Eastside Road, January 16, 2018—

TODAY WILL BE a fast day: it's Tuesday, and long overdue. But what have we been eating these last three days?

	Saturday, having noticed the preponderance of meat in the diet of the last few days, Cook decided to make a sort of braise or stew of vegetables. Brassicas constituted much of the melange, and while I'm fond of brassica leaves, those parts of the plants found underground are not to my personal taste. I do like carrots, and celeriac, and radishes: otherwise root vegetables taste mostly like dirt to me. Except for potatoes, tubers are out of the question. ditto corms and rhizomes. Alliums, of course, are not roots at all, but bulbs, and essential to my diet — though Cook was, I thought, perhaps a bit too extravagant in the use of garlic in this particular dish. I'm not complaining. Everything doesn't have to be to my personal taste.
	Sunday: Ah, Cook served a marvelous pasta tonight — tagliarini, the one I've been buying online, dense and flavorful, tossed ith anchovies, parsley, thin-sliced lemon, and croutons. The flavors were fresh and pointed, the textures crisp, chewy, and interesting. Why do people eat roots and tubers, anyway, when they can have food like this? Of course it's true pasta must be manufactured and anchovies netted and trucked, but what else is civilization for?      🍷Cheap Pinot grigio
	Yesterday, Monday, though the weather has been warmer lately, Cook bethought herself of a good thick winter soup, like one we'd had in Portland a week or two ago — split pea soup, based on a corned-beef broth she'd found in the freezer, with little cubes of boiled ham, onion, carrot (ah there!), thyme, a bay leaf, garlic… Gee, this was delicious. I drew a critical remark for gobbling, and it's true, I should curb my enthusiasm. But it was so good.      🍷Aglianico

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