The Most Important Meal

So for breakfast the other weekend, I had this craving for harissa, and a poached egg. Something kind of just like this:

I have learned, from Michael Ruhlman’s blog, an easy way to poach an egg. You do not need the special spoon he’s selling, though. You just need a spaghetti server, that big pronged spoon with holes in it. (A regular slotted spoon might work, too, depending on how yours is constructed.) Set a pot of water on high heat, and when it’s boiling, crack the egg into the spaghetti server. Do it over the sink, because the point is that you want to get rid of the liquidy part of the white. It takes a little dexterity, but it’s worth it, because then you just dump it in the water, turn the heat down a bit, and wait a minute or two. I like the yolks really runny, so that’s all it takes, and then you scoop it out. 

Then you just have to decide what to do with your egg. Like I said, this one was destined for some harissa. You can buy pre-made harissa, but what fun is that, when David Tanis has such an awesome recipe for it, and everything you need is right there in the pantry?

Toast some cumin, coriander, fennel, and caraway.

Grind them up, mix with some paprika, cayenne, salt, and minced garlic. Add in olive oil and a bit of red wine vinegar, and you’re good to go.

All that remains is to plate it up. I used the last of the pea shoots I’d gotten in my last Winter Sun Farms, and a piece of toast. The perfect way to start my Saturday.

Copy Cat Tart

Ages and ages ago (well, a couple of months), my friend over at Moody Food wrote about a turnip green tart she made. So when my turnips showed up with their lovely greens still attached (late in the season, the root veggies we get usually have theirs removed), I knew I would have to follow suit.

Not long ago, I would have called this sort of dish a quiche. And I would have made it in a pie plate. Because I am a philistine (hyperbole: exaggeration as a rhetorical device). And truthfully, I still don’t know why it should be called a tart. I think of a tart as a pie minus the top-crust. Which I guess this is, in a way. But then couldn’t you call a pizza a tart? Gah. This kind of rambling is what happens when work is slow on a December Friday afternoon.

In any case, quiche, tart, deep-dish pizza, whatever–you need a crust. And Nicky’s, adapted from Chocolate & Zucchini, is a good one. There is no chilling involved, as there is with butter crusts, which is useful for those of us who decide that we want quiche for dinner at 8 o’clock and can already hear our stomachs grumbling.

Parbake this while you’re getting the filling ready.

For that filling, you need some greens. My turnips only supplied about a half a pound, so I supplemented with some mixed mustard greens from the farmer’s market.

Wash, and then cook in boiling salted water with a ham hock–or, if you live in New York and don’t keep those things lying around, a rind of parmesan cheese that you stuck in the freezer, in a rare moment of foresight.

While they are cooking, sautee some onion in butter.

Then puree the greens and the onion in a food processor, together with as much of the cooking liquid as you think you need, plus some lemon juice, salt, and pepper. (Toss the parmesan rind.)

Beat together a couple of eggs, and then mix in the pureed greens. Pour the whole thing into your parbaked crust, and stick it back in the oven.

And so in no time at all, you have a lovely dinner, that is made even lovelier if you’ve got maybe a little soup to go with it, or some bread and cheese.

Not Your Grandmother’s Flan

I have been noticing this month that many of the other participants in French Fridays* with Dorie were expressing slight anxiety about making this particular recipe. Some of them even conceded, after making it, that it was not really to their liking. I guess this is fine. Admittedly, there are a few things that even I do not enjoy eating (smoked fish, caviar, and tapioca are on the short list). But, really, this is eggs, pumpkin, cheese, and nuts. What’s not to like?

Ok, yes, it is blue cheese (gorgonzola, specifically), and I guess there are more people with an aversion to that particular variety than to, say, cheddar. I am quite impressed that so many people signed up for a project that included something they were so nervous about–and that so many followed through and made the damn thing. But for me, this is recipe a small piece of bliss. And incredibly simple to make.

Normal flan is not my thing. Give me a creme brulee any day of the week, but keep your soggy flans. Maybe if they all had the crunch of toasted walnuts on top, I’d be a flan fan.

For this savory one, you need some cooked winter squash, eggs, and milk. If you’ve got a can of pumpkin, wonderful. If not, or if you’d rather use up some of the excess of butternut you’ve been getting in your CSA box (ahem), roast it or steam it and stick it in the blender with the other ingredients.

