Pity our poor Lloyd, for he is married to a clearly insane woman.
Today was a market day, and unlike most market days, I had an actual plan. Plenty of greens, because Lloyd and I have not been good about eating our vegetables this week. Eggs, because we are running low. Garlic, lots of it, for the making of the garlic stew ‘mouse shared with us. Berries, whatever looks good, for the making of bumbleberry pie. Corn, for eating as is, for succotash and for my summer staple, spiced corn, an Ismail Merchant recipe I got by way of Laurie Colwin. Riding to the market on the N train, I decided that the time had come for me to make a batch of chicken stock. I hadn’t made it in a long time; I try to keep stock-making to cooler weather and just spend the hotter months making food that doesn’t require it, but lately I’ve been craving the things I like to make with it: pasta with beet sauce, risi e bisi, braised kale with mushrooms and oyster sauce. I’ll get some chicken feet from the egg farm, I thought. There is not a chicken broth that is not made better by throwing at least a single chicken foot into the pot. I can’t remember where I learned this, but I know that as I got braver, I would throw two feet, then four feet into the pot, until eventually I would throw an entire one-pound package in. Lloyd knows that I know what I’m doing with these chicken feet, but they appall him nonetheless. Once I put a pot of stock ingredients on the stove and forgot to warn Lloyd. He went into the kitchen to make coffee and was confronted by the sight of half a dozen chicken toes poking out of the pot. He does not shriek like a little girl, but if he did, that would have been the moment for him to do it.
At Union Square I walked directly to the egg farm stand and queued up. Today!, the handwritten sign said. 5 pounds backs, $3. Even better!, I thought. I won’t have to make another stop for a chicken at home; I’ll just make it with backs and feet! I knew I would be slightly more encumbered than I’d planned to be at this point, but I didn’t mind. “One dozen large brown, one dozen extra large brown, a package of backs and a package of feet,” I said when I reached the head of the line.
It took a bit of digging around in coolers for the counter guy to find everything. I saw him pull two large-ish bags from a cooler and put them on the table. One of them was the largest bag of feet I had ever seen. $5, said the label. This was a five-pound bag of feet.
“Wow. Lotta feet,” I said.
“Yep,” said the counter guy. “This is the only package of feet we have left.”
My heart sank. I didn’t need five pounds of feet. I didn’t want to start my shopping trip with 12 pounds of groceries. On the other hand, the guy did take the time to find them for me, and the line behind me was getting longer.
This was the point at which I could hear the voice of my mental-health professional in my mind, and I knew that if he had been at the market with me, rather than on a well-deserved vacation, he would have been going berserk. “What are you doing? Why are you not taking care of your own needs? You don’t need a 5-pound bag! Why are you worried about *his* convenience? *He’s* certainly not thinking, ‘oh, maybe she doesn’t need 5 pounds’! He’s thinking that he wants to make a sale! You don’t need to worry about his feelings, you need to worry about yours! No one else will take care of you! You have to take care of you! Aaaaaaaaaaaa!”
Reader, I heard it all, and I still bought the whole damn bag. Thus did I sentence myself to lugging 12 pounds of poultry products to my regular veggie guy, to the tomato stand, to the fruit stand, to the dairy stand. Corn on the cob was right out; after all, corn is heavy to carry around in quantity. I was forced to restrain myself on this trip. Unfortunately, my idea of restraint is a head of Simpson lettuce, two little bundles of arugula, two big bundles of black kale, a spray of tarragon, a bundle of celery (so superior to supermarket celery, so much greener and leafier and more pungent, that it is worth it to me to pick it up on this trip), four pounds of heirloom tomatoes, half a dozen serrano chiles, a dozen bulbs of garlic, and 3/4 pint of cream. No berries to be found anywhere. That’s all right, I thought; I can’t possibly carry one more thing. Then I discovered that my favorite fruit stand had a small complement of greengages. If you’re not familiar with them, greengages are a type of plum, or at least a close relative of plum, with a fairly thick skin that is deep green when unripe and a warm green gold when ripe. They are terrific in jam and in plum tarts, but left to my own devices I can eat ridiculous quantities out of hand. I bought four pounds.
This is insanity, I thought on the ride home on the N. I either need to get a car or I have to learn how to shop like a human being. What are we going to do with five pounds of feet? In general, I don’t like to freeze meat at all, raw or cooked, because frozen meat sustains cellular damage that affects the texture and taste of the meat after it is cooked. If I ever find myself with a frozen roast on my hands, I usually marinate it to offset some of the freezer damage. This time, though, I have little choice. There are wonderful dishes to be made with chicken feet, like the chicken feet in black bean sauce I had at dim sum one weekend, but Lloyd flat-out refuses to even try them, and I don’t know how to do anything with chicken feet but boil the (figurative) stuffing out of them, forcing out all their jelly-making goodness into the soup pot. In the end, I weighed them out into pounds, wrapped them tightly in food film and again in aluminum foil until they resembled giant foil tamales, or small bales of heroin. Four of them are sitting snugly in the freezer, in a space made clear by pushing the quarts of cherries I’d frozen the previous four weekends out of the way. The fifth, never bundled and wrapped, is sitting in a bubbling pot atop five pounds of necks and backs, studded with shallots and a carrot, blanketed by celery leaves, just lying in wait to give Lloyd a rude surprise.