The Dinner Files

Note: Thanks to everyone who showed up to the Eat Real Lit Fest on Saturday and listened to me read. I didn’t end up telling a story about sunnies at all, but instead told the tale of the disgusting mess you see above. For those of you unable to attend, I’ve conveniently posted the reading below. To those in the U.S. of A., enjoy the upcoming long weekend. I’m taking one myself. See you back here next week!

Documenting all my cookbooks and food magazine archives last spring for Edible San Francisco lit a bit of a fire in my belly. I’ve been cooking some of those recipes over the summer and it’s been fun cooking from recipes instead of for recipes.

Or it was until last Tuesday. When I decided to make the Creamy Caramel Pudding I pulled from Food & Wine last March. (Of course in terms of my “recipe file,” of course, last March is March 2009. I mean, in terms of my recipe file “last march” could be March 1999, but I digress.)

Anyway… I was suspicious of the recipe because it has you add low-fat milk to a hot caramel. But made it despite myself. And guess what? The milk curdled, just as I thought it would and I ended up trying to work this cornstarch-thickened curdled mess through a sieve in a sad and desperate attempt to salvage “dessert.”

Please see the result above. Disgusting, right? I would like to add that, out of professional curiosity I tasted that mess. It didn’t even taste good, even when the curdled aspect was factored out in my professional taster’s brain.

A bad recipe from Food & Wine. What the hell? I know mistakes can slip through a test kitchen, but this was ridiculous. This wasn’t “it wasn’t as delicious as it could be” this just didn’t turn out, plain and simple.

The thing is, I looked it up online. The photo is a bit bigger there and I could see – in the goddamn photo – curdled bits in the pudding.

The Creamy Caramel Pudding recipe is exactly the type of recipe I hate.

I mean, a disgusting sticky mess to clean up is a demoralizing experience for me, and I’m pretty confident in my general cooking abilities. I can only imagine what it does to people less sure of themselves in the kitchen.

So what do I care if it demoralizes other people?

I’d like to say it’s because I believe deep down in my soul that if everyone loved cooking and make their own delicious food the world’s problem – or at least some of them – would slip away.

If I’m honest, though, the reason I care is that I love cooking and if other people love cooking too that helps validate my obsession and love of cooking.

I mean I really love to cook. I’ve loved it since I was a kid and became what can only be described as addicted to it during grad school. It was my reward at the end of the day. Something concrete, that other people appreciated, and that disappeared and I never had to see again. It was the perfect antithesis to the abstract work that interested no one on which I slaved away at day after day with no end in sight.

People who hate cooking—who want to get in and out of the kitchen as quickly as possible—used to baffle me. Who in their right mind wouldn’t want to fill the house with the scent of homemade paella?

Then I had a kid. I also acquired a 70-mile round-trip commute that ate up at least two hours a day and much of my will to live. And I got it. All of a sudden I wasn’t cooking, I was getting dinner on the table. I was “cooking” like all those people who hate cooking cook. I was throwing together whatever was quickest, whatever was at hand. And I was doing it while complimenting my son on each and every one of his 42 robot drawings, jockeying with my husband over who would cancel their Thursday night plans since we’d accidentally double-booked ourselves, and jotting down next week’s shopping list as I wondered if I’d responded to yet another pre-schooler’s birthday party invitation. If the whole thing went down without tears or third-degree burns I considered it a grand success.

As much as I love to cook, I found I hated getting dinner on the table. Dinners made in a frenzied, uninspired rush that matches the “less than 30 minutes” time frame so many of my fellow Americans are willing to devote to the task are no fun to make day after day.

As someone who knows what cooking is, let me tell you: That ain’t it.

There is little pleasure or satisfaction to be found in that activity. It is a chore. It is a worthwhile chore, in my opinion, but if it’s someone’s only contact with their kitchen, it’s no wonder they hate cooking.

