Love Apples

Bouchonne's Marrow Escargots: Love & Friendship.

Where have I been?

Ah yes: Food fog.

I'm tripping over my fingers to tell you of all the blissorgasmbliss bits crossing my tongue over the last days, with bliss friends visiting.

I'll start with where we had a starter on Friday: Bouchonné marrow topped escargots. I can never understand people dismissively stating that escargots are merely a vehicle for garlic butter. And your point is...? But marrow trumps this by a quantum scoop.

If the marrow looks pink in the photo it still can't look pink enough. Bouchonné serves it underdone. This had never occurred to me to do, something that puzzles me in retrospect.

A minerally crisp white wine. The compelling waitstaff who I wish would just pull up a chair. A great start to an evening.

Bouchonné is at 9 Fairmount East, on the northeast corner of St-Laurent. +1.514.273.8846.

An Inconvenient New Addiction: Fresh Fennel Seeds

We were staying at B.'s for the night. Breakfast was something I was distinctly looking forward to. A tumble of eggs, and coffee, kids, and needing to dash for ballet lessons, and "where are my shoes?"

On the outside, it might have seemed chaotic--but for me on the inside, it was the great serenity of life that works.

Then in no time, it became serene on the outside too. Just grownups in the garden, looking at how it has changed over summer. How this plant did. How that one didn't. How "flowers that don't have a scent just piss me off," and other such words, their truth, momentarily irrefutable.

In the middle of it, B. pulls off some seeds: "Here. taste this."

I did. Of course I did. And as I did, B. tells me "It's fresh fennel seed. If I could have this as gum, I'd chew it all the time."

Oh yes. Invasion of gentlest fennel. Intense. Green. Wet. I was suddenly needing it every day.

In the photo, the branch that's bare shows the seeds I ate.

Copyright 2008. All rights reserved for photos and text.

Love Apples: the Canning. The 2008 Edition.

Normally canning tomatoes goes like this:

Get up before dawn, without an alarm set, just from the excitement. A sensation not unakin to Christmas morning.

Tie hair back
Brush teeth
Wear something that likes tomato
Tiptoe downstairs
Make tea
Peer outside
Turn on Puccini
Put blanching kettles up to boil
Wash tomatoes

By the time it's Saturday morning for the rest of the world, serious progress has been made. I feel virtuous and aesthetically pleased. I feel like I've been to church.

This year, er, not exactly that.

Everything was off schedule: our house, the market, the lands. We had just gotten home from PEI, and I had placed an order for heirloom San Marzanos. When I saw them, it was love at first sight. Yet to start all of this on a Monday, one day before a Big Family Visit, and work deadlines looming, made for less than ideal conditions.

And so: Wash. Blanch. Grind. Cook. Can. All of it in fits and starts. R. did the bulk of it: early, late, in small spaces in between. It all felt disjointed; hollow; burdensome.

Ah, but then, a moment of grace-- As I was coming home from a late meeting, and several breaths before I turned the key in the front door, I was already able to detect the glorious scent of my tomatoes emanating from every brick and stone: sweet yet, now, burnished; their depth discernable. My senses trilled with them. Is it any wonder they call them love apples? It was the incense of our home. It was church after all.

Copyright 2008. All rights reserved for photos and text.

Plum Plum Tart: A Continental Bridge.

R: People will find it weird that you put food on the floor.

Tori: They won't--they'll only see the plummy and gold tones, and how they love one another.

R: Er. I think that's likely to be what you see.

Tori: [Starts humming.]

***

I only decided to make a plum tart after I'd come home from market. I had bought some Mount Royals, round, dark, wet --meant for breakfast.

As soon as the tart thought occurred, I felt like 1) It HAD TO happen, 2) There was no way I'd have enough plums. (Though come on, Tori, focus, at least *weigh* them: oh well there you go: you don't even have half of what you need. Damn. Damn. Curse-rather-than-weep.) and 3) It was too late to go out again before my desperate need to serve it as part of dinner with friends.

