I wanted to minimize the number of condiments and constituents I’d put into this meal, so I decided I’d try to get most of them together in small cups, to be placed on the table where we could each reach for them as we wanted. It only occurred to me after I had started to write this post that basically what I had done was to assemble a miniature cooked salsa.

In the picture above, taken before we had begun to eat, only a bit of the salsa had made it out of the little pot to the top of the plate, but the rest soon followed.

The second image includes most of the elements, other than the eggs, bacon, and toast, that went into the meal, although the fresh bronze fennel buds and flowers didn’t make the cut that afternoon.

• the meal included four slices of thick bacon from Millport Dairy Farm’s pastured pigs, fried over low heat inside a large enameled cast iron skillet, turning occasionally, removed while they were still juicy, before they had become crisp, set aside on paper toweling to drain, a tablespoon or so of butter added and the heat under the pan increased to medium before 6 fresh eggs, from free-range chickens, and also from Millport Dairy Farm, were cracked into the skillet, fried until their whites had barely set, seasoned with local P.E. & D.D. Seafood salt, freshly ground black pepper, and a pinch of dried fenugreek from Bombay Emerald Chutney Company (purchased at the Saturday Chelsea Farmers Market), but nothing else until they got to the table, although they were garnished with pungent micro lemon balm from Two Guys from Woodbridge; on the table I included a Brazil yellow pepper-infused olive oil and 2 small ramekins of a salsa just assembled with 2 small baby French leeks from Mountain Sweet Berry Farm and one very small dark green celery stalk from Norwich Meadows farm, one fresh habanada pepper from Campo Rosso Farm and one red shishito pepper from Alewife Farm, all of the vegetables finely chopped and briefly sautéed in olive oil, with some of the chopped celery leaves tossed in; the toast was made from slices of a levain from Bread Alone, like virtually everything else on the table, from the Union Square Greenmarket
• the music was Johann Mattheson’s 1723 oratorial, ‘Der liebreiche und geduldige David’ (The Loving and Patient David), performed by the Kölner Akademie and the Cologne Academy Choir, conducted by Michael Alexander Wilens; this is from this interesting diplomat, composer, and music theorist’s Wikipedia entry: “All of his music, except for one opera, one oratorio, and a few collections of instrumental music, went missing after World War II, but was given back to Hamburg from Yerevan, Armenia, in 1998. This includes four operas and most of the oratorios. The manuscripts are now located at the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg, the former Hamburg Stadtbibliothek (City Library).”