When a recipe goes viral, it can give rise to a sense of community that is almost physically tangible.
Hello from week two of sheltering in place in Oakland.
Yesterday I walked a mile or so to a tiny market by the lake and paid four bucks for a single can of cannellini beans so I can make this soup today. I've been wanting to make it for awhile but didn't have canned beans on hand when the shelter in place order kicked in last week and the big grocery store nearby ran dry of bunker basics. (I had about ten kinds of dried, tinned and smoked fish in my pantry, though. Priorities.)
The recipe is adaptable, basically foolproof and easy to understand even if you don't really know how to cook. Every time I make this soup, my apartment smells so good I think "Wow, I really know what I'm doing with this whole cooking thing," which I don't think often even though I really know how to cook and generally know what I'm doing. I can eat this soup for a week without getting bored of it.
The recipe itself comes after a thoughtful essay that you can skip if you only care about soup.
I’ve seen that price for half-frozen, uncooked killed crab, but these guys were still alive and kicking, if a little sluggish after a day in a small unaerated bin on the sidewalk. I smiled at the lady in a poncho who was stationed next to the bin, held up a finger for “one,” and she picked one out with her tongs and flipped it over for me to check out. I nodded, she bagged it, and I dived into the store to check for chicken livers and get rung up and came back out with an extra whole silkie chicken because I was so sprung on being back on my food turf after several days in Denver, which is all about white people putting bacon on everything that isn’t bison or trout.
Don’t get me wrong, I love bison — trout, too — but for me home will always be a place where it’s easier to find pho, soul food, mole, ramen or a squirming crab the size of a dinner plate than a burger.
There’s also bergamot limoncello, but it tastes a little like soap — expensive, very fancy soap, but still soap — so I’m trying to get the flavor dialed in.
While I was googling savory cocktails on my lunch break, I got two freelance inquiries today: one about developing a WordPress web site, and another asking me to devise "aperitifs and dessert drinks that can be poured by robots."
Bees are weird, in that way anyone who grows up with the mythos of the rugged individualist thinks they're weird. There are so, so, so many of them and they're so, so organized, but in a freeform, slightly haphazard way.
We like to think of ants and bees as precise, but it's not the precision of craftsmanship; it's the precision of thousands of unskilled hands repeating the same simple process over and over. They're a triumph of instinct. Drones live six weeks and martyr themselves at the drop of a hat, once they've started stinging, which made me feel less bad about the flat crunch of dozens of little bodies giving way whenever one of us made a wrong move with the hives.
When I think "beehive," I think of perfect, idealized hexagons, but real live combs have an irregular rhythm to them. They flow around and across physical space in a way that looks like a Buckminster Fuller dome that's been squashed at a party by a clumsy drunk, apologetically stretched out with fumbling hands and set back down about where it started.
Granted, some of that impression was probably due to the types of bees I saw and the fact that the hives could've, as I was apologetically told a half-dozen times, stood to be better maintained before we drew honey from them, but it was still pretty alien. So was the sound: a steady, thick drone that, when I leaned in close to the hive, I heard as a high-pitched, boiling sizzle. Lean back out, and the high frequencies of thousands and thousands of tiny wings would drop off, leaving behind that low unplugged-amplifier growl. Most bizarre Doppler shift I've heard in my life.
Also, you can chew straight-up honeycomb like chewing gum, and it's pretty pleasant. If you like your chewing gum a little crumbly and stiff, anyway.
Interesting things to ponder while I laid down smoke for my friend and did my level best to recite that entire Eddie Izzard sketch from memory.
Haven't changed it much in the intervening months; Nowadays I'd use coconut cream instead of coconut milk, because the Smart and Final by my house sells shelf-stable unsweetened coconut cream tetra paks, and because that shit is basically magic. Know what happens if you forget an opened carton of dairy cream in the back of the fridge for two weeks? Clumpy nightmares. This stuff? Coconut yogurt. Lately if I'm in a mood for dessert, I'll take a shot glass full on its own.
Also I'm out of that piquillo pesto. Stuff was delicious.
