Long, Day's Journey Into . . .

If you had told me back in college that, in my dotage, I would be making most everything from scratch, I would have laughed you out of the room. And even as recently as 15 years ago, while I was touting the concept of Slow Food, I can’t say I really practiced it. Who knew?

The brisket and spare ribs in our soul food kitchen take anywhere from 8 to 12 hours to cook, depending on weight. Most of our chickens require a 12-hour brining, followed by prep and cooking. Homemade yogurts, creme fraiche, butter, buttermilk, and labane are ready in 48 hours. Our roasted whole chicken is more like a 3 to 4 day affair. Our southern-style kimchi doesn’t really mature until about 14 days. The sauerkraut is ready in 3 weeks. Pickled lemons: 1 month. And our homemade vinegars: from about 1 to 2.5 months, depending how hot in gets in our kitchen (If you can’t stand the heat, get out your pickling jar).

It’s all a bit weird, this dissonance between, on the one hand, the go-go pace of Tel Aviv and the go-go pace of food service here and, on the other hand, the careful thought and planning required to prep some of the key items on our menu. If, for example, I’m running low on vinegar, I can’t just whip over to the market and buy another bottle of the shit. Well, technically, I suppose, I could. But it’s just not the same as making it from scratch. And that requires two things mostly: a good bit of extra shelf space in your mind for advance planning and a lot of extra physical shelf space to store all this stuff.

If my mind can barely handle the juggling of logistics months in advance, my kitchen space groans in protest every fucking day.

It’s all about real estate, I tell myself. Whenever I buy something new for the kitchen, something, I’ve decided, has got to go. If I’m doing a long term prep on a dish, it obviously has to be stored somewhere. Which means that that particularly spot in my kitchen has to be freed up somehow.

The whole thing, I suppose, can be stressful, the constant juggling act in both time and space. Which is really the antithesis of the Slow Food Movement, right? When I can — which is far from always — I try to think of the process as a beautiful balancing act between the planning stages of fruits to come and the letting go of what has gracefully matured.