fantasia: on some vegetables + on a ground + for 7 (count 'em) trumpets

Choral musicians are notoriously busy during the krissmiss season and this vocalist is no exception. I mention this only because this entry is more about clearing the stable of bloggable nonsense I have saved up than anything else. I worked a solid 17 days in a row up until last Thursday and, since I now have the time to look back on some things that I wanted to write about, I think I can cobble together an entry here.

First I’d like to mention what has become my favorite restaurant ever: Barbette. It’s a beautiful French bistro nestled about three blocks away from my rented Uptown real estate at the corner of Lake & Irving and the food is par excellence. I’ve only eaten there maybe four or five times (which is a lot since I am always on the lookout for a new place to try) but every single time has been amazing.

Now I’m not completely sure how to make a really great risotto (I’m told it’s easy but time-consuming) but the best I’ve ever had is at Barbette. I picked my sister, Caitlin, up from the airport last week and took her there to have dinner. The vegetarian option that night was the aforementioned risotto (with wild mushrooms) and gotdamn! it was good.


(Quick side note: the vegetarian option the last time I went there was the Croque Madame. This translates roughly to “Mrs. Crunch” but I decided to call my beautiful grilled Gruyère sandwich a “madame sandwich” because it sounded a whole lot better.)

I think I should mention briefly that I sometimes feel like I talk about the fact that I’m a vegetarian a lot. I’ve met plenty of people that are what I call “vegetarian douchebags” and I'm hyper-sensitive to not coming off like this amongst mixed company (hopefully I‘ve succeeded).

In any case, the reason I talk about being herbivorous a lot is that every really-good-but-also-vegetarian meal seems like a huge discovery for me; almost like a secret I found that the world doesn’t know yet but totally should.

But, sue me, I’m from the Midwest. We like meat here. When I told my grandmother (bless her heart) that I stopped eating meat she just said something like, “Oh, then we’ll make some tofu for you next time you’re here for Thanksgiving.” And I hate tofu (but love my grandmother). But this demonstrates a fundamental-but-probably-involuntary ignorance of meatless cuisine…which can be pretty tasty.

Vegetarian food is notoriously well-seasoned. I’m sure there’s a learned person’s reason for that but, in my estimation, the food tastes so complex because the meat flavor is gone and, due to the fact that the taste of just-plain-vegetables can be pretty tame, you have to make up for that with a unique-to-the-dish combination of spices. This is what I love about it. There’s a thousand different aromas and tastes rolling around in a good vegetarian meal compared to a plate of meat and potatoes (a culinary experience that, while admittedly delicious, is so commonplace that it has its own cliché).

Now, don’t get me wrong…because I think a nice steak or a kickass chicken marsala is just about the best thing ever. And, frankly, I cheat every once in a while with a bite from a sympathetic friend’s plate to remind me that what I’m missing is not that big of a deal. But, in the end, meat pretty much tastes like meat no matter what you put on or around it.

(Side note: that sweeping generalization is not completely true. There is an entire world out there of competitive barbecuing where people make a living by cooking the same cuts of meat that end up tasting wildly different from one another. And that’s totally awesome.)

So, with all that being said, here’s my latest find. I had a few people over for dinner recently and, since I’m in my “soup phase” right now, I decided to troll the Internets for a good recipe I could cook.

Voila! Bourou-Bourou from the Greek island of Corfu: boil some chopped vegetables in water and combine with some tomato paste (the only ingredient that isn’t fresh) and pasta.
The secret ingredient, however, is a bit of red pepper flakes. This is literally the only spice other than salt and pepper that goes into this thing but it totally makes the dish.

Alright, so that was the culinary half of this entry. The other thing I wanted to mention is that I attended a Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra Concert last Thursday with a whole heap of composers (Jocelyn Hagen, Daniel Nass, Abbie Betinis and J. David Moore…you should all commission them) that consisted of nothing more than pieces written by John Harbison.

The playing was (obviously) incredible but I had a hard time taking anything from the music. It may be because I have a hard time perceiving structure if the music is on the fringes of tonality but I also think it’s because most of the pieces on the program (except for his Fantasia on a Ground) was--shall we say--more sentence-centered than paragraph-centered. And by this, I mean that there were almost no musical ideas that spun themselves out over a long period of time. In fact, one of the lengthier works on the program (at circa 25 minutes), Umbrian Landscapes with Saint, consisted of no less than 12 different movements with nine ritornellos.

And I hate collage.

This is not to say that I didn’t learn a whole lot from listening to a peerless orchestra play insanely difficult music that, since I’m primarily a vocalist, is far beyond the realm of my comfort zone.

So that was that, I suppose. I would love to see/hear his opera, The Great Gatsby, some time since it’s a form that I appreciate more.

On a different note, Jocelyn recently gave me the Mix of You-Have-to-Hear-This and, included with many other gems, was Eric Ewazen's Fantasia for Seven Trumpets. It is hands-down the most metallic piece I've ever heard not-played by a percussion ensemble. Buy it now.

Happy holidays!