You could freestyle, too, and cook without recipes, as we all ought to do more often as the lessons of recipes reward our attention with confidence. Say, a kale salad dressed in egg yolks whipped with olive oil and a little mustard, lots of lemon juice for sunniness, salt and pepper, with clumps of soft cheese, croutons, dried cherries, roasted cashews and chunks of apricot. You want the dressing emulsified, on the thicker end of runny, and all of the other ingredients in balance. You’ll figure it out. It’s great with steak, fried chicken cutlets or all on its own.
Maybe some shrimp tacos as well? (With guacamole? Sure!) Jerk chicken with pickled bananas? Grilled tofu salad? Definitely some buttermilk pancakes for breakfast on one of the days, and a mortadella sandwich with ricotta and pistachio pesto to follow a few hours later. The point, on a long weekend that heralds the start of a new season, is to cook with the intention of delivering pleasure as much as sustenance, to celebrate the delicious even as we honor those who have made delicious possible.
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Now, it’s nothing to do with fresh peas or a crown roast of pork, but I fell upon the Australian novelist Peter Temple’s 1996 novel “Bad Debts,” the first in his four-part mystery series about a lawyer named Jack Irish, and I’m glad I did. It begins: “I found Edward Dollery, age 47, defrocked accountant, big spender and dishonest person, living in a house rented in the name of Carol Pick. It was in a new brick-veneer suburb built on cow pasture east of the city, one of those strangely silent developments where the average age is 12 and you can feel the pressure of the mortgages on your skin.” Onward!
