vip in the city

Creamy indulgence

Today was Ash Wednesday – the first day of Lent. After last night’s extravagant feast, I was ready to embrace a more ascetic lifestyle, so for the next forty days, I will be giving up meat – red and white… and the other white.

Having gone the “meatless Fridays” route the past few years, it didn’t seem too great an additional burden to extend the restriction throughout the entire week. I do appreciate the carnivore’s lifestyle, though, so rest assured that the required element of sacrifice is still there. But let’s be realistic: I’ll still be eating seafood and animal products (dairy, eggs, honey). Apparently this dietary combination makes me a pescetarian rather than a vegetarian, since of course, true vegetarians do not eat fish.

Incidentally, is there a word for the vegetarians who eat bacon? If not, there should be, because I’ve met my share of those in my day. Hey, I sympathize: if ever I were to attempt to extend my Lenten dietary restrictions year-round, that would be my downfall as well. Bacon’s tasty, yo!

The New York Times just ran a piece on the challenges incompatible diets can pose for romantic relationships. In it, author Kate Murphy included a hilarious quote from Anthony Bourdain’s compulsively readable 2000 memoir and industry exposé Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly: “vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans … are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit.”

Well, I wouldn’t go quite that far. But I certainly don’t have to understand it.

So I may be off meat for a month and a half, but I can still indulge in delicious cheese. And wouldn’t you know: Fairway Market had just gotten in a fresh shipment of burrata, the highly perishable curd and cream delicacy from Campania, introduced to me by MLF a couple of weeks ago.

I picked up one of the leaf-wrapped pouches, and hurried home with my bounty….

…and cut right in, unleashing the oozing creaminess within.

Now that’s sinful.

Tags: burrata, cheese, Fairway Market, Lent, meat