The ridiculousness of how much my cooking habits, and hence my family’s eating habits, changed was made all the more difficult to swallow since the job to which I commuted hours each day was as a food writer at Sunset. My days were spent discussing, dissecting, and perfecting recipes designed to tempt readers into their kitchens, yet my own small kitchen sat increasingly un-used as we became dependent on test kitchen leftovers for our dinners. There were cases of Chinese take-out containers in the pantry at work for just such purposes. It got to the point where my son would request dinner from the “little white boxes.”

Cooking – the focused, rewarding, from-scratch kind I love – became something I rarely did.

Yet experiencing what “cooking” is for so many people made me wonder about widespread claims of not liking it.

Then we tested a Three-Hour Thanksgiving at the magazine (note: it was not for the magazine, it was for an external project that was being tested in the test kitchen). I witnessed the recipe testers, people who loved nothing more than a few hours in the kitchen, people who made caramelized sugar cages for desserts and de-boned legs of lamb without a thought, rendered flustered, miserable, defeated, and actually sweaty by the task. Yes, it was possible to do the whole thing in three hours, but it wasn’t fun. One cook kept mumbling “why would anyone do this?” as she worked. Another cook, our chattiest and cheeriest member, didn’t say a thing during the entire three-hour process, but finished the final dish, set it on the table, sat down, and firmly declared: “That was the most unpleasant three hours of my life.”

I thought of all the people who don’t really like to cook, who would be the people tempted by the promise of a relatively quick homemade Thanksgiving feast. The idea of them venturing into the kitchen with these recipes and punishing timeline in hand just broke my heart. The worst part, as you might imagine, was that the result was what could be at best deemed a serviceable holiday meal. Edible but not delicious. Unremarkable in every way except its speed of preparation. The whole thing seemed designed to make anyone hate cooking.

When our only approach to cooking is as something to finish and be done with, is it any wonder so few people do it on a regular basis? And perhaps even fewer find pleasure in it?

Like exercise, we know it’s good for us. Like exercise, however, cooking takes time and effort. And if you’re not used to it, it takes even more time and effort.

There are people who truly don’t like cooking. I can accept that. I get that. It’s like me and gardening. I have gardening books. I like the idea of gardening. I do, in fact, take care of a small but pretty yard. But I don’t like gardening. I do it, but it’s a chore. I like the result, but not the process. I can accept that for some people cooking is the same.

If, however, someone’s only experience in the kitchen is getting dinner on the table in 30 minutes or less, it’s a but like deciding you don’t like gardening if you’ve only ever pulled weeds.

Or, an even better analogy comes to mind. Cooking is like sex. If you’ve only ever had a quickie in the storage closet, can you really say whether you like it or not? Quickies—of all sorts—have their place. But they shouldn’t be the only way you do it.

And cornstarch-thickened puddings? They just aren’t worth the shortcut.

I first had sanddabs at Scoma’s about 16 years ago. My grandmother had come to visit and demanded that we go to Scoma’s, an old-school seafood restaurant in San Francisco that she loved.

She asked how I liked the sanddabs. I told her they were great, they tasted just like sunnies.

“No they don’t!” she replied.

“Yeah, Gram, they really do, here, try a bite.”

“Well,” she said for emphasis, “I certainly know what they taste like and they don’t taste like sunnies.”

Luckily I was old enough to know to just let it drop. Because they do. They do taste like sunnies. And I love sunnies and every single memory I have of them. They make me think of holding an ultra-long bamboo pole while my great-grandfather navigated the old wooden fishing boat painted white to his favorite fishing spots – the same spots, I should add, that my father takes my son to every summer. They make me think of warm weekends at the family cabin with tons of uncles and aunts and friends around when my brother and I were the only kids there and if we didn’t cause a fuss no one remembered to put us to bed and we heard (and witnessed) great stories. They make me think of guitars playing and the family singing and crisp bites of pan-fried white-fleshed fish that tasted of the lake we fished them out of and how I smiled as the crumbs fell on the pine needle-covered forest floor.