Puree away, and then pour into buttered ramekins in a bain-marie. I gotta say, I don’t quite understand why Dorie has us put a piece of paper towel under the ramekins, but I kind of trust her not to steer me wrong.

Sprinkle on top some crumbled gorgonzola and chopped walnuts. Stick in a hot oven for as long as it takes. The size of my ramekins was not the size of Dorie’s, so the timing was not accurate, but it’s easy enough to see when they start to puff up and pull away from the sides, and also when a knife comes out clean. Serve with something green, just for the sake of appearances.**

*Yes, it still is a Friday thing. I was busy this week, hence a day late.
**By which I mean visual aesthetics. I would never order you to eat your vegetables. Plus, pumpkin is a vegetable already, so you’ve got that covered.

A New Project

As I’ve mentioned obliquely already, Moody Food and I have both decided to participate in this food blogging project called French Fridays with Dorie, wherein we–along with several hundred other people who like to cook and take pictures and write about it–will jointly work our way through Around My French Table: More Than 300 Recipes from My Home to Yours, Dorie Greenspan’s latest brilliant cookbook. Moody Food pays a little closer attention to things like “start dates” and “deadlines” than I do, but luckily they don’t kick you out of the club if you miss a week, so it doesn’t matter that I had no idea this project started LAST week already. I missed making gougeres (though I’ll likely make them on my own at some point, just because–I mean, why WOULDN’T I want to make cheese puffs?) but clued in just in time to make Gerard’s Mustard Tart.

I asked my friend P., who shared this with me, and who is a Genuine French Person, what is the difference between a quiche and a tart, and he did not know. Things that I have made and considered a quiche have always been in a pie plate, and I understand that is not really correct, but I have three pie plates (thanks to Lindsay for 2 of them!) and I don’t know how I lived with fewer, but that made it difficult to justify buying a tart pan. I have learned, though, that Projects (like Cook Club, and French Fridays with Dorie) serve as an excellent justification for buying myself new kitchen tools and exotic ingredients. Like a tart pan, or this fancy pants mustard:

 

which I won’t tell you how much it cost (more than the tart pan), but Moody Food said it was the best, and I saw it at Kalustyan’s, and said, “Ooh, yes, I think I need this.” And lo and behold, a few months later I find myself making this mustard tart, and very glad I had some high quality whole grain mustard on hand.

 

Anyway. Usually I would do my sister’s patented (not really) olive oil crust for a quiche, but I like following directions on occasion, so I did the crust Dorie recommends, which includes an egg, and a bit of sugar, and only a teensy bit of ice water. As always, I was sure there wasn’t enough liquid to make it into a proper dough, and as always, I was proven wrong (with DG looking on through the parchment paper).
 

 

Like any normal pie crust, this gets chilled, and then rolled out.

 

(See, mom? The first mat you bought me was a roul-pat, not a sil-pat. Still very useful, but not for oven use.) And then put in the tart pan, and chilled again. 

 

And then baked, ideally with something used as weights, though she says if it’s cold enough, you don’t need them. She also says that if you use dried beans or rice as the weights, you cannot then cook with them. Because I am ignorant, I did not know this already, and because I hate to waste anything that qualifies as food, I have in fact cooked with beans that I had used as pie weights. If I served them to you, I am sorry. But I happen to own ceramic pie weights, so that won’t happen again.

 

So you bake and cool the crust, and then you chop up some carrots and leeks into sort of thick matchsticks, and steam them with a rosemary sprig.

 

Remember when I discovered this spring, doing the detox, that lining the steamer with fresh herbs is an amazing way to cook fish? Well, I’m a slow learner, and it hadn’t occurred to me that it would have the same transformative effect on vegetables. It’s amazing I managed to graduate from college at all, seeing how thick I can be.

 

So you do a little egg/cream mixture, dump in a good amount of mustard, pour that into your par-baked crust, and top it with the veggies. They can go any which way you want, but the picture in the book was so pretty, I decided to be formal (if not as neat as J. would have been) and do them in spokes.

 

One hot oven later, and P. declared this an unqualified success, although he had never heard of a mustard tart before (neither had Dorie’s Parisian friends, it seems).

