Because the day is cloudy, muggy and threatening to rain here in the city, I have opted for the quiet, semi-slothful day at home. (By “semi-slothful” I mean “putting up the cherry jam I made last weekend and maybe making a batch of hummus for the week ahead, but not much else.") Having thus given myself permission to goof off this weekend, I started going through the rest of my pictures from Arkansas and found one I’d forgotten I’d taken. This was taken at the parking lot at the Colony. The butterfly had been slowly opening and closing its wings in a regular breath-like rhythm. It was so still, and moved with such deliberate quiet movement, that I thought it was dying, but after I took the picture it flew away, not suddenly, as if it were afraid, but with the same thoughtful movement, as if it knew that the picture had been taken and it was free to go.
Your hummus sounds great; if you could make 25 gallons/week and never get sick of it, it must be good stuff. Mine—which isn’t really mine, but a recipe from Sally Schneider’s A New Way to Cook—is thicker, more like the consistency of fluffy mashed potatoes. You make it by toasting whole cumin, coriander and sesame seeds and grinding them; you then add them to a paste of minced garlic, salt, cayenne pepper, tahini, lemon juice and water. Zizz the chickpeas in a food processor, add the paste by tablespoons and zizz again, pour in a little of the cooking liquid from the chickpeas and keep zizzing until you have a smooth but fluffy mixture. You can add some olive oil at this point, but I usually wait until I serve the hummus and just drizzle the oil over the top. This is really good in a sandwich with whole-wheat pita and steamed broccoli, maybe a little chicken breast if you are hungry enough. Do send me an e if you’d like exact proportions of the ingredients.
You have no idea what it is like around here. I made my living as a cook for so many years, you’d think I could please anyone--at least with the food which I’ve had to make ad nauseum, (and no, I never did get sick of Nancy Kayoum’s hummus--and it was the most absurdly simple recipie in the history of the world, though with a lot of oil--but you really should have tasted her baba--helped mightily, essentially, by the fact that we roased the eggplant in a tandoor). Yeah, well. I miss the smell of toasting cumin seeds. Jesus. I learned to hate ground cumin once upon a time, but the fucking magic of a brown flickering skillet full of toasted whole seeds! Fuck, did that ever smell good. We used to make a curry served between fried “rotti,” (wasn’t really rotti, but whatever,) which we always started with toasted spices, then the house curry gravy, then par cooked vegetables. Jesus Christ, the awake shimmmering, nut grabbing, love catching clarified heat of those aromas. I loved that. But, I never toast a damn thing anymore. I own no whole cumin seed. So there. I do make a lot of scrambled egg whites with chives, which are very well received. See, this is the thing about relationships--it’s just like having a neighborhood restaurant--you make whatever the hell your regular wants, the way she wants it, and you, you, pathetic slob, you eat cucumber peels and peanut butter sandwiches--standing up, while doing the dishes--cause this is how you’ve been trained.
The butterfly was probably enjoying a “semi-slothful” day until you snagged the soul from its body by taking its picture with your technologically-advanced, but soul-sucking picture taking mechanism.
Or, you know, maybe you scared it away.