I didn't write down any amounts or much in the way of directions because dude, it's grits, but if you need your hand held, here you go: Prepare the grits with coconut milk or half water / half coconut cream for the liquid; stir in a handful of cheddar; add a few pinches of smoked paprika, damn the hipsters; throw in some salt, which goes without saying but probably should've been said in the recipe; and drizzle on some maple syrup -- not enough to drown out the salt/smoke/savory, but enough to last you through the last few bites.
PBR Fisher is rolling back slowly toward the stove after spending the year after the death of PBR Fisher's mother failing to innovate in the kitchen and mostly drinking neat whiskey and ordering takeout. Dad taught PBR Fisher how to make a grilled cheese sandwich at the age of 4, but Mom was the reason PBR Fisher's childhood analog of mac 'n' cheese from a box was champignons à la crème, liverwurst or Gruyère on toast. Here. Have a book review instead of a real update.
PBR Fisher is reading Food and Trembling and officially book- and blog--crushing on Jonah Campbell, especially the post-vegan pantry staples, paralyzing self-criticism of one's mastery of sauces, high-flying philosophy, salt-hound palate, easy vernacular, gustatory sentimentality and unremitting cussing. Also Campbell digs Hauschka, which is pretty fucking dreamy. Have you heard Hauschka? So dreamy.
Plus, you can't hate on anything with a blurb from Joey Comeau on the back cover: "This book is the Fear and Loathing of food writing: thoughtful, vulgar, and hard to describe, but it is never boring." (You know Comeau's on Tumblr, right?)
Observe:
See, I used to be sick a lot, and this really fostered an antagonistic Cartesian split in my life. It basically goes like this: I get sick, and then am all like "WTF, BODY? I treat you well with whole grains and some other healthy nonsense and this is how you go and do me? Well how do you like this?" as I stuff a fistful of chips into my mouth, "and THIS!" the next fistful of chips, and so on, until I have eaten an entire bag of Ruffles or whatever it is. And for a moment I feel a perverse sort of victory that is part sheer delight at having tasted delicious chips for such an extended period of time, part the guilty pleasure that comes with eating an entire bag of chips (not unlike the shameful self satisfaction of spending a months' rent on booze), and part mad Flagellant monk triumph over the body that says "Hey body, what's up? Bet you feel like shit, eh? Well, how you like me now?! Remember, I made you (untrue, admittedly) and I can unmake you, never forget that." As if you're teaching your stupid body some sort of lesson for being self-preserving enough to get sick. It's really insane, but that's how it goes.
PBR Fisher is feeling hella weird about the use of the third person throughout but figures it's too late in the game to abandon it now, and notes that it is fucking gratifying reading a breakdown of comfort food from someone with a nearly Buddhist sense of the futility of comfort.
(Photo from this worthy interview at Swallow Daily.)
As in, Americans seem to have no idea what this thing is. But whatever!
As in, the photogenic little British jam-filled shortbread cookie.
As in, The Doctor's favorite biscuit. [See Figure 2.]
Figure 2: Do you feel lucky, punks? Well, do ya?
Cool! So now we all know what a Jammie Dodger is. But I'm betting not many of you know about flips. They're a very old cocktail, dating to the late 1600s, when sailors made themselves frothy drinks at sea by stirring sugared booze with a red-hot iron. The drink got a proper spot in the bar books a couple centuries later, minus the hot poker and with the froth coming from a different source: eggs.
Eggs have a solid place in cocktail history, and only fell out of favor in the second half of this century, right around the time we all decided vodka was awesome. (I dunno. We were stupid.) Throw in a couple of thankfully-no-longer-relevant salmonella scares from a few decades ago, and raw eggs in cocktails have become sort of a hard sell, even though you're far more likely to hurt yourself slipping in the shower than eating raw eggs.
Yeah. Eggs. Raw. But stay with me; They're in a flip for a reason. When you shake the hell out of a drink, the eggs and water emulsify into a thick, rich froth. It's kinda like latte foam. You like latte foam, right? Then you'll like this.
