Clarion Content

Did you ever hear the old saw, "You might be walking around lucky and not even know it." Some would tell you every day you get is a lucky one, others believe the world is samsaric. The Clarion has been known to espouse both points of view.

The Clarion had an experience that was distinctly more lucky the other night. We dropped by a friend's house, for an early evening for a happy hour beer on the way home. Unfortunately for her, but fortuitously for the Clarion, said friend's girl called out sick on the dinner he was preparing for her. Now the Clarion knows any number of great amateur chefs, but it just so happened, it was our luck, or perhaps our karma, we were at the residence of one of the professional ones. A person who had been preparing a delightful dinner for two when the girl came up ill.

After long hours over low heat on the stove the Clarion witnessed our pal combine his butternut squash stock, delicately seasoned, with heavy cream in a new Hamilton Beach blender. After some slow blending this mix was poured back into the soup pot and placed back over low heat. Its rich aroma wafted into every nook and cranny of chef's place.

We settled back into another episode of Entourage. (commercial free.) The Clarion isn't sure when chef cooked the pork tenderloin, by the time we became aware of it, it was on a cutting board. It had already been roasted and looked mouth wateringly moist. But what was chef doing? He was slicing it up into just bigger than bite sized pieces and tossing it into a warm bowl with raw spinach. When served this produced spinach of an other worldly texture, not raw, not cooked, just ever so slightly softened by the heat of the meat. The pork's heat had shaped the spinach leaves, too, curling them, bending them, inward, folding them around individual pieces of the meat.

Chef plated this rich green and brown mix on smallish, bright, white plates, the butternut squash soup was served in a matching white coffee mug, using said plate as a saucer. The soup's reddish orange hue complimenting, lightening the mix of other colors perfectly. The tastes meshed even better.

The Clarion was sorry she was sick. She is a good egg, and a kick to hang out around. But some days, you are walking around lucky and don't even know it. Other days you gotta remind yourself that be able to walk around and able to access clean water out of a tap at will makes one pretty lucky. Problems, everybody's got a few. Other days you walk into a wonderful meal and forget about them for a while.

Labels: Durham, food, Pop Culture