Watching Ripples Change Their Size
Now Playing: Vashti Bunyan--"Jog Along Bess"
I've decided not to go to library school. The plan for the past couple of years has been to go to library school, hopefully here, with cooking or culinary school as a backup option. Thing is, though--I love what I'm doing. For a long time, I thought my chosen work would only be worthwhile if done in an academic setting, which I now see to be ludicrous. My boss and the money excepted, I enjoy my coworkers, I enjoy interacting with customers (a colossal turnaround from just about every other restaurant job I've had), and most of all, I love cooking. It's strange to think I barely even knew how before I was twenty-five. I never really cooked before grad school, when I learned to cook a few simple fish and poultry dishes, but now I see doing new recipes as pretty much the highlight of my week. If I'm more interested in the backup option than the main plan anyway, why go through with the latter at all? I moved up to Ann Arbor originally to go to the Michigan School of Information, but shouldn't view my years here as wasted simply because I've changed my mind. Learning is never wasted. In that spirit I offer:

Merluzzo Livornese (serves 4)

1 potato
1 lb. fresh cod fillets
1 1/2 tbsp. corn oil
2 tbsp. olive oil
1 garlic clove, crushed
2 tsp chopped fresh parsley
salt and pepper
1/4 tsp dried hot peppers
1 cup tomato sauce

Boil potato, peel, and set aside. Saute both sides of cod in corn oil until brown. Discard oil. In skillet saute garlic and parsley in olive oil until garlic is pale gold. Stir in salt, peppers, and tomato sauce. After 5 mins. add fish. After another 5 mins. add potato. When sauce amalgamated and oily, serve with French or Italian bread.

It turned out great (maybe a little salty), although there was no specification as to how the fish should look, and it eventually separated into chunks while I stirred. Part of the whole point of cooking is to find new ways and new recipes, but I may have inadvertently offended a few coastal Tuscan gourmets. My apologies. I cooked while watching A Hard Day's Night, and, figuring I should watch something Italian, ate wile watching Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow from the same year, the latter a lovely romantic comedy trilogy from Vittorio de Sica starring a ravishing Sophia Loren (who does one of two famous stripteases, if I remember, in the final act), and an endearing Marcello Mastroianni (Aldo Giuffre, so memmorable in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly as the drunken Union colonel at the bridge, pops up as their friend in the first act who's faced with a difficult choice). In the first, I find a phenomenon where I always notice something different every time I watch. In this case, shortly after Paul's identified his grandfather (the wonderful Wilfrid Brambell, he of Steptoe and Son, the Jonathan Miller Alice in Wonderland, and the inexplicable Witchfinder General cameo) as a leading source of "breach-of-promise cases," the just as great Norman Rossington, as the boys' manager, takes the old coot away, assuring the lads that everything will be fine: "I'll just bind him to me with promises." Ha!