Primavera; the cheese is a local Monterey Jack. “I’m looking for
the things that really make a difference,” says Waters. “Certain
things that taste remarkably different.”
After frying eggs in olive oil, crowning them with a ring of fresh
herbs from her garden, and serving them for lunch on whole wheat
toast rubbed with garlic, she takes a glass teapot and fills it with
mint leaves.
“This is my favorite recipe,” she tells me, adding boiling water
to the leaves from a kettle.
This is fresh mint tea, as simple as it gets, and she pours it into
small glasses for us to sip. “Interesting,” she says as she tastes.
“This mint is lemon balmy. It’s different from the mint you get in
spring, which is more assertive.”
I must confess that my mint tea tasted, at first, just like mint
tea; but after thinking about it, I suppose it did taste lemon balmy.
Noticing a detail like that doesn’t just happen, but being aware of a
detail like that is what comes at the end of path #2, a path that I
find myself traveling upon leaving the home of Alice Waters.