Blue

Blue Songs are like tattoos.

One of my guests recently ordered our chef’s tasting menu. It’s one of my favorite things to do, and, because things were a bit slow in our soul food kitchen, I had time to prepare things the way I most enjoy: everything from scratch.

It didn’t start out that way. I cycled down to a favorite spot of mine for fresh, handmade pasta. Then thought, fuck it, I’ll do the fettucine myself. Which I did. Then came the prep for the aglio e olio sauce — followed by the making of Marcella Hazan’s amazing tomato sauce and then the calamari, stuffed with shrimp and mussels. Every single one of those components took me back to various times way back when. Another meal beginning to be steeped in remembrances.

I skiddled over to dessert: rhubarb and blueberry crisp. With a healthy side of whipped cream. The rhubarb took me back to days in the produce department in our family store. The blueberries: the short, intense season in the fall during my first college semester up in Massachusetts. Smells of fall and approaching winter in our Tel Aviv kitchen.

The green garlic soup with herbed buttermilk was the newbie in the mix, a dish I have only begun to make recently. Even so, the smells of the sauteeing fresh garlic, much like the preparation for the aglio e olio, took me back to some of the earliest dishes I used to make with the stuff: hungarian goulash, omelettes, spaghetti sauce.

And then finally, this grilled romaine hearts and grilled pineapple salad, rubbed down with a jalapeno-infused olive oil, topped with parmesan shavings, and accompanied by a homemade blue cheese dressing. And that dressing was the coup de grace.

I hadn’t had clue cheese dressing since, hell, forever. I’d simply forgotten it over the years, even though that was my go-to sauce (along with mustard) for all sorts of things beyond mere salads (burgers, potato chips, roasted potato salad, coleslaw. It was never homemade, just a bottle of chunky commercial junk coming out in those amazing chunks of cheese (or what I assumed was cheese. Authentic? Hell no? Real blue cheese? Hmmm, probably not. It was all ersatz most likely, and I loved every drop.

This one, however, being whipped up in our soul food kitchen, was the real deal, blended in with a generous helping of homemade cheese and red-wine vinegar that was also home cultivated.

I put Joni MItchell on in the background, a favorite album during my two-year cross-Sahara trek after University. It was a good day in the kitchen.