Friday
A food diary by Ari Níelsson, entry 1.
Hello!
For the next few days we have some food diaries from Ari Níelsson, recounting preparations and dining of a birthday weekend.
Ari Níelsson is an artist and writer based in Berlin. You can find him on instagram and twitter.
This first, about Friday:
#brassicabloc
It’s kale season, and a degree of respect is surely due a plant that not only survives the frost, but sweetens for it; this has rarely been my personal experience of winter. For the last couple of years around this time I’ve enthusiastically bought a large bag when it starts to appear in the shops. Having lugged it home I remember, every year, that what I actually wanted was not ‘curly’ but cavolo nero. Aside from it being significantly nicer to handle it’s also easier to fit into my minute fridge, which is considerate.
What is to be done? All thoughts of hearty salads scatter to the winds as the reality of how slowly an average portion size will diminish its occupation of my Kühlschrank dawns, and I end up trying to tackle the problem head-on. Salted and blanched, the kale makes for an excellent pesto with the addition of toasted walnuts, a hefty whack of garlic, and pecorino. If you ladle the brassica out with a degree of care, the same water can be kept on the boil for the pasta, and the resulting pasta water used, in addition to oil, to let out the pesto itself. Toss and served with goat’s cheese; all in all, a fairly efficient operation for long short days and low energy.
Most of my cooking this week has not been this. When I’ve thought about making food in a meaningful way I’ve been thinking about the weekend, when I’ll gather some friends to celebrate another year in Berlin, which also coincides more or less neatly with my birthday. It was a fairly modest affair the last time around, now I’m eyeing up the kitchen table, wondering how to extend without breaking it.
Today’s preparations have consisted of pickling red onions with dill, mustard seed and sumac, tossing some thin lemon peel batons in salt for an Ottolenghi potato recipe for which I can never find preserved lemon, and making hjónabandsæla. Translating quite reasonably as ‘marital bliss’, hjónabandsæla is a simple affair of crumbled flour, butter, salt, sugar and oats (compressed), topped with rhubarb jam and more crumble (free with it), and represents a lot of my fonder memories of Iceland. This year I had the foresight to make a quantity of rhubarb and ginger jam with the stems rejected from Nigella’s rhubarb schnapps recipe for being insufficiently rosy. When she specified that you should use the cheapest vodka you could find, I have to assume that she failed to consider the deals to be had on Wodka Gorbatschow at the Reineckendorf Lidl, but it cannot be denied that a merry time was had by all at midsummer, and there’s still a bottle left.
