The Dinner Files

Two friends and an acquaintance (well, I know him and he might recognize me but maybe not) have come out with books this spring. It was with great relief that I opened them up and found them to my liking. There is always that moment before reading a friend’s book or going to their gallery show or hearing their band when I hold my breath and hope the deepest hope that I’ll like what I read/see/hear.

Food books first. Gordon Edgar’s Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge recounts his travails running the cheese counter at Rainbow Grocery here in San Francisco. I’ve been shopping at Rainbow, a worker-owned vegetarian co-op in my neighborhood, for years. Since it’s a co-op, the workers tend to stay around. The nice guy who always helped me deal with bagging and getting stuff to my car when my son was a tiny baby in a sling is still there, working the service counter, directing cars, and, I’m sure, helping other overwhelmed new moms. The cheese counter Gordon (a.k.a. Gordonzola) oversees is the reason that I desperately wish against all hope that someday Rainbow will stop its vegetarian ways and start selling meat. I wish this primarily for my own convenience, but also because, if the cheese counter is any indication, the meat counter would be amazing. I’ve watched the cheese section at Rainbow grow and develop over the years into the shining beacon of deliciousness and overcrowded convenience behind the produce area. There is a lot of cheese in not much space back there, but the grab-and-go pre-cut pieces and stellar variety combine to trump, in my opinion, the fanciest cheese spots around. Sometimes I want to sit and taste cheese and talk about the cheese before I buy, but not usually. Usually I’m doing the grocery shopping and need some Italian fontina, a hunk of Parmesan, a soft blue, and maybe something else but I’ll figure that out myself, thank you very much. Reading Gordon’s account of learning about cheese, developing the cheese section at Rainbow, and how this all fits into his essential punk philosophy and radical politics reminded me about everything I love about that store. It reminded me that the insane parking and long lines are worth it.

As much as Cheesemonger hits on how I shop for the food I cook, Marcia Gagliardi’s The Tablehopper’s Guide to Dining and Drinking in San Francisco hits on how I eat when I go out. Finally someone has organized a restaurant guide in a way that I eat and choose restaurants. I’ve turned to Marcia several times for restaurant suggestions and she has been spot-on every time. Spot to impress clients from out of town but quiet enough so their older ears can hear well? Chez Spencer. Where to go for a 5 o’clock dinner with my father-in-law with my son in tow because my husband has a meeting at 6 and it’s a school night? The bar at Two serves plenty of real food that early. I could go on but I don’t need to because her book answers all these questions and plenty I never thought of. The girl knows nothing if not the dining scene in SF. If you live in or ever come to SF, this book is a must-own (unless you’re staying at my house, I have a copy you can borrow).

Finally and completely unrelated to food, Elissa Auther’s String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art is, after many years of anticipation, in my hands in full book form. I’m interested in the whole concept of craft (my two favorite things to do besides actually craft in the form of quilting or knitting are writing and cooking which have the craft about them) and the difference between art and craft, so this book has my name all over it. I’m about a quarter in. Here’s the thing, I know Elissa well. I love how this book sounds just like her. She speaks with this level of precision – it’s a joy to hear and a pleasure to read. It is rare that the academic prose has life to it (and here I should admit a real weakness/fondness for academic studies – it reminds me of all the quiet alone reading time I had in graduate school which even then seemed like such a gift), but this book strolls along through the use of fiber in contemporary art with grace and verve.

I also recently re-read My So-Called Freelance Life to remind me not to take assignments unless I’m either really interested in them or they pay really well (of course a combination of the two is always nice…). Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs kept seeming like it was going to be tragic but wasn’t too depressing and is beautifully written and should be read by anyone who has ever even flown over Madison, Wisconsin. The Ghost Map about the cholera epidemic in London is written like a mystery and has filled out my knowledge of cholera epidemics nicely (Paris 1832 – go ahead, ask me anything!). Even though I’d read all the stories when they were published in magazines, I still savored the time I spent snuggled up with Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness: Stories.

How about you? What have you been reading?

