The Bad Seed

A look back at yesterday's meals — A Tale of Horror

Hallelujah!  I slept through the night (a full 8 hours) and woke up feeling almost back to normal.  [The rainforests breathe a sigh of relief as my tissue usage drops precipitously overnight.  One more day of this cold could have deforested Brazil.]  Apparently my optimism in not canceling today's students — as I had done Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday — was not unfounded.   I was even feeling sufficiently healthy to return to my old breakfast stand-by, fruit and nuts with yogurt.

Happily, the meh fruits I'd been eating all week without enthusiasm (perhaps they were feeling under the weather too) gave way to a truly delicious bartlett pear, banana, and navel orange today.   They were accompanied by a few tablespoons of the world's most excellent yogurt (yay, Amish grass-eating cows!), some raw walnuts, and, as a rare treat, roasted cashews.  (Don't tell my friend Laura, who worries about my salt intake, but these nuts were salted as well.)

So how did we — who know about the health advantages of raw nuts and the potentially carcinogenic compounds into which the roasting process transmutes the nut oils — end up with a bag of roasted cashews?  Answer: Peter did the shopping.  He claims that Whole Foods was out of the raw cashews we normally buy and I suppose I believe him.  I also believe that the health dangers of "bad" foods are lessened when the healthier alternatives are not available.  (A corollary to this law is that if the deli person doesn't hear you say to go light on the butter and slathers a huge mound of it onto your bagel, this extra butter contains no cholesterol.  I have just about mastered the exact right volume of speech to not quite reach over the plastic counter at my bagel shop.)

Roasted nuts can transform a mundane bowl of fruit into a delicacy, if not an outright bar snack.  Because my fruit assortment was not even particularly mundane today, I had a real gem of a breakfast, which lifted my spirits and practically had me singing as I ate.

Until the last bite. 

[Cue ominous music]

I put the remaining yogurt-covered pear chunk and walnut half into my mouth, crunched down, and — blecccchhh — rancid nut!  Was this a message from the Universe that my burgeoning optimism was being overruled?  The memories of all those delectable mouthfuls quickly faded as I gagged on the bitter, sour, OFF taste of the bad seed.

Readers, does it ever happen to you that your final bite of something that has been otherwise delicious is spoiled by rancidity or other off flavors?   How does the bad seed escape being eaten until the very end?  I have two theories about this:

1. A bad taste followed by a bunch more good bites does not lodge in my consciousness.  (Boring, this theory, but probably true.)
2. Our sensory systems have evolved to shrink from bad-tasting morsels, which could indicate danger in the form of contamination or spoilage.  Some little-understood sensory function in our brains guides us to only the best bites, until there is no other option available.  Probably an alert "primitive" man would simply cease eating when the good stuff ran out.  Me, I just continue to plow through my bowl, on which I am only partially focused, as I am checking my email during breakfast, scarfing down both healthy and contaminated mouthfuls indiscriminately.  (Don't you hope this more glamorous theory proves to be true?)

For lunch, Peter and I shared the remaining Brooklyn bagel from yesterday, toasted with butter.  (I was not in the kitchen to monitor Peter's buttering, so this cholesterol didn't count either.)  The bagel was multigrain, a flavor we hadn't tried before, and tasted strongly of graham flour, which I liked and Peter didn't.  We ate the bagel with some delightful eggs that Peter had scrambled with cheese, and browned to just the right doneness.  Actually, there are for us a range of right donenesses; we usually eat our scrambled eggs on the runny side, but today Peter opted for a different treatment, and the change was quite pleasing.

Can you believe it — dinner started out with another bad seed!  It happened to both of us, on our very first bites of. . .but I'm getting a little ahead of the story.

First of all, you have to know that today NYC was hit with our second snowstorm of the season.  When we looked out of our windows, all was gloomy and monochromatic.  (I had some photos taken out of our windows to show you what I mean, but I accidentally deleted them, along with most of the pictures I'd shot while preparing dinner.  Just imagine the gloomiest winter landscape you can, then reduce the color level in your mental picture so it's even gloomier.  There — that's how it looked here today.)

I was getting glum sitting here, watching the flakes coming down while monitoring the Chihuahuas as they performed their indoor winter fitness routine on their treadmill.  (If you beg me hard enough, I'll post a video of them working out.)  I thought to myself, "What could make it seem more like summer in the middle of this dreary January?"  And then it occurred to me: cook a summer meal.  So I did!

I had an extra half-hour between students this afternoon, so I raced to the freezer and dug out a few precious items I'd frozen during the growing season for just this eventuality.  From the very beginning of last summer, I had a frozen blob of garlic scape pesto I discovered way in the back of the freezer.  Then I found a ziploc bag containing some tomatoes from a week in early September when we received too many to consume.  (Ah, those days seem long ago right now.)  Just to complete my tribute to the entire growing season, I pulled out a few carrots from November's harvest.

Now I was ready to create my summer meal.  Luckily, I still had cooked penne left over from the eggplant bake of 2 days prior, as well as a little remaining mozzarella and plenty of grating cheese.  I grated 2 big carrots into my baking dish, dumped in the tomatoes, which I'd already chunked before freezing, and tossed them with a several tablespoons of the pesto and some extra olive oil.  (I had pictures of all these steps, but, sadly, they were deleted too.)

Next I added the pasta and mixed it all together.  Then I added the halved mozzarella balls and grated my own snowstorm of Asiago over the lot.  Oh, and a little fresh ground pepper.   (Up to this point this dish had taken only about 15 minutes of prep time.  Not counting the tasks I did pre-freezing back in the summertime, of course.)

I put the baking dish into Connie (my trusty convection oven) and set her temperature for 350 degrees.  Peter received his instructions to start her up at the appropriate time so that 30 minutes of baking would end just as I was finishing with my last student of the day.

Here's what the dish looked like when it was finished:

I'd had a few minutes between students to run across the street for a perfect summer wine to accompany this dish, coming home with a bottle of Riesling Spätlese (and a St. Emilion for sometime later in the week — yes, I know it's already Friday evening).

So we sat down to our lovely summer picnic, enjoying the wonderful scents wafting from our plates and our wine glasses, dreamily brought our first bites to our drooling mouths. . .and simultaneously spit out bites of rotten tomato, making dreadful grimaces.  Oops! I guess some of those tomatoes had turned before I got them in the freezer.  Anyway, the rest of the dish was delicious and free of rancidity.  I am just happy that it was our first bites and not our last ones of this dish that contained the off flavors.

I wish you all a sunny weekend, completely free of off flavors.