I love corn, in almost any form. While that goes for corn on the cob as well, I hate the messy process involved in eating it (I put it in the same category as boiled lobster: best consumed while sitting on sand, preferably rocks, on the ocean, preferably Aquidneck Island).

And then there’s corn where the entire cob can be eaten at the table with a knife and fork, since it’s only about 4 inches long, and completely tender.

But before we got to that treat last night I sautéed a different green vegetable, which also, incidentally, from the same young farmers as the corn.

• two large handfuls of shishito peppers from Alewife Farm, washed, drained, dried, then sautéed over medium high heat in a broad 13″ cast iron pan for a few minutes, stirring and turning, seasoned with Phil Karlin’s P.E. & D.D. Seafood Long Island Sound local sea salt, arranged on plates, with more salt added to taste
• slices of a She Wolf Bakery ‘miche’

I was able to do most of the preparation for the main course before we sat down to the peppers.

• after the oven had been heated to 400º (while it was a warm humid night, I would only have to use it for 5 minutes, and our new AC system is able to cope with that), exactly one pound of very fresh cleaned squid from Pura Vida Seafood Company, bodies and tentacles, rinsed and very carefully dried, were quickly arranged inside a large rectangular enameled cast iron pan that had been heated on top of the stove until hot, the cooking surface brushed with olive oil, and once the oil itself had become quite hot, the mollusks were immediately sprinkled with a heaping teaspoon of super-pungent dried Sicilian oregano from Buon Italia, a small crushed section of a small ‘Diavvoletti Rossi‘ Calabresi peperoncino secchia from Buon Italia in the Chelsea Market, and a pinch of the now powdered remains of some light-colored home-dried habanada pepper I had purchased fresh from Norwich Meadows Farm back in 2017 (and it’s still awesome), sea salt and freshly-ground black pepper, followed by 3 full tablespoons of juice from an organic Chelsea Whole Foods Market Mexican lemon and a splash of olive oil, the pan placed inside the hot oven and the squid roasted for just 5 minutes, by which time their bodies had ballooned somewhat, after which they were removed and arranged on 2 plates and ladled with the cooking juices from a footed glass sauce boat
• some micro ‘Hong Vit‘ Asian radish greens from Windfall Farms arranged next to the squid

• ten ears of baby bicolor corn from Alewife Farm, shucked (taking more time to do so then with the big ones, since these ears were so small and delicate), and retaining as much of their stems as possible, since everything was tender, sautéed briefly inside a heavy medium size antique copper pan in which a little butter and a little less olive oil had been heated until fairly hot, sprinkled inside the pan with salt and black pepper and finished with fresh chopped epazote from TransGenerational Farm, which has become my latest favorite herb
• the wine was a Spanish (Galicia/Rias Baixas) white, Martin Codax Rías Baixas Albariño 2017, from Philippe Wines
• the music was Vivaldi’s 1717 opera, ‘L’incoronazione di Dario’, Ottavio Dantone conducting Accademia Bizantina

 

• the music after dinner was chamber music by Conradin Kreutzer, an early nineteenth-century (okay, ‘Biedermeier‘) composer and conductor, whose work is relatively obscure today