Gustatory Pleasure

Normally I eat very simply. I eat two of my three meals a day at work and part of my evening ritual every night is to make my breakfast and lunch for the next day and to pack everything into little containers, all ready to go. I eat lots of multi-grain cereal, grapefruit, FAGE 0% yogurt with honey, and baby carrots. I cook two or so nights a week and usually make a stir-fry or a soup or something earnestly hippie that I can eat for a couple of days. I’m just at the tail end of a whole-wheat-pasta-and-broccoli-with-peanut sauce thing I made last week and I’ll probably eat spinach salad with dried cranberries and blue cheese for the rest of this week. I still eat frozen stuff from Trader Joe’s all the time but I am getting way better about eating fresh food and have come to a happy place in my life where, when I consider what type of snack I’d like to eat, I as often as not go “Pink Lady apple? AW YEAH.”

All this is to say that my food life is a friendly and yummy but relatively straightforward one. When I go to New York to visit my dad we usually eat somewhere schmancy at least once but I happen to like his Italian cooking better than any restaurant’s so I usually ask for that over going out. I’m familiar with over-the-top cookbook prose (“I was eighteen in 1963, in Provence for the first, but not the last, time. I passed a gap in a lavender hedge on the path to the sea and saw inside a tiny courtyard with an ancient stone table bestrewn with roses. I was drunk on sunlight and the smells emanating from the kitchen, I made my way to its open door, where a tiny apple-wrinkled old grandmother stirred a pot of heavenly proportions over the fire. Wordless, I accepted a bowl from her, took my first enchanted bite, and thus the shape of my destiny was born.”) and I know what a roux, demi-glace, and reduction are. I know about donut peaches and cave-aged cheese and ganache. I can’t make most of those things …in fact I can’t even roast a chicken properly…and I certainly don’t buy them most of the time, but I can eat them very happily, whenever I get the chance, which is admittedly not as often as I’d like.

Enter my cousin David. My cousin David, who calls me “darlin’” and who is like my new best friend. He came to my birthday party and then we all went to dinner at his house when my mom was in town a couple of weeks ago and I borrowed a bunch of movies from him and we’ve been talking about going to shows and going to dinner and going to Portland. He’s a lot of fun. As I’ve mentioned multiple times recently, I haven’t had much to do with any of the people on either side of my family for most of my life, so it’s been really cool to get to know him and to hang out together. We come from pretty different backgrounds in some ways but we’re beginning to find out we have stuff in common too. I really like talking about boys with him because, as a single guy, he has good insights and helpful information (“Dude, that is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard of”) and as my cousin, there’s no weirdness where he might think that I’m flirting with him or whatever. It’s sort of what I imagine having a brother would be like, if I had a brother, and if my brother had a shaved head, a Harley, and pierced nipples.

Anyway, an integral part of David’s plans to take over the world has to do with his apprenticing with a very cool chef he knows called Gabe.

I guess they met when David took a cooking class from him at Chef Gabe’s awesome cooking school and they eventually decided to make it a formal apprentice relationship. Apparently my cousin spends a lot of time doing kitchen chores and on his knife skills and working on his palate and also on just basic cooking techniques, building up a repertoire of dishes as he goes. He says he has a white chef’s jacket and everything. I think that this is a very excellent idea, not just because I firmly support everyone I know’s continuing food education so that I may reap the delicious benefits, but also because it’s a cool thing to do. Apprenticeship! How very old world!

David decided to have Chef Gabe cook him up a fantastic dinner to celebrate his and some other friends’ birthdays, and when I was at his house a couple of weeks ago, he invited me too. I was not exactly sure what I was in for but I am always happy to be included in food-based activities, as my ass will tell you, and the generosity of my aunt and cousin allowed me to be in on this one. So yesterday I put on a cute dress and went on down to Boulevard Park, listening to this ridiculous Tainted-Love-y song that I have been loving lately five times on repeat. I was very happy to see my Aunt Diane and cousin Michael, who live in Salem, Oregon and who’d driven up for the party.

We rolled up at the house and were immediately greeted by a group of David’s friends and offered various multicolored alcoholic drinks. (I had some sort of sparkling juice thing). And then…well, it’s hard to explain.

First we had some nice artichoke leaves with saffron aioli. I had a little explaining to do to my table-mates when I pulled out the camera. “I’m food-blogging this,” I said. “You’re what?” they replied. I guess I have some explaining to do to my readers too, which is to tell you that I am the worst photographer the world has ever known and I clearly have not mastered my new(ish) camera yet, as I forgot to put the flash on for a couple of these.

Then came the meatsicles. They are glorified, glorious bacon-wrapped dates, to which I was introduced last year in Chicago and which have held a special place in my heart ever since. These particular dates were stuffed with goat cheese and then wrapped in prosciutto and skewered on a breadstick, creating, perhaps, the perfect snack. I’m vegetarian about 85% of the time but when they bring out the meat pops you just lay all that nonsense aside for the evening and get down to business, you know?

Then we had soup. I forgot to take a picture of the eetsy beetsy weetsy little pitcher of tarragon-mint-basil pistou (which is French pesto) that this came with. It was very cute, and very yummy. (David, apparently, created the “cantaloupe pearls” that you can sort of blurrily see there).

And here we have a gorgeous little pissaladiere, with caramelized onions and anchovy cream.

This was possibly my favorite dish of the night, a fennel-asparagus-mushroom salad. This was about the time that I began to overuse the phrase “blow my mind” in reaction to every course as they rolled out of the kitchen. You can see I barely managed to put my fork down to take the picture…by this point my tablemates were all “DON’T FORGET TO TAKE THE PICTURE OF YOUR FOOD, FOOD BLOGGER.” We’re about an hour and a half into the dinner at this point, with four delectable hours to go.