I bought sanddabs last week. I simple dotted them with butter and sprinkled them with salt and broiled them until cooked through, about 4 minutes or so pretty close to the heat.  We had them with bread and salad and it was a simple, perfect dinner and we talked about school and summer as the well-cleaned bones piled on a plate in the center of the table.

I’m honored to have been asked to read at the Eat Real Lit Fest in Oakland. I’ll be there tomorrow (Saturday) afternoon reading sometime between 4 and 5. They’ve asked us to tell a story rather than just read. I’m thinking I might tell a story about sunnies. Come by and say hi, it would be great to have some friendly faces in the crowd.

We had our first day of school in the San Francisco public schools last week. It seemed early in theory, but just about right in practice. I was ready to have the predictable schedule of school back in our lives. My son didn’t necessarily agree, but was excited to see his friends. He was also excited when I told him that we could make dumplings for dinner.

Ernest’s favorite foods are dim sum, sushi, tacos, and pizza (plain cheese pizza, he would emphasize while holding up his index finger in a way that reminds me of my grandmother making an important point). As with fried chicken and mac-n-cheese, he was deeeee-lighted to learn that we could actually make dumplings right here in our own kitchen.

Unlike our other adventures of making food he usually only gets when we’re out, we did and will be making dumplings again. Ernest got so into helping make the dumplings that when we made them again on Sunday (and my dashing husband got his hands dirty, too) we had them done – start to finish – in less than 30 minutes.* (The first round took a bit longer simply because the filling included Swiss chard which required cooking down before turning into the filling.)

Pork and Swiss chard dumplings

These dumplings are fairly quick and very easy to pull together. Yes, the pork cooks when you boil the dumplings.

1 bunch Swiss chard

2 scallions

1 tablespoon freshly shredded ginger

1 tablespoon dry sherry or rice wine

1 teaspoon soy sauce

1 teaspoon chili oil

1 teaspoon toasted sesame oil

1/3 pound ground pork

about 40 won ton wrappers

Rinse Swiss chard leaves until clean. Cut out the white stems from the Swiss chard leaves. Finely chop the stems. In a large frying pan over medium high heat, cook the chopped stems with a tablespoon of water. Cover and cook until tender, about 5 minutes. Add leaves, cover, and cook until leaves are completely wilted. Transfer leaves and stems to a cutting board – carefully leaving any liquid in the pan behind – and let sit until a bit cooled off. Addendum: You need to remove as much liquid still in the chard as you can. There are several ways to do this: put chard in a fine mesh sieve and press on it with a spoon, put chard in a clean kitchen towel or layers of paper towels and squeeze it, or simply pick up the chard in small handfuls and squeeze the liquid out. Whichever method you use, try not to think of all the tasty vitamins and whatnot going down the drain. The supreme texture and loveliness of the dumplings will comfort you soon. Finely chop the chard and transfer to a medium bowl.

Finely chop the scallions and add to chard. Add ginger, sherry, soy sauce, chili oil, and sesame oil. Use your hands to combine everything. Add the pork and, again, use your hands to gently mix the ingredients together.

When you start, just work with four to six wrappers at once. When you get going, though, you can lay out a dozen at a time. Set up your filling station with a clean work surface, a small bowl of water, a spot for the bowl of filling, and a large baking sheet sprinkled with cornstarch.

Note: If you plan to cook them right after making them, you might as well put on a large pot of water to boil now.

Lay out four to six won ton wrappers on the work surface.

Dot the center of each one with about a teaspoon of filling.

Use your fingers (or a pastry brush, I suppose, if you like to clean things) to wet the edges of the wrappers. This is a very important step because the water is what will allow you to seal the wrapper shut, so don’t skimp!

Now fold one corner over the filling to its opposite corner to make a triangle and use your fingers to firmly press the edges together and seal them.

Now pull up the two corners that are farthest away from each other and press them together to seal them.

Voila!

Set this dumpling on the cornstarch-sprinkled tray and make three to four dozen more.

