Transition Food

Fantasizing on the first cool morning about days spent baking pies or learning how to make donuts is the culinary equivalent of reaching for my boots and jackets on the Tuesday after Labor Day.

A good way to ease into cozy fall cooking while still taking advantage of the produce still available, I figure, is to explore that one aisle of the beloved food co-op that always daunts: the wall of bulk food dispensers. Take grains: I read great things about farro; I love a nice wheat berry salad from Whole Foods. Grain salads seem like a great transition dish: hearty and comforting, and easy to modify. Also, my days lately are spent either temping (where you don't know if they'll have a microwave or what) or running around to auditions and rehearsals. One-dishers like this salad are great to carry since they can be good hot or cold.

Take a look at the cost breakdown:
.69 lb organic pearl barley $0.75
.39 lb block feta $2.60
Juice of 3 lemons $0.93
1 bunch organic lacinato kale $1.67
1/4 large bulb fennel $0.37
1.3 bunch scallions $0.19
1 red onion (leftover, negligible)
Total: $6.51

Note: these are prices at the Park Slope Food Co-op. I love the co-op. I know there are haters, but it seriously pains me now to buy groceries anywhere else. It hurts the brain to think about how much we pay for packaging.

This would be a pretty good number for a single lunch. However, I have been eating this salad literally ALL week. I figure I got about six servings out of this batch, so:

Cost-per-meal: $1.09

It's so yummy, and has been, to continue the clothing analogy, the beige sweater-dress of my week's meals. Accessorized with leftover chicken and roasted veggies, beans, a poached egg or diced avocado, I have not grown tired of eating it yet.

I basically stole kitchn's version with minor tweaks, so check out their recipe for cook times.

Next week: Quinoa!

A New Toy

J's mother gave us a mandoline! This largesse has coincided perfectly with the publishing of Mark Bittman's instantly classic 101 Salads. At an outing to FCI recently (and, I believe, my first ever luncheon), Sarah asked me if I would ever go to culinary school. The answer is no, but if I did it would probably be just so that I could take less than 45 minutes to chop an onion. I do not relish knifework.


First up was this yummy salad from Kitchn. Mine seems to fall into a totally different color scheme, but we used a tomato and a pepper from the garden! I prepped the onion and cukes (which -- J's idea -- we always score with a zester before slicing; it cuts down on toughness and looks really pretty!) in seconds and assembled the rest while the fish cooked on the grill. Lemon squeezey.

Then last night, I was a little pleased to end up with the night to myself because Emily's take on Bittman Salad #2 is a perfect lunch or dinner for one, but not really take-to-work-for-lunch material.


Next time I might make this on a hot day and pair it with a version of the cold avocado-melon soup we had once as a special at the Main Street Bistro in New Paltz. Light and fresh but still rather decadent, no?

The verdict: mandolines are wonderful, even if the only thing you ever use it for is onions. I don't care for big chunks of red onion in things, and I care still less for cutting them the old-fashioned way. But I will now put thin, lovely onion slivers in every salad I ever make. One thing though: use the finger guard.

Things in California that are not Chez Panisse

{Looking back at the bridge from the ferry on the way to Tiburon}

{The amazing farmer's market at the old Ferry building, now a really nice marketplace. The oyster po' boy is becoming a tradition.}

{A creepy-pretty mural}

{Language of the Birds: Words on the ground that fell out of books hanging from the streetlights directly above. Just up the hill from City Lights Bookshop.}

{Pretty signs on Polk Street, after brunch at an adorable little cafe that turned out to be a huge chain. Why don't we have one of those on every corner?}

photo by K Hellyer via yatzer
{Another public piece by Brian Goggin called Defenestration. Good title. My favorite is the grandfather clock.)

photo by R. R. Jones
{A Midsummer Night's Dream at Shakespeare Santa Cruz: the most delightful Shakespeare production I've seen in ages, and the first play I ever did at school (I played Demetrius).}

{At a sunny little spot in Santa Cruz}

I know everyone jokes when they go on vacation about never coming back and living the life of a permanent tourist. I believe no one really wants this, but it is liberating to remember that not every worthwhile experience is just beyond your front stoop. Yes, even New Yorkers.

Chez Alice

Last week my boyfriend and I went to California to visit his family. I gave considerable thought to not coming back.

We called upon many of Jonathan's old friends, and visiting tends to involve eating together. So we ate. A lot. The highlight: Chez Panisse, of course! Well, the cafe, anyway. But I would never have known that we were sitting in the little sister.

{Me: Zucchini salad with squash blossoms and pecorino}

{Jonathan: Avocado and beet salad with purslane and chili flakes}

{Me: Sea bass with Indian spices, mint & cucumber raita, and tomato & eggplant}

{Jonathan: Goat's leg (!) and potato gratin with roasted heirloom tomatoes & salsa verde}

{My cookbook-cover shot with desserts (1) Rhubarb tart with strawberry ice cream & (2) Creme Panisse with raspberry coulis....}

{...and (3) Chocolate pavé with espresso cream & chocolate sauce & (4) Mulberry ice cream with peaches and creme chantilly!}

{Mm, pretty Barbera and Rosé. The colors just looked so pretty with all that natural light.}

Thank you, Alice, who started it all.

