The veggie box usually features a "mystery" or two, unannounced by the CSA. Weeks I have to shop before veggie day can be challenging, since the last minute changes and extra mysteries often become orphaned ingredients. But it's usually not too much of a problem, since they can all go into the "chef's choice" day.
But this week -- we got sweet corn! Four ears!
There are only two things to do with sweet corn: eat it right away, or compost it. There once was a time when I thought otherwise, also when I bought the stuff in the store. Then my spouse, raised (sorta) in farm country, read me the riot act. To paraphrase her, the corn is past its prime if it's not still attached to the stalk when you put it in the water.
So what could I do but eat it tonight? With Mika out of town, and only four ears, it was up to me and the boys to save this corn from a far worser fate than ever it might meet.
My confession comes in: I can never remember how long to boil corn. This may have come from my previous belief that ten minutes was the right length to make sure it was thoroughly cooked, another notion that was whupped out of my head by my better half after I ruined a batch about 1988. The correct number of minutes, of course, is three, but for some reason that number won't stay in my head.
So it was I found myself today in the embarrassing situation of googling for a recipe on how long to cook sweet corn. (Mark Bittman, "how to cook everything" appears to be not entirely accurate. Even Good Housekeeping let me down.) And in checking out a couple of answers, I noticed an odd set of variants in instructions about exactly how to boil the water. Some of this was not unusual -- salt or no salt, etc. -- but I saw several 'recipes' for sweet corn that called for adding sugar and lemon juice, and even vinegar, to do...what to the corn? Normally experimental, I'm never going to find out directly. My spouse would think all her great work in educating me in the ways of sweet corn would be undone.
And, obsessiveness over details in this space notwithstanding, I'm drawing the line at researching recipes on how to boil water.
The corn out here, of course, is no match for anything grown in the great Northeast in summer -- corn and tomatoes are two foodstuffs that California will never grow well. But -- on the other hand -- I'm getting fresh sweet corn in November. So nyeah nyeah nyeah.
Izzy had fresh corn for the first time this past summer, and was a very enthusiastic first-timer. When he saw the corn today, he could not contain himself. He started making grunty noises and squealing smiles and corn-eating gestures. He ended up eating two and a half of the four ears we had! It's a great pleasure for a cook to be able to serve us something so simple to make and yet so satisfying to the diner.