(These were made using the technique of bringing up all four corners to the center and sealing the edges; a method that we found 1) trickier and 2) not as attractive after boiling.)

When ready to cook, make sure the pot of boiling water is well salted and put the dumplings in somewhat gently. Boil, stirring gently now and again, until cooked through, about 3 minutes.

While they boil, move the baking sheet on which you held them next to the stovetop and put a cooling rack over it. Drain the dumplings by lifting them out of the water with a slotted spoon and placing them on the cooling rack.

Transfer to shallow bowls. Serve with soy sauce, chili oil, or whatever sounds yummy to you. We ate ours with a sauce of 2 cloves minced garlic, 2 tablespoons soy sauce, 3 tablespoons chili oil, and 1 tablespoon vegetable oil and topped with minced cilantro.

We have a lot of ideas floating around our house for future dumpling fillings these days. I’d love to hear yours.

* The Sunday dumplings had a shrimp and chive filling. Pulse 1 pound shelled raw shrimp (I used some great wild-caught Florida pink shrimp that were wonderfully flavorful) and 3 bunches chives in a food processor. Then fill dumplings as above – seriously it is just that simple and crazy delicious.

I think I forgot to mention that I did finally finish that monster needlepoint project I inherited from my grandmother. I finished it in time to give it to my parents for Christmas, as which point my dashing husband offered to have it framed. His framer agreed to do it but noted that the entire reason he left retail framing and only works with galleries and museums and directly with artists was precisely so that he would never have to frame a needlepoint again.

It turned out beautifully – or as beautiful as this insane paint-by-numbers-esque creation was ever going to turn out. It was finally shipped to Minneapolis, driven up north (an ordeal in itself considering that it was too big to fit in anything resembling a normal sized car, the realization of which led to my dad claiming via email that his mother was “working us from the grave”), and installed on the knotty pine wall in the hallway outside my bedroom where the two missing stitches smack dab in the center of the whole thing will taunt me for the rest of my life.

Halloumi, for those of you not in the know, is a Greek cheese that you can grill or broil or saute. It doesn’t melt! Why doesn’t it melt? I’m thinking it has to do with its crazy rubber-like, chewy, salty nature. While I was at the family cabin this summer, my parents went back and forth between their house in Minneapolis during the week and up to the cabin on the weekends. So every week my mom would call or email and want to know what I wanted her to bring up. One week I thought having grilled halloumi and vegetables would be a nice dinner and asked her to get 2 or 3 packages of halloumi.

She ended up with “3 lbs halloumi” written on her shopping list.

We had quite a few grilled halloumi dinners. Enough, in fact, for me to finally figure out that the way to grill it isn’t in cubes on a skewers, which tends to make the cheese crack and break apart and stick to the grill, but cut into long rectangles put straight on the grill that can be manipulated individually, as well as decently oiled, making them easier to cook evenly.

Notice above the technique of putting the same vegetables on the same skewer, allowing for different cooking times for the different veggies (tomatoes are done quickly, red onions take a bit more time; see more about grilling vegetables). Just skewer everything, brush everything (including the halloumi pieces) with olive oil, sprinkle the veggies with a bit of salt (seriously, the cheese is really salty, so just enough to season them a bit), and grill until done how you like them. As you can see, we like things with a crusty edge at our house. Some may even call it a bit burnt, but we don’t.

Even my dad, who is not a particular fan of meatless dinners, loved the hearty texture of halloumi along with brightly colored grilled cherry tomatoes and chunks of zucchini. He also got pretty into grilling it. As he put it, “it’s kind of fun to grill something like that, that looks so pretty.”

We served it with a lemon orzo pasta (cook orzo in chicken broth, drain, toss with olive oil, lemon juice, and lemon zest – add chives or parsley with whatever floats your boat and serve it hot, warm, or even chilled) and a mint chutney (whirl a bunch of mint, a hot green chile like  a serrano, a few stems of parsley, a clove of garlic, 3 tablespoons olive oil, 1 tablespoon of lemon juice and salt to taste in a blender until smooth and saucy).