Because seriously guys, this drink TASTES LIKE A JAMMIE DODGER.
Jammie Dodger Flip
Makes two small "Wow, this is all booze? You don't even taste it. Let's make more! This is great! Wait, why are you standing sideways on the wall? Oh no, I must be lying on the floor. That explains the 'going very fast' feeling and then the loud noise right under my head" drinks.
1 oz. Chambord
1 oz. Frangelico
1 oz. bourbon
1/2 oz. Tuaca
1/2 oz. simple syrup
1 egg
Crack the egg into a shaker and add the rest of the ingredients. Next comes the dry shake: Shake until you get a thick, creamy foam, which takes a bare minimum of two and all the way up to five minutes of energetic work using the shaker, or about ten seconds on the highest setting of a blender -- your choice. (If you use a blender, transfer to a shaker for the next step.)
Add ice to the shaker and shake until chilled -- at least 30 seconds, until the shaker feels really cold to the touch -- and strain into a glass. If you're feeling extra snazzy, give the foam a few seconds to settle and then draw a little heart in the center using an eyedropper filled with Peychaud's bitters.
If anyone asks you why the drink is a funny color -- the liquid under the foam is a very, very pale browny-purple -- let 'em know it's the Chambord. They won't care at all after the first sip.
Hat tip to Sonic Biro for the Jammie Dodger screenshot!
I'm a dork, so here's a cocktail inspired by a frankly gorgeous word from the Neil Gaiman-penned episode "The Doctor's Wife": petrichor, the smell of rain falling on dry ground.
[Skip to recipe]
Doesn't that make you think "cocktail"? Sure it does!
This drink, guys. This drink. It starts out dark, almost musty, what with the rye, which always smells in the best possible way like old books; the cactusy smoke of the mezcal; and the saddle-leather musk of smoked tea, but it finishes herbal and a little ozone-y and sort of ... resiny green. You know how the high desert smells like creosote and dust when it's hot? It's not like that at all. But it's wonderful.
A Very Wordy Note About Sourcing
The absinthe choice isn't crucial, and probably any peaty scotch would do (maybe not as strong as the campfire stink of Laphroig, but you get the idea). But the dry rye flavor of the gin and the clean, mineral-y smoke of the mezcal do most of the heavy lifting here, and the drink wouldn't be the same without these exact spirits.
You won't find St. George or Del Maguey at the kind of liquor store that sells cigarettes and porn and ice cream and condoms — and bless those stores, where would we be without them but unfucked and ice-cream-less at midnight, which is a sad state of affairs — but your favorite decent specialty liquor store should carry them, somewhat nearer the top of the shelf than the floor where the blended whiskey in plastic bottles and the truly regrettable vodkas live. If you don't already have a favorite decent booze store, find one and befriend it as soon as possible.
Shake ingredients over ice until properly chilled. Strain into a cocktail glass or a sake cup or, like with every drink I make at my place that doesn't get photographed, a mason jar.
Lapsang souchong simple syrup
Makes about 1 c. Based on a recipe here.
1 c. sugar
1 c. water
1/2 c. loose lapsang souchong tea leaves
Bring sugar and water to a gentle boil, stirring until sugar is dissolved. Turn heat down, add tea and simmer, covered, for about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Let cool, then strain into a container. Should keep for a couple weeks in the fridge.
(This recipe doesn't come with a photo of salad because THAT'S JUST PLAYING THE BASTARDS' OWN GAME.)
Let's talk about the phrase "a beautiful salad."
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I'm not making up this phrase. I hate it. Loathe it. Imagine it taking human form and dying alone and unloved after a long life of betrayal and unhappiness earned by its own annoying, disingenuous, secretly fascist ethos. Fuck you, "beautiful salad."
It's not that I hate salad, per se. Salad, like casserole, can be anything. I like salad. What I don't like is been seen eating salad. I'm a woman, which means I can't eat a damn thing without someone making what's on my fork into a statement about me as a person. At the grocery store, if someone spots vegetables in my checkout pile, I get a wistful sigh and a "Look at all those vegetables! You're so healthy!" When I brought salad to my old job for lunch, women would sigh and say "Oh, a salad? You're so good!"