One good friend just started a full time job after freelancing for years. Another friend has twins who are old enough now to eat real food so they’ve been trying to have family dinners most nights. Still another friend’s husband had a change at work and is no longer home in time to make dinner, which has always been his gig. In short, three friends in quick succession have asked for fast dinner ideas.

I’m going to try and keep them in mind in the coming weeks. Faster, quicker, easier. The fact of the matter is that I often cook that way and, due to some work-life circumstances this spring I’ll be cooking like that more anyway. At our house getting dinner on the table in a hurry often manifests in the form of pasta. Pasta with a lot of vegetables in it. I’m working on expanding that mindset (it’s difficult, though, since such pasta dishes are always a hit with all three of us).

This mushroom soba noodle soup is sort of a departure, right? Sure, it’s pasta and vegetables, but they’re in a soup! Hey, I’m trying here.

It may not be revolutionary, but it is delicious. Fresh, light, and perfect for this time of year when heavy winter foods don’t sound so great anymore but when you still need something to warm you up come dinner time.

Mushroom soba noodle soup

This noodle-y soup-y creation was inspired by a recipe for a mushroom hot pot in Japanese Hot Pots by Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat. It’s a great resource – especially if, like me, you like to make (and eat) big bowls of delicious.

4 cups broth (I used a mix of chicken and pork broth; one or the other or dashi would have been good, too)

1 cup sake

1/2 cup mirin

1/3 cup soy sauce

3 cups shredded Napa cabbage

1/2 pound shiitake mushrooms

1/2 pound oyster moshrooms

1/2 pound wild arugula (regular arugula or spinach would also work just fine, although with less bite)

1 pound tofu (firm, soft, silken – whatever you like) cut into three or four big pieces

1/2 pound soba noodles

some type of chile powder for garnish (we used ground ancho chile because it was in the cupboard)

Heat the broth in a medium pot. Add sake, mirin, and soy sauce. Bring to a simmer and cook, partially covered, for about 10 minutes. Taste and adjust seasoning – adding more mirin for sweetness or more soy for salt, if you like.

Add cabbage, cover, and cook until cabbage is wilted, about 3 minutes.

Meanwhile, bring a pot of salted water to a boil and trim mushrooms and cut into bite-size pieces if they are large.

Add mushrooms to the pot, cover, and cook until mushrooms and cabbage are tender, about 8 minutes. Add arugula, cover, and cook until the arugula leaves are wilted, about 3 minutes. Put large pieces of tofu on top of everything else, cover, and simmer until tofu is heated through, about 2 minutes.

Meanwhile, cook soba noodles in the boiling salted water until tender to the bite. Drain and divide between three or four large bowls.

Top noodles with the vegetables, one piece of tofu each, and broth. Garnish with chile powder, if you like. A few thinly sliced green onions would be tasty, too.

A neighbor asked for popover tips recently. I shared what I know and promptly made a batch of my own. The three of us ate the twelve of them in a snap.

They are good with roasts, good with stews, and a delight for breakfast. I suppose you could put jam or something on them, but it seems like a bit of gilding the lily to me.

Popovers

Here is what I know about making popovers pop. You want a very hot oven, a preheated muffin tin or popover pan, and room temperature ingredients. I’ve done the whole “fill only every other muffin cup” nonsense and never noticed it made a lick of difference.

3 eggs

1 cup milk

1 cup flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

4 tablespoons butter, melted

Heat the oven to 450. While the oven heats, put the eggs and milk in a blender or bowl and let sit to come to room temperature. Once the oven is hot, put an empty 12-cup muffin tin or popover pan (or 2 6-cup pans) in the oven and let it heat while you make the batter.

Whirl the eggs and milk or whisk them vigorously until completely combined. Add flour and salt and whirl or whisk until smooth. Add 2 tablespoons of the butter and whirl or whisk to combine.

Take pan(s) out of the oven and brush the cups with the remaining melted butter. Fill cups evenly with the batter. Twelve muffins tins will each be about half full.