Even though I’m back in San Francisco, land of chilly summer days and freezing summer nights, I still have a few things on my mind from the weeks I spent in northern Minnesota this summer.

First among these are potatoes au gratin. I became a bit obsessed with them this summer and I blame it all on the White Hawk (a.k.a. “The Hawk”). The Hawk is a restaurant and bar on the lake where is my family’s cabin. There is also a resort with a restaurant that no one on the lake really goes to anymore and a restaurant and bar that has been documented on these pages before, called the Lonesome Pine (a.k.a. “The Pine” – you see how we nickname things up north, hey?). The Hawk had closed, been sold, re-opened, closed again and then early this summer re-opened. Word on the lake was that the food was better than that at The Pine. We found that hard to believe at our house, but one night my mom and I took my son to find out.

Much like The Pine, the menu at The Hawk is Minnesota old-school. Ribs, chicken, walleye (although The Hawk throws in an option of Maine lobster – who orders that I do not know since fancy and expensive isn’t generally how the local crowd rolls). Dinners come with soup or salad and your choice of sides. One of the sides offered at The Hawk is “Awesome Auggies,” which, our very enthusiastic if slightly inept server explained were “the best potatoes au gratin ever – we pack them with cheese and some garlic and there’s pepper in there – they’re great.”

I’m no fool, I ordered the Awesome Auggies. Now I like a nice potato gratin Frenchie-style – either a dauphinoise with lots of gruyère and cream or an austere one with a few bits of ham with the potatoes and just a scattering of cheese shavings on top – but potatoes au gratin, creamy and full of cheddar cheese, leaves me weak in the knees. We never ever had them at home when I was growing up (probably, to her credit, because my mom didn’t buy Betty Crocker potatoes au gratin in a box like so many Minnesotan moms did), but I would sometimes get them at someone’s house or at a restaurant. To a kid who didn’t really much cotton to meat but found cheese irresistible, potatoes au gratin were the bomb, plain and simple. They were the ultimate side dish that I wished I could just order for dinner.

The enthusiastic server’s description of the Awesome Auggies got me pretty excited. A bit of garlic? Lots of pepper? Sign me up. I prepared myself for awesomeness. I started, in my crazy-pants fashion, thinking about ordering an extra side of them in case they were really as awesome as they sounded.

They were not awesome. They were salty. But they were not awesome. One of the ways in which they were not awesome was that they were not potatoes au gratin. They were the insides of twice-baked potatoes in a gratin dish. Sort of mashed, sort of chunky. Orange colored but it seemed to be more from paprika than from cheese.

The Awesome Auggies simply left me with an insatiable desire for good potatoes au gratin. As the addage goes, if you want something done right you need to do it yourself.

Potatoes au gratin

These are made with sliced potatoes – if you have a mandoline this is a good time to break it out, but a sharp knife and  a steady hand will do the job just as well. The real key is to slice the potatoes as evenly as possible, whether that be thickish or thinish.

4 pounds potatoes (Russets or Yukon Golds)
3 tablespoons butter, divided
2 tablespoons flour
1 1/2 cups whole milk
1/2 cup heavy cream
2 cloves garlic (optional)
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/4 teaspoon cayenne (optional)
2 cups shredded sharp cheddar cheese, divided

Preheat oven to 375. Peel potatoes, if you like, but you can simply give them a good scrub if you like to leave peels on. Slice potatoes into even slices. About 1/4-inch thick is good, but whatever thickness you can manage evenly is just dandy.

Use some of the butter to grease a 9×13 pan and set it aside.

Melt the rest of the butter in a medium saucepan over medium high heat. When the butter melts all the way and stops bubbling or foaming, whisk in the flour. Keep whisking and cooking until the mixture smells like pie crust (this signals that the flour is cooked), 2 to 3 minutes. Still cooking and whisking, slowly pour in about half the milk. Whisk until smooth then ad the remaining milk and cream and whisk until smooth.

