When Too Much is Just Right

If your sister is a chef, and a passionate and inventive one, you will one day find ordinary meals with her a thing of the past. She will arrive for a twenty-four hour visit apologizing for having brought "not a thing," which you will find means frozen pate brisee, toasted pine nuts, a cheese generally found only in Sweden, a salad made with corn scraped off the cob, tiny roasted plum tomatoes and tarragon and three condiments in professional squeeze bottles, one of which is a grapefruit and mint aioli, which somehow isn't revolting.

This is off the cuff; this is on the highway at 6 a.m. to make a ferry boat; this is in the carry-on luggage; this is in the bag slung over one shoulder as the other arm's presence is fully required to carry the pink--yes, pink--cat carrier, in which an eleven week old kitten named Elvis (female) is patiently waiting to meet his (human) cousins.

Actually that last paragraph is more about this particular chef than about the meals she provides or revises, when what I want to write about is how a person can think she is settling on a simple lobster salad for dinner and end up seated at a table on which is placed a spinach and parmesan tarte with a crimped crust and a deceptively quickly-made filling, miniature rosti, green beans that were somehow transformed into uniform pieces with beveled ends with a few tricks of a knife, another tart, sweet instead of savory, with bananas and real caramel, a cupcake covered with the most real looking icing violets you have ever seen and a four-inch-high actual flower pot filled with chocolate mousse, cookie crumbs, and another realistic icing flower--a daisy this time--in honor of the four-year-old who also received a carton of cookies embellished with her own image.

The conversation at this meal, at which the simple lobster salad is simply lost, part of the woodwork, is about another meal, of course, at which beef tenderloin was served, "with baby veg," inspiring the chef's father, a man who previous to his younger daughter's career thought all sandwiches came pre-made, to ask--as an aside--"with what reduction?" to be told "wild mushroom," as though this were all a matter of course.

Which it is, actually. And although I know enough not to "look a gift horse in the mouth," as I was told this evening when I suggested that the photo cookies were perhaps a wee bit over the top, when I part company with said chef, the best cook I have ever, or will ever meet, it must be said, I will want nothing more for dinner than a piece of toast. The following morning, I will have a cup of coffee, still recovering, but by the evening, when I am missing the chef's companionship, passionate admonishments, inventiveness, generosity, tiny kitten, and tendency to sprinkle toasted pine nuts on pretty much everything, I will sit in front of my dinner (which will look a little flat, taste a little dry) and think: If only this had a reduction.