discursive terroir

Wine, opened 10.29.11, Julia’s Dad brought it by to drink, I made some chicken and potatoes, Chateau Leoville Poyferre St. Julien 1966, it held up well in a cellar for 40-odd years, tasted delicious, yes, soft, fruit, then earth, then cedar, until the end of the bottle when the whole thing went south from too much exposure to the airs of the 21^st century.

We sometimes make up remarkable words to describe the things we do, eat, drink, make, and imagine. The chicken, unremarkable, but good. The wine has a different vocabulary.

As part of an upcoming exhibition at MoMA of a project I worked on several years ago with artists Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Ashley Hunt, and Katya Sander, we have been asked to present a talk for “Modern Mondays” in April 2012. But where will the words come from? I have for the past several years back-burnered my fledgling middle-aged art career in favor of something of a career in the kitchen, where talk tends to be blunt, guttery, and quick to shut itself up and get back to work. I like to imagine that I have moved some distance from the flowery, impenetrable rhetorics of art and critical theory, far from an elitism I perceive myself, paradoxically, idiotically, to be above. Really? Far? Above? In the kitchen one might say, “Fuckin douche.”

My response to collaborators: “I will start preparing my remarks immediately. These remarks will be ‘solid, with a leafy edge to the core of pepper, plum and mulled fig notes, fanning out nicely on the lightly toasted finish.’ Now that is some highbrow mumbo-jumbo that Jacques Ranciere couldn't even shake a stick at! It just goes to show that one can never escape the discursive field, class politics, or the beautiful terrifying constitutive power of language.”

Or, for the talk, make up some vocabulary for chicken.

color study for a salad

some dish

Here are two menus from the weekend, catered dinners in private homes, one involving the above plate:

10.22 for 15

yellowtail on cucumber, cilantro, jalapeno

braised leeks, idiazabal, toasted walnuts, wrapped in Serrano ham, with saba

crostini with roasted figs, valdeon, chives

seared scallop, seared cucumber, murcott tangerine, watermelon radish, oil-cured olive, preserved lemon, shallot

market greens, herbs, crème fraiche dressing

short rib, roasted carrots and little onions, polenta, gorgonzola, greek oregano

vegetarians: chick pea stew with roasted squash, turnips, cauliflower, onion sultanas, polenta, almonds, herbs, lebneh

plum upsidedown cake, plum conserve, runny whip

cheese plate: red Leicester, taleggio, aged mahon; rhubarb mostarda, roasted grapes, pickled golden raisins

10.23 for 12

arugula, lettuces, roasted yellow beets, pickled red onion, toasted walnuts, gorgonzola, tangerine-cumin vinaigrette

pork chop, braised radicchio, cippolinis, roasted figs, marcona almonds, jus

same dessert as 10.22

new for fall, or spring can really hang you up the most

New for fall, pork, mustard greens, roasted onion and apple, plumped sultanas, mustardy jus, out with the heirlooms that have been hitting the table a lot in the past six weeks, all super-summery with melons, sweet basil, etc. etc., the time is getting ahead of us, that salad has become anachronistic, time to retire it since it’s almost fall-like here, bring on the pork and apples things are falling everywhere, straight out of the sky, right off of the trees, or pulled from vines, into our laps, down to earth, hitting the streets, coming, going, cherokee chocolate tomatoes, apples, pears, tyrants, the morning paper over the fence talk about anachronistic on this last morning for Khaddafi, the pictures, it is unbearable the things we can do to one another, go on, prep for a supper, harisa, lebneh with saffron and lemon verbena, and some Arabic coffee to sip slowly until the fall of something else or the next spring whatever we bring about

el hyperion bulli juicy souk

The day is done and it’s supper time, so what if there is no flat leaf parsley for the pasta and it’s only a short walk down Hyperion to get some, I’m not going out to shop for some ingredient that has gone missing from whatever dish I might have in mind. “Make it work,” the chef would tell me. After all, there are cippolinis left over from a Friday night duck dish, there are capers, pine nuts, roasted tomatoes, anchovies, garlic, chile de arbol, basil, white wine, orrichetti, and delicious parmesan from Paradise Pantry in Ventura left over from a Sunday trip for surfing, so shut up and make a meal of it for chrissakes. How can you go wrong with a pine nut? Midas them up in olive oil and then let them cook in the tomatoey sauce with everything else, they kind of disappear in there but they’re in there and reappear surprisingly and whenever I taste a pine nut in any application I’m flung to Damascus, if the shit ever stops hitting the fan there we will go back forever, “snobar” is arabic for pine nut, they’re not cheap in the souk they’re from Pakistan not local, the regime orders them up along with rocket parts and nuclear intelligence, the best in the souk were long sweet little things, though not as good as the Spanish ones from the indoor market in Roses, the town made vaguely famous by el bulli, where we did not go though we drove by the gate on the way out to hike a remote stretch of coastline, “Oh look there is el bulli.” “Should we stop?” “What for?” “Keep going.” The market in town was more interesting besides it was open in winter and el bulli was not not even the drive-thru window and it was never on my list I don’t have a to eat list though I recommend the market in Roses, here is a picture of one of the xarcuterias in there, they had some ingredients you could work with, that you could make do with, that you could make work, because you almost always can.

If there was one of these places down the street here I might go because it would be nice to have some pork sausage to throw into this saucelet tonight or even some pork shoulder to make a little sausage on the fly but I’m not interested in laboring much over this supper and even though I could get the reportedly missing ingredients in a snap, I’m not having it, that trader joes is a bitch of hipsters at this hour, a mess of Volvos and priuses and biodiesel retrofit benzes and the odd suv, shopping carts, strollers, tattoos, scruffy beards, big eyeglasses, and, sadly, unavoidably, the occasional logo arching across an ass—put some clothes on please juicy can’t you see I am trying to buy a melon to wrap my Serrano around? During that Friday night duck dinner (seared breast, spiced squash puree, cippolinis, mustard greens, demiglace, walnuts) we went out of our heads proposing alternate labels for those rump-riding pajamas, “crusty,” “pucker,” “waxy,” and so on, cheap shots yes, but what else can one do when faced with such effrontery from behind? “Juicy,” oozing, perhaps, a roast that didn’t rest before getting sliced, that just wasn’t ready for this world, let alone the plate, you want the juice in your meat not all over your john boos maybe we need a dress code around here

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