All By Myself
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| Dinner for One |
But the other night Melissa was at a lecture, and I was home early (because I had been at work for 25 hours and left when most people were just getting in), and I felt like cooking something.
Since I hadn't planned to cook anything, I decided to just rummage through the refrigerator and figure something out. I had all sorts of grand plans, a soufflé perhaps. But fatigue kicked in and I went for what seemed like a quintessential bachelor dish--an omelette and a salad.
All in all, it came out surprisingly well, given my utter lack of thought on the subject. The omelette was a simple cheese omelette with Vella Dry Jack, one of the landmark artisanal California cheeses. The salad was a spinach salad with toasted pecans, dressed in a vinaigrette made from a bit of verjus, enough oil to make the vinaigrette emulsify (sure, it was about 3 times I guess), and two cloves of raw garlic. This was for less than a quarter-cup of vinaigrette, so the dressing had some kick.
It was an interesting exercise, even if I did come up with an unexciting but flavorful dish. I made the dish with minimal stress about how it looked, so while the omelette browned a little bit (a constant problem with my attempts, though suggestions from Tom and Carol helped this time), I took the time to appreciate its strengths and weaknesses without lamenting what could have been.
The other interesting aspect was the wine. I thought about opening some wine (though I don't know what I would have put up against the salad, even though verjus is more wine-friendly than vinegar), but opening a bottle of wine just for me felt like a little much. I mean, sure, we've got all the standard things for preserving an opened bottle of wine--Private Preserve and VacuVins. But it just felt silly. Maybe this is the advantage of having a "house wine" of some form. Something you open without thought or regret. I said to Melissa later that maybe we should invest in some half-bottles. She arched her eyebrows and asked, "So that we can drink alone more?" Okay, well, maybe not. But the meal wanted some wine to be complete; it illustrated remarkably well how much wine is as much a part of French cuisine as the food itself.
I suspect Melissa would be upset if I made a habit of cooking dinner only when she wasn't there, but it was fun this one time.
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