Okay. Get ready. Are you ready? This is the charcuterie plate, lovingly presented on slab of slate that David was in the middle of buying at Lowe’s when I showed up at his house. This is all house-made: pate with balsamic/port reduction, duck proscuitto, cappacola, saucisson sec, fried pancetta, baby salami, Meyer lemon marmalade (rocked my WORLD), caper berries, and homemade pear mustard. I’ll give you a minute to absorb all that.

You’ll have to take my word for the fact that this is a picture of my very first foie gras, moments before I stuffed the whole thing in my mouth with my bare hands, moaning ecstatically the entire time, juices running down my face. (That really is an enormous goose liver I’m talking about, not a euphemism for something dirty). It’s accompanied here with roasted Muscat grapes. I love grapes and I love roasted things but I haven’t ever put them together. I don’t know what I was thinking because the roasted grapes, they are wonderful. One of the things I liked best about this dinner, by the way, was how the flavors came together; some of them were a little new to me but all of them were accessible, all of them made sense, and all of them were fantastic.

And here is some more organ meat, which I’d never had before at all but which I found worryingly palatable. This is, indeed, chicken livers and fava beans.

(I am not telling you what we had to drink with this.)

This is a lovely piece of lamb and what I believe was an artichoke bottom stuffed with a little ratatouille and then topped with an adorable savonette potato. Lavender demi-glace, that big beautiful pool of sauce is.

And once again I fail to realize the flash was off, thereby obscuring the simple pleasures of a nice Roquefort soufflé with some house-made fig bread. Blue cheese and figs, two of my great loves, brought together in the dark. While we were busy snorfing this up Chef Gabe came around with some more of the balsamic-port reduction sauce from the pate we’d had with the charcuterie and squoogled some on everyone’s plate, which I subsequently proceeded to lick clean.

Dessert! This is…you may want to sit down for this…white truffle ice cream with walnuts and Armagnac-soaked prunes. This was a hard sell for several of my tablemates but damn it was good. I did several of the truffle-haters a favor by finishing their servings because that’s the kind of giver I am. I have a tiny bottle of white truffle oil somewhere in my kitchen, actually, which was a very lovely birthday gift one year from a very cultured friend, and I’ve never known what exactly to do with it. Now I know that I should just use it to…make ice cream, of course! It was a really cool sensory taste experience, because the ice cream is all cool and sweet but there’s this very earthy undertone that’s pretty subtle to an inexperienced palate like mine but deeply yummy nonetheless. The prunes almost killed me because they were soaked in so much booze but they too were fabulous.

But Chef Gabe, my friends, isn’t done yet. He’s not done until you have a cardiac arrect right there on the table amongst the Riedel, a smile lingering on your sauce-smeared face. Here’s a little sweets plate that he sneaked into the menu just because he’s Chef Gabe and you will do like he tells you. It’s hard to see but what we have here are: Scharffenberger chocolate truffles with either boozy cherries or olive oil and salt (more on this later), honey-almond croccante, homemade marshmallows wrapped around chocolate and dipped in graham cracker crumbs (you heard me), and ginger snaps made with…gloves off, now.. BACON FAT. The marshmallows and the croccante were stupendous, and I ate about five ginger snaps just for the street cred, but the love of my heart was reserved in this instance for the olive-oil-and-salt chocolate truffles. I was raised to believe that olive oil makes anything better, a precept by which I stand to this day, but…well, see, the problem was that my vision was too limited. I had been content, in what I now see as my blind and ignorant life, to merely pour olive oil on vegetables, pasta, meat, soup, bread, and directly into my mouth. I’d thought I’d been living pretty well, as a matter of fact. Stupid, stupid. It never even occurred to me that you can put olive oil on chocolate and still be within the confines of the law. I can’t explain this to you. I don’t even want to explain this to you. Just…okay, the next time you make truffles, or even the next time you have chocolate gelato from that place near the Pike Place Market, put on some of your nicest extra-virgin on there, just a drizzle I’m guessing, and then the merest whisper of a sprinkle of your very best non-blue-canister salt. Before you do so, gather your loved ones to you and give them your blessings, because once you put a chocolate truffle drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with salt in your mouth, you are going to die and go to heaven and you’ll want your affairs in order, I’m sure.

We had such a good time. I didn’t get to spend as much time with my aunt as I’d have liked but I did get to chat with Michael some during the truffle ice cream and I also got to hang out with a lot of David’s friends, all of whom were very lovely and funny and pretty. I spent a tiny bit of time talking to Chef Gabe and Chef Gabe’s wife and Chef Gabe’ six-month old baby, and quite a lot of time just sitting back and rolling my eyes back into my head with unfettered delight, slighty unable to believe that food can taste so good. Or even that life can be so good, that an evening can be built around gustatory pleasure and that the food and wine and music and conversation and late evening light and friends and family can combine so easily and naturally, can make everyone feel that this is the heart of being alive.

It was a wonderful night. I’m so grateful to my cousin David for being born, and to my aunt Diane for giving birth to him and to my cousin Michael for agreeing to switch seats with someone at my table so we could have dessert together, and to all the nice people I sat at table with for being cool and interesting and articulate, and to Chef Gabe for rocking my world and for forcing me to roll physically onto the bus this morning wearing my biggest pants. All those things made last evening one of the most deeply enjoyable I’ve ever had.