Lately, I’ve asked myself how the World Wide Web would react if I were to turn the focus of this blog from food and cooking to the strange, slowly unfolding joy of combining mailing address and material possessions with one beloved other. A photo of him, aged a distant 24, is pinned to our fridge with a magnet painted to resemble a fried egg, and my MFK Fisher anthology is now sandwiched between the complete illuminated William Blake and Mark Elbroch’s Mammal Tracks And Sign; these facts are somehow moving and momentous. I am discovering a never-before-explored urge to tidy, and a thrill in preparing his evening meal that I believe is quite unrelated to any pre-existing enthusiasm for the culinary arts.

(Resist the urge to vomit, World Wide Web. I’ll get right back on topic.)

After a third visit from the gas company–which has left me still without functioning stove (day 12 now) and in possession of a document attesting to the “hazardous condition” of my gas pipes–the evening meal that so thrills me to prepare was prepared in a crock pot.

“You had a crock pot all along? Well, why didn’t you say so? We mightn’t have wasted all that time leaving commiserating comments about forbearance and creativity had we known you had a crock pot!”

Well, yes, I do have a crock pot. But it’s also July! In New York City! Would you want stew in July in New York City?

Tonight I bit the bullet and plugged in the beast. I cooked what I had in my fridge and larder: sweet Italian sausages in their skins, on a bed of carrots, onions and garlic. Frozen chopped spinach and canned chickpeas went in later, for heft; smoked paprika and dried chili flakes last of all, for depth and zing. Halfway through cooking, I found half a jar of roasted red peppers, so slivers of those went in the pot, too.

I simmered it all in just under half a bottle of cerasuolo (an Italian rosé) from Cantina Zaccagnini. I bought it after the gas men left, partly to braise with but mostly to console myself.

It’s a fairly nice rosé, to my palate. Of course, I may be succumbing to the alluring imagery of the word “cerasuolo” itself; it’s Italian for “cherried” and suggests, to this overgrown aficionado of children’s literature, Lewis Carroll’s Drink Me liquid:

“Alice ventured to taste it, and finding it very nice, (it had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast,) she very soon finished it off.”

Even at the hottest setting, the contents of the crock pot took three hours to come to the faintest of simmers. The result of extended cooking at such a low temperature was that each element of the dish had time to thoroughly infuse its bedfellows: the spinach and chickpeas tasted of sausage, the sausage tasted of the aromatic vegetables, and everything tasted of cerasuolo. Unfortunately for the readers of this blog, everything also looked like pigswill.

Hopefully I’ll be growing a bit more adept at cooking sans Maillard in the coming days. I may not have a choice.

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