Salsa

I'm not particularly partial to parsley, let's just get that straight. It brings up ambivalent childhood memories of eternal passover seders in which wine was not so much flowing as, well, being dipped in an endless litany of plagues. It was meant to represent bitterness, the tragedy of one group of humans enslaving another (never a pretty endeavor, nor a righteous one, but today I won't go there). Nevertheless, I was tempted by Chefin' Stefan's (of recent Barcelonan adventures) suggestion of a divine beet salad with nothing but julienned boiled beets, chopped walnut, and parsley. Oh, and we can't forget the key ingredient which actually drives the deal home. Truffle oil.

Brilliant, simple. Obscenely expensive?

I wondered, given the price of truffles (which I must shyly admit I had never experienced prior to a foray into Fresh Fields in D.C. years ago with Kirsten, the kitchen goddess and all around fab friend). One of the last things acquired on my pampered-daughter spree was a bottle of the golden(ish) elixir. Ok, that isn't precisely true. At the gourmet shop in the mall of New Hampshire, where I also obtained another hefty dose of silicon (no, not for that, although... oh... get your minds out of the gutters) I sought, and found both black and white truffle oil, and not knowing the difference, or purported benefits of either, chose the bottle whose expiration date was the farthest from present. I know, embarassingly pragmatic at times, and embarrasingly not so at others...

There was also a choice of whether the base oil would be olive or grapeseed. Needless to say, I chose the grapeseed as its flavor, in my semi-informed opinion, was less likely to interfere with the infused truffleness. And though a small, and important piece of my luggage was likely pilfered by the TSA, none of the myriad bottles of Porto, sea salt and body oils and creams, nor the truffle oil spilled. Ok, one container did leak, just a little, but the heather grey shirt that it darkened may yet be salvaged. But, I digress.

Oil obtained, it took me one whole day to find myself at the local organic farmstand buying produce to my heart's content. I must also confess that I will always go for the tomato seconds when planning on sauces or soups (in this case destined for a test run gazpacho) because the exact consistency becomes far less important than the ripe sunshiny sugar that will burst forth when liquified. It has been so long since I got to refill an entirely empty fridge, and my hands where aching from lack of kitchen over the past months. In that respect, it was so good to be home. Ha ha! I discover, there are fresh beets, looking round and delicious, in their mildly dusty cover.

If course it took me several days and a few other meals under my belt before I felt truly ready to make this experiment. Stefan made me promise (and I swear that I complied) to make this salad exactly per his instructions before meddling with it, as I wanted, by adding a bit of crumbled goat cheese. Wow. The beets were boiled the night before, while I pressure cooked a pot of black beans for future consumption, and laundered, in desperate (and succesful) attempt to not charge my sublettors for the very expensive mattress cover that they washed but that did not dry properly and smelled of a sickly sweet tangy sort of invisible mold. (Once again, I am reminded of the miraculous effects of chlorine bleach). They were the sweetest sugary beets I have had in years, rivalling, of course, the fateful beets that I finally tried in Argentina after months of starving myself (few of you will understand this reference, but make no mistake I would still never try the nutria). In order to not let them dry out, and mostly, let's be honest, to experiment with my new ingredient, I drizzled a bit of the truffle oil over them and a dash of salt to boot. Sheer delight, as I snuck, staining fingers with a criminal red, a few slivers of beet. (What is that called again, when you break up and make odd the structure of a sentence for the poetics of its rearrangement? Hyperbatón?)

The following day, off to TJ's again to obtain the weekend Citronage (over the top Sangría has long been my specialty and I find that soaking the fruit the night before in an orange liqueur does just the trick), I remembered that I had yet to restock my freezer with appropriate allergens, that is, walnuts and such, and I found the only parsley packed in an (albeit recyclable) plastic box. Two curiosities: one linguistic and the other gastronomic. In Portuguese, parsley is not, as one might expect, some derivation of the Spanish word, perejil, but rather resembles it in no such way, and in fact acts as a confusing "falso amigo": salsa. What? Any self-respecting foodie of the world will know Salsa as its inescapable incarnation of mexican accompaniment to dishes with corn tortillas (and a host of others). Who are these lusophone renegades that are going to mix our sauces with parsley? Molho? Wetness? I suppose that is what a sauce ultimately is, which may bring new (or old) meaning to saucy, but, again, the point escapes me. Gastronomically speaking, and here is where I must take umbrage, I am not a fanatic of this little green herb, I will skip over it, or replace it 9 times out of 10, and in my crisper you will likely find, at any given moment, fresh basil, or cilantro, but never parsley. And so, I was skeptical, from the getgo as to whether this would really be a worthwhile undertaking, chopped, and chopped, like Dana Carvey chopping broccoli, and mixed it together with the chopped walnuts and beets, drizzled a bit more oil... et voilá.

Truly delicious dish, though I might add that processing the parsley a bit more (I am a texture kind of girl, and particularly picky about what textures touch my tongue) or better yet, choosing a flat over the curly, which resulted a bit too springy for my palate. All that said, I insist, that next time, I will find a nice firm chevrie and crumble it at the last minute just before serving, so the pink stained patterns will spread out in appetizing fans, before being consumed.