Put filled pan(s) in the oven and reduce heat to 425. Bake 25 minutes without so much as thinking about opening the oven door. Reduce heat to 350 and bake until completely golden and mostly brown, about another 15 to 20 minutes.

Serve popovers hot, or at least warm. Time does them no favors.

We ate dinner last week in an industrial space that had been re-done into a residence and studio that was so stunning that Ernest jumped up and down as he shouted “Mama, this is so cool!”

I had to agree. The space was cool, the company delightful, and the food perfection. I was offered the serving bowl filled this endive, herb, kumquat salad and took way more than my fair share. I have since made it three times for myself for lunch. I’m making it now, while the kumquats are plentiful.

Kumquat endive salad

This is the ultimate end-of-winter-almost-spring salad. The bitter chicory of winter with the bright tart sweetness of citrus and the fresh green promise of spring herbs. You might not be able to have a real spring salad yet – there is no asparagus in here, no hidden fiddleheads – but it’s starting to seem like you will if you just hang in there.

4 Belgian endives

about 10 sprigs parsley

about 10 sprigs mint

10 kumquats

2 tablespoons lemon juice (Meyer lemon juice works nicely here, too)

1 1/2 tablespoons vegetable or olive oil (nothing too strong!)

1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon salt

Cut off ends of the endive and pull apart into leaves. Cut leaves into bite size pieces, if you like, and put all leaves into a salad or serving bowl.

Pull off the leaves from the parsley sprigs and put them with the endive leaves. Pinch off the mint leaves and tear them into smaller pieces and add them to the mix. Cut the kumquats into quarters and throw them in.

In a small bowl, mix lemon juice, oil, and salt. Stir or whisk together an drizzle over salad. Toss salad to coat everything evenly with the dressing.

I made this chocolate pudding with my best friend from high school in mind. She loves chocolate pudding. I’ve seen her eat it for breakfast and I’ve seen her eat in for dinner. Nice big bowls of it.

She does not, however, like to cook much. She bakes some mean cinnamon rolls and whips up a batch of pudding if the mood hits her. She doesn’t understand what all the fuss about pie crust is and will throw one together if she feels like eating pie. Yet I once saw her pull a can of black beans out of a cupboard and prepare to eat them cold out of the can because, as far as she could see, there was nothing in the house to make dinner out of. Cheese and eggs and tortillas and salsa were sitting, waiting, in the fridge. I made her some ad hoc huevos rancheros and she thought I was a genius.

For all her baking, fussy is not her game. I don’t think she is at all interested in tempering eggs or doing other things that, to my culinary mind, are part of making pudding. So I experimented with streamlined methods and minimal dirty-dish production. Now I just want all those hours I’ve spent whisking hot liquid into beaten eggs back. It ends up it wasn’t really necessarily in the first place.

Chocolate pudding

This is not pot de crème or extra rich or super-duper chocolate-y. This is creamy, yummy, old-fashioned chocolate pudding. The kind that is mainly milk and eggs. The kind you can tuck into a nice big bowl of. If you want a bigger chocolate hit, simply melt two to four ounces of chocolate and stir it in at the end with the vanilla.

3/4 cup sugar*

5 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder

4 tablespoons cornstarch

3 cups milk, divided

2 eggs

2 egg yolks

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

In a medium saucepan, whisk together sugar, cocoa, and cornstarch. Whisk in about 3/4 cup of the milk. Work it until it is very smooth and all the cocoa and cornstarch are dissolved and you have a brown paste. Add the eggs and egg yolks and whisk until everything is completely combined again. Now whisk in the remaining milk.

Put the pot on the stove over low heat. Cook, stirring with a wooden spoon and scarping the bottom and edges and corners of the pan to keep bits of the mixture from thickening unevenly, until the mixture thickens and coats the back of the spoon. This will take about 15 minutes. You want to cook the mixture slowly so the eggs don’t overcook and curdle into chunks. If nothing is happening, however, you may need to increase the heat – just little bits at a time – to get the mixture to thicken up properly. Take off the heat and stir in vanilla.