"I don't think it works like that," I'd say. "If eating salad made me a good person, I'd have to eat salads the size of a Studebaker."
In our screwy culture, "healthy" equals "virtuous and happy," and the whole stupid attitude reaches its crisp, judgy, orthorexic peak in salad. Eat salad, be a better person! Happy people eat salad! And, since you can't even cram leaf fronds in your pie hole without worrying about whether you're doing it prettily enough, make sure it's a "beautiful salad."
Personally, I'm more interested in the salad version of the fast-talking '90s romantic-comedy sidekick: sardonic, sharp, pungent, and way more interesting than the boring lead romantic interest. Think, like, Janeane Garofalo in Reality Bites, or Banky in Chasing Amy.
So: Here is a salad. The Caesar-influenced dressing packs a fucking wallop thanks to multiple umami-heavy ingredients and a ton of raw garlic, and it has a mellow, creamy taste that makes my toes curl. It goes well on things like steamed vegetables, but if you are a venal, no-good person of suspect moral fiber, put it on French fries.
Lurid Salad
Dressing
Yields around 1 c dressing.
1 salt-packed anchovy. You can substitute 1/2 - 1 tsp fish sauce, or swap in about half a teaspoon or so of nutritional yeast for a vegan dressing, but you really ought to try anchovy if you can. Buy them online; make them yourself, if you have fresh ingredients and more than a month; check your favorite Italian or Greek grocery; or, if you're in the East Bay, grab them off the top of the seafood counter at Berkeley Bowl.
4 tbs white vinegar
4 tsp white miso
4 tsp tahini
2 tsp dark molasses
2 tsp whole-seed mustard
4 cloves raw garlic, minced or grated (For a non-spicy, less pungent version, try black garlic instead.)
a pinch or two of salt, depending on the saltiness of the fish
a couple pinches of black pepper
Wipe most of the salt off the anchovy and pull off any fins. Cut or bend it at the tail to expose the vertebrae, and peel the fillets away from the spine, which you'll discard along with the tail. Flake or mash the anchovy and dump it into the vinegar while you measure the other ingredients, to give it a chance to soften. Stir in remaining ingredients and mix until smooth.
Salad
Three or four salad-y ingredients in bite-size pieces. (Sliced bell peppers are good. So are, um, leafy things. Walnuts are great. So are cranberries and beans and leftover chicken and corn and whatever else is in the fridge that will fit on a fork.)
With this one, I’ve set a personal record for the highest ratio of work to results. It took more than two hours to turn this:
… into something much less imposing:
But oh my god it was worth it.
Salmon heads aren’t small. The eyes are big as pennies. The heavy heads feel hard and sleek, like chunks of airplane fuselage. Cleaning them means getting right up close and personal with them, rinsing away blood and cutting out sturdy accordion-folded gill arches. This ain’t no anonymous block of protein; this is a chunk of animal, it’s staring right at you, and it’s got little teeth.
But the head is where the good stuff is: bones, brains, meat and plenty of the silkiest fat I’ve ever tasted, and seriously, the Asian market nearby sells them for 59 cents a pound. Like most cheap cuts, it takes time and effort to get the best out of them, but the results are magic: The finished soup is buttery. Creamy, almost, which is unusual in a dairy-free soup. The soup itself smells like fish, but tastes salmony instead of fishy, even after two days in the fridge.
Salmon head soup
Serves 4. Takes about two and a half hours, largely unattended. For the cleanest, least “fishy” soup, wash the salmon heads, soak them for at least a few hours in salt water and thoroughly rinse them before cooking, until the fins don’t feel slimy.