Reduce heat to medium and cook, whisking, until sauce thickens slightly, about 2 minutes.

Stir in the garlic, pepper, and cayenne, as you like, and about a cup of the cheese. Whisk until cheese melts and sauce is smooth, about a minute.

Layer about half the potatoes in the pan and pour about half the sauce over them. Layer in the rest of the potatoes, pour the remaining sauce over them, and sprinkle the whole thing with the remaining cheese.

Cover with foil and bake for 45 minutes. Remove the foil and bake uncovered until bubbling and browning on top, about 25 minutes. Let sit for about 10 minutes before serving. Reheats beautifully. Freezes, like all potato-laden dishes, horribly.

My summer is pretty much over. I can tell that by looking out the window. Yesterday when I looked up from my computer screen I saw a smooth blue lake surrounded by birches and pines and maples and oaks. For the past month-plus I spent my days in swimsuits and sundresses and shoes were worn only as protection against rocky paths. Today the sky is grim, the air is gray, I need a sweater, and wool socks are de rigeur. From the big old midwestern sun of a Minnesota summer to the damp gray of San Francisco’s famously chilly non-summer. I’m insanely grateful that my parents put in the wifi at the family cabin that allows me to de-camp there for weeks in the summer. I’m also happy to be home, August fleece and all.

My trip ended with a bang, though. On my last day I met my new niece and she is awesome, if just a bit lazy. It appears she would rather sleep than eat, so I gave her a very serious talking to while admiring her extraordinarily long fingers. Then, on the plane ride home I read Confessions of a Prairie Bitch: How I Survived Nellie Oleson and Learned to Love Being Hated by Alison Arngrim.

I was born in 1970 and grew up in Minneapolis. I think by law I was required to love Little House on the Prairie in all its forms. My first grade teacher read Little House in the Big Woods out loud to us after lunch. We made maple snow candy at recess. We even took a field trip to Lake Pepin, for god’s sake. Every Monday night my family would watch Little House and my dad would cry at some point during at least two-thirds of the episodes. I never, however, wanted to be Mary (too boring) or Laura (who wanted to be good like Mary, which baffled me). But Nellie? There was a girl with some life to her. It’s not that I wanted to be her so much as she caught my attention. I didn’t want to be mean like Nellie, but I sure didn’t want to be a good little girl with crappy clothes and tons of chores who seemed to spend the majority of her time trying to impress her Pa like Laura either.

As soap operas prove daily, the villain is always more interesting.

So I, like everyone else my age, grew up watching Little House. That would have been enough to make the flight from Minneapolis to San Francisco go by pretty quickly. Yet my connection to Prairie Bitch goes just a wee bit further. In 1993 my dashing husband (then boyfriend) and I took a trip down to Los Angeles to visit his younger brother and some friends. The trip happened to be over Halloween. His friend Jack took us to the Magic Castle – a crazy old-time-like castle in LA home to magic shows – because, if I’m remembering this correctly, a girl he was dating or, perhaps, was hoping to date, worked there. We went to the show. I recognized the magician’s assistant. It was Nellie. The people we were with told me I was crazy, but I knew what I saw. Our connection there confirmed that the assistant was, indeed, Alison Arngrim, and asked if I wanted to meet her. Before I really had a chance to answer or think the better of it, the lot of us were brought backstage.

I mentioned how it was Halloween, right? Did I mention I was in costume? As Esther Williams?

So I met Nellie Oleson while dressed in a 1940s bathing suit. (She had been dressed as a magician’s assistant, of course, which would have put us on more equal wardrobe footing, but had already changed into jeans and an old T-shirt.) She could not have been nicer. She was happy to meet us. She regaled us with tales of crazy fans who had trouble with the it’s-just-a-TV-show element of reality and yelled at her or even tried to hit her. She was warm and hilarious and completely down to earth. She even offered to have our picture taken, I said it wasn’t necessary because I didn’t want to seem like a total geek, and she said I would probably regret not taking it and insisted in the most charming of ways. I’m so glad I have it and I love that the flash gave her devil eyes.

