Soaring Through Blue

Portugal? What's a Portugal?





Oh, Portugal.

You're a country, right?

I imagine you're warm most of the year, with slowly sloping boat hulls bobbing against rocks overlooked by sun-drenched houses perched on cerulean seas. I imagine expansive piazzas devoid of people, surrounded by vaguely European-style cathedrals, sort of Spanish, sort of Italian, definitely Portuguese. Whatever that is. Verdant pastures dotted with trees, leaning into the ocean breezes, small ponds surrounded by pygmy goats. Dauntingly tall cliffs loom perniciously over glisteningly blue ocean.

Oh, Portugal. I just lied to you. You were never even in my consciousness before this week, when I got a new cookbook about Portuguese food. You see, unless there's food involved, you're not on my radar. Nothing is, really. Aside from that 80s movie with Julia Roberts playing a Portuguese-American in which she looked like a Portuguese water dog and spoke with a brazenly bad Portuguese-American accent and ate gluten pizza, I was ignorant, blissfully oblivious. We never studied anything about Portugal in school, ever. Not a mention. Ever.

Really? I couldn't have cared less about Portugal.

Until now.

Now, I adore it. I wish to hump its lower leg, figuratively.

Because Portuguese people? They eat food. And the author of this cookbook? Hired me to teach a class. Oh god.

Now, I dream of Portuguese food tumbling from oven to plate, and down my throat into my waiting belly. Steaming potatoes in jackets with salt cod, with milk mayonnaise splooging over the top and oozing down the crevices. Oh god. God.

And oh, the photography. I am not sure who took what, having not looked at the photo credits, but it's heart stopped beautiful, whoever took it. I am verdant with jealousy.

However, I know why the photos turned out well. It isn't just because of the photographer's skill.

Oh, no.

Not, hardly.

It's because the food is so good. Food that good just automatically looks gorgeous in photos. It attracts the perfect light, and arranges itself in a perfect composition. The casseroles, the soups, the oozing milk mayonnaise---this is family food, meant to be eaten by large groups of people, elbows on the table, leaning into each other's private space, laughter and stories and arms waving and gesticulating, pontificating, like what you think families should be, and adding to the excitement and glamor of the photos.

Single people don't do this kind of food justice, at all.

That green dip, the one with anchovies and stuff? The one I made for when friends came over? That one? On page 138? I had to shove it to the back of the refrigerator because I longed to scarf it down so quickly that I wouldn't have even tasted it. Even then, it was hard, since I knew just where it was, behind the tub of duck fat, and I wanted it, badly.

So so so badly.

And that chorizo dish in the photo up there? The one glistening with grease in the radioactive orange glow? PapaChef got really pissed off at me for making him wait to eat it late at night after he'd worked all evening and was hungry and tired and just wanted to eat, because I had to snap photos of it. Isn't that adorable? I told him it was worth waiting for. He snapped at me, some more.

I adore that man. I adore our adorable squabbles. Oh god.

The recipes in this cookbook are written with great care but don't seem uptight and anal the way some cookbooks are. You know the ones I mean: full of quadratic equations and theorems that make your head throb, tiresomely, and the thought that failure looms if you don't follow every word, exactly. The ones that feel like your fifth grade math teacher, the one you hated, the one who said Math Barbie was an idiot.

I have no idea where that came from.

Of course, I may just be biased in this regard, since the recipes in our new book are written the way these are, as if we're casually leaning back against your kitchen counter testing the mouth feel of a pork chop, encouraging you, bolstering your confidence despite your utterly adorable lack of experience, knowing you'll do just fine, eventually.

The molasses cookies, for instance.

Their crisp edges crackle against the teeth with each bite, with the center an oozing love orgy of molasses. And the fennel? Oh, the fennel. I couldn't even taste it in the first batch, so I put in a lot more and it was way, way better. Oh god.

So, stop pretending that you imagine what Portugal is like. Buy this book. Support the author, and maybe, just maybe, he'll hire me, again. Oh god.