Humans,
It's Osito! For those just tuning in, you heard from the humans of Cow by Bear last month: Dad (aka Chef Bear) spent the early summer on a weathered fishing boat in the middle of the Mediterranean, apprenticing under a fisherman who hadn't spoken a word for 40 years and who harvests the finest mussels on the planet.
I'm happy to report our situation has changed; Dad is HOME.
He came off that boat with his fur stiff with salt and a long beard. He hugged me, sniffed the kitchen, and said what must have been the first fully coherent sentence he'd formed in weeks: "Is the grill hot?"
I've spent the last month or so helping him experiment with new ideas, findings, and recipes from that journey, and let me tell you — he was not exaggerating. The mussel toast he scribbled about on a fishing boat? He's made it on dry land, on real equipment, and it is even better than the sea-spray-inspired poetry he sent us. The rose water ice cream that "tasted like a memory he hadn't had yet"? I've now had that memory. Twice. Today.
He told me that as he was departing the boat, the fisherman pressed a small jar into his paw. It looked like mussels in olive oil and something green he still can’t fully identify. The fisherman said nothing then returned to his nets. Dad told me, “I've cooked on multiple continents and one distant planet, and no one has ever said more to me with less.”
The other thing he keeps saying is that one of this was meant to live on paper or in his memories. It was meant for the table. So while he's back to prowling the kitchen without pants and muttering about the exact temperature of midnight air, the rest of us are doing the responsible thing and partaking in his Summer Tour Around the Mediterranean menu; tasting what his voyage became.
Now that he’s home, he's cooking like a bear possessed. You'll want to experience this one. His Mediterranean menu ends on XXX, so get in here before this Levantine-leaning chapter closes forever.
Yours (and Dad says hi),
Osito
P.S. — A postcard turned up at the Cow by Bear headquarters that wasn't Dad's handwriting. Just a bamboo leaf pressed onto paper, with one line: "When you're ready for the East, you know where to find me.” He won't tell me who it's from yet. More soon.