Killing yourself to eat

I just finished reading that brilliant Chuck Klosterman book, Killing Yourself to Live. The premise is that Klosterman, a music critic for Spin magazine, drives across the country ostensibly to visit the places where famous rock stars have met their early demises, but ends up trying to make sense of the relationships in his life.

This book is not about food. But Klosterman occasionally writes about where he eats along the way. And where he eats demonstrates his outlook on his on-again-off-again relationships, all of which come to an end by the end of the book. Klosterman eats at one of two types of places: 1) chain restaurants; and 2) restaurants that he frequented in his past. Both serve the same purpose -- to make him feel a little less lonely.

In the former camp are Cracker Barrel and the Olive Garden. Klosterman elevates Cracker Barrel to the "sublime" because "[y]ou can order chicken and dumplings with a side order of dumplings." He also claims/fantasizes that he fell briefly in love with a 19-year-old Cracker Barrel waitress who brings him dumplings and apparently reads Kafka. As for the Olive Garden, he says that "the Olive Garden is good; it always makes me happy." He adds that he wanted to go the Olive Garden because it was "in the news"; a Bachelor contestant claimed to wine-not-tires-heir Andrew Firestone that it was her favorite restaurant.

In the latter camp is the Uptown Bar and Grill in Minneapolis (his "emotive ground zero"), where he sauntered in twice a week during the summer of 1994 -- and "always for supper on Sunday night[.]" Indeed, he recalls that, the night before the '94 Lollapalooza, he ate a "delicious hot turkey sandwich with mashed potatoes and gravy while listening to a semi-hard rock band called Hester Moffet."

Klosterman chooses restaurants not for the food, but for the comfort, familiarity, and grounding they provide. The chains plug him into a larger community of people sharing a common experience; and like those people, Klosterman wants to fall in love and to be loved. Indeed, he frequently falls in love quite easily (see, e.g., mythical Cracker Barrel waitress above) and places value on relationships as relationships; the girlfriend, whomever she is, simply fills a role. Olive Garden makes it a piece of cake, er, tiramisu to fall in unchallenging love. The greasy spoons of his past allow him to recall those pleasant life episodes, those first girlfriends who gave him comfort. They force him to think about what could have been and to ponder whether those feelings are worth recapturing.

Fungi

Mushrooms for sale at the farmers' market on the Embarcadero in San Francisco. 

Make way for duxelles

I respect Andrea Immer, but I don't really like Andrea Immer. For starters, the master sommelier very nearly talks down to her viewers on her Fine Living Network show, Simply Wine with Andrea Immer. The perky Immer also praises boring, uninteresting wines, mainly because the wineries give her major access for her show. But what Andrea Immer attempts to do is to make wine accessible to everyone, so that you don't have to walk into a male-dominated, Bordeaux-laden wine shop unarmed. And that is to her credit.

To that end, she came out with a food-and-wine pairing-essentials book, Great Tastes Made Simple, in 2002. Amy picked it up at a Super Target during our trip to her hometown of Orlando, Florida in January. While we were driving down to the Keys and back, she read excerpts of the Immer book to me. The blurb that captured my attention was about duxelles. According to Immer on page 85:

"[Duxelles are] the ultimate trump card. It's also easy to make. Very finely chopped mushrooms are slowly sweated in butter with some flecks of shallot until the mushrooms are very tender, reduced, and concentrated. In addition to seasoning with salt and pepper (always!), a squeeze of lemon is classically added to kick up the taste. I liked to add a little bit of white wine or sherry earlier in the cooking, in lieu of lemon."

For whatever reason (probably because I became fascinated by Jose Andres' simple mushroom preparation at Jaleo), I forgot about duxelles completely until Thursday evening, when I found myself saddled with mushrooms that were about to go bad. So, I chopped the hell out of some creminis and put together a riff on Immer's duxelles, opting to use both wine and lemon. The end result smelled like a rich mushroom stock that reminded me of a cream of mushroom soup I used to eat at the American Cafe when I was 9 or 10, something that's now perfect with an Oregon pinot noir or in Jack Czarnecki's kitchen. Based on Immer's remark that she typically made a batch on Sunday and pulled from it throughout the week, I poured the duxelles into a plastic container for future use. But for what?

This morning offered up the answer. Amy asked me to make her an omelette for breakfast before she went off to work at the wine shop. She reminded me that Immer folded the "classic culinary cornerstone" into "an omelette or stir[red] them into scrambled eggs." I combined some of the duxelles with grilled green peppers and put them into an omelette. The result was a step away from the vieille-ecole matching of eggs and white truffles, earthy and rich.

Immer suggests using duxelles as a topping for hamburgers, but I'm thinking that I might use them as a soup base. But what else can I use them for?