Alice Waters will take marker-goers about Green City Market on a shopping trip to prepare for a fundraising lunch. Shopping with Alice from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m., with a booksigning from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m., proceeds benefiting Green City Market.

Whoa boy. Guess who’s going to be in the front of that line, copy of The Art of Simple Food in hand, and dressed to the nines in order to catch the eye of a certain 64-year-old? Take me back to California with you, Mrs. Waters. Take me.

Or I won’t go because that’s pretty early in the morning. More as (if) it develops.

I’m at the point now where, with many things, I’ll have a vague notion of whether a combination will be good. I made a red wine reduction sauce – something I bring up frequently because it makes me sound more accomplished that I actually am – that called for red wine, butter, shallots, and thyme. I didn’t know exactly how it would taste, but I did know that if it didn’t taste good, it was my fault.

Sometimes, though, I won’t have the foggiest notion of what two ingredients will taste like together, which usually results in a reckless exuberance for experimentation that I haven’t felt since mixing drinks my freshman year in college. Orange Slice and whiskey? Let’s do it!

That’s how I felt when I came across this recipe for a salad of grapefruit and avocado, although, to be fair, I can’t think of a scenario where I wouldn’t want to eat an avocado. In this way, I guess it’s much like whiskey. Sorry, grapefruit, you’re Orange Slice.

Also to be fair, this recipe came from my Alice Waters cookbook, The Art of Simple Food. I’ve made a number of dishes from this book (including my entire last post), and she hasn’t steered me wrong yet. Grapefruit and avocado? If you say so, Ms. Waters.

The recipe is, well, simple. First, you remove the rind and membranes. Alice Waters also taught me how to do this. Basically, you cut off the top and bottom so that you can just barely see the flesh, and then cut in downward strokes around the fruit, ideally leaving all the meat and none of the white membrane. Here’s my result; it’s not that I couldn’t see the remaining membrane, I just kept it to show that I, just like you, am a flawed human being:

Then you cut along the internal membrane to divide it into slices. Then you cut up an avocado, and put it all on a plate, alternating slices.

The vinaigrette is simple, too. First, there’s grapefruit juice “squeezed from the membranes.” I’m still unsure about this process, but luckily my knifework was sloppy enough that I took some flesh off too, leaving me with more than enough juice for the dressing. Then you add white wine vinegar.

Quick word about white wine vinegar: I didn’t own any, so I figured I’d go to the store and pick some up. That should’ve beeen pretty straightforward, right? Except that I went to Olivia’s, my neighborhood’s snooty market. Picture Whole Foods, but with condos on top.

I actually like the store a lot, aside from the price tags. The good news is that I knew they’d have white wine vinegar. The bad news is that it turns out they have a pretty large selection, which paralyzed me. Taster Number One was with me and urged me to buy the cheapest stuff. This was out of the question because it’s the cheapest for a reason, right? I suppose it would’ve been helpful to remember our dispute from the carrots, but I didn’t, so there I stood, agonizing over how I was going to spend $10 than I had to. I said I wanted to ask an employee which one was the best, but Taster Number One pointed out they probably wouldn’t know and would just make up which one was “the best.” This made sense to me, so I randomly picked one. How did I do?

In the end, I only used about a teaspoon of vinegar. So, time well spent.

Other ingredients in the vinaigrette were salt, pepper, and oil. In other words, it was a vinaigrette.

RESULTS

Not as bad as Orange Slice and whiskey, but not as good as my favorite combination, ice and whiskey. My main complaint was that the tartness of the grapefruit overpowered the flavor of the avocado. In my previous post about tofu with Thai curry sauce, I speculated adding salt might lead to the biggest improvement, and I think that might be the case here, too. More salt, either directly on the avocado or in the vinaigrette, might bring out the avocado’s flavor. Other than that, I’m sort of at a loss as to how to mellow out the acid of the grapefruit.

In any case, here’s the final result. I don’t think I’ll make this specific salad again, although I’d try some variation of it. Alice Waters has a few different versions, including this one (which is technically an adaptation by the linked website) that has a more interesting vinaigrette.

In my previous life as a lazy cook, I would have grilled cheese and soup somewhere in the neighborhood of once every couple weeks. Generally, this was my fallback meal if I was low on supplies or needed to eat a quick dinner. The grilled cheese would be Brownberry whole wheat bread with muenster and cheddar cheese, and the soup would be canned. It’s not a bad meal, but certainly not one I looked forward to.