 

 

And so, my first FFwD adventure comes to a close. I have learned many things already, beyond just the recipe for a delicious quiche. (It’s made of egg, it’s in a crust, it’s round. You can call it a tart, and I can call it a quiche.) The project has already proven worth the price of admission, which was really just the cost of the book, which I wanted anyway. In fitting with the community aspect of this project, and on the chance that some other participants meander over to my little blog, here are my answers to a little “getting to know you” questionnaire the organizer put on the site for people to fill out. (And apologies if you all now also have The King and I stuck in your head.)

 

Name: Lexi Beach

Hometown: Bryn Mawr, PA

Current town: New York, NY

How you pay the bills: A funny little niche of book publishing.

How many in your household? Just me and my frequent dinner guests.

What is your favorite comfort food? It’s the cooking that’s my comfort. But I have been known to indulge in yogurt-covered raisins.

The best restaurant you have ever been to? (and what did you have?) Blue Hill (the one in Manhattan, not at Stone Barns). We had the tasting menu, with the wine pairings, which might help explain why I just about fell out of my chair upon tasting the basil ice cream.

Worst habit or vice? Biting my nails (which I can’t do while I’m cooking, so all the more reason to spend lots of time at the stove).

What is your mother’s best dish? Lasagne.

What is your motto? It all works out in the end.

Which kitchen gadget do you use the most? The Cuisinart. Couldn’t survive a week without it.

Cook Club 2

[Guest post from M.]

L. has graciously allowed me to post a story to her blog about our most recent cook club.  As regular readers of this blog know, a few months ago, L. gathered a group of us with the idea of having regular supper parties.  There are four of us, and we take turns hosting.  Whoever hosts is in charge of all the food.  The other three bring guests and drinks.  L. hosted our first dinner party, which you can read about here.

Sunday night, it was my turn.  Those of you in the New York area know that this past weekend was sweltering.  Disgustingly hot.  All I wanted to do was lay in my air-conditioned bedroom and dream of winter snows.  It felt like we were in Alabama, and as luck would have it, I had planned a menu of southern food from The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook.  Even more lucky, I had done some of the baking the day before, and two of the main dishes were salads.  Regardless, by the end of the evening, my kitchen felt like a sauna.

So, on to the important things.  We started off with cheese straws (recipe from Mark Bittman; I don’t have a large food processor, and the Lee Bros’ recipe was a bit too reliant upon the food processor for me to feel as though I could adapt it reliably to my food-processor-less kitchen) and deviled eggs (recipe from the Lee Bros.).  I also had a big pitcher of sweet tea, and L. brought a pitcher of unsweetened white jasmine iced tea.  Delish!  I even dug out my grandmother’s hand-crocheted table-cloth for an added Southern touch (am I the only one who associates tablecloths with the South?  We never used them growing up — they seem most at home on a table tied to traditional ways).

After everyone had arrived and had had time to cool off with iced tea or wine, I started the grits.  I had planned originally to make grits with blue cheese, but with the weather, I thought the cheese might make them unnecessarily heavy.  I had already made the collards — vegetarian, but cooked in a smoky tomato onion sauce that gave them a nice traditional flavor — so I just heated those up as the grits cooked.  I had also prepared the two salads before my guests arrived — a succotash made of corn, cranberry beans, tomatoes, yellow squash, and basil;

and a “new ambrosia” made with grapefruit, oranges, avocados, celery, and cucumber — so C. tossed them with their dressings while I cooked. 

The recipe for the ambrosia is available online here.

I was most fond of the collards and grits, but I thought all the dishes turned out well.  It was nice, in this heat, to have cool dishes and to avoid the heaviness that comes with meals featuring too much dairy or meat.  Next time, I think I’d use less dressing on each of the salads, and I think I would de-seed the tomatoes before adding them to the succotash. 

But, of course, the most important part of any meal is dessert.

I had cooked a buttermilk pound cake the day before.  It was my first attempt at making a pound cake, and it turned out beautifully.  I’m still slightly traumatized by the amount of butter that went into it, but the results were divine.  I topped the cake with some plain whipped cream, a sauce made from blueberries that I had picked in New Jersey the weekend before, and fresh blueberries (sadly, not fresh picked). 

So, all in all, a lovely dinner with old friends and new.  We survived the heat and proved that a vegetarian southern feast is not an oxymoron.

Adventures in Salad

Yes, I understand that the reason people eat salad so frequently in the summer is that it is traditionally a meal that does not involve turning on the stove.

And yes, I do generally object to food bloggers who post “recipes” for salads.

