Good Eatin’ vii
This is the seventh in an occasional series of Good Eatin’—kind of a sidebar often involving leftovers—where I will describe an easily put together meal that we enjoyed very recently, maybe yesterday.

Not The Food Chain, but a food chain. One thing leads to another.

The Last Of The Cabbage

I made Shrimp Remoulade for a dinner with friends, so there were some shrimp left, already thawed and peeled. I have to use those soon, or they’ll go south.

I made Country Cabbage Soup for my lunches, which takes half a head of Savoy cabbage, so there is half a head left. When you’re cooking for one or two, that happens.
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When I was experimenting with Asian chicken salads with noodles, I said to myself, “I really have to start making pasta, again.” We used to make it a lot in Newton, as a family. We still have the pasta machine, but I think the only time we have used it in San Francisco is when Brian visited. So I went through my cookbook library and pulled the ones that would feature pasta. I was astounded to see that I have 11! I put them in a pile in some sort of order, pretty much chronological, and started reading and making notes.

Meanwhile, a friend loaned me an audio book called HEAT, by Bill Buford. I had read excerpts from this book in the New Yorker, and it was on my must have list. The subtitle pretty much captures the essence of HEAT: An amateur’s adventures as kitchen slave, line cook, pasta-maker, and apprentice to a Dante-quoting butcher in Tuscany. In short, through a friendship with Mario Batali, Buford quit his job at the New Yorker and went to work in the kitchen of Babbo, Batali’s restaurant in New York. Eager for root knowledge, he made several extended trips to Italy to learn pasta. Later, he went to butcher pig and then cow, but that’s another subject.
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pickled corn, potato cake, halibut

I’m currently reading from Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook. The Introduction and subsequent chapters on General Principles and Scoring the Good Stuff (shopping) are the best I’ve ever seen on the shopping, preparation and service of a meal. (With regard to shopping, I’m concurrently reading Julia Child’s My Life in France, where she spends a chapter on developing relationships with your butcher, fishmonger, equipment shopkeeper, etc.)

The most useful thing I can teach you, is the concept of mise en place. As a cook, your “meez” is your first principle, your belief system, your religion, your Tao. All else springs from this basic relationship with your food and your environment. Literally speaking, mise en place means “put in place,” but it is so much more than that.

Having your meez together means that you have cleaned and cleared your work area in advance and have assembled every item of food and every utensil and tool you will require, and put them in accessible, comfortable locations, ready for use.

Try this when preparing for your next meal: Put everything in a heap in front of you. Every ingredient. Every tool. Then think. Think about the stages to follow. As you reflect on what you are going to do, and when and where you’re gonna put all this, a plan will emerge:

“Well, I won’t be needing the cream until later, so I’ll put that in the fridge. Someplace I can grab it quickly when I need it, The butter, Hmmm. It would be nice if it were soft when I use it. I’ll leave that out.”

And so on. THINK! Generally speaking, any recipe has three distinct stages, often separated by considerable periods of downtime.

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