Category Archives: Food

The inspiration and jumping-off point for this cocktail, the Rainier cherry is splendid in appearance and taste. I like the fact that it’s not quite as sweet as its traditional counterparts. Too much sweetness can be a bad thing, in both cocktails and fruit.

This simple summer salad combines the sweet tangy tartness of fresh raspberries, with the creamy bite of crumbled goat cheese, and the buttery crunch of walnuts for a combustible flavor punch. When doing a salad like this, the best thing to do is keep the ingredients fresh and simple, and go for a homemade raspberry vinaigrette, as I managed to do with relative ease.

With the aid of the following recipe from Martha Stewart, the dressing came together all right. It’s a lighter dressing, and a bit on the watery side (in texture, not taste). You’ve got to use a lot of hand power to emulsify this one, so have the whisk at the ready. The trickiest part is pushing the fresh raspberries through the wire strainer with a wooden spoon. At first, it will feel like nothing’s happening. You’ll check the bottom and wonder where all the juice and puree has gone – just stick with it. Move the spoon back and forth, pushing the raspberry mush through as best as possible. Soon, it will start dripping through. It just takes time and effort.

As a prelude to the Pasta Puttanesca, and to fortify myself after a day in the office before beginning the admittedly simple recipe, I put together this easy plate of appetite-whetters. A few cherry peppers, some olives, a few slices of salami, and a couple of multi-grain flatbread crackers made for a bright beginning to the evening of salty goodness. A white Spanish wine accompanied the whole affair (not sure if that’s appropriate or not, but it’s all Andy could rustle from the wine cellar, a.k.a. the wooden rack in the basement).

I used to think that small plates like this were foolish, but they really do work well, especially in the summer, when you want to take a moment to decompress after a long, hot day.

The origin of Pasta Puttanesca seems as variable as the ways to properly make it. Some claim the dish and its (supposedly) quick prep and cooking time was the result of prostitutes trying to fit in a quick meal between clients. Others maintain that the prostitutes, at least the not-so-good ones, were down to the bare bones of their kitchen, and could only come up with the ingredients here. Personally, I’m happy with any dish that’s good enough for a hooker. Yes, I am a tramp.

For my virgin stab at the Puttanesca, I used the following recipe from the New York Times:

Pasta Puttanesca

Start the sauce while the pasta water is coming to a boil; finish it while the pasta is cooking. Add a salad and a loaf of bread and you’re out the door to your evening’s activity, whatever it might be.

Ingredients

• Salt to taste
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 3 or more cloves garlic, lightly smashed and peeled
• 3 or more anchovy fillets
• 1 28-ounce can whole plum tomatoes
• Freshly ground black pepper to taste
• 1/2 cup pitted black olives, preferably oil-cured
• 2 tablespoons capers
• Crushed red pepper flakes to taste
• 1 pound linguine or other long pasta
• Chopped fresh parsley, oregano, marjoram or basil leaves for garnish, optional

Method

• 1. Bring pot of water to boil and salt it. Warm 2 tablespoons oil with garlic and anchovies in skillet over medium-low heat. Cook, stirring occasionally, until garlic is lightly golden.
• 2. Drain tomatoes and crush with fork or hands. Add to skillet, with some salt and pepper. Raise heat to medium-high and cook, stirring occasionally, until tomatoes break down and mixture becomes saucy, about 10 minutes. Stir in olives, capers and red pepper flakes, and continue to simmer.
• 3. Cook pasta, stirring occasionally, until it is tender but not mushy. Drain quickly and toss with sauce and remaining tablespoon of oil. Taste and adjust seasonings as necessary, garnish with herbs if you like, and serve.

I didn’t vary much for my maiden voyage into whoredom: I followed the recipe pretty faithfully (right down to the oil-cured black olives). The result was good, but a little on the dry side. I think that draining the tomatoes may have been an unnecessary move. (Crushing them with my hands, however, was the best, and most fun, part of the whole endeavor.) Having just heard someone refer to anchovies as the ‘bacon of the sea’, I added a few more than three, and as we didn’t have any fresh marjoram, that got omitted from the list of possible garnishes. The result, though, seemed to be a good representation of this venerable dish. It’s got a rustic flare to it, a bit of the burn (I used a generous ‘taste’ of crushed red pepper flakes), and a hearty flavor thanks to the potent, salty ingredients. Still, I think there’s room for improvement, so suggestions are always welcome.

For a style-over-substance guy like myself, the most important part of any meal or libation is the garnish. And in a dish that can get dull and played-out, like this salad, the garnish can reinvigorate everything, giving new life to the tried and true. Here, a simple pile of spring greens and sliced fennel is sprinkled with shaved parmesan, pine nuts, and some freshly-ground pepper. That such simple things can make for such a wondrous difference is one of the ways that food will always be infinitely interesting to me.