I told myself to let it go--there's plenty of food--but I again had this sense that I needed to make it in order to declare myself home. To ground us all, really.

And if this sounds melodramatic, trust me, it was. (Have I mentioned jetlag? It was jetlag made me do it!!) I was feebly flailing hoping this would make plums spring up from the ground.

But then in the middle of my ineffectual twirls about the kitchen, I opened a cupboard in that distracted one does for lack of what else to do.

Cue floodlights, lyre strains, wing flutters: There was before me a jar of plum preserves I had just made last week, but already forgotten about. It was made with thoughts of deep winter. Instead it lit--that home serving this home--a more symbolic bleakness.

Half a jar went in. SO good. A triumph of the unreasonable.

Copyright 2008. All rights reserved for photos and text.

Same Place Next Year.

There's a unique pang in leaving the places where you're a regular.

And you don't really know how it might change without you.

Copyright 2008. All rights reserved for photos and text.

Budapest Breakfast: Foie Gras.

I often wonder how much of an expensive treat one might choose to eat if it were always available for cheaps.

I got to know my answer for lobster and caviar, having lived in times and places where they were abundant. (The answer? LOTS.) I suspect much the same would be true for best Graves and truffles were I given the chance to find out. (Won't someone please need me to know this!?!)

In profusion here is foie gras. Last I bought it, $17 for a glorious 700g. For years, I've proven what find breakfast food it makes when I'm here, and I can. The best moment is when you forget that it's a privileged occurrence, and all you're left with is melting cool deliciousness.

The photo shows, too, how much goose fat the bread likes first. (Erm.)

I also speculate how much might I would be willing to dish out for, say, garlic mashed potatoes if priced in double digits for an ounce, but I hope never to have to find out...

[Incidentally, be it duck or goose, Hungarian foie gras is often what's labelled Produit de France once enough value-added through processing and tinning.]

Canelés, Macarons, and Red Boxes

The joys of French friends visiting: Canelés (note how they are bien cuit and mi-cuit) and macarons.

Workspace Chocolate.

There are some things one finds out about yourself when one's cleaning up. Surely this is an ignored reason for our compulsion to avoid doing it: self-knowledge often irks.

We're expecting a good friend to stay with us here in Budapest. The flat's in good shape, plus she knows us well, plus she doesn't care, but I did think my work/reading space could use some tidying.

Tidying, ever fraught.
This time round I've discovered that:

1. I'm fond of the first snap of the chocolate tablet, and the first bite. I'm apparently much less so of subsequent ones, least so of the last.

2. I could use more variety in my life. Côte d'Or not my favourite, but I've (it's now apparent) become weary of disappointment, or of shopping for better.

3. I eat A LOT of chocolate.

Tori the Addict: the Butter Fridge

1) People tend to be blind to some of your shortcomings when they're all blissed out on chocolate or duck fat.

2)There's a lot of surplus when you're lost to the crazy waves of MUST MAKE X, and so friends get to walk off with some loot. People like loot.

3)It's also popular-making that I'm willing to suspend near anything when a friend has a compelling food query. (And heartfelt apologies for those of you who've stood on the other side and heard me say in so many words: "Sorry. Gonna be late. But I'm saving lives!" when we all know I'm merely saving supper: in the middle of it all--or possibly ever--I'm not the best judge of scale. And I somehow always choose to keep basking in things said in the heat of the moment.)

But then, there's a darker side: the moments when your friends discover you're passion for food is a bit scary to them. This usually dawns after an innocent start: say, where I'm asked how I made something. The problem is mostly that I just don't know when to stop talking. As my obsessing is not scary to me, I don't have the best gauge of how far's too far, though I’m trying to guess at this better. I've now surmised that anything which includes the words "10 days" sets friends off, or, weirdly, the word "lard."

