corn, crab, pol­i­tics and sim­ple things

Have I given you my corn chow­der recipe? I think I did, but I’ll go back and check. One thing I’m going to try to learn this upcom­ing year, well two things, one is to write bet­ter, more pre­cise recipes. The other is to find a way to present them on the blog that is eas­ier to get and more appeal­ing, like maybe a hot link to a sep­a­rate page that will include a photo of the com­pleted dish. We’ll see.

In any case, this sum­mer has been about corn. I just love sweet corn, and not the scary kind that finds itself mixed in baked pota­toes in Eng­land. I’m sorry, that is just WRONG. No, the kind I mean is picked up from the Star­chaks’ farm stand on Main Street in South­bury, Con­necti­cut, dri­ven directly home to be shucked on the back step (always throw the husks over the back fence; I love to have a fence to throw things over), then boiled for pre­cisely three min­utes, and raced to the table and salted, and eaten with­out hold­ers. I can eas­ily eat four ears, no prob­lem. How­ever, after an entire sum­mer of corn on the cob, my fam­ily was object­ing to the monot­ony. So in addi­tion to the corn chow­der, I came up with a recipe that takes into account the awful pos­si­bil­ity that some ears of corn will not live up to the billing I have just given them. They will be, inex­plic­a­bly, tough. Or not juicy. Or starchy. The kind of corn that, were you to encounter it on the side of a lame plate of surf and turf at Red Lob­ster, you would sim­ply treat as the kind of aber­ra­tion it is: clearly there to pro­vide the illu­sion of a veg­etable but not in any way expect­ing to be actu­ally ingested.

So if this hap­pens, what is an unhappy cook to do? Well, rather than slog through and eat it any­way because it’s there, and you bought it and cooked it, sim­ply say good­bye to the sorry ears and put them aside. Fin­ish the rest of your lovely meal and do not dwell on the dis­ap­point­ment. There’s always another trip to Star­chaks’ tomor­row. Mean­while, save it for the next meal you pre­pare, espe­cially if it’s a nice meaty one like steak, pork chops, or as last night, a roasted leg of lamb rubbed with a mix­ture of chopped rose­mary, gar­lic, lime juice and olive oil. While the lamb is roast­ing, here is what you do:

Scal­loped Corn, or How to Turn a Fail­ure Into a Suc­cess
(serves four easily)

6 ears cooked corn
four cloves gar­lic, chopped fine
half pint light cream
1 cup fresh bread­crumbs
3 tbsps melted but­ter
1/2 cup grated pecorino or parme­san cheese

Spray a nice casse­role dish (I used a pretty oval Pyrex one) with non­stick cook­ing spray. Sprin­kle the gar­lic over the bot­tom of the dish. Cut the ker­nels off the ears of corn (be sure to gather up the few racy ker­nels who will fly off onto the counter top) and sprin­kle them onto the gar­lic, tak­ing care to sep­a­rate the long rows should they stick together. Pour the cream over all the ker­nels evenly, then toss the bread crumbs in the melted but­ter and fluff them up. Spread evenly over the corn and then sprin­kle the cheese over all. The casse­role can bake for the final half hour of the roast lamb, and will be ready to make the per­fect accom­pa­ni­ment for a juice, gar­licky bite.

Then there’s the peren­nial ques­tion, what to do with a really high-quality 1-pound can of crab­meat, the kind that comes in the refrig­er­a­tor sec­tion of the fish depart­ment? Or alter­na­tively you could order it along with your lob­sters from Dave Thomas in Isles­ford, don’t think it isn’t pos­si­ble. Any­way, say you bought it intend­ing to make crab­cakes and then you got back from the Hamp­tons where you had just had crab­cakes. Well, here’s what you can make, in two seconds:

Sim­ple Crab Salad
(serves four)

1-pound can crab­meat, refrig­er­ated
1/4 cup red onion, chopped fine
3/4 cup may­on­naise
juice of half a lemon or lime
salt and pep­per
half an avo­cado, sliced length­wise
1 really good heir­loom tomato, cut in bite-sized pieces, or a hand­ful of grape toma­toes, cut in half length­wise
pinch paprika
four slices but­tered toast

Mix the crab­meat, onion, mayo, and juide together, fold­ing gin­gerly so as not to break up the yummy long pieces of crab claw. Then salt and pep­per to taste. DO NOT eat it all at this stage. Taste just a LIT­TLE. Then put on a large plate, mounded in the cen­ter. Sur­round with tomato bites, and fan the avo­cado slices on top of the crab. Sprin­kle with paprika. Serve with but­tered toast.