3 salmon heads, gills removed and thoroughly washed
1 onion, sliced
8 c. water
1” knob of ginger, peeled and cut into quarters
1 c. white wine or sake
1 tbs patis (the clear, salty kind of fish sauce; I used Rufina-brand patis)
1/2 tsp gochujang (Korean hot pepper paste) (optional)
1/2 tsp salt
Bring the salmon and water to a boil in a large pot, then turn the heat down and simmer for around 30 minutes until the meat is flaky. Strain out the salmon heads and use salad tongs to pick out chunks of meat and set them aside; the heads are going to start falling apart when you poke at them, so it should be pretty easy, if a little weird. (“Oh man, is that the BRAIN?”) Return the rest of the salmon to the pot and simmer for another 90 minutes. Once the meat has cooled, pick it more carefully with your fingers and remove any skin, fat or bones - the meat at the neck will probably have thin little bones that you can find by crumbling large chunks of meat in your fingers.
Once the liquid in the pot is reduced by about half, remove it from the heat and strain again to remove the solids and set aside in a large container. Rinse out the pot.
Once the stock has been cooling for a few minutes, you’ll see a skin of fat forming across the top. Skim some of this off but don’t throw it away; you can use it for the next part!
The next part: Sear the onion and ginger in the pot over medium heat in some oil or some of the salmon fat, stirring often, until the onions are browned and stick to the pan a little but aren’t burning. Keep adding more skimmed fat from the stock if they start to look dry. Turn the heat down slightly and deglaze with the wine or sake: pour it in and stir, scraping the bottom of the pot, until all the crusted browned bits have dissolved and about half of the liquid has burned off - you want a little alcoholic bite in the finished product, but only a little.
Add the stock and simmer. You should have about four cups of soup; if you have less, add more water, and if you have more, keep it at a simmer until the extra boils off. Once you’re there, fish out the ginger pieces and stir in the rest of the ingredients. Feel free to add more fish sauce, but go easy, and try it as you go.
Divide the meat into bowls and pour the hot soup over the top, then serve.
That's right. After two regional and three national Grilled Cheese Invitationals, I finally have a trophy. Josh and I have one each, actually: our sandwich, the LoveKraft, won a judge's award, third place in the amateur Kama Sutra category, and the first-place spaz award, which is a large and slightly grubby plastic Ken-doll-like head that smells like VOCs and is kinda sticky inside.
So, what's in the LoveKraft? Grilled halloumi, a firm goat/sheep cheese; chèvre tinted a deep charcoal color with squid ink; mint-pistachio-lemon sauce; caramelized onion; and, which you can see squirming out of the sandwich, buttery-soft octopus-tentacle confit, which we cooked in a crock pot plugged into the rental car's cigarette lighter on the six-hour drive down to Pasadena.
Josh and I were gunning for spaz with this one. Sandwiches are graded by attendees on several factors, including appearance, flavor, texture and weirdness -- and the spaz award goes to the one with the highest weirdness rating of the 250-odd entries. After a couple years of getting way too close to placing in our categories, we threw our hands up and went "FINE, SPAZ IT IS."
But, since we're also food dorks, we wanted to make a sandwich that tasted as good as it looked horrifying. We were inspired by a super simple halloumi-octopus salad we perfected awhile ago, then researched ways to cook octopus without turning it chewy or requiring lots of on-site cooking, since searing would be out of the question on the tiny, low-powered electric burners used in the competition. We had the idea blocked out pretty early but we didn't actually do a trial run until less than 24 hours before the competition, so we were punching the air and cheering when we tried out the first test ones.
Man. Three trophies. The judge's award was amazing, but judges tend to be foodies enough to not be intimidated by a sandwich as all-out weird as ours. But the category award? That's judged by punters. Holy hell. We really did it. We made it taste good enough that regular folks voted for it.
As to what it tastes like: salty, sour, rich and creamy all at once, with super mild octopus flavor thrown in. If you could convince yourself to bite into that floppy mess of tentacles, you were in for a treat.
It's been quiet here. Long did I wander in the desert, working all the damn time, arriving home late and too exhausted to cook, living on the same Bittman chicken recipe and delivery food, with nothing to show for it but the perfect ingredients for delivery pizza (alfredo sauce, garlic, ham and green onions, with jalapeños for the adventurous. Trust me on this one.) But I am back, with something wonderful: the root beer Manhattan.