Andy has long been a fan of the beet. Me, not so much. But better late than never, and the past year has seen a beet boon in my kitchen, and on my restaurant plates. (I still get giddy at the thought of a certain phenomenal beet salad I had at Five-O earlier this year.) For their taste, consistency, and most especially that gorgeous color, it’s hard to beat the beet.

For a seafood lover like myself, it’s slightly strange that scallops and shrimp don’t rank that high, but for whatever reason I don’t usually choose them. I’ll go to town on shrimp cocktail if it’s on hand at a party, but for the most part I keep my seafood selections to fish and lobster and oysters, with some occasional calamari. Every once in while though, I get a hankering for scallops, so if we find some decent ones (even at $19.99 a pound) I’ll indulge. Such was the case the other day, and the timing was fortuitous as there was a great recipe for grilled scallops in the New York Times magazine that week.

The ingredients are simple (I only had to locate the miso and the scallops):

* 1 pound scallops (but at that exorbitant price point, I went for eight large ones as it was a meal for one)

* 2 Tbsp. miso

* 2 Tbsp. mirin

* Vegetable oil

* Black pepper

* Toasted sesame seeds and scallions (for garnish)

The recipe:

Grilled Scallops with Miso Glaze

Whisk together 2 tablespoons miso, 2 tablespoons mirin, and some black pepper. Thread scallops onto skewers. Brush with vegetable oil, and grill until almost done.

Brush miso mixture on both side and continue to cook, turning once or twice until glaze caramelizes a bit and scallops are done.

Garnish with toasted sesame seeds and thinly-sliced scallions.

Here are the grilling instructions for scallops – the main secret to success is to err on the underside of cooking:

Heat gas grill until very hot. Rub grill with oil and set 3 to 4 inches from heat. Grill scallops until brown on bottom and release easily from grill (2 to 3 minutes). Turn and brown other side; total cooking time should be 3 to 5 minutes. You want to take scallops off before interior becomes completely opaque.

One of the first dishes I learned to make for my husband (first and few) was this easy Penne a la Vodka. It sounds more grown-up than it actually is (and everyone knows most of the liquor burns off before anyone can get the remotest bit of a buzz going). I forget where I saw the recipe – something on the Food Network probably. It calls for chopped onion, but the chef who prepared it said her kids didn’t like onions in their food, so she would simply cut one in half, let it cook with the sauce for a bit to give it flavor, then take it out and they never noticed the difference. The same trick could be used to fool my grandma, who swore she couldn’t eat onions. (She loved Andy’s sauce so much she never noticed how much garlic and onion was actually in it.) If you didn’t tell her something had onions in it, she would eat it happily and not notice a thing except how nicely flavored it might be. But if she saw an onion, all bets were off.

On medium heat, in a medium sized pan, saute the onions and garlic in olive oil until translucent. Add the tomatoes and cook down for about ten minutes. Add the vodka, let simmer for a few more minutes. Add the cream and cheese, let simmer again, then add the basil and salt and pepper to taste. Total cooking time should be about half an hour. Serve with penne pasta, garnish with fresh basil. I added some shaved parmesan cheese on top as well, because one can never get enough cheese.

(Please note that the measurements listed are approximations, as the original recipe has been lost, so if you think they should be adjusted, don’t hesitate to do so. This is a pretty fool-proof recipe and can take some fluctuations.)

Our summer cooking consists mostly of grilled goods, as I can’t abide a live oven or stove-top in the summer. Luckily, Andy is a grill master, so he fires the shiny metal thing up, and I’m free to concentrate on marinades and skewers and neatly folded packets of aluminum foil. I’ll grill just about anything once, to try it, and some notable successes have been corn-on-the-cob (somehow much more flavorful when the golden rows aren’t leeched by a vat of boiling water) and wedges of cabbage (slathered with butter and garlic salt and pepper). In both instances, the vegetables benefited from not having their flavor sucked out by water or steam.

Of course, the grill is used mostly for meats and fish, and for this dish I marinated a couple of chicken breasts overnight in a mixture of soy sauce, balsamic vinegar, olive oil, sesame oil, worcestershire sauce, brown sugar, a few cloves of minced garlic, a dash of fresh grated ginger, and freshly-ground black pepper. You can’t go wrong with those ingredients, and the proportions are as you like them. (Generally one part of the soy sauce, vinegar, olive oil and sugar, and less of the sesame oil and worcestershire sauce.) The mark of a good recipe, for this non-chef, is how forgiving it can be – and this one is very much so.

