Quietly At Home: Ten Years Ago

[Pink Pig Time Machine by Wilfrid:  February 20, 2012]

After the fantastic long weekend in Barcelona, I was relaxing at home this week ten years ago.  A little home cooking and reading Thomas Mann.

I did manage a couple of meals out, though.

Must have been wild salmon in the shops, because I made it a couple of time, serving it cold with capers, and hot with a Bordelaise sauce and roast potatoes.

A dinner in the Gramercy Tavern bar room was a quiet harbinger of things to come.  It was the first sign of pork belly returning to New York menus, like the glimpse of Harry Lime's shiny shoes in The Third Man.  It wasn't called pork belly; it was listed euphemistically as "fresh bacon," and came with red cabbage and spaetzle. This was preceded by a warming bowl of chicken soup with little croutons spread with chicken livers.  Cheeses to follow: Serpa, Guernsey (a kind of cheddar, rarely seen) and Berkshire Blue.  A domestic pinot noir, Hartford Valley (Russian River), was right for the pork.

My other meal out was taken at Pico, then causing a bit of a stir as a modern Portuguese restaurant.  Sadly, it was no Aldea.  After a bite of white truffle custard as an amuse, I remember the cockles with chorizo having that aroma which went from smoky to rubbery. Suckling pig, though, had a beautifully brittle skin.

That's about it, really.