Foraging

Human Highlighter Suit Tally: 4

TWO NEW FEATURES:  By popular demand (well, perhaps not popular, but at least a few close family members) C.C. will be producing a “video of the week.”  Here’s the first of a possibly-regular series.  AND, I’ve added a “human highlighter suit tally” to document the number of times Milo wears his Day-Glo FC Barcelona uniform.

The quest for food with which to cook the dinner we planned before we knew it would be impossible to shop this weekend continued today.  The tension increased because we were invited for brunch at exactly the time the OpenCor opened—10 am.  Which meant we wouldn’t be able to shop until 12:30 or 1 pm.

Alec drops me and the roller cart off at the OpenCor on the way home from brunch.  The centerpiece of our menu is Rosa’s Roast Chicken with Wild Mushroom Casserole and Red Wine (from The New Spanish Table, of course).  I quickly learn that, while the OpenCor is perfectly fine for a quick emergency shop on Sunday, it falls short if you need to buy all of the ingredients for a somewhat ambitious dinner.   It’s a bit like a really big, Spanish 7-11.

The recipe calls for a 6 – 7 pound chicken.  There are only two whole chickens left, each about 3 pounds.  I put them both in my cart before someone else realizes they want to serve chicken tonight.  There is not enough spinach for the sautéed spinach with pine nuts and raisins we had planned, so I change the plan to a spinach salad; I’ll use the leftover cabrales and dressing from the other night.  Although this is beginning of wild mushroom season, there are none.  So I get some regular button mushroom and a package of dried.  And no fresh herbs.  I know we have dried thyme at home, and I remember seeing rosemary and bay leaves in the park behind our house.  It’ll have to do.  You may wonder why we didn’t simply decide to cook something else; I don’t really have an answer to that question.  And forget the watermelon granita with gingered strawberries.  At this hour, it’s too late for that anyway what with all of the freezing and scraping required, never mind the absence of strawberries and ginger.  I get three pints of Haagen Dazs instead.

Alec, unpacking the bags, asks me where the fresh herbs are.

“There were none—I’m going to go out to the park and pick them.”

“Don’t you think that’s probably illegal?”

“I don’t know.  I’ll bring my cell phone in case they put me in the slammer and I get one call.  Make sure yours is on.”

The kids overhear this conversation and become genuinely concerned that I won’t be returning.  An extreme reaction, perhaps, but they are so whacked from all of the change that it seems entirely plausible to them that I will end up in a Spanish prison.

I tuck the kitchen shears into my pocket and head out.  Fortunately, the park is pretty deserted.  I know Borg (a horticulturist) told us he had spotted bay leaves in our park, and I am confident that I will recognize them. I lived in Northern California after all, and they were everywhere. But as I make my way up the hill, everything looks like a bay leaf.  So there I am, furtively tearing off leaves and sniffing them.  Nothing smells like bay.  Finally I pluck a few branches of something I think smells kind of like it, and figure I can fool Alec, who is a stickler for ingredients.

I’m pretty sure I remember where the rosemary is—at the top of the hill across from the playground.  Sure enough, there are bushes of it.  Also lavender and sage growing like weeds.  I see no inviting signs, saying: “Dear Neighbor, Please help yourself!”  Nor do I see any prohibiting me from taking a snip or two. So I look around to make sure no one is near, snip a couple of branches, and stuff the contraband herbs into my pockets.  Of course, my fragrant hands are a dead giveaway.

When I return home, Alec is not fooled by my bay leaf impostors and decides to go out himself, sure that he will locate the tree.   He returns with yet another impostor, and so the dish lacks yet another ingredient.

In this recipe, you mix the mushrooms with diced red peppers and onions, whole garlic cloves, the herbs, chicken stock and red wine (the herbs are supposed to be in cheesecloth, which makes it much easier to remove them later—I searched in vain for cheesecloth at several well-appointed kitchen stores during the week, but am not entirely certain that I made myself understood.  I tried to translate an English description and asked for “the white fabric for making cheese that is full of small holes”; people invariably returned my request with a look of concern and perplexity).   Anyway, you sit the chickens on top of this mixture and roast them. 

But before I get any farther, I also need to tell you that these lovely supermarket chickens still had several feathers on them.  Which is still several steps removed from the market chickens that come with both head and feet attached.  I know there is this whole movement now that you should not eat anything that you couldn’t kill yourself, but this is an area in which I become completely American.  I do not want my food to look like the animal from which it came.  Please do not serve me fish with the head on; even shrimp head kind of give me the willies.  It pains me to admit this, because I’d like to think of myself as a tougher person, one who could whack the chicken in the morning and serve it for dinner.  But I’m not.

Back to the recipe.  You roast the chickens for an hour and a half, and then take them out while you doctor up the sauce from what remains in the pan.  First you are supposed to skim off the fat.  There is so much fat in our pan that it’s more like bailing out a boat than skimming.  I come into the kitchen to find Alec surrounded by fat-filled bowls as he skims and skims and skims.  Then you need to remove the solids if, like us, you were unable to find cheesecloth.  And then you cook it down a bit.  Alec is muttering, convinced that the sauce is bad and that the dish will be a disaster.  I’ve found that, at these times, it’s best to leave him be, so I go back out to the living room to be with our guests.

Soon Alec emerges, chicken carved and displayed on a platter.  We pass the meat, the sauce, the rice.  And it’s good.  Really good, I think. We’ll have to make it again, next time with the right stuff.

NOTE:  In regaling our friends with the story of our shopping scavenger hunt, they tell us that the OpenCor used to be open on September 11.  But three years in a row, angry Catalans protested that decision by setting several of them on fire!  Folks take this holiday pretty seriously.