This winter has been the worst Chicago has seen in almost thirty years, so if you know how bad Chicago weather normally is, maybe you can imagine the soul-devouring frozen hellscape I’ve been dealing with for the past five months.

If you can’t picture it, here’s a photo I took out my front door earlier today:

The good news about this excrutiating cold - aside from the solace that since this winter was so unusually bad, it probably won’t be worse next year – is it that gave me an excuse to appropriately make a more thoughtful version of my fallback meal in mid-April.

Enter Alice Waters and her cookbook I love so much, The Art of Simple Food. I was fairly nervous about trying her minestrone recipe because 1.) I’ve never made soup before, and 2.) the recipe only calls for three cups of liquid, which seemed wrong. But I put my trust in Ms. Waters, took her hand, and she made my first soup experience more enjoyable than I’d even hoped it’d be. Coo coo ca-choo, Mrs. Robinso- er, yikes. Sorry, I was somewhere else.

Anyhow, the recipe involves the following intricate steps:

Put the vegetables in the pot according to how long they take to cook.

Usually, when I cook, I get bogged down in the details, especially if I’m making more than one dish. Before I even open the fridge, I pour over the recipes and figure out how I’m going to coordinate the various cooking times. This involves some advanced mathematics and an obsession with detail that tends to throw me into a blind panic.

However, I’m able to tell (more or less) when a vegetable is cooked without having to consult a stopwatch. As a result, I was able to pay less attention to the directions and more attention to the food. I had the new experience of feeling more like I was cooking rather than, say, putting together Ikea furniture.

The other promising change concerned my vegetable chopping. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I tend to cut things up however I damn well feel like cutting them up at the time, which usually means the pieces of diced vegetables end up as unique as snowflakes. This anarchic approach towards food prep is how I believe James Dean or maybe a young Marlon Brando would’ve operated in the kitchen and probably lends to me a devil-may-care aura that women who grew up in the ’50s and ’60s find irresistibly sexy (Alice Waters, I’m looking at you).

However, apparently there’s a functional reason to have your vegetables cut to the same size - so they all cook uniformly – so I allowed my mojo to take a hit and reluctantly researched online how to properly dice stuff. Let’s take a moment and admire my soffritto:

Yeah, I just said ”soffritto.” At least I didn’t say “mirepoix.” I’m not ready to be a person who uses that word. And not just because I don’t know how to pronounce it.

Dicing an onion is my new favorite thing to do. Instead of describing the process, follow this link to a clear, concise video on Chow.com. There are a lot of videos on this site, including a series of videos on a range of topics called “Chow Tips,” most of which are pretty useful and none of which are longer than thirty seconds. I recommend checking them out. Fair warning, though: If you watch more than three, you’ll be saying “Chowww tips” for the rest of the day. Chowww tips. Chowww tips. Watch and you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Anyhow, here’s the next step, when I added garlic, thyme, salt, and a bay leaf:

Then I added some water and brought it to a boil:

Then green beans and leeks:

Okay, here’s where I panicked a bit because I had to seed and peel a tomato. I got the seeds out, but I still have no idea how to take the peel off. I also put in zucchini, which I fortunately didn’t have to peel.

This next step confused me a little, too. The recipe called for a pound of spinach. Do you know how much spinach is in a pound? A crapload, that’s how much. I used a half pound instead. I also put in cannellini beans.

The soup was basically done at this point. Notice all the liquid. Miraculous, huh? Trust Alice Waters.

A step or two back, I started getting ready to cook the grilled cheeses. Taster Number One cut up a loaf of bread, sliced the gruyere, and buttered the bread slices. I would punch a child to get to eat what’s in the following picture right now:

A few grocery trips back, Whole Foods was sampling Kerrygold Pure Irish Butter. In a surprising show of restraint, I didn’t buy any that day, but I wanted some for these grilled cheese sandwiches. My God, this is good butter. Eat this butter and you’ll feel like a stupid idiot for thinking the butter you currently have in your fridge is good. The cows that make this butter are apparently raised on grass, get daily udder massages, and sleep on memory foam mattresses.

Anyhow, Waters also recommends putting sage leaves on the bread before frying. Here it all is in the pan. I made a third sandwich, you know, just in case two wasn’t enough for Taster Number One and me.

After the sandwiches were done frying, I rubbed the bread with garlic, which is a nice technique to add to my repertoire. I now rub the rim of my drinking glasses with garlic, too.

Here’s the final meal:

Ah, the perfect meal for the middle of April! Tell me again why I moved to Chicago?