ramps and oysters

holy honkin' hounds of hades.

i do not know what you had for dinner tonight but i will bet odds-on it was not as good as my dinner. this is not just my characteristic immodesty talking; your dinner wanted to be as good as mine, but it wasn't.

it's not your dinner's fault. it's not your fault. my dinner is just so awesome that very little has a chance against it.

i am going to pause here and say that it is no secret that i am posting pretty far into the future here. if you follow my story at all you might already be saying but flask! isn't it may already? aren't you off in some remote location, sleeping in your car?

why, yes. yes i am. i left home last wednesday and it is my habit to do two things: the first is that i do not tell people where i am going or where i am. this is partly because i may know where i am, but not where i'm going or when i'm coming come, barring the start of race season.

the other thing i do is that i write blog posts pretty far into the future because i never know where i'm going to be.

ok, ok, ok. you can tell actually which posts i write ahead of time (if you care about that kind of thing) because i schedule all posts i write ahead of time to run at seven or seven thirty in the morning. if the post has a time that doesn't end in 00 or 30, i wrote it same day.

i like to post at least one day ahead of time so it gives me time to put stuff together and i just have a lot of stuff i want to say and we can't have me out in some wilderness with no show-and-tell so in the weeks leading up to my departure i sometimes go into overdrive.

so really it's 27 april just after dinner.

which brings us back to my awesome dinner.

this morning i noticed that a whole bunch of my mushrooms were ripe. so i planned to make some version of this thing. but then i was in the grocery store because i needed to buy an onion to do that and they had RAMPS!

ramps, my friends. that springtime delight. i have never found ramps in the wild although i hope one day to do so.

but at the tiny grocery they sell ramps, which are not a domesticated species and therefore have to be gathered in the wild. ramp season is fleeting, and spring greens are a primal thing. back in the day when we ate from our root cellars all winter, anything edible and green that came up in the spring got et.

the people of the supermarket have lost the traditional desperation and relief of late winter and the spring greens, but in some communities and among some individuals this vestigial memory runs strong.

so i had mushrooms grown in my kitchen and ramps gathered out in the woods and i made a light pink sauce and put it over angel hair pasta.

short version: all parts of the saute done separately to capture the flavors of the mushrooms and the ramp greens. white parts of the ramps go in the sauce.

it is past good.