No maps for these territories

Today I went to the farmer’s market for my dinner.

I got:
* salad greens, mostly spicy as the weather is getting hot
* chard, which always seems to me to taste of vitamins (in a good way; chard is healthy, and not ashamed to let you know it)
* peaches! some of the first; tiny and intensely sweet
* and new potatoes — very new, so tiny that some are the size of a hazelnut and the rest no bigger than a fresh almond.

Out of all the cookbooks I own — which is a fair number — the only one suitable to cooking such perfect potatoes is James Beard, who advises in his inimitable way on sauteeing such potatoes in half a stick of butter, adding parsley and consuming immediately. Beard was never afraid of butter. Indeed, what right-thinking person would be? (a vegan could substitute some high-quality olive oil and get the same effect). But truly, worries over figure and fat, cellulose and cell structure: who cares, in the face of new potatoes and butter? If you have not eaten a new potato — a true new potato, tiny and fresh out of the soil — then you have not lived.

I am eating the above with a bit of strip steak that was in the freezer,* and drinking wine while I pack up my clothes and gear for camping at Sasquatch this weekend, and feeling pretty good. I am working hard and living well.