But I like breaking rules occasionally. Even (especially) my own rules. Plus I keep reading about grilled romaine, and I happen to have 2 big heads of the stuff in my fridge. And I might not be fortunate enough to have an actual grill, but I have an awesome grill pan (thanks, Mary & Gay!), and I always like trying new techniques.

So the first thing to do is take the romaine and strip off some of the outer leaves until you’re left with something that you can look at and say, “Yes, I would no longer call that a head of lettuce, that is now a heart of romaine.” Please, please, please, do not go buy a sealed plastic bag of romaine hearts. God only knows how those things have been treated. I wish I didn’t know as much as I do about food safety–I wish I didn’t have to know–but I follow Bittman’s blog on my google reader and he has a guy named Barry Estabrook write posts that frequently scare the hell out of me and remind me exactly why I spend all my money at the greenmarket even though I also belong to a CSA. Seriously, kids, check out this post from just today:

Earlier this month, federal marshals seized 3,500 gallons of honey from a Philadelphia warehouse. The honey, which had been imported by Sweet Works, Inc. from China, contained chloramphenicol, an antibiotic that is not approved for use in food, animal food, or food-producing animals in the United States.

Antibiotics?? In HONEY?? Honey has antibacterial properties. You can put honey on a cut if you are out of neosporin and it will protect you from infection. Plus it never goes bad–archaeologists have found honey in Egyptian tombs that is still just fine. Honey is magical, which is just one of the many reasons I don’t understand vegans. But that is enough of a rant for right now. I will leave the vegans alone for another day.

Back to dinner. You buy a full head, strip off the leaves to be used for a normal salad at a later date, and that’s that. Cut the lettuce in half lengthwise, drizzle each half with some olive oil and sprinkle with salt & pepper.

Then you want to get started on the caramelized onions. I should probably point out that I don’t have the patience to actually caramelize onions, and because of that I have learned that I quite like crispy, charred onions on my salad. It gives sort of a smoky bacon-y flavor without actually adding any meat (and uncooked onions keep a hell of a lot longer and more easily than uncooked bacon). Also it is the key to my newest favorite salad dressing. Heat up a heavy skillet over medium/medium-low, and then add a tablespoon or so of olive oil. Dump in some thinly sliced onions (I used cipollinis tonight, but shallots are excellent, too, or whatever you have lying around) and let them cook, stirring occasionally. When they get to a level of brown that pleases you, turn off the heat.

If you are the cautious type, wait a few minutes for the pan to cool before this next step. If you are like me, just pour in some red wine vinegar and watch it sizzle and spatter. (You might want to jump back.) Stir it all up, sprinkle in some salt, and add a little more olive oil. There’s your dressing.

On another burner, you’ve got your grill pan going, right? Right. Relatively high heat. Once it’s hot, put the romaine hearts on, cut-side down, and let them cook a few minutes, just until you get grillmarks. Take ’em off, put ’em on a plate, and pour the dressing on top. Scatter some gorgonzola over it (shaved parmesan would be nice, also, if you’re not into blue), and voila.

If, at this point in the game, you find yourself thinking, as I did, “You know, I really want to make a mess of this thing called a salad. What else can I do to it to offend everyone’s sensibilities?” The answer: a fried egg. Or two. Wheee!

So heat back up the skillet you used for the dressing, coat it with a little more olive oil, just to be safe, and crack in a couple of eggs. Ideally you want them sunny-side up, so the yolks are still running and they mix in with the dressing and yes, I know you don’t like runny yolks, but I promise, it’s just better this way. Slide the eggs right on top of the lettuce and Bob’s your uncle.

Also, a side note today: I’m trying out a new blog hosting site, which a friend of A.’s started a while back. So if you’re reading this on blogspot, come on over and check out the alternate format: The CSA Files on Posterous. For now, my posts will be going both to blogspot and posterous, but presumably I’ll decide soon enough if I like one host better than the other. If you have an opinion, please weigh in.

 

Iconoclastic Grilled Romaine Unsalad

serves 1 for dinner (I had a very light lunch, so this might not be strictly accurate)

 

1 heart of romaine lettuce, split in half lengthwise

1 small onion, or 1 shallot, sliced thin

2 eggs

olive oil

salt & pepper

red wine vinegar

gorgonzola cheese, crumbled

 

Heat a skillet over medium-low heat. Drizzle in a tablespoon of olive oil and add the onion slices. Cook, stirring occasionally, until it’s more or less caramelized. Turn off the heat and let the pan cool a little before adding in a couple tablespoons of red wine vinegar. Stir together and pour in a little more olive oil. Season with salt to taste.

