Struggling to be a decent person, chapter MMCCXLV

That's persimmon, not bell pepper.

What I learned from the winter salad greens with persimmon vinaigrette and Mt. Tam from Cowgirl Creamery Cooks is just how much better Fuyu persimmon is when diced very small before it's tossed in a salad. I’ve added persimmon to salad in bigger pieces, but tiny is the way to go. The little cubes are crunchy and bursting with sugary juice -- the pomegranate seed effect, but without the irritating seeds. That's all I learned from this salad. I think the purpose of most salad recipes is not to be original, but to get you to make salads. 

The Cowgirls’ cottage cheese pancakes recipe planted in my mind (accurately or not) an image of light, fluffy, cheesecakey pancakes and I planned to make them on Friday morning. But when I went upstairs to cook them I discovered Mark had eaten the cottage cheese that I had been saving for this purpose. It's a special person who can easily resist lemon pie, apple cake, bourbon cocktails, sugar cookies, gumbo, peanut butter cookies, creme brulee, clam pizza, French onion soup, Dungeness crab, and 1,022 other renowned delicacies, but is helpless before a carton of Clover cottage cheese. That’s my man. He’s always been a fool for cottage cheese and in the past I’ve found it endearing but at 6 a.m. on Friday morning I was intensely irritated because I wanted cottage cheese pancakes.

You can yell at your mate for unwittingly eating up all your earmarked cottage cheese, but it’s sort of lousy p.r. for your personality. I was so mad about the stupid cottage cheese that it took an act of will to gently close the refrigerator and stomp back downstairs to fume in the solitude of our bedroom where only God and I were witness to my rottenness. My thoughts went something like this: That was MY cottage cheese/JFC I’m selfish/but I really wanted those pancakes/What a spectacularly petty person I am/why couldn’t he have asked if I had plans for the cottage cheese?/all those people who haven’t liked me over the last 47 years? Onto something. 

After about 20 minutes the fever broke and I was so glad I’d chosen the route of solitary fuming because I don’t actually begrudge Mark a bowl of cottage cheese and in the fulness of the morning decided to buy cottage cheese on a regular basis because it’s such an easy way to make him happy. Pettiness and selfishness only become definitive statements about who you are when you succumb to their power. They’re feelings, they quickly pass, and you should lock yourself in a room until they do. I wish I could tattoo this on my brain.

Later that day, I made the Cowgirls’ creme fraiche, lemon and ginger granita. I’d never before made granita and it was probably a mistake to start with a cream-based version because it wasn’t icy, pure, and crunchy like I imagined granita.  It was more like an undistinguished lemon ice cream with a chalky texture.

That’s a wrap on five recipes from Cowgirl Creamery Cooks. I wanted to finish this post with an eloquent summary review of the book, but don’t have the steam tonight. Tomorrow. Meanwhile, on the stove bubbles the chili for chili spaghetti from Roy Choi’s L.A. Son, the next book on the list.