No doubt about it — I have let you all down.
Not because of my extended absence — though I’m sorry about that, to be sure — but because of my recent food malaise. I’m grateful that you’re not here in my kitchen watching me scarf down weird leftovers and countless bowls of shredded wheat with honey. What has happened to me? Where did all the vegetables go?
Well, all the vegetables went into this dish I made the other night. All the green vegetables, at least. It was about 4:45 PM and, naturally, I was hungry. I wanted to make something easy, something simple. Something that didn’t involve more than half of our cooking vessels. Next thing I know, I’m standing over two pots on the stove, buttering up an ovenproof skillet, fluffing some rice, and pureeing some braised greens in the blender. I shredded some provolone I found in the fridge. I made a little bechamel. For Pete’s sake, I actually dumped a bunch of beans in to some pot or another. And then, once I’d mixed a whole bunch of stupid things together, I baked them. That’s right. Because the dish really just wasn’t right yet. No, it needed the loving kiss of six minutes under the broiler. At no point during this process did I ever stop and ask myself a simple question, the one your mother might ask if she was really, really mad at you: What in god’s name are you doing?
This dinner that I made was no one’s idea of simple. I don’t know what went wrong. (More accurately: I don’t know what went right.) And went wrong it did, my friends. Instead of a simple, light vegetarian dinner, I ended up with an unidentifiable, amorphous green pile of a meal, the kind of dish that gives a bad name to vegetarians the world over. I was devastated. Destroyed. In fact, I was so upset with myself, I had to tweet about it, right there in the kitchen. (Technology!) My friend Dan had a great response:
It was sort of swampy-looking on the plate. A feast for the eyes. I pushed some around with my fork. Dan, on the other hand, ate all of his and came back for seconds.
“It tastes like spinach soufflé” he said.
Spinach soufflé? What was he smoking, and where could I get some?
“Yeah,” he clarified, “The Stouffer’s spinach soufflé my grandmother used to make when we came over for dinner. It comes in a box.”
It comes in a box. High praise.
4 Comments
That was funny and sad, especially since I read it over a huge mound of brown rice with some soy sauce and about 3 leftover shrimp crowning it. Ahh, dinner. I know we’re eating together on Sunday, but we should cook together more; I need the inspiration of people other than myself to make me cook when Barb is at work.
recently I read (in a NYT article about bentos) that there’s this Japanese idea that your plate should have 5 colors. for a while that was my goal but I never managed to achieve it (unless wine counts as a color.) After throwing that goal aside I immediately made one of those piles of food. And boy was it delicious, so much deliciousness that I took a picture:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sarahfromthefuture/3970329985/
I should reiterate that I LOVED LOVED this pile. I could eat it every day, seriously.
Wait! You may be onto something here! Rev up your designing skills, create a cool new graphic box with a cutting edge look and logo, put your price point under Stouffers, cook like a mad woman and start marketing “Berkshire’s Best ORGANIC Spinach Souffle’! (Is that enough commas?) I’ll only take a 10% finders’ fee for the idea after you have made you first million.