Meanwhile, heat a grill(pan) over high heat and drizzle a bit of olive oil on the cut sides of the pieces of romaine hearts. When the grill is hot, put the lettuce on, cut-side down. Cook for a couple of minutes, until you can see grill marks, then remove from the heat.

Add a little more olive oil to the skillet. Put the heat at low, and when it’s hot, crack in a couple of eggs. Cook sunnyside up, just until the whites are cooked, leaving the yolks very runny.

Pour the onion dressing on top, scatter on the cheese, and slide the eggs on top of everything.

Dirt Candy

There is this great restaurant down in the East Village called Dirt Candy. The chef’s philosophy is something along the lines that vegetables are awesome and deserve place of pride on the dinner plate. And as much as I love a good burger, I tend to agree. I wish I had access to a proper garden of my own so I could grow dirt candy for myself. But all I have is my window box full of herbs, which magically survived the incredibly snowy winter we had this year. (And, of course, my CSA, which doesn’t start up again until June.)

The harvesting, though, is only part of the joy of growing vegetables. The other part is the digging in the dirt. Which is how I spent the day yesterday, volunteering through New York Cares at the Padre Plaza Success Garden in the South Bronx. They were preparing a section of the park to add more raised garden beds, so we turned over top soil, and pulled out roots, and made a valiant effort to remove a tree stump. (The stump won the battle, but not the war.)

And then I swung by the greenmarket and picked up some dirt candy of my own, for dinner. I had bought some leeks earlier in the week (and the generous vendor gave me a bunch of lavender for free, prompting the 4th use of my ice cream maker this month–honey lavender ice cream). To that, I added some mushrooms, eggs, and honey chevre. And when I got everything home, after taking a 2 hour nap, it turned out I was making quiche. The leek/mushroom combination seemed especially apt, given that both are notorious for needing a lot of cleaning, because the same could be said for me after my day of playing in the dirt volunteering.

This is my sister’s olive oil crust (made with thyme from my window box). I am hit or miss at rolling out pie crusts, so this is a very useful recipe to have.

(Note to self: don’t leave your cell phone on the counter when making something that involves flour.)

These are the aforementioned leeks.

The traditional method of preparing leeks involves slicing down the length of the stalk, almost to the root, washing carefully in a tub of water, and then slicing up. I prefer cleaning them a la Hesser: slice them up first, and THEN wash them (a salad spinner is wonderfully useful for this).

Then the leeks go in a skillet with a chunk of butter and some salt.

Slice up the mushrooms:

and add them to the skillet (with maybe some more butter…)

Meanwhile, scramble together 5 eggs and a cup-ish of milk. Mix the sauteed veggies in (a little at a time–don’t want to cook the eggs before they even get in the oven) and some crumbled up chevre.

Bake at 375F for, oh, 45 minutes or so. Until the middle is cooked.

My new camera is WAY better than the old one (thanks, mom!) but even so, I can’t make this quiche look pretty. It is delicious, so it has that going for it, but you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Leek and Mushroom Quiche
crust:
1 1/4 c. flour (I used whole wheat pastry)
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 c. (or more) of olive oil
1/2-1 tsp fresh herbs, chopped (I used thyme)
2-4 Tbsp water

filling:
1 bunch leeks
1/2 lb mushrooms (criminis work great)
2 Tbsp butter
5 eggs
1 c. milk
2 oz. goat cheese (I used the honey chevre from Patches of Star Dairy)
salt & pepper

Pre-heat the oven to 375F.
Mix the crust ingredients together in a small bowl with a fork, until they are just fully combined. Use only as much water as you need. Press the dough into a 9″ pie crust, going as far up the sides as you can.
Clean & slice the leeks in whatever way you like. Heat a pan over medium heat and add 1 Tbsp butter. When it’s melted, add the leeks and salt and saute until they are starting to color. Meanwhile clean and slice the mushrooms. Add them to the pan, with another Tbsp of butter. Cook just until the mushrooms have lost that raw look.
Let the veggies cool while you scramble together the eggs and the milk. Mix them in gradually, and then add the goat cheese, in chunks. Season with a little more salt and some fresh ground pepper. Pour the whole mess into the pie crust and stick it in the oven. Cook for 40-60 minutes, until the center is fully cooked.

