Rare Intervals

Fleeting beauty. Broken clouds after a rainy morning and enough leaves that the light is becoming shafts. The green is beginning to run rampant. A flood watch, down in the lowlands, but the ridge absorbs like a sponge, now, and the driveway is little affected. More rain moving in, so I go out and collect a small batch of morels, to tide me over. I made a soft-spread last night, actually this morning, working off the tapenade theme, morels cooked in butter, smoked cured ham, sweet relish, and black olives; process with a little brandy. Being poor, I eat this on generic saltines. I recommend it as a way to use up extra morels. Most recipes using dried mushrooms call for using a reconstituted ounce. I don't have a scale that's accurate in small quantities, I mostly weight rocks and large pieces of wood, and I don't need very specific numbers. Sandstone is 140 pounds a cubic foot, more or less. So I was considering making a simple balance scale, but I have no standard, I need something that weighs a gram. This entire issue only came about because I was rolling a smoke and I wondered how much tobacco I used in the average cigaret. I guessed it was a gram, a complete guess. Thought about it later, and started collecting small pieces of metal, if I can get access to a decent scale for an hour, I can nail this balance down. B called and wanted to come over for a drink. This is like a once or twice a year occurrence and I could only imagine something was wrong, but, no. He's hosting the family dinner on May 15 and wanted to cook the very large roast I'd scored from the pub. Dinner for 20. I tell him, sure, we can do that, cook it in the smoker with a pork roast above it, dripping down, for about 20 hours. He's so relieved that I'd thought about it, I can see the worry leave his face. We make some plans, agree to talk again. Ronnie will make potato salad (really an egg salad with potatoes, the best I've ever had), Dawn will make a green salad, B will bake French Bread, Josh will bring beer and ice. I had thought about it. If Jenny and Scott are going to be there, we might arrange a morel gravy with several pounds of morels. This could end up being one of those legendary meals. I've cooked at several. You feed 12 to 20 people a feast, and a couple of years later 70 people swear they were there. See my offprint, The Family Meal, An Exercise In Manners. B wants to cook a whole pork loin as part of the mix, and I need to think about the arrangement of the meat in the smoker. This kind of feast takes a mind of it's own, yes, it will blow your mind, stay calm, arrange the meat and go to bed. Tomorrow, some things might be made more clear.