Duck for Cover

The New Yorker recently ran a profile on an artist who runs a blog that republishes the internet's collective apologies for not updating their blog. So in an effort not to contribute to the collective shame of millions, I'll skip that part and just dive right in.

As many of you know, I'm spending the summer in Portland, taking care of a handfulla hooligans and living large in la Maison du Sel. Last week the boys came back from a trip to New York City, so for the past few days I've been running around with my arms full of basketballs and nerf guns. But I have no complaints, because I can finally stop dividing recipes into fourths—and there are never leftovers. Especially when I make two-minute pizza (to which I'll devote an entire post later).

I'm lucky enough in this city to have a farmers' market at my disposal every day of the week save Friday, so I've made a vow never to buy produce anywhere else. This morning, in addition to a riot of vegetables—flowering broccoli, tomatoes of every color, sweet as sugar snap peas, bushels of beets, kaleidoscopic fingerling potatoes—I picked up two of these darlings:



Duck eggs! They're twice the size of chicken eggs and a little more ellipsoidal, which makes stuffing them inside a standard egg carton quite the feat. But the real difference emerges once you crack one open on, oh, say, a six million year old piece of Himalayan rock salt that's lying around the house.



That's a solid block of salt, about one-and-a-half inches thick, that with thirty minutes of heating on a gas burner turns into nature's best skillet, a primordial frying pan, mined from the depths of the Himalayan mountains and cut into a rectangle just for me. It's been waiting six million years for this: a fried egg with a thin veneer of crisp, salty perfection on the bottom, and then that glorious yolk, much larger and darker than that of its cousin Gallus gallus domesticus. I could have written paeans to the glory of this fried egg. But that would have meant letting my lunch get cold, and that would have been a crime with this waiting on the table—a buckwheat crêpe graced with a pile of sautéed beet greens, tomatoes, and artichoke hearts, and slivers of Boerenkaas from the Willamette Valley Creamery. Oh, I love summertime.



Just when I thought my stomach couldn't have it any better, the gods shined down on me in the stacks of the Reed library after a scanning disaster. Scanners, for those who are wondering, are about as amenable to processing sixty pages of full color Bon Appétit recipes as an eight-year old is to cleaning his room, as I tragically found out after I spent twenty minutes flipping pages and pressing buttons, to no avail. But after wandering woefully in the stacks, tears forming waterfalls of smeared mascara down my face, I found a Pabst wedged between the stacks, and all was once again good.

So the moral of the story is, kids, that when life hands you lemons—or a free can of beer—make a Michelada.



Michelada Ooh La Lada


To derive civilization from a can of Pabst, you will need:

one can of cold beer
1-3 ounces of tomato juice
one fresh lime's worth of juice (about an ounce)
a dash of Worcester sauce
a dash, or several, of hot sauce
a dash of soy sauce
a fancy glass and ice, to serve
salt, for the rim

First, run a lime wedge along the rim of the glass to moisten it, and invert it onto a small plate dusted with the fancy salt of your choice (the one pictured is Haleakala Ruby, a Hawaiian sea salt mixed with volcanic alaea clay). Fill the glass with plenty of ice, and add all of the ingredients, finishing with the beer. Stir it all together—preferably with a swizzle stick—and adjust the flavors to taste with a dash of this or a splash of that. Then kick back in the sunshine and revel in how you just took a boring beer from flat to fantastic.