It has been so warm this spring that I can barely think about eating, let alone cooking. I am daydreaming about nice cool, summertime foods that do not require a lick of cooking: watermelon, strawberries, icy bowls of bobbing crimson radishes, Good Humor Bars, freshly shelled peas. I am not musing about meat loaf, spaghetti, beef stew or roasted chicken.
What I do need to do is organize is a Father’s Day Sunday Dinner, one which does not involve any of my time spent in the kitchen. I will have to see if Mr. Friday is amenable to tossing some kebobs on the grill. There is nothing quite so delightful as the charred, crispy edges of chunks of pepper and onions combined with chicken or steak.
We will gather on the back porch, where we have a few Adirondack chairs (which are never as comfortable as they are picturesque). I love the al fresco nights, when we can elude the mosquitoes and enjoy candles and strings of white lights. We can watch the last of the sun’s rays gilding the tops of the pecan trees and listen to the cardinals squabbling in the hedge. It will be time to slow down and the enjoy the lengthening purple shadows. There is no television news in the background. It is a pleasantly warm, humid summer evening.
Kebob skewers dress up anything and everything. Mr. Friday loves to cook on the weekend, thank heavens, and he says he enjoys it on Father’s Day, too. I suspect that is because he can control the menu selection. Everything he touches becomes a carefully designed and choreographed production number. On the weekends The Girl from Ipanema typically streams tunefully as Mr. Friday rummages through the fridge, taking out jars and bottles and containers of wine, mustard, horseradish, capers, lemon juice and olive oil. From the spice cabinet he selects honey, allspice and cilantro. He snatches up a hefty wedge of garlic, too. He pours everything into a glass bowl, testing the wine first, of course, and adding the chunks of chicken. (He has another elixir for steak that involves lots and lots of garlic.) That’s it – no recipe. Just instinct. (Disclaimer: once I had to stop him from using olive oil for cooking pancakes, so sometimes these impromptu food experiments do go awry.) This freedom from recipe structure leaves us time to wander into the back yard and toss the ball for the dog, testing more of the Chardonnay. Excellent planning.
Drifting back into the kitchen, Mr. Friday threads the chicken chunks onto metal skewers. (We used to try to use wooden skewers, but never remembered to soak them, so a lot went up in black puffy smoke.) He also skewered mushrooms, red peppers, green peppers, yellow pepper and red onions, separately. (Although we like slightly charred vegetables, it makes sense to cook the vegetables and the meat separately otherwise the vegetables can incinerate while the meat cooks.) And then he tosses the meat, and then the vegetables, onto the hot grill. Another moment of cooking deflection triumph.
Mark Bittman (who is about to start writing for New York Magazine! https://nymag.com/press/2017/06/mark-bittman-joins-grub-street-and-new-york-as-columnist.html) had a great graphic in the New York Times a couple of years ago – all the myriad possibilities for kebabs: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/07/08/magazine/kebab-generator.html?_r=0 You don’t have to be boring and suburban sedate like us.
Our house might be different. Happy families and all, the father you fête on Father’s Day might like a little fuss. Think of the tofu, mango, okra, eggplant skewers you can present to your dad on Sunday night. Yumsters!
“Ah, summer – what power you have to make us suffer and like it.”
– Russell Baker
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