I also rather love that if you didn’t know who was the celebrity and who was the fan who was super-psyched to meet the celebrity, well… you might not guess correctly. I also wish I had even remotely appreciated how smooth my skin was at 23, but I digress.

Prairie Bitch was just what I needed. I read a lot this summer, and a frightful amount of it was just not exciting. Seriously. I made my way through way too many dull or just plain bad books. Prairie Bitch was fun. Alison Arngrim did not have an easy childhood, but she is a lady who has made the best of what life has handed her. I remember from our brief meeting 17 years ago that she seemed like rollicking fun and a straight talker, and that was just how the book read.

There were a few other glimmers of delight in my summer reading, and if you still have some summer left and like to wile away some time in a lounge chair or on a towel on a dock or on the sand with a book in hand, these were the books I woke up early or stayed up late to finish:

The Imperfectionists: A Novel by Tom Rachman is for anyone who has ever lived abroad or worked in publishing. It focuses on people doing both at the same time. Like all good novels, though, it completely transcends its subject. As a writer and a reader the structure dazzled me. Brilliant. (If anyone reading this is the person who gave me this book, please let me know. I thought my dashing husband passed it on to me, but when I thanked him he had no idea what I was talking about.)

Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food by Paul Greenberg. Whether you’re well-versed in the disaster that is modern industrial fishing and what it’s done to the oceans or you don’t know what I’m talking about, this book spells out how we got to the place where every fish counter in the U.S. is selling the same stuff – no matter location or season. Greenberg, most refreshingly, goes beyond the idea that if people just buy different fish everything will be okay. Amazing research well told.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett. What can I say? It’s a page turner!

Let the Great World Spin: A Novel by Colum McCann is, from what I can tell, being read by every book club in the land and was recommended to me by five different people, so you’ve probably already read it. It was really good, wasn’t it?

There is usually a jar of harissa – the top assiduously covered with a fairly thick layer of olive oil – sitting somewhere in my fridge. It sits waiting for me to make couscous (the dish not just the teeny tiny pasta), at which point I remember to pull it out of the fridge and dollop it on dinner.

Alas and alack, I am at the family cabin and there is no jar of homemade harissa sitting in the fridge. There are about a dozen jars of jam, four of which are strawberry. There are plenty of bottles of hot sauce, three of which are Tabasco – not even, I feel the need to add, different types of Tabasco; just three bottles of Tabasco so if, say, three people were eating they could each have their own bottle of Tabasco at the ready in case something remotely bland went down. There are eight different jars of mustard opened and ready to spread on sausages.

There are, in short, plenty of condiments. We lack not for condiments here on our little bit of Northern Minnesota. But is that good enough for me? Absolutely not. So I made some homemade harissa. Since I knew we would use the whole batch, I made it fancy, with herbs. It was crazy delicious.

Homemade harissa

If you like things hot, quite hot, toss a few arbol chiles in with the larger red ones.

2 ounces of large dried red chiles (ones labeled “New Mexican” work well here)

4 cloves garlic

4 stems of flat-leaf parsley

16 large mint leaves

2 tablespoons of olive oil

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1/2 teaspoon salt

Remove the stems and seeds from the chiles. Put them in a medium bowl and cover them with boiling water. Let that all sit for about half an hour. Lift the chiles from the water and put them in a blender or food processor (let some of their soaking liquid cling to them). Toss in the garlic, parsley, mint leaves, olive oil, lemon juice, and salt. Whirl this into a relatively smooth paste-like sauce. You can add a few tablespoons of the chile-soaking liquid to thin it, if you like. Taste and add more salt or lemon juice, if you like.

Now what to do with it. Dollop it on stuff you want to taste hotter and more delicious. Steak, chicken, and vegetable stews are some of my favorites. Or, and this worked out quite well, use half of the above batch as a marinade for 1 1/2 pounds of chunks of leg of lamb, letting it all sit together for a few hours or overnight, and then grill those lamb chunks until browned and cooked medium rare. Serve with the reserved harissa.