I’m think­ing about all this sum­mer food, and all our fun this sum­mer in gen­eral, to take my mind off Leav­ing Anx­i­ety. Yes, I who can find some­thing to be anx­ious about under all cir­cum­stances, am wor­ry­ing about leav­ing. It’s a bit stress­ful get­ting the house in order should some­one want to rent it this fall and win­ter. So we’re pack­ing away clothes, linens, etc., so as to make it count as fur­nished, but not per­sonal. Then of course there’s the ever-present unwill­ing­ness to leave the three Js behind. I can­not imag­ine how much Jane will change over the year until we get back in July. Already she can say “up above” when she couldn’t six weeks ago, and it will prob­a­bly be a mat­ter of only days before “the world so high” follows.

Also I must admit to a cer­tain don’t-wanna-fly creep­ing back into my recon­structed heart, which was doing so well about fly­ing on our way here. But even some­one not as self-centered as I might be for­given for a bit of anx­i­ety when my life entails mov­ing from Tar­get Num­ber One to Tar­get Num­ber Two or the reverse, depend­ing on your point of view and air­port of depar­ture. One of the fun­ni­est moments of the sum­mer, in a com­pletely sick way, was when Rol­lie stopped to chat after scyth­ing the meadow to the side of the house. It was the day when all the non­sense broke about what liq­uids you could and couldn’t take on board and how we had all just nar­rowly avoided what­ever dread­ful thing hap­pen­ing on the way from Lon­don to here, and gen­er­ally announc­ing the incip­i­ent Armaged­don. Rol­lie put some grass between his teeth and whis­tled. “When’s John expected?” I sighed and said, “He’s fly­ing back from Lon­don tomor­row morn­ing.” Short silence. Then Rol­lie grunted. “You HOPE.”

Well that’s just icky! I can join the thou­sands of gen­er­a­tions of par­ents before me and moan that I really don’t like the world we’re bring­ing our child into. Europe has such a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive on the world than Amer­ica has, and such a sadly neg­a­tive view of much that is Amer­i­can. It’s so hard to know what to think, but one exam­ple of the huge iso­la­tion of the United States these days came up when I was talk­ing to a friend at the pool about the air­port sit­u­a­tion. “It’s just going to lead to worse pro­fil­ing than we had in the past,” she wor­ried. And I men­tioned the awful case of a fam­ily in Lon­don whose home was bro­ken into by dozens of armed spe­cial force police offi­cers, shout­ing and order­ing peo­ple to the ground, all based on what turned out to be com­pletely base­less threat infor­ma­tion. The story was top news in Europe for days, as the mis­take was dis­cov­ered, the family’s ruined lives paraded in front of the news media, the police and gov­ern­ment forced to apol­o­gize. And you know what? The story never broke here at all. I guess that’s a com­bi­na­tion of our lack of inter­est in sto­ries not directly related to Amer­ica, and a reluc­tance to dwell on mis­takes. Watch­ing tele­vi­sion here is inter­est­ing: the media seem to want us all really scared, but not very specif­i­cally! A strange mix­ture of how right we must be because we’re Amer­i­cans, but how target-number-one we are because every­one else in the world thinks we’re wrong. Such an unhappy sit­u­a­tion. It will be help­ful to get back to Lon­don and real­ize that of course we can go back and forth and the world doesn’t end.

In the mean­time, though, I’ll con­cen­trate on Avery’s lit­tle face, pressed up against her dad’s. Because you see, he DID come home.