Transfer mixture to individual serving bowls or a single large bowl. Cover surface with plastic wrap or waxed paper and chill at least 3 hours and up to 3 days.

* I used “vanilla sugar” – sugar in which I store fresh vanilla beans. The sugar keep the vanilla beans supple and fresh; the vanilla lightly scents the sugar. Regular sugar works just fine, too.

I was craving some chiles rellenos. Then I read this lovely post at Rachel Eats about walnuts, and her walnut pesto looked so yummy that the neurons started firing. Then I remembered that there is a traditional chile rellenos dish that uses a walnut cream sauce. After a bit of research I realized I did not want to make that dish, at least not any vaguely authentic version of it. I don’t much care for peaches in my meat.

So I MacGyvered my own version. They were fabulous and I will never make them again, at least not until someone tells me a trick for skinning walnuts that actually works (um, that baking soda thing? sure, it loosened the skins, but it turned the nuts dark and the skins weren’t all that much easier to deal with). I ended up picking the skin out of all those grooves like a crazy person. My self-diagnosed OCD doesn’t need that kind of aggravation.

Chiles rellenos in walnut cream sauce

1 1/2 cups walnut halves

1 cup cream

1/2 cup milk

1 teaspoon salt, plus more to taste

12 large mild green chiles

1 tablespoon vegetable oil or lard

1 onion, chopped

3 cloves garlic, minced

3/4 pound ground beef

1/4 cup currants or chopped raisins

1/4 cup pitted black olives, minced

1/2 cup sliced almonds

Pomegranate seeds or chopped red onion for garnish

Put walnuts in a medium bowl and cover with boiling water and let sit a few minutes. Drain. Return walnuts to the bowl and cover with boiling water, again letting it sit for a few minutes. Drain walnuts and spread on a kitchen towel. Settle in with a long radio program or a good chat and pick off the skins from the walnuts.

Put the skinned walnuts in a medium bowl and cover them with the cream. Let soak for a few hours or overnight (chill). Whirl in a blender with milk and 1 teaspoon salt. Set aside.

Roast and peel chiles (if this process is new to you check out this guide). Once cool, make a slit along the side of each chile and pull out and discard the seeds. Set chiles aside.

In a frying pan over medium-high, heat oil or lard and add onion. Cook, stirring, until soft, about 3 minutes. Add garlic and cook, stirring, another minute.

Add beef and cook, stirring and breaking up the meat as you go, until well browned and cooked through. Add currants and olives. Cover, reduce heat to a maintain a simmer and cook about 5 minutes. Drain off any excess fat and stir in almonds. Add salt to taste.

Heat oven to 350. Let stuffing sit until cool enough to handle. Stuff each chile with the beef mixture. Lay chiles in a baking pan, cover loosely with foil, and bake until hot through, about 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, put walnut cream in a small saucepan and warm over medium low heat.

Serve chiles napped with walnut cream sauce and garnish with pomegranate seeds (traditional and would be amazing, but we had none) or the sad-sack but very tasty purple of the chopped red onion.

You will likely have extra walnut cream sauce. It is delicious spread on toast or tossed with a small bowl of pasta for lunch.

Bright and bitter. Some days that describes me to a T. Purple and salty. Sometimes that works too, although in a more metaphorical way. They all get right to the heart of this salad, which hits the bright and bitter, purple and salty notes perfectly.

Radicchio green olive salad

This is my riff on a salad made at Toro Bravo in Portland. Their version relegates the green olives to the side, as a spread atop two slices of grilled bread. I put all the flavors in the bowl. With some good baguette and tasty cheese, you have yourself a simple and utterly delightful dinner.

1 head radicchio

18 green olives

1 cloves garlic

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 tablespoons sherry vinegar or lemon juice (good both ways!)

Salt to taste

Lots of freshly ground black pepper

Scads of freshly shredded Parmesan cheese

Trim radicchio and cut or tear into shreds or bite-size pieces. Put radicchio in a large salad bowl.