For our many years together, R. has come to know how deep this current of extremes runs in me. Though he knows that I still go to some lengths to protect him from the truth that he has made his life with someone who's very comfortable swimming way past the deep end.

Sadly one of my dams broke yesterday. It held for 4 years, since we got the tiny fridge to "complement the one downstairs," for our small Budapest flat.

We had come from market. R. was asking what should go in which fridge, the big one downstairs, or the tiny one in our flat. To everything I answered "downstairs." Only to "Butter?" did I answer "the fridge in the flat." We didn't discuss it further. We went about our morning. Suddenly, while we were walking, I see him turn his head in the way that tells me he's had a sudden thought. Uh-oh.

R.: "Tori. [Pause pause.] Do you mean...we...only got the upstairs fridge to store butter."

Tori: "Erm."

R: "But WHY???"

Tori: "Well... Butter tastes like other foods, otherwise."

R: [Bewildered, though amused, pause.]

Tori: "We keep do Champagne in there as well. But have you tasted our butter?!?!."

Indulgence. Lattes.

I hate to admit it, but I often have a knowing smirky smile when I notice someone eating something that I associate with the infantile. I enjoy watching it; I even feed the habit. In fact, I suspect I have whole relationships built around my desire to indulge it. Yet in the back of my mind, I've a thought that goes with the smile: I'm so glad you like it, now when are you going to grow up?

Don't tell me it's wrong. I KNOW it's wrong. Very very. Should. stop. right. now.

Milk chocolate. Candy of any kind, even toffees. Popsicles. Chocolate Milk. Ice cream. Gum. They all do it to me.

And it's not that I can never be found elbow-deep in a box of milk chocolate bonbons, especially if the box is marked Neuhaus. And for the love my friends have of them, my involvement is extensive: I even made marshmallows by hand once wanting to make the perfect hot chocolate to soothe a tired friend. Nevertheless, even in those moments, I see the adult eating the treat before me, but really I see a toddler version of them, same-clothes same-glasses same-room eating it just the same way, and I inwardly smile my obnoxious smile.

Change the milk chocolate to anything 70% +. Or thaw the ice from the cream and make it crème brulée or even the more pudding-like pot de crème, and the adult is back, and my smirk goes.

There's one place, though, where I feel the eyes of the Cheshire cat on me. And I want it known that I've no intention of growing up. Café au lait. Lattes. Or here, Tejes Kavé. While R. orders his second double espresso right now next to me, I drink my tall frothy cowy drink. Sweet as mother's milk without the addition of sugar. Go ahead, call me a kid. Here I am one.

Rosemary Is for Remembrance. Only I Forget.

I l-o-o-ve rosemary. We grow it on our small upstairs balcony. I break off a bit of a branch when I go by it, and munch. I admit it's not for the wimpy. It does taste something of the coniferous. It's a bit twiggy in the mouth. Only to my obsessional thinking, this adds to the experience.

Of course in lamb. And I can't think of socca without it. And for a sort of remembrance cake I've made for sad occasions that need subtle marking. And.… And.... And.... I've even taken to tucking some in the phone pocket of my briefcase, to use in lieu of mints.

It's a source of automatic joy to me. I don’t question it. Who wouldn’t like it?

Last weekend, I flew some with me, bursting with immoderate pride to ----'s cottage. She said a quiet thank-you just in passing, but hey... I'm used to being around friends who are less crazed than I am re. food. A few days later, still at the cottage, I notice we haven't used it, and it's at the point of passing beyond reach into herby heaven.

I say aloud that we need do something with it quickly. She tells me, amused that we're here again: that for 16 years I've knitted much of my life to hers, and yet I keep forgetting she hates rosemary.

"Really?????"

"Oooh really."

"Who doesn't like rosemary??"

"Er… I don't."

Then I remembered my brother doesn't like dill. Something else my pink-eyeglasses-wearing brain rejects. Who doesn't like dill?