The Dinner Files

I was feeling a bit blah. We got some take-out from our favorite Thai place. I requested the silver noodle salad because I love love love it. I LUV it. I thought: that Thai silver noodle salad sure will be a bright spot on my exhausting blah day.

I can only assume the restaurant ran out of silver noodles. Why else would the silver noodle salad have giant squares of rice noodle that roll up into tubes in it instead of skinny, tangled silver noodles? Like so much food, a large part of the appeal with the silver noodle salad is the texture, which, as you might imagine, was shot to hell with the noodle change-up.

It was just all so disappointing.

Anyone been to Farina on 18th (in San Francisco)? What’s up with that? Maybe I hit them on an off night, but what a mess. The cheesy focaccia thing was awesome–papery thing bread dough wrapped around oozy, amazingly creamy cheese. And their “La Grande Mela” cocktail of bourbon, cassis, and bitters struck me as just the thing. Everything else had something quite strikingly wrong with it. Watery mashed potatoes under the otherwise perfectly tender calamari; fava beans that were too big to serve raw served raw on the yummy plate of deeply savory salami; grit in the plump borage raviloi; tough, overcooked fish in the balanced broth of the zuppa di pesce.

But the cocktail was good and the company was even better, so I hardly care anymore. I’d go back–and sit at the bar and have a cocktail and order some of that bread. But the rest of it? Too much money for truly mediocre food. Truly mediocre food that just isn’t so tricky to make a bit better.

Plus, they do that thing where they don’t seat you until your whole party is there. Even with a reservation. Even if you’re a party of two so the table couldn’t get any smaller. Just let me sit down. Why punish me because my dinner companion gets lost easily? I sort of forced them/shamed them into letting me sit down–by explaining the logic of me needing to eat dinner anyway, whether or not my “party” arrives at all. It betrays such an utter lack of hospitality. Anyone with me on this one?

What I should have done was check out one of the three restaurants that came up again and again when I asked people where to eat. What I did was stay in my hotel room and subsist on left-over steak and pistachios from the welcome basket.

Two and a half years ago Ernie and I tried to go to The Hitching Post II, you know the one, the one from Sideways. I was down in Santa Ynez to be Sunset girl at a wine club event. I did so as a last-minute favor to the wine editor, and I had two conditions: that I bring Ernie (then 3) and that our hotel have a pool. He was a huge hit at the wine club event–running through the vines, grabbing handfuls of pinot noir grapes, shouting “Mama! These grapes are good!”

Our duty done, we ate aebleskiver in Solvang, we frolicked in the freezing hotel pool, we gazed at the moon turned red by wildfires farther south, and generally had a lovely little mother-son getaway. The only real downside of the trip was the insane wait at The Hitching Post II, which had been so highly recommended by both Sunset wine editor and Sunset travel editor. A wait insane enough to put me off.

Last night redeemed that disappointment. I went to the Hitching Post II. I ate grilled artichokes with a smoked tomato mayonnaise concoction that had the addictive quality of crack (why else was I thinking of ripping open a package of crackers in order to finish off the sauce when I had a giant-ass steak coming?). I felt my saliva glands activate when a perfectly cooked steak was placed in front of me. I tasted fried as fries are meant to be: crisp, golden, well-salted, and cooked in beef fat.

As great as the steak and its fixin’s were, the highlight for me may have been the relish tray. I know why relish trays fell out of favor: because too many people made bad versions of them and gave them a bad rep. When a relish tray is fresh and well-composed, it is divine. Divine, I say! I’ve been putting them together for dinner parties–often in lieu of the more filling pre-dinner cheese plate–for a few years and hope to see the trend go beyond my living room.

For those of you not from the midwest: a relish tray consist of carrot sticks, celery sticks, olives, and pickles. Add radishes or cherry tomatoes for color, spicy pickled okra to be a bit daring, or your own pickled garlic among true friends. I liked the pepperoncini at The Hitching Post II, but it seemed dangerously close to an antipasto platter….