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Saturday was Drunk Housecleaning, and I have a system for it.
During cleaning, I stick to 50/50 PBR/pineapple shandies, the poor man's mimosa (or the mimosa of someone who finds the aftermath of champagne cocktails not unlike having their head stepped on by a horse). It's important not to pick something too high-octane, or Drunk Housecleaning will become Drunk Napping, followed by Waking Up At 5 p.m. And Oh My God The Weekend Is Almost Half-Over, I Can't Even Be Trusted To Do Basic House Maintenance, Why Did I Think I Could Get Anything Real Done When Even Remembering To Feed Myself On A Workday Makes Me Feel Almost Proud And Capable And I Can't Even Remember To Do That Half The Time, and hideous spirals of shame and self-recrimination don't wash the dishes.
The music: The Bee Gees. It is acceptable to limit yourself to the disco years, unless you're a child of the '80s and the slow stuff is baked into your brain right next to the capacity for human speech so you don't really mind it. Justice works, too, and so does Donna Summer; pretty much anything, as long as it's trashy and not too deep. Remember, keep it cheerful: you're buzzed, so you're pretty much always one Tom Waits ballad, Jeff Buckley tearjerker or not-too-experimental Wilco song away from wallowing in memories of failed relationships and long-gone exes, and exes don't wash the dishes, either, which is maybe part of the reason they're exes.
So, very lightly buzzed and hip-thrusting to "You Should Be Dancing," start cleaning. Do it until you run out of things to clean. And when you're done, have a proper drink. Don't just slosh more crap beer into a jar; stop, put away the cleaning stuff, break out the barware and mix yourself something fantastic. Don't just charge into the next thing on your list; the whole point of Drunk Housecleaning is that it's painless during, and fun afterward.
This Saturday I cleaned the living hell out of my kitchen and, at the end, dug out my single cocktail glass. It is an absurd monstrosity: a soup bowl on a stem that could hold a martini big enough to knock out a horse, preferably the one that stepped on your head after that patio party where you discovered French 75s. Then, giant cocktail glass yawning, I mixed myself my new favorite invention and got loopy on Pine Sol fumes and root beer Manhattans.
Oh my god, root beer Manhattans. This is a classic "sleeper" drink, my favorite kind: balanced, nuanced, smooth and approachable, but with serious business under the hood.
A long note on sourcing:
I apologize if the drink has a high quotient of hipster bullshit, but Carpano Antica and Templeton have been cropping up a lot in Oakland, which has been having a fucking off-the-hook rye and bourbon renaissance, and the Carpano Antica has come along for the ride. It turns out if you go to restaurants on slow nights and are super excited about the bartenders' specials, or you very politely order a quality bourbon at a bar where most of the loud, pushy clientele thinks Maker's Mark is top shelf, or you go to a restaurant with a fantastic bourbon selection and spend an afternoon with your boyfriend ordering every kind of bourbon "with a horsie on it," bartenders will take a shine to you and start pouring you the stuff they like. Shut up, smile a lot, listen and take notes. They're better than you are at this.
I don't know how much luck you'll have finding everything for this. The root beer liqueur I picked up on a whim at BevMo. I got the Templeton there, too; you may or may not have luck finding it your market, who knows. The Carpano Antica will be more of a hassle; I picked some up at Cask in San Francisco, which is like a glorious, well stocked, wood-lined heaven that had the tiniest French bulldog behind the counter whose WHOLE FACE FIT IN MY HAND OH MY GOD.
Anyway, all that goes to say, it may be a hassle to find some of the ingredients. If you have to substitute, you'll be sad if you go with a sticky-sweet root beer liqueur instead of the spicy, complex Blackmaker. If you're swapping out the rye, try a strong, sharp, hot bourbon or rye whiskey that's not too sweet -- something that singes the nose hairs a little when you lean too far into the glass. And as to the Carpano Antica ... well, shit, the only thing I can think of as a substitute would be the tears of angels crying with happiness, but I guess some kind of sweet vermouth would work? As to the bitters, I've been using the homemade Buddha's hand bitters a friend gave me which are flat-out amazing, but you could easily swap in lemon bitters or plain ol' Angostura.