For the quinoa, I followed the instructions of a friend and simply cooked a batch in the rice cooker, then added olive oil, fresh parsley, salt, and pepper. The broccolini was equally easy, but I’ll include the online recipe for accuracy since it came out so well. (This too seems like a pretty forgiving one, but lemon can sometimes seem deceptively innocent, and zest especially is no joke.)

Broccolini with Lemon Dressing 

Ingredients
1 pound broccolini
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon lemon zest
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon salt
Pinch of freshly ground black pepper
Directions
Wash and trim the broccolini and steam for 5 minutes, until it is crisp yet tender. Drain.
In a small bowl, whisk together the oil, zest, lemon juice, salt and pepper. Drizzle the dressing over the broccolini and toss to coat.
(Note: variations: 1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper instead of black pepper or 3 tablespoons toasted hazelnuts chopped sprinkled on top.)

My latest culinary obsession is quinoa. It’s a grain that can be cooked in the same manner as rice, but for this recipe it was amended with much more. Fresh red peppers and a red onion imbue some purple and red to the scene, while the fresh cilantro packs a vital punch. Black beans lend the dish a heartier aspect, making this enough of a light meal on its own. I like it for summer, as it’s meant to be served chilled (and the cool down time in the refrigerator allows for all the flavors to meld and bleed into one another). Recipe follows.

Black Bean & Quinoa Salad With Cilantro Lime Vinaigrette

Ingredients:

Starting at this time of the year, I do not want the oven or the stove-top to be on. Nor do I want hot soup or steaming vegetables for lunch or dinner. For this light lunch with JoAnn, we started with a glass of cucumber water. I got the idea a number of years ago when we traveled to Virginia for a family wedding. After a flight and a taxi cab in the high heat of a Virginia summer, we stumbled into the hotel lobby, tired and sweaty and, at least on my part, grumpy as hell. Plopping down on a couch, I looked up and saw a large carafe of icy water, through which the cloudy visage of floating cucumber slices and watermelon pieces could be seen. I poured myself a cup, quickly downed it, and poured another. It was such a refreshing treat, the notion of a fruit-festooned pitcher of ice water has remained a source of relief from summer heat.

For the salad, a friend recommended thinly sliced fennel on a bed of arugula, with a simple Dijon vinaigrette (utilizing that wondrous white balsamic vinegar).

A few slices of cherry tomatoes for color, and a topping of grilled chicken (not done on the grill, but purchased already cooked from the Fresh Market – because when it’s 95 degrees out you don’t even want to grill).

To add further color, and another side dish of cool flesh, we repeated that simple take on tomatoes that so enraptured me earlier, with a yellow heirloom that made all the difference.

Heirloom tomatoes are known as much for their unique, and quite varied, style as they are for their taste, and are best left without some additional crazy-ass culinary adornment. At the local Price Chopper (consider the source) they rang up as “Ugly Tomatoes” which seemed rather mean-spirited. I think they are beautiful, especially when the red and yellow pigments do battle in a riot of circus-like stripes, and the puckered ribbing leaves wavy designs along a cut slice. Give me gorgeous, flawed, natural imperfection over perfectly-proportionate precision any day.

Originally I was going to cut them up and add them to a salad, but they were too pretty to get lost in that wilderness. A friend advised that I keep them separate on their own platter, slicing them and arranging them as seen here, then amending just slightly with some basic ingredients.

A light drizzling of olive oil was a good place to begin, but it was the second addition that was the real revelation: white balsamic vinegar. I thought I might get away with a champagne wine vinegar, but was advised it wouldn’t be quite as sweet. This turned out to be true. The difference was profound. Sprinkled with some salt and pepper, a few chives from the garden and some sliced almonds, the tomato dish was complete.

Garnished with a sprig of pesto basil (also from the garden) and the foliage of a fennel bulb (coming up), it was ready to serve. It’s the perfect summer accompaniment, but substantial enough to stand alone as a light meal. For swimsuit season, that’s exactly what is needed.

This is the gift from our friend Eileen, put to its intended use as a sushi platter. The beauty of the dish speaks for itself.

In an effort to curb my ever-expanding waist, I’ve taken to eating one healthy meal a week. (Hey, it’s better than none!) So the other evening I stopped at Fresh Market and picked up a couple of salads – seaweed and sesame noodle. With a middle of rice, it made for a decent dinner meal, a rare meat-free selection that somehow filled me up.

Finished off with a few pieces of candied ginger – which is no joke – it was a nice spring collection, with hints of the Eurocentric-named Far East, and whispers of the sea.