Finding Uses for Beets

As an adult, I have learned that I like beets quite a bit, but I’m never sure what to do with them beyond roasting & tossing with one dressing or another (honey/rosemary/cayenne, yogurt/ginger, goat cheese & dijon vinaigrette…). M. and I tried them raw, julienned with ricotta and a citrus dressing, and while I found it to be a beautiful dish, it was frankly too bland for me. So I was intrigued when I found Orangette’s recipe for Beet-Feta Tart. Not least because anything in a pie crust is automatically better than the same ingredients NOT in a pie crust.

So we start off with Martha Stewart’s pate brise, a savory version, and with a mix of all-purpose and whole wheat flours. Blind bake it. (I should really make something with these chickpeas eventually, instead of just using them as pie weights…)

Then while that’s in the oven, mix up a couple of eggs, 3/4 c. of milk, and a quarter pound of feta, crumbled.

Oh, I should probably put this as the first step, really–the beets need to be roasted and peeled, which will take close to an hour, but can be done a day or more in advance.

Once the crust is baked, slice the beets into 1/4″ thick slices and layer them in a single layer in the crust, to cover as much of it as possible.

Then pour in the egg/milk/cheese mixture.

And bake for 40 minutes at 350F.

The cool thing about this dish is that the color of the beets continues to filter through the eggy mixture. This is what it looks like straight out of the oven:

And then this is a few hours later:

It’s a pretty thin tart, but it’s pretty rich, with a wonderful salty-sweetness from the cheese and the beets.

Lunchbox Food

Years ago, Amanda Hesser devoted a column of the (old format) food section of the New York Times Magazine to an airplane-appropriate menu that was still Hesser-approved. It was a little fussy for me, if I recall, but I DO recall is the point.

Even more years ago, there was a scene in Hannibal where Lecter is on a plane, and he has carefully packed his own carefully composed meal because airplane food is clearly not going to cut it for someone with his palate, and then he winds up sitting next to some little brat who, like, sneezes all over it or something and he gives him the whole thing. (Don’t worry, he hadn’t prepared soylent green for himself or anything. It was probably a comte and some foie gras or something.)

Here is what I think about eating when you’re traveling: do it as often as possible, and lower your standards. I don’t mean once you’ve reached your destination, just while you’re on the plane/train/automobile. If you have ever found yourself stuck on a stalled Amtrak train between New Haven and Bridgeport, or forced to spend the night in Rome’s Fiumicino airport, you understand the importance of NOT being hungry for those hours of imprisonment. And if that means resigning yourself to a crappy sandwich from Au Bon Pain for dinner, then so be it. And have a cookie while you’re at it. And a bag of mixed nuts. Avoid the microwaved pizza on Amtrak if you can, though.

My point is that while I like the idea of packing myself a little lunch when I’m about to board a plane, it’s just not going to happen. There are other things I need to worry about, like making sure my passport isn’t going to expire before I get back into the country and that I didn’t forget my Zyrtec. There will be food available somewhere, it will be crappy, and I will buy it and eat it. I will be marginally cranky because it was mediocre but not unmanageably grumpy because I’m starving and passed up my last chance for 2,000 miles to acquire sustenance. Lesser of two evils.

That said: I work in midtown, which is the land of inedible cafeterias and $12 lunch specials. $12 is not a bad deal for a sitdown lunch with table service, but one cannot do that every day when one is keeping an eye on one’s bank account. Plus I have all these vegetables in my fridge that need to be cooked. And it turns out that the requirements for a decent make-your-own airplane meal are about the same as for a brown bag lunch. (Although my lunchbag is an insulated fabric one from Cascade Lemonade‘s shop on Etsy.)

And so (longest recipe intro ever) we turn to Orangette’s Kale and Cheddar Frittata with French-Style Carrot Salad. And what a coincidence! I have kale, I have carrots. I have a shallot. I was strangely out of cheddar (?!) but that was rectified easily enough.

First the salad. Carrots, Cuisinart, grating disc…

…and voila! Dress with lemon juice, olive oil, salt, and a little minced garlic.

And then we move on to the main dish. Cut the stems out of the kale and slice the leaves into ribbons.

Cook the minced shallot in olive oil for a few minutes, just until it’s soft.

