COWARD

The fresh mussels didn’t make it to Super One on Saturday, the day before the Super Bowl. Some problem with the truck from the coast, or the driver. I’m used to getting them there, my favorite store, and they are always good – with a young guy behind the counter who carefully picks through my order by hand, tossing out the suspicious ones. Normally, I buy them to make moules-frites, but this time, I had paella in mind – a seafood paella based on a recipe from Sarah Jay, proprietress of paellapans.com. The name of her website says it all. We bought one of our two pans from her many years ago, and though we rarely make the beloved Spanish rich dish, we wanted a seafood supper for the Super Bowl. 

            Sarah’s recipe calls for shrimp, scallops, and either mussels or clams – but I’m not one to follow recipes religiously. For all the disturbing American hype built up around it, paella is actually a humble dish and marvelously adaptable to all sorts of ingredients – including stuff you might just have in the fridge. We happened to have a handful of green beans and a red bell pepper – neither of which show up in Sarah’s seafood recipe – and I tossed them in for color, some festive carotene and chlorophyll to brighten the rice. We missed the mussels but I did find some clams which added a hint of brine to the affair.

            No chips, no dips, no guacamole, no bottled beer for the game – not for us. We wanted a comforting, hearty meal, something to take the sting out of Seattle’s certain loss to the Patriots – or so I had it in advance of the game. I had the Seahawks losing by ten; I had Sam Darnold throwing three interceptions. I had the Monday Morning Morons on ESPN howling like monkeys about Sam’s reversion to form, back when he was a Jet, tossing the interceptions that all led to Patriot scores.

            That was my card ahead of the game, and I was certain about it – the pure pessimism that grew over the years from watching my favorite teams, college and pro, fall time after time to the teams I despise. Take them in alphabetical order, starting with college: Alabama, LSU, Ohio State, Texas; then move to the pros: Dallas, Green Bay, Houston, New England. I had actually forgiven the Packers at one point until Aaron Rogers came along, and now I have grim thoughts about the Steelers, who hired him a couple years ago in the faint hope of becoming competitive again. I’ll surely hate the Steelers as long as they have Rogers.

            The real demon among my list up there is, of course, the Patriots. I made the mistake of watching Pete Carroll’s Seahawks in their second consecutive Super Bowl, 2015, the game where Russell Wilson managed to throw an interception from the one yard line with 20 seconds to play. The touchdown would have iced the Hawks’ astonishing comeback. The hated Pats won 28-24. I watched the whole game. The finale broke me, like Bo Nix’s ankle a few weeks ago on the final play against the Texans, leaving my beloved Broncos to face – who else? – the Patriots in the AFC final, without the exciting hero Nix who had pulled Denver back from the brink around ten times this past season. I have good reasons for my pessimism.

            It’s so bad that I have become a football coward. I can no longer watch teams I love playing teams I hate. I just can’t.

            So back to the paella.

            I made the dish while Dorothy watched the game on our lone television. Our TV room is an extension of our kitchen. You can’t work in the kitchen while the TV is on without noticing the TV – unless you keep your back to it. Which I did. She likes the play-by-play in any game she watches, plus the famous Super Bowl commercials, so she had the sound on (I never watch sports with the sound on), but we compromised: she kept it low, low enough for me to hear nothing but an incomprehensible murmur without my hearing aids.

            All of this was going on just few feet away the entire time I was cooking the paella. I glanced at the screen only once to see the Hawks ahead 3-0 after the opening drive. Then looked away and stayed away. I watched the stove instead. If you had been watching me watch the stove, here is what you would have seen:

            Bring the shrimp shells to a boil in salted water. Gently toast a big pinch of saffron in a small skillet, add to the shrimp shells, turn the heat way down and let stock steep like tea. Meanwhile, saute the green beans, bell pepper slices, shrimp & scallops for two minutes in a nice glug of olive oil heated in the paella pan. Set them aside. Grate a yellow onion, peel six cloves of garlic and leave ‘em whole. Skin, core, and chop three Roma tomatoes, then make the sofrito, the foundation of the dish, with those vegetables. It takes a good twenty minutes to stir this stuff into a robust and fragrant purée before you add the rice (medium-grain Calrose; we could not find Spanish Bomba here in town) and let it start soaking up the sofrito. As soon as the rice turns translucent you pour in the hot stock and arrange the clams around the edge of the pan, pushing them down into the liquid. In another twenty minutes as the swollen rice rises, you add the beans & pepper strips and form a pretty pattern – red and green spokes in a wheel of paella with festive cockles humming sea-songs around the rim.

            The game was going on all this time, and I was studiously ignoring Dorothy’s occasional chirps, barks, and yips at things happening on the field. Once she cried out, “Oh no!,” and my heart fell to the floor. That had to be Darnold’s first interception, but I refused to look.

            The shrimp and scallops go in last, again sweetly arranged, and then you cover the pan with foil, raise the heat a tad, and sweat bullets while the dish forms the grand trademark of a true Spanish paella: the crisp, deeply browned layer of bottom-rice known as socarrat. I use my nose to judge the status of the caramelizing rice. Is it burning? After all this effort, will I ruin the dish? Had Sam Darnold thrown his second interception?

            Dorothy had a Caesar salad chilled in the fridge and ready for the dressing. TV trays all decked out with salad dishes and shallow plate-sized bowls made by our favorite, Le Creuset. I loaded up and fled to our home office upstairs, still dreading the outcome of the game, still terrified to watch, but determined to enjoy my supper. It’s a dish I adore eating as much as making. Watching Seattle crash as I knew they would would put me off my feed, perhaps for years to come.                                

            Dorothy came up nearly two hours later as I sat reading a Jack Reacher novel, the best I could manage under the circumstances. Reacher was smackin’ guys around four at a time. I smiled, seeing Tom Brady’s face on all of them. Bowl and plate were clean to the bone. Glass of Cote du Rhone long gone. I heard her on the stairs as she approached – my mouth dry, my heart racing. And she announced:

            Seahawks 29, Patriots 13. Darnold had no turnovers.

            I rushed downstairs to join the post-game celebration. I think I cried a little.