Mince olives and garlic into a paste and then mix with oil, vinegar or lemon juice, and add salt and pepper to taste. (You can also do this in a blender, if you like.)

Toss radicchio with the dressing. Then add a whole lot of Parmesan and toss it again. Serve topped with more Parmesan.

I love the Winter Olympics. The Summer Olympics are fun to watch and all, but the Winter Olympics grab my heart. I read the coverage, I watch clips, I follow the way fans follow things. I even disconnect our internet connection and plug the cable cord into an old 9-inch TV tottering on a stack of books on my desk to watch the coverage.*

This love is clearly the fall-out of a Minnesotan childhood. As active as we were when the snow melted and the humidity and the mosquitoes set in, so many Summer Olympic events bear little resemblance to the things I ever did or do. I love to swim and always have, but as a kid I swam in lakes, not pools. The winter sports seemed more like expert versions of what we all did all winter long – skating for both speed and grace, hockey, skiing whether with our heels fixed or not, sledding down hills aiming for speed and hoping against crashes.

Every November we’d head to the sporting good store for new-to-us skates. Every garage had an arsenal of sleds and hockey sticks. Our neighbors flooded their backyard to skate on. If that was full we grabbed our skates and a shovel and cleared the creek near the house or headed to the park where acres of baseball and soccer fields were drenched and cleared and turned into so many skating rinks. I took figure skating lessons after school every week and on Saturdays our parents put my brother and me on a school bus that took us to the various ski hills within two hours of Minneapolis.

A DC friend recently tweeted, after six days home in Snowpocalypse, for advice from Minnesotans on what to do now that all the bread was baked and the movies watched.

I told him that snow is celebrated in Minnesota. It’s what makes the cold fun. No snow and you have a gray, leafless, and ultimately useless landscape. Snow means you can ski and snowshoe and snowmobile. Snow lets you build the banks for pond hockey.

As much as I identify with the sports, though, I know an even more important element of this love of mine stems from the memory of those two weeks when – in those late days of winter when it still got dark by 4 and the cold had set in deep and all that snow had lost the novel luster it had in December – my parents and my brother and I would gather and cheer. It probably helps that I was 9 (going on 10) when the Miracle on Ice happened at the Lake Placid Olympics in 1980. Of that twenty-man team, twelve, plus the coach, were from Minnesota.

So, as an ode to the games and as a way to keep busy on a school holiday that caught me by a bit of surprise and as a way of apologizing for steering every conversation towards the end of the Russian reign in figure skating or the number of Olympic-grade luge tracks in the Western Hemisphere or the percentage of Canadians who shoot left in hockey for the next two weeks, last night I made my dashing husband’s favorite dessert: oeufs a la neige.

Oeufs a la neige

These delights are lightly poached meringues floating in a vanilla custard sauce. A fun food fact: this dessert is called floating islands in English. The seemingly direct translation of that back into French would seem to be the dessert known as île flottante, which is, in fact, a different dessert altogether that may be made of meringue or cake but in any case is one big island surrounded by the sauce, not lovely little poached “snow eggs.” Since they are delicious served cold, you can make them up to a day ahead of serving.

4 eggs

tiny pinch salt

3/4 cup sugar, divided

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract, divided

2 1/2 cups milk, plus up to 1 cup more

Separate the eggs and set the yolks aside for the moment.

Put egg whites into a copper bowl, if you have one, but any large bowl will do. Feel free to use a standing mixer with a whisk attachment, if you like, but I’ve timed myself and I can beat four egg whites by hand almost as quickly – and with much less hassle and much more control – as the machine. Beat eggs with a large balloon whisk, if you have one, but any whisk will work, or in the machine until foamy.

Add salt and keep beating as it turned fluffy.

Keep beating until firm peaks form – when you lift the whisk or beaters out of the egg whites the peak that forms should droop a bit, but then stay put.

Fold in 1/4 cup of the sugar, incorporating 1 tablespoon at a time. Then fold in 1/2 teaspoon of the vanilla.

