oil, and lemon. Or a yogurt salad with cucumber, garlic, and mint.”
This might well be the most wholesome of the men’s meat meals we uncovered. The kaftes are smallish, the vegetables plentiful.