Salsa Verde

It’s a green sauce and it saved the day.

“Learning more and more about less and less and less.”

When I am hungry, I mean really famished, things get dark. My vision gets blurry, thoughts scatter, objects lose their color and the world turns against me. In this state, all I want to do is eat crap. I want to shovel cool ranch doritos into my mouth, guzzle coca-cola, destroy chocolate cakes with my mouth, french fries become a vehicle for mayonnaise…..you get the idea.  Just give me carbs, sugar and fat. It’s a bad place to be. Last week I almost gave in to the demons, but luckily, the salsa verde brought me back from the dark side.

Mark and I had made plans the day before to meet up for a day of relaxed cooking. A shoulder of lamb was to rubbed with olive oil, anchovy, and fresh herbs from Mark’s flourishing garden and then slow- roasted on Webby. There would be fingerling potatoes, corn, baby eggplant, and one of my favorite all-purpose sauces in the world (also taking advantage of the herb explosion): salsa verde. Somehow time slipped away from us that day and lamb shoulder was out the window, as it takes hours, but we decided to just find something at the market on the north shore.

“I ain’t the judge, you don’t have to be nice to me.”

When I finally met up with Mark, I hadn’t eaten all day, and was close to slipping into the void. He had been driving for hours, trying to get a haircut, and was in a similarly precarious mental state. Words were exchanged in gruff bursts tied together with expletives. Something had to be done quickly. We crossed the second narrows bridge in silence, our thoughts sharp and fragile. “Chicken? beef? pork?…..fucking hot dogs?” I said to break the silence. “It doesn’t god-damn well matter anymore, does it? What does it fucking matter?……I can’t think,” he responded. I had a back pack full of goodies: nice olive oil, corn, potatoes, and precious little eggplants from the market – but it seemed like it might not happen. I saw pizza in our future.

“I stomp on the floor just to make a sound.”

Mark stopped at some store in some strip mall to get something and I paced the parking lot. The stench of McDonald’s hung in the air, A&W’s lights shone from across the street, Starbucks had a fridge full of shitty pastries…….it all so seemed so appealing and so very available. I felt like an animal standing there – an animal about to make a bad decision. I had a sandwich from Shitbucks and my thinking was stabilized, but my guilt level was through the roof. I decided not to tell Mark. He emerged and we drove off. Wrong turns were made and his mood deteriorated. We finally found a grocery store and decided to just get something (anything) from there. We got some rib-eye steaks (surprisingly nice looking) and that was that. We drove fast back to Mark’s and started cooking immediately.

“Oh Maybelline, why can’t you be true?”

Mark fired up Webby 2.0 right away and I marinated the steaks with rosemary, black pepper, garlic and olive oil. I left those out to come up to room temperature and started on the salsa verde. Salsa verde is a sauce based around a large amount of chopped herbs, capers, garlic, anchovies, lemon juice or vinegar and loads of olive oil. Toasted breadcrumbs and hard-cooked egg are sometimes added to give texture and flavor. There are a million recipes with slightly different amounts of everything, but you can’t really go wrong if you just use a bunch of fresh, soft herbs and season to your taste with the rest of the ingredients. The really great thing about it is it goes with pretty much everything – poultry, beef, lamb, pork, vegetables – anything. Now I used a food processor, but it is fun to do with a mortar and pestle, or even chopped by hand. I grabbed a knife and went out to the garden to gather the herbs. It had been hot for the past couple weeks and a recent rain had perked them up, and they were standing at attention waiting. I got some basil, parsley, chives and mint – a good handful of each. Back inside the herbs were buzzed up in the processor with the garlic, anchovy, capers, oil and vinegar. I felt the life returning, as the the meal was upon us.

“The green mind says it’s okay.”

The steaks went on the grill, right beside those nice little eggplants and I got on the final piece of the puzzle, a little corn and potato hash with swiss chard. Then we were eating and it was good and we were happy.  The end.

Glad we didn’t order pizza.

Pictures by Mark E. Roberts