Put 2 1/2 cups milk and 1/4 cup sugar in a wide pot or sauté pan. Heat the milk to a gentle simmer, stirring occasionally to help the sugar melt. Use two large spoons to form football-shaped dumplings of the egg whites, scooping the mixture with one spoon and shaping it in that spoon with the other spoon.

Then using the free spoon to help ease the meringue into the simmering milk. Do as many meringues as fit without crowding or touching too much in the pan.

Cook, turning over once, until meringues are firm, about 2 minutes each side. You may be tempted to go check your email while the meringues are poaching. I cannot recommend you do that since, in my experience, it leads to this:

When the meringues are cooked, lift them out of the milk with a slotted spoon and drain them on a clean kitchen towel.

Repeat with remaining egg white mixture.

When all meringues are cooked. Strain the poaching milk through a fine mesh sieve. Add enough more milk to equal 2 cups, if necessary.

In a small bowl, whisk the egg yolks with the remaining 1/4 cup sugar until lighter yellow and thick. Keep whisking as you pour the milk mixture, which will still be very warm, into the egg yolks. Constant whisking will keep the yolks from curdling. Transfer this mixture to a medium saucepan and cook over low heat, stirring pretty much constantly with a wooden spoon until the mixture thickens enough to coat the back of the spoon and show the path where your finger runs to have a taste.

Stir in remaining teaspoon vanilla. Strain custard sauce, if you like.

You can now cover everything with plastic wrap and chill it up to a day before you serve, or prepare the dishes, cover them and chill them until you serve them, or assemble the desserts and eat them warm. You could even make one and eat it right away and then put the rest away for dinner time. Put about a sixth of the sauce in a bowl and float three meringues on top. Make five more.

* That’s right, we have no TV. We have no place we want to put it where the cable runs and we’ve just never fixed that because we seem to be able to watch most of what we want to on our computers or DVD. Don’t worry, we’re not actual crazy “no TV” people. As I’ve stated here before, the very fact of Project Runway gets me out of bed in the morning. I look forward to 30 Rock as much as anyone.

This cauliflower is like gold, but more precious.

That is an inside joke between me and a long-ago college boyfriend. When I was 18 the two of us traveled from France to Greece and Italy and Denmark (!) on EuroRail passes and change we found on the floor of the trains. Or so it seemed. We couldn’t have had that little money, though, because I managed to gain about ten pounds in two weeks in Italy. I had never had gelato. It was a revelation. I ate it several times every day. But I digress….

So we were traveling on a shoestring, as the saying goes, and we were terribly young and had pretty much no idea what the hell we were doing half the time. So we did things like not pay the extra few bucks for reserved seats. For the majority of our travels, this was fine. For the packed overnight train from Zurich to Zagreb, it was less fun. Every seat was taken. Plenty of other people in the corridor. And tons and tons of Yugoslavians (because that’s what they were then, we knew not yet of Serbs and Croats and the horror that would come soon enough) heading home armed to the teeth with the bright and shiny goods of Western Europe. All those televisions and boom boxes had to go somewhere – somewheres we could have been sitting. We ended up squished into a corner of the vestibule at the front of the car next to the bathroom that could have been working better.

That would never happen to me now, of course. Not only would I reserve a seat because I would do a teensy bit of research – ask the station attendant, even – about the need to do such a thing, but even if I didn’t have a seat there is no way on this green earth that I would let someone put their crap on a seat I could sit in and even if I ended up sitting in the corridor, when the pushing and jostling started I would push right back and refuse to huddle in the creaking, rattling, drafty vestibule next to the leaky toilet. But, as I said, we were young. We were midwestern. We were polite. We didn’t make a fuss.

We arrived in Zagreb sleepless and a bit worse for wear. We were planning on staying a day or two, maybe going to some other Yugoslavian cities. We exchanged whatever pittance we thought would see us through that first day and were handed several inches of bill-size paper that we could only assume was their terribly deflated money. We then spent the day witnessing what seemed like never-ending incidents of people kicking and spitting at “gypsies” (I didn’t know then that “gypsy” is derogatory and that they are called Roma).

