(the picture was taken just before the mustard arrived on the plate)
Dinner was going to be a new sausage from the Greenmarket that I had been anticipating for more than a week, but then I realized that Barry was going to be on the upper East Side that afternoon, so I took the opportunity to ask him to bring home some fresh, from Schaller & Weber, because it is a source not as easily visited from central Chelsea as Union Square.
The rest of the meal was more or less cobbled together on the basis of color and texture, and, in spite of the flags raised by its individual elements, it really didn’t belong to any particular cooking tradition, other than my own.
- four spicy smoked sausages made by and from Schaller & Weber, (pork and beef, slow smoked with hardwood) pan grilled until they looked a little blistery, arranged on top of a spray of arugula from Lani’s Farm, dressed with a little Portuguese olive oil, Maldon salt, and freshly-ground black pepper, with a little Düsseldorf mustard, Löwensenf Medium, also from Schaller & Weber, on the side
- ‘Magic Molly’ fingerling potatoes from Norwich Meadows Farm (they’re awesome to look at, before and after cooking, and they taste even better than they look), scrubbed unpeeled, dried, sliced lengthwise, mixed inside a bowl with one medium red onion from Norwich Meadows Farm, a tablespoon or two of Portuguese olive oil, sea salt, freshly-ground black pepper, a piece of crushed dried orange/gold habanada pepper, a small handful of rosemary leaves from John D, Madura Farm, stripped from their stems, everything arranged on the surface of a large well-seasoned Pampered Chef unglazed ceramic oven pan, roasted at 400º for about 30 minutes, arranged on the plates, sprinkled with toasted home-made breadcrumbs and garnished with pea greens from Windfall Farms
- the wine was a California (Sierra Foothills) red, David Marchesi Sierra Foothills Proprietary Red 2016, from Naked Wines
- the music was Pier Francesco Cavalli’s 1657 opera, ‘Artemisia’, Claudio Cavina conducting La Venexiana