Pickled Shallots

OK, here's an easy way to beat back winter (if not the snow lining our deck): some pickled shallots. Although that's the easy way to say the name of the dish. It's really Cebolinhas no Vinagre. But since I don't even pretend to speak the first word of Brazilian Portuguese, I'm going with Pickled Shallots.

These little bits of sweet zip show up in relish trays in small Brazilian restaurants, even in New York, but particularly near Cachoeira. They're usually made with small, red onions, ones we don't get in the United States. So Bruce reinterpreted the dish the other night for a dinner party with shallots. He made a room temperature relish tray of these, olives, caper berries, roasted red peppers, Manchego, and grilled squid to serve before a meal of marinated skirt steak, oven fries, and chimichurri. Let's just say we were having a South American feast.

And while the food was good, I loved these shallots most of all.

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Red Currant Jam

When I first met Bruce, he was a canner of the first order--and surely the only person canning at any given moment in New York City! On the hottest summer days, our kitchen would be filled with steam. We even considered installing an air conditioner in the window. Never did it, but people say it's the thought that counts. Seems to me it's the air conditioner that counts. But call me a crazy Texan.

Soon, the shelves in the living room were lined with jars of jams, jellies, and pickles, serried up in front of the books. It looked as if we were running a general store for graduate students--home-canned fruit and vegetables along with volumes of Yeats and Auden.

Now that we've moved to the country, Bruce is always in canning heaven. Right now, the red currants are coming in like mad. All this rain and cool weather in the Northeast has given us a bumper crop. So yesterday, amid the rumbling thunder and while I tried to get a bunch of gooseberry bushes into a plot in the backyard, he cranked out five small jars.

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Haroset

When I met Bruce, I attended a church, sang in the choir, did the whole nine yards. I even wrote the Lenten and Advent lectionaries every year.

It was a liberal Presbyterian church in Austin. And frankly, it was a bad time in my life: a nasty divorce, coming out, career upheavals (years and years of a Ph D program and then finally a job teaching at a liberal arts university all led to the whole "I got to get out of academia" mess).

So liberals took me in.

Now, years later, up in liberal New England, I'm still the one goading us on to religion. Left on his own, Bruce probably wouldn't celebrate any religious holiday. So every year, I write the haggadah for Passover. And it's sort of crazy, with people acting out the parts of Moses, Pharaoh, and the rest. I even have plastic bugs and sunglasses and other things to act out each of the plagues.

Thus, I find myself making the haroset today. For the uninitiated, haroset is supposed to represent the mortar with which the Israelite slaves were to build Pharaoh's temples. It's pretty sweet stuff, perhaps to symbolize how God can turn bitter slavery into sweet redemption.

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Deli Mustard

When I was a kid, my mother had a friend I called "Miss Minnie." She was neither. But she knew everything. She probably knew who was buried in the tomb of the unknown soldier.

Sometimes, if we had early release from school, I got to go to lunch with my mother and Miss Minnie. My mother was fond of a German deli in Dallas (still there: Kuby's). So one day, we all trundled in the car and went down for corned beef sandwiches.

My mother warned Miss Minnie that the deli mustard in the little pot was hot. But Miss Minnie just narrowed her eyes and gave a shallow nod, as if to say, I am an urban sophisticate, dear. I have eaten steaks in Amarillo. I have picnicked at Platt National Park. I know what's what.

She smeared it in great gobs on her sandwich. And bit down.

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Hot Hot Sauce

Lately, I've been hankering for culinary fire. You know, a real spike on the tongue, Maybe it's because of this:

That's the skating rink that is our driveway. Ah, New England. Ye gave us Puritans and schoolmarms.

I can't possibly understand what made them so bitter.

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