It was all quite upsetting to a nice, sleep-deprived girl from Minnesota, raised among so many nice, restrained, liberal people. We decided to catch the night train south, this time snagging floor space away from the toilet. It was another long, sleepless night – with lots of stops and noise and confusion for us. We saw a group of people literally kick an old Roma woman off the train. At another juncture a group of passengers physically blocked a Roma family from boarding the train.

We didn’t speak the language or have any understanding of the culture, so we sat – wide-eyed and horrified – as we rode the train south to Greece.

When we finally disembarked in Thessaloniki, the fresh ocean air hit us like a tonic.

We soon bought the cheapest phrase book we could find and were delighted to find it filled with such useful gems as “you dance like a fairy,” “will you marry me,” and “your hair is like gold, but more precious.”

From then on we described everything good, everything lovely, everything that helped us forget about that train ride as “like gold, but more precious.”

This cauliflower gets its golden hue from a bit of turmeric. It works fine without the turmeric if you don’t have any on hand, but look at that color! Why leave it out?

Spiced caramelized cauliflower

The wee bit of sugar in the spice mix helps the whole thing brown and caramelize and crisp up ever so slightly. I tried making this dish with just 2 tablespoons of butter, and it worked fine just perfectly fine but was significantly less like gold.

1 head cauliflower

3 Tablespoons butter

1 teaspoon sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1/2 teaspoon hot paprika

1/2 teaspoon sweet paprika

1/4 teaspoon cayenne (optional)

1/4 teaspoon turmeric

1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Heat the oven up to 450. Cut cauliflower into florets. I like to try and keep things fairly bite-sized so I further divide the larger pieces, but I’m sure you know how you like your cauliflower cut up.

Melt the butter and then mix it in a large bowl (big enough to hold all the cauliflower) with the sugar, salt, and all the spices. Add the cauliflower and toss to coat the cauliflower as evenly as possible with the spicy butter.

Lay the cauliflower pieces in a single layer in a roasting pan or on a baking sheet. Cook them in the oven until browned, sizzling, and tender with crispy bits forming on the edges – mine took about 25 minutes.

Serve hot or warm. I think they’d be rather nice as a little appetizer – with toothpicks – with drinks.

We liked it with rice and brown butter dal, with a little fresh green chile and red onion relish (seasoned to taste with salt and lemon juice) for freshness and color. This dinner? It wasn’t just golden. It was like gold, but more precious.

Last week, before the lefse extravaganza, one of my other San Francisco Bay Area cousins (the Watson cousins have a quorum going – four out of seven of us live in the Bay Area; if you count Monterey, which is a questionable move, the number goes to five out of seven – impressive considering not a single one of us is from here) stopped by after work to make samosas. Why samosas? We really don’t know. I taught her how to make gougères last fall (for her book club meeting when they were to discuss My Life in France – the inspirational tale of Julia Child’s time in France, including embarking on her culinary career at the tender age of 37) and we had a rollicking good time and wanted to do it again.

So we made 110 samosas. I mean, if you’re going to get a pan of oil bubbling and pull out the rolling pins out and cover the kitchen in flour, you might as well have something to show for it at the end of the day, no?

First, the fillings. One potato. One lamb. I make no claims to even the remotest authenticity. We didn’t even fill them right. We gave up and filled them like ravioli or pierogi.

Potato Samosa Filling

This is what most people think of when they think “samosa” (or, I suppose, if they think “samosa”). This filling was soft and fluffy lightly spiced and full of little seeds – cumin, fennel, and mustard – to give it plenty of flavor. If you want to make them more like samosas you get at most Indian restaurants in the States, throw in about a cup of frozen peas towards the end.

4 large Yukon Gold potatoes

Salt

1 large onion, chopped

2 Tablespoons vegetable oil

1 teaspoon cumin seeds

1 teaspoon fennel seeds

1 teaspoon mustard seeds

3 dried small red chiles

10 fenugreek seeds

1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric

1 Tablespoon lemon juice, plus more to taste

Put potatoes in a large pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil and add about a tablespoon of salt – you want the water to actually taste salty. Cook until potatoes are tender all the way through, 20 to 30 minutes.