Add the kale, with a little more olive oil and some salt. Stir it all up, and then cover and let cook for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally

until it’s all properly wilty and cooked through.

While that’s taking care of itself, beat up some eggs.

Grate in some cheddar, and then mix in the kale/shallot mixture. (A large ball whisk is much better for this sort of thing than the little whisk I usually use–thanks, J., for that.)

Pour the eggy mixture back in the skillet and cook over very low heat until it’s nearly cooked through.

Finish it off under the broiler.

Orangette notes that this is a very thin frittata, and indeed it is much thinner than the ones I usually make. But she also claims that it serves 2 people for dinner, and even I was not hungry enough for an entire half. So we got lunch at work the next day, plus an extra serving in the fridge to boot.

Maybe if I hadn’t had the English muffin alongside? But what are eggs without an English muffin? Isn’t that why we eat eggs?

Whatever You Like, Fried

Remember when J. was staying with me while she recovered from being run over by an SUV? Well, on the last night she was here, she made something called okonomiyaki for dinner. It is a kind of Japanese snack food, a cabbage pancake. The word, J. told me, translates roughly to “Whatever you like, fried,” which is fine by me.

Traditionally, you bind the chopped cabbage together with flour, dashi stock, egg, grated taro root, sweet potato flour, bonito flakes, and whatever else you like. You can mix in meat, shrimp, other vegetables, noodles…the list goes on. Then it gets pan fried with a few pieces of bacon on top (they will finish cooking when you flip it) and topped with bonito flakes, okonomiyaki sauce (sweet, tangy, brown, ineffable), and mayonnaise (ideally Kewpie brand*).

So this week, M. was coming over for dinner, and we had to figure out something interesting to make. I still had that half a head of cabbage tucked away in my vegetable drawer, and she didn’t seem put off at the idea of making something I know very little about. So we gave it a go, working very loosely from this Okonomiyaki recipe (cookies required, and not the good kind) from Just Hungry. For the record, M. is not only a charming dining companion, but also very handy as sous chef and staff photographer.

(The shots that are way overexposed are the ones I took).

My version still needs to be tweaked. I made the (probably novice) mistake of making one giant pancake instead of 2 smaller ones, and it sort of fell apart when we flipped it. That could also be due to the fact that I have yet to have that particular pan replaced under Calphalon’s amazing lifetime warranty. I will also be braver next time and buy some taro root, and maybe even make some dashi instead of just using water. And the ratio of cabbage to batter could use some adjustments, probably. I’ll update this next time I try it, but it’s too delicious not to share right away:

Totally Inauthentic Okonomiyaki

1/4 c flour
1/4 c + 1 Tbsp water
3 eggs
4 oz sweet potato, finely grated
1-2 Tbsp soy sauce
1-2 tsp fish sauce
Pickled ginger, chopped, to taste
2 c chopped cabbage (about 1/4 head)
2-3 scallions, chopped
4-6 slices Canadian bacon (or pork belly, or whatever)
vegetable oil
mayo
okonomiyaki sauce (for sale in Asian markets, or there are any number of recipes floating on the interwebs)
bonito flakes

Whisk together the flour and water, then mix in the eggs, grated sweet potato, soy sauce fish sauce, and ginger. Add the cabbage and scallions and mix it all together.

Heat a skillet over medium heat and drizzle in a little vegetable oil. When it’s hot, pour in half the batter and top with a few slices of the bacon (photo shows 1 large pancake).

Cover and let it cook for a while, until the egg has started to set a little. Flip and cover again until it’s cooked all the way through. Repeat for second pancake.

Drizzle with sauce and mayo, and sprinkle some bonito flakes on top.

We also made this Italian Parsley and Beet Salad from Gourmet. It is an absolutely gorgeous dish, but not as flavorful as we’d expected. It takes ages and ages to julienne the beets when you have lost the julienne blade for your mandoline, and your hands wind up stained red for a day. But it still takes less time than roasting beets whole…

Julienne a pound and a half of beets.

Mix in a quarter of a red onion, sliced very thinly.

Add a cup and a quarter of chopped parsley, and toss with the lemon/orange/olive oil dressing (we suspect there should be more of that than the recipe calls for).

Toss all together and let it marinate a little.

Serve with ricotta cheese.

*Yes, Lindsay, Kewpie makes mayonnaise. I didn’t know, either. The bottle even has a little baby embossed on it, though I hadn’t noticed until M. pointed it out.