Monday, August 28, 2006

A simple dedication

In the good days I would work with Morgan in the kitchen and I felt very secure in the knowledge of limitless possibility. He had a lazy grace about him and always moved very slowly so it seemed that he did not care about the cooking. But he always cared, and for him the point of it all was in the planning and the making of the meal. He was more alive in the kitchen than at the dinner table.

What Morgan really had was the discipline to always respect the food. I never saw him cut any corners or settle for the easy option when it was not the right one. He would do the best things he could with the ingredients and the tools that he had, and he worked with a simple dedication that was oblivious to time and effort and all the other little things that you needed to sacrifice to make a great meal.

It was Morgan who showed me that red pepper and basil go extremely well together, and we had made on more than one occasion tilapia fillets with red pepper-basil tapenade. It was the first of the recipes we had dreamed up together that I had written down in my notebook and it was the one that I turned to two nights ago when Natalia and Matt and Hunter came over for dinner. To start I made mussels in a saffron and white wine broth and I paired the tilapia with a lemon asparagus risotto. It was nothing I had not done before so I gave myself an hour to prep and make everything.

As I diced the red pepper I was thinking about the night ahead and what we would do after dinner. I opened the wine and sipped on it – the chef’s prerogative – as I stirred the broth in which I would cook the mussels. There is no radio in my kitchen but I put some tango nuevo on the stereo in the living room and it made me feel like I was dancing as I moved around the kitchen.

I ended up having less time than I thought because I stepped out to send a work email I had forgotten to take care of earlier. Risotto is a dish that consumes a lot of attention because to cook every grain you must stir it constantly over controlled, medium heat. Sadly I probably did not give it the attention it deserved even though it came out quite passable. The mussels also did not taste as good as the first time I had made the recipe; and I felt badly about the tilapia because I had intended on breading them but did not have the time to do so.

I had treated making the meal very lightly and now that it was done I felt very hollow inside. It was not anywhere near what it could have been and that had come about because I did not respect the food. I had been in a hurry and had wanted above anything to put the meal on the table and I did not concentrate on the making of the food like I should have. We ate and it was good nonetheless because the company was charming but I woke up the next morning feeling quite disgusted with myself.

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