Notice how the lamb is not all jammed onto the skewer. Notice how each lamb piece has a little room to breath. Please feel free to mimic this skewering method.

I’ve been a bit mad for cherries this summer. Mad enough to keep buying them even as the rate at which we manage to eat them slows down. Even as everyone else thinks to themselves, “you know what? I don’t think I need to eat a pound of cherries today.”

Luckily, one so mad is also obsessed enough to spend some serious time standing at the kitchen counter pitting them and laying them on trays so as to freeze them.

My pal Cheryl is right, they are delicious just like that – frozen. Once my snacking on frozen cherries calmed down, I threw some in a blender with yogurt, mint, and a bit of orange juice. Perfect summer breakfast.

You could use fresh cherries, obviously, but using frozen cherries thrown right in the blender creates an icy-ness in the smoothie that is divine – and unlike actual ice, frozen cherries don’t water down.

My plan was to use the sour cherries – something I never ever see in California – I bought at Clancy’s in Minneapolis and use the rest of the insane amount of blueberries my parents had brought up to the cabin and make scads of turnovers. These turnovers would be gorgeous and delicious and I would distribute them amongst our kind neighbors here at the lake – some of whom coughed up some Benadryl and Benadryl cream when my son got stung by a bee and others of whom are just jolly welcoming folks to whom I find myself driven to give turnovers.

So I made two batches of pie crust, tossed fruit with sugar and flour, and started rolling out circles. It ended up being 14 circles – six sour cherry turnovers and eight blueberry turnovers. Here’s the thing. Whether browning meat or rolling out pie dough, I like to take it to the limit. The limit is where really good stew becomes mind-blowing, where a nice pie becomes sublime. The thing with the limit, though, is it is the actual limit. Go beyond it and… things fall apart quickly. Good meat is burned. Perfectly ripe fruit boils into a mess of crust-less nonsense.

I went too far. I reached for the sun and my wax wings melted. That turnover dough wasn’t strudel-thin, but it was too thin for turnovers. Once in the hot oven the fruit just burst right out of those weak little casings and bubbled into a sticky, almost-burnt raft on the pan. The turnovers were still edible, but much of the juicy essence of the fruit ended up soaking in the sink.

They tasted fine, but only a few looked remotely gift-able. (The skillful use of a knife to cut off the burnt fruit dripping out of the sides saved the ones below for their photo shoot.) The Benadryl-giving neighbors (hey Rollins!) ended up with a turnover apiece. The other neighbors (hey Carlsens!) will get something nice soon. I have plans. Big plans.

Sour cherry turnovers

The sour cherries were awesome in these. Use any fruit you like, though, just cut the sugar back by about a third for fruit that isn’t mouth-puckeringly sour. This recipe makes six not-too-thin turnovers; increase at will if you have the gumption to roll out the dough.

1 recipe pie dough (for a one-crust pie)

1 pint sour cherries

1/3 cup sugar

a scant 2 tablespoons flour

Make the pie dough, divide it into 6 pieces and pat each piece into a 1/2-inch-thick disc. Wrap in plastic and chill at least an hour and up to 2 days.

Preheat oven to 350. Pit cherries. Have a large baking sheet ready. In a large bowl toss the cherries, sugar, and flour until some juice from the cherries and the sugar and flour form a sort of wet sandy mixture around the cherries.

Roll out each disc of dough into a 5- to 6-inch circle. Put 1/6 of the cherries on half of each circle, fold the dough over the fruit to make a half-moon shape, and crimp the edges. Put turnovers on the baking sheet, cut a vent or two or three in the top of each turnover, and bake until fruit filling is bubbling and the crust is the color of a wooden cutting board, about 50 minutes. Let cool.

Eat with coffee. I find they really taste best at breakfast. Turnovers are, after all, the original Pop-Tart.