This meal is mostly a lesson in improvisation, born of the need to scour both a freezer and a refrigerator to come up with a meal almost at the last moment. We had expected to be out until very late on Friday night, so I had not purchased anything that could be used for an entrée, or even a fresh green vegetable. Still, when our plans changed at the last minute, meaning now we would be home, I was able to recover the field, thanks to electrical refrigeration.

The potatoes and the leeks were both a little long in the tooth, but they cleaned up nice, and neither had lost any of the goodness they’d originally promised.

• two crab cakes from PE & DD Seafood (crab, egg, flour, red & green peppers, garlic, salt, pepper, breadcrumbs, mayonnaise, milk, celery, and parsley), defrosted earlier in the evening, heated inside a heavy oval enameled cast iron pan, 3 to 4 minutes to each side, served on a salsa composed of 8 chopped Backyard Farms Maine ‘cocktail tomatoes’ from Whole Foods,c sea salt, freshly-ground Tellicherry pepper, a bit of a powdered seasoning blend with the proprietary name, L’eKama, chopped thyme from Stokes Farm, 2 small chopped scallions from Tamarack Hollow Farm, both crab cakes and salsa finished with a sprinkling of chopped green stems from the scallion
• a small handful of baby arugula from Lani’s Farm, drizzled with a good olive oil, Alce Nero DOP ‘Terra di Bari Bitonto’, from Eataly
• eight small red potatoes from Phillips Farm, boiled in well-salted water, drained, dried in the still-warm vintage Pyrex glass pot in which they were cooked, rolled in a little olive oil, seasoned with sea salt and freshly-ground Tellicherry pepper, then introduced into a heavy tin-lined copper pan in which 3 leeks from Phillips Farm, cut into half-inch segments, had been sautéed in olive oil until tender, the mix tossed with some chopped parsley from Lani’s Farm
• the wine was a French (Loire) white, Château la Berrière Muscadet Côtes de Grandlieu Sur Lie 2015, from Chelsea Wine Vault
• the music was Viktor Ullmann’s 1940 Concerto for Piano, composed in Prague, with soloist Moritz Ernst, Gabriel Feltz conducting the Dortmund Philharmonic Orchestra, and his 1944 Piano Sonata, composed in Terezín, with Moritz Ernst the soloist in that piece as well