Patience, or How to Make Caramel

When one hosts a large-ish party with an impressive main dish, one earns the right to erase silently an entire item from the intended menu. I was giddy at the prospect of trying something that goes with the transcendent bread pudding at my restaurant: bourbon-spiked caramel sauce.

Wilting over the heat, I watched as a promising tint of gold formed a lacy edge to cup after cup of bubbling sugar. But just as I would begin to feel hopeful, the entire mess would flare up like seafoam and shrink into a spiteful white clump.

Guests began to arrive, and I pretended to myself that I had never planned on serving dessert and ignored the drawerful of ripe peaches huddling in the fridge.

Monday was a new day, so I prepared myself to waste another box of sugar and possibly the better part of a hot afternoon over a hotter stove because these guests would have caramel and peaches, damnit.

Five cups of sugar and several episodes of Planet Money later, I decided to listen to the advice given by only a few of the recipes I came across (the others provided suspiciously few steps and an "it's-so-easy!" attitude I deemed untrustworthy): You must let the sugar dissolve completely before the mixture comes to a boil. I had been a little loose with terms like "must" and "completely". I mean, can syrup ever be completely clear?

As a child, I never understood why Patience had such a good reputation. Anyone can wait for something, I thought. But to watch a pot of sugar and water is to confront again and again feelings of discomfort (at not being in control) and fear (of things not turning out right) and to quiet those feelings.

At its heart, home cooking is about inviting friends into your home so you can validate a slightly obsessive need to turn something simple that everybody likes into something complicated and stressful. And so it was terribly gratifying to spoon up the thick stuff over soft grilled peaches and hear the most beautiful phrase in the world: "You made that?"

Do-Over Dinner

We set for ourselves a challenge this week: two dinner parties, a day apart, with almost no prep time with both of us in the room. Dinner #1: A Saturday night BBQ with lots of folks. Dinner #2: a quiet evening with another couple. Turns out the same menu works for both: pizza on the grill!

Dinner #1 was a bit chaotic and really festive. We bought dough from the pizza place around the corner and prepped as many toppings as possible, but there was still a lot of assembly while guests looked on. One friend remarked that it was like Grimaldi's, where half the fun is watching the guys flip the dough while you wait.

Dinner #2: Monday was a whole new mood. I did exactly what we had planned for the party dinner, but the chaos of the first run-through gave way to a peaceful afternoon stirring a little circle around the kitchen: caramelize onions, simmer sauce, knead dough -- stir, stir, knead.


The result of a questionably planned couple of nights spent entertaining was the rare opportunity to do it all over, recollecting recipes in tranquility.

If you can remember not to go nuts with toppings (three per pie should suffice) and keep the rest simple, you won't have to make a fantastic but debilitating, leftover-using, morning-after breakfast like this one following Dinner #1:


I used 101 Cookbooks's tomato sauce (lemon zest!), and made three varieties of smallish, semi-personal pizzas. Make sure everything is chopped and pre-cooked and organized in little bowls, and have a post-it with each pizza topping combo handy.

Ours:
Mozzerella - tomato - basil
Asiago - grilled peppers
Gorgonzola - caremelized onions - sausage

Next time I would like to make the dough, but I find no shame in buying a ball of dough from around the corner. Guests seemed equally impressed by the fact that they sell it to just anyone ("You just ask? Do they look at you funny?") as by homemade dough. The pizza is fabulous, cheap and impressive. We don't ever order pizza at home, but now I know we never need to.

4th of July Weekend Part II: Portland

I have a new favorite bookstore: Rabelais! Not just cookbooks, but food books. And how have I never heard of the eponymous Rabelais (novel-inventer, Swift-influencer, tosser-off of deathbed witticism)? The owners are husband-and-wife Brooklyners who seem to have set up shop partly so they could defy those who admire photos of elaborate dishes but exclaim "No one cooks like that at home!"

Portland has become a destination foodie city in the past few years and even reminds me a little of Brooklyn with its passion for sustainable but fancy ingredients and a casual vibe. Duckfat fits this description.

The main attraction is french fries fried in... duck fat. We forwent the Poutine, which is like a parfait with layers of fries, cheese curd and duck gravy, and tried a few of the sauces: truffle ketchup (Heinz + truffle oil!), Thai chili mayo and my favorite, horseradish mayo.

However, I was equally ecstatic to see a yummy version of my favorite kind of salad: greens + cheese (ricotta) + fruit (strawberries) + texture (fennel). Fresh, bright and the perfect antidote to bad-for-you, ducky wonderfulness.

I couldn't resist the sweet potato curry soup, which I thought might be too wintry but was the perfect spicy counterpoint.

Now that I'm back I'll have to start cooking from some of the books J bought. Maybe I'll finally try a souffle....