Put potatoes through a ricer or peel and chop – the choice is yours. My cousin “chopped” ours into a mash. It was all very even and precise. She’s a lawyer.

Meanwhile, you can heat another pan over high heat and cook the onions in the oil until they start to brown , adjusting the heat so they don’t burn before they soften. Or, do as we did and wait for that potato pot to be drained and use it to avoid washing a pot. Yes, I’m that lazy about washing dishes.

When the onions are starting to brown, increase heat to high if necessary and add the cumin seeds, fennel seeds, and mustard seeds. Cover and cook until the mustard seeds stop popping, about 2 minutes.

Add chiles, fenugreek seeds, and turmeric. Stir to combine and then stir in the cooked chopped or mashed potatoes. Cook, stirring, to keep potatoes from sticking too much to the pan (they’ll come up when you add the lemon juice in a moment, so there’s no need to panic), until flavors blend a bit, about 5 minutes. Add salt to taste if needed and drizzle whole mixture with lemon juice. Stir to pick up bits of potato on bottom of the pan and transfer to a bowl to cool a bit.

Lamb Samosa Filling

This is essentially kheema, a spiced ground meat dish that goes with rice or bread or potatoes and makes a great stuffing for vegetables that can be stuffed.

1 Tablespoon vegetable oil

2 large onions, chopped

6 cloves garlic, minced

2-inch piece of fresh ginger, grated

1 1/2 pounds ground lamb

6 whole cloves

6 black peppercorns

2 bay leaves

3 dried red hot chiles

1 teaspoon ground coriander

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric

1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon

3 chopped tomatoes (fresh or canned)

1/2 teaspoon salt

Lemon juice

In a large frying pan or pot, heat oil over medium high heat. Add onions and cook, stirring, until soft, about 3 minutes. Add garlic and ginger and cook, stirring, until very fragrant, about 1 minute. Add lamb and cook, stirring as you see fit, until cooked through. Add cloves, peppercorns, bay leaves, chiles, coriander, cumin, turmeric, and cinnamon. Stir to combine. Stir in tomato, salt, and 1/2 cup water. Cover, reduce heat to maintain a simmer, and cook for about 45 minutes. Remove cover, taste and add more salt if you like, and cook off any remaining liquid. Stir in lemon juice and transfer to a bowl to cool.

You will notice that the potato and lamb samosas look quite different on their outsides and well as their ins. We baked the lamb ones – since they had plenty of unctuous tasty fat in them to keep them moist anyway.

So, onto the dough (tired yet?). Use your fingers to work 3 tablespoons of vegetable oil into 2 cups whole wheat pastry flour mixed with 1/2 teaspoon salt. Stir in 1/2 cup water. You may need to add another 1/4 cup to make a workable dough. Knead it in the bowl until it holds together as a ball. Cut into 20 – 30 pieces and cover with plastic wrap or a damp kitchen towel. Work with one ball at a time.

On a floured work surface roll each ball into a 4-inch circle. Cut the circle in half. Now you can fold the half-circle in half and pinch the cut sides together to form a cone for a traditional samosa shape and fill the cone about 3/4 full of filling and then crimp the end shut, or just fill it and crimp the edges as we ended up doing because we were so tired and lacked proper Bengali skills. Place filled samosas on a lightly floured baking sheet.

When you’re ready to cook you can either bake them for about 20 minutes in a 375 oven and/or heat about 1/2 inch of vegetable oil in a heavy pot or cast iron pan over medium high heat to 350 – 375 degrees. Fry, in batches and without crowding the samosas – until golden on each side, about 3 minutes per side. Drain on paper towels or a cooling rack.

We were total heathens who just shoved them in our mouths as we went. I really just do not want to think about how many we ate as we filled and fried. A lot. We officially ate a whole butt-load of samosas. And then some. Luckily, I had made a cilantro mint chutney. It’s chock-full of vitamin A.