Some chopped grilled lamb and some rice pilaf (sound familiar?) stir-fried with extra shallot and a handful of cilantro. Be grateful I didn’t take a picture. Seriously. Lucky for me there was leftover yogurt sauce (I love the stuff). My dashing husband opted for hot sauce instead. Steamed broccoli rounded out our utilitarian dinner.

It was the kind of day, though, during which Ernie and I had made cookies. So dessert was fun. Today? Back to school, back to work, back on the road. I’m tired already.

You know what I hate? Parades. You know what else I hate? Parades’ ill-disciplined cousins, street fairs. I hate the crowds, I hate the noise, I hate the hassle. So you know what? I don’t go to them. For the most part this works out just fine. Once in a while some well-intentioned person will invite me to a parade or street fair and I politely decline.

But every Memorial Day Weekend I am forced to confront Caranval!. Carnaval! takes over our neighborhood. Carnaval! as you might have already guessed, largely consists of, yes, a parade and a street fair. Those are the defining events of Carnaval! as far as I can tell. Roads are closed, music finds its way through the air into our house, parking spaces are at an all-time premium, even on our quiet little street. And I am psychically and physically surrounded by parade and street fair.

And you want to know the worst part? I forget about it every year. It catches me off-guard and in-town. All of the sudden competing samba music, steel drums, and house music come floating through the air and I innocently wonder who’s having the big party. And it stays like that for a bit before reality sinks in and I realize that everyone is having the big party and I’m stuck for the weekend.

So I took my frustration out on a leg of lamb and we invited some neighbors over–no one had to drive or give up their parking spot. Brilliant!

I grilled this butterflied leg of lamb in an onion and garlic paste marinade pretty much according to this recipe I wrote for Sunset a few years ago (except I left out the rosemary). Ignore the picture with the recipe on the Sunset site: don’t roll and tie the lamb, grill it flat as stated in the directions to get plenty of onion-pasted crispy bits, which is what everyone wants. (The reason the picture with the recipe in the magazine was rolled? The food stylist thought it looked better. We had to write all these weird explanations in the captions. One editor wanted me to re-do the recipe to match the picture. I refused because it is less delicious if you roll it. I became a bit difficult over this small issue. Stubborn, entrenched, inflexible. Because no matter how pretty that picture is, you get globs of semi-uncooked onion paste in the meat if you roll it. And who wants to have their name associated with that?)

And be sure to make the yogurt mint sauce to go with it. I served it with rice pilaf and green beans. A big green salad would have been welcomed too, but we had a shaved fennel concoction with chunks of Meyer lemons in it.

But we started the meal with a beautiful piece of smoked salmon my Uncle Denny caught, smoked, and carried down from the Olympic Peninsula for us. It was a particularly fine specimen savored by all.

Ernie’s favorite part? A bit of the skin.

I really can’t even describe how tasty this soup was. And I’m a professional! My whole job is describing how tasty things are (or sometimes it so seems…). It’s so good I already posted the recipe over on local foods (I have to say, I’m loving the redesigned site over there). For the full experience, don’t add the flour option and use cream. You could also spend part of your afternoon making the homemade chicken stock if you’re feeling nutty, or not. Whatever, it’s your call. It was so gray and dreary here yesterday that our freezer is now chock-full (full I say!) of chicken stock. And nothing makes me feel safer. It’s my security blanket. My very cold, hard, savory security blanket….

Borscht, which I’m told just means “stew” in Russian (correct me! please!), in its beet-centric variety is one of my favorite soups. I like it thick with cabbage and beans (and meat even) as we had it last night as those pesky spring winds whipped up and sent us all shivering into our poorly insulated San Francisco houses. I like it thin and plain and chilled. I like it with tiny mushroom dumplings in it. I like it with a sprinkle of fresh dill. I like that it’s a brilliant, scary color. I like that I had a quart of it sitting, waiting in the deep-freeze for an evening when I had cooked through the CSA box earlier in the week than usual, no one wanted to go to the store, and no one much cared what we ate.

