Cream Improves Practically Everything

I do not usually have heavy cream in my house, but after buying some for a recipe, I used up the remainder by adding a bit anywhere it seemed called for. Suddenly everything I made was calling for it--even my coffee, in which for years I've been preferring milk to half-and-half. The pinnacle of this orgy of butterfat was an amazing salad, quite possibly the best I have ever eaten. Granted, cream alone would not have been enough; the cream was ably assisted by a serendipitous assortment of odds and ends that had collected in my refrigerator.

It started prosaically enough, with a salad-in-a-bag (a romaine/red cabbage/carrot blend on sale for 87 cents--I'd bought three, ironically with the intention of some light, healthy meals to counteract Thanksgiving and its leftovers). I added walnuts, bits of leftover turkey, and apple cubes (a Holiday apple, my new favorite variety, which I have only found at Johnson's Fruit Farm by the cabin). Then I made a dressing of olive oil (the California Estate variety from Trader Joe's that has had me looking for new things to drizzle it on), balsamic vinegar, red wine vinegar, garlic, pepper, and a little salt and sugar. I mixed crumbled blue cheese and bacon (from the pig, cooked so its fat could be used in the poor, unloved Thanksgiving maque choux) in to the dressing, then tossed it into the lettuce mix. I wonder if I will ever have all the right ingredients together again, or if I am destined never to recreate this sublime (and ridiculously rich) salad experience.

The recipe that made me buy cream in the first place is pumpkin stuffed with everything good, a recipe published everywhere to entice one to buy Around My French Table: More Than 300 Recipes from My Home to Yours. (I have so far resisted the actual buying, but it's sitting in my Amazon cart tempting me.) I'd tried stuffing a pumpkin with good things once before and it was disappointingly bland, but the concept seemed so wonderful that I tried again, and I'm glad I did. The key difference was probably that this time I had a better pumpkin: sweet and smooth-textured where the other had been stringy and watery. More of the good bacon left from making maque choux fat helped, as did lots of garlic and fresh chives and thyme (dug from under snow in my backyard, but still good). I used raw-milk Swiss cheese. (The recipe's suggestion of cheddar as an alternative seems wrong: I love cheddar cheese but in this recipe Swiss is a natural accompaniment to the bacon, garlic, and herbs.) And of course there was the magic cream. It was very, very good, and very, very rich. It would be better to eat with a group of people so each person can only have a small portion; tempted into a second helping, I felt a little ill afterward.

Finally, I rediscovered how much more delicious even the most delicious pasta sauce becomes with the addition of a little cream. For the pasta in the picture, I improvised a lemon-cream sauce using lemon-flavored sea salt. It was good but would have been better if I'd had an actual lemon. Even better is adding a little cream to a tomato sauce, any tomato sauce.

Delicious as this creamy interlude has been, I hope that I can stop it from becoming a staple. I admit I bought a carton yesterday, but it was only because I had a coupon, I swear.

Maybe this will have to be a New Year's resolution.