Root beer Manhattan
Makes two.
1 oz Blackmaker root beer liqueur
2 oz Carpano Antica Formula vermouth
3 oz Templeton small-batch rye whiskey or Redemption High-Rye Bourbon
three or four drops of bitters
Shake over ice and strain. Serve up with a lemon twist if you're feeling fancy.
It turns out you can buy stainless steel straws on Amazon!
And it also turns out you can get old and nerdy enough that instead of thinking "That looks totally useless, how could any loadie snort anything through an eight-inch straw, the ones I've met all have the lung capacity of a chain-smoking raver with a Peter Pan complex," you think "Damn, those would look great with the cocktails I'm making up for my food blog," and then you buy tiny baby-bottle brushes for cleaning them, too.
A.k.a. "what happens when you're trying to make a cocktail out of whatever's lying around once you've run out of real booze." This is usually disastrous, cf. that one cocktail I made with sloe gin and liquid smoke that tasted like McDonald's BBQ sauce. But this time, it made for a slightly fruity, slightly herbal, nicely balanced drink.
God knows why I named it that; the reason is lost in the past, along with the explanation for why we had sloe gin kicking around in the first place.
The Softball
1 oz sloe gin
1 oz dry vermouth
1 oz vodka
dash of bitters
1/2 oz simple syrup
4 oz club soda
3 basil leaves
Tear the basil leaves roughly and drop into a pint glass or mason jar. Drop in a handful of ice and stir, bruising the basil, then pour the rest of the ingredients over the top and stir. For flavor and/or fanciness purposes, swap frozen pineapple or peach pieces for the ice.
It's summer! It's the season for corn! And stone fruit! And bizarre exercises in overthinking food! Which isn't actually a seasonal thing at all, chez PBR Fisher.
This soup's rad. It's based on a corn chowder recipe from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything, but wanders away from that recipe's one-note corn flavor into territory that goes from sweet to savory to earthy with every bite. And, since you can find peaches and corn frozen year-round at grocery stores after you've blown the entire prime farmer's market season on brunch and sleeping in, you can make it whenever you want.
Peach-corn chowder
Prep time: About an hour. Serves four.
½ lb (about 4 stalks) celery, trimmed of leaves and halved
2 ½ c corn kernels
5 tbs olive oil
½ onion, sliced thin
3 tbs flour
3 c milk (dairy, vegan, whatever, as long as it's not sweeted or flavored)
1 ½ c peach slices
1 ½ tsp cumin
1 tsp salt
⅛ tsp pepper
¼ tsp smoked paprika
Preheat oven to 400°. Toss the corn and celery in 2 tbs of the oil and spread evenly in a single layer across a baking sheet. Roast, stirring occasionally, around 20 minutes, until the corn looks lightly browned. Pick out the celery (tongs help!), remove the corn and set it aside, and return the celery to the pan to roast a bit longer until it looks very slightly charred, then remove and set aside. Turn off the oven and head for the stovetop.
In a pot big enough to hold all the soup, cook the onion rest of the olive oil over low heat until the onions start to become translucent. Stir in the flour and cook, stirring constantly, for 2-3 minutes. Gradually whisk in about 1 c of the milk in a very thin, steady stream; as the cold milk hits the hot oil/flour roux, it'll instantly foam up and thicken dramatically, so work your way around the bottom of the pot and blend in any extra-thick parts before adding more liquid.
As soon as you have a smooth sauce, add the milk, celery, corn and peaches. Turn the heat up to medium, cover the pot and cook for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Pour the whole mess into a blender, check that the lid's secure (hot soup to the face is only funny in retrospect) and purée until smooth. Garnish with a peach slice and a small handful of corn kernels, certainly more than in the pretentiously spare-looking presentation in my photo.
