Some writers tend to ruminate, and I’m one of those. Like agonizing endless minutes over the menu for a take-along picnic. It was for an evening of blues at the Hollywood Bowl with a sorta friend, the kind who might get to be something else, only nobody’s sure what or knows when.
As my polar opposite, he likes lists and categories, so in deciding what to take, I knew I was walking some dangerous edge between a misleading romantic evening with handmade chocolate truffles to feed each other like mama bird/baby bird, on the one hand; and an unfairly contemptuous takeout of curled meat on dry bread from some fast-food vomitorium on the other. Either was likely to send the wrong message. I needed to seek the middle ground, and at first, I thought past experience might be a guide.
I can cook, but I immediately realized that would be ill-advised since it had happened once before and might lead him to expect it again in this lifetime. Yes, I made the guy a sandwich once, and he wanted to know exactly everything that went into it. I don’t usually go by recipes unless there’s going to be real company, so a dish may be different from one time to the next. Below is the list I spoke to him.
Any measured amounts would be entirely fanciful, so I’ll leave it to you as better cooks to suit your taste. It’s pretty good, like tuna salad, only better:
Patricia’s Slapdash Salmon Salad
One 14.75-ounce can pink salmon (all canned salmon is wild caught; did you know that?)
Ingredients chopped fine:
Celery
Green onion
Green pepper
Dill pickle
Capers
Parsley and dill weed, fresh or dried
Mayonnaise
Nonfat plain yogurt
Take out and discard some of the edible skin and/or bones, if you prefer. (I dislike the idea of eating a spine, even if it is full of calcium!) Deposit fish chunks in a medium-sized bowl, and break them apart with a fork. Add chopped ingredients, parsley and dill weed. Dress with a half-and-half mixture of mayonnaise and yogurt, mixing thoroughly. (You won’t taste the yogurt.)
Although this concoction had been entirely satisfactory spread on La Brea Bakery wholegrain
bread from Costco, I decided to butt out completely and turn to the professionals. I meandered up to the Continental Deli, a German concern where the sandwiches taste so good that whenever I tuck into one, I want to cry with gustatory joy. The rye bread is softer than a down pillow, the mustard has a nice head-kick, and the meat is so–well, it may cause you to hear heavenly choirs of moos and oinks, even if you’re ordinarily a carnivorous nonbeliever.
I asked about alternatives to the potato salad that comes on the side with a dill pickle. The Sandwichmeister reeled off a few options, took in my expectant expression at the end of the list, and gave me a pitying stare. “We’re not coleslaw people,” he explained dryly. I went with the default potato salad, first because it boasted a short list of ingredients for my friend to digest–potatoes, cooked eggs, and mayonnaise–but also because the potatoes appeared to have been riced, unusual and probably excellent for texture. And yes, it put the sandwich in the spotlight in the same way a sideman–say, a terrific bass player or a background vocalist–enhances a star like Buddy Guy.
In addition to the fresh-peach streusel I got at the deli, I threw in some grapes from Trader Joe’s. Last, after apologizing to the planet in advance for the environmental assault of plastic flatware and cups but attempting to retain a bit of my character with cloth napkins I would take home and launder for reuse, I flipped the picnic basket closed, filling the outside woven cylinders with bottles of sparkling water and wine, and there it was–enough, but not too much.
Many native Californians, myself included, pride themselves on their ability to cork wine effortlessly. My friend brought some nice old French stuff that he opened quite competently for a Midwesterner, and I took a backup bottle of Domaine Alfred Syrah in case we wanted it later. We enjoyed our on-rye sandwiches–corned beef for him, turkey and Black Forest ham for indecisive me–on a spacious patio before the concert. As the sun set, we loitered up the motorized conveyer belt to the stars, found our bench, and settled in happily to hear great music.
During intermission, we had dessert, and as the lights went out for the second time, my friend mentioned that other bottle of wine. I whisked it out, sliced the foil off in one clean circuit of the knife, plunged the corkscrew point into the target, twisted, clamped and extracted–all in the dark, as though blindfolded with a linen napkin.
Of course, he couldn’t see either, which is actually good. Same thing with the food–excellent, but nothing fraught with implications. Wouldn’t want him to think I was showing off for him when we’re just friends, right?
Patricia McFall has published both long and short fiction, as well as non-fiction that includes book reviews and features on books and authors. She has privately edited more than a dozen trade books and thousands of manuscript pages in addition to teaching, coaching and editing many writers. Her story “On the Night in Question” will appear in the anthology Orange County Noir from Akashic Press in April 2010.
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