Nouvelle Nouvelle Cuisine

I came home yesterday evening to find Daniel sitting at the dining room table with a half-empty five-pound bag of sugar next to him, tablespoon in hand, diligently spooning sugar into an open bottle of lemonade.

This is not Soviet lemonade, where the worker is spared the dangers of decadence of sugar in the original recipe. This is yuppy health-freak lemonade (not my selection) - Santa Cruz is the brand name - and you may be sure that a proper amount of sugar (and certainly not unwholesome corn syrup) was included in the ingredients. But Daniel was improving on that. Apparently, the table cloth was also in need of a modicum of table sugar.

Meanwhile, in the kitchen, he was cooking. We had boiled potatoes as part of supper, and there was some dairy-free, etc., Whole Foodsish quasi-margarine set next to Daniel's "canvas" - a bowl of potatoes. The bowl was bright yellow with deposits of wholesome margarine, a bit of which was actually stirred in with the potatoes, and the "topping" was salt - a snowy field of glistening salt to give the landscape some character. Luckily, it turned out that he prepared a plate of the delicacy for me, and he proudly handed me a spoon full of it.

Crunch.

(September 6, 2011)