Except Ernie. He and I have a lot in common (half our genetic material, for example). What we do not share is a love of borscht. He tried it. He tried several bites. He made the same face he makes every time he tries it: let’s call it displeased. He ate some cereal instead. And strawberries. He doesn’t get a substitute dinner very often for two reasons: one, he’s a decent eater who doesn’t ask for one; two, it’s been drummed into his head that “I am not a short-order cook.”

Am I asking too much of him when I serve up a big, steaming bowl of fuchsia root vegetables?

I had coffee with a friend yesterday. She, too, is part of the food world–writing away and developing recipes and whatnot. We spent a moment–just a moment, mind you!–bemoaning the fresh, simple, ingredient-driven, Italy/Southern France-inspired cuisine that dominates our fair city of San Francisco. It’s all great, of course, but once in awhile you want someone to dazzle you with something you’ve never seen before, and I don’t mean yet another variety of Mediterranean green. I want something weird. Something not a variety of something else. Something I’ve never dreamed of. Something amazing.

And yet, between the two of us, I don’t think you could find more “simply prepared asparagus and peas” (as she so deftly put it) if you tried.

And after all my yackety-yack, what did I cook? Well, see for yourself:

Yep, those are some late-spring, early-summer vegetables. Simply “braised” in olive oil and water (water! of all things simple!) with some fresh herbs (let’s not get too cliché… oh wait, it’s way too late for that) and served on polenta. What is it? 1985? But you know, it was just right for a Thursday on a sunny day that had turned into a clear-but-windy night in San Francisco. It was also fast. It’s such a crowd-pleaser I already posted the recipe (such as it is) over at local foods.

p.s. The carrot cupcakes were a hit (although they had a bit of that metallic thing chemically-risen baked goods can get–I’ll play with the proportions a bit). Cooking with 16 4- and 5-year olds is insane. They really like to stir. A lot. Next time I’m just bringing bowls of flour and water for them to work on. They also like to stick their fingers in their noses and mouths. A lot. More than once did I say “Calum/Serafina/Shai/Jacob/Vaughn, go wash your hands” and then 30 seconds later look over and say it all over again.

Does that ever happen to you? Once in a moon-so-blue-it’s-turquoise does it happen to me. I ate some stuff–mainly “sportler brot” (“fitness bread”! it says so on the label!) from Ester’s German Bakery via our neighborhood co-op and some goat gouda cheese (remind me to tell you about the time my French exchange family took me to Holland and we went to Gouda–oh, the fun we had!)–but not any dinner. Instead I was busy developing a dairy-free, egg-free carrot cake to turn into cupcakes today with Ernie’s preschool class.

Dairy-free and egg-free because that’s how things roll these days. Between allergies and politics, cooking and other people’s kids is a tricky business.

Carrot cake because they planted and grew carrots in their garden and they’ve already prepared them every other way anyone can think of.

Me because I volunteered to come in and do a baking project because otherwise I am a very bad parent who doesn’t contribute to the school (except, of course, for the substantial check I write them every month) and selfishly pursues her own career during the time I pay other people to keep my child out of traffic–oh, I mean stimulate his mind, enliven his curiosity, smooth over not-fully-socialized-and-thus-painfully-honest peer interactions, and strengthen his body–all day.

These cupcakes are tasty. Basic and tasty. Cream cheese frosting would set them up just right, but I don’t want the teachers to hate me, which I think they might if I left them with a room full of sugar-fueled pre-schoolers just as “quiet time” rolled around….

Dairy-free, egg-free tender carrot spice cupcakes

1 1/2 cup grated carrot
2 Tbsp. lemon juice
1/2 tsp. salt
1 1/4 cup flour
3/4 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup light brown sugar
1 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. ground nutmeg
1 cup cold water
5 Tbsp. vegetable oil
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract

1. Preheat oven to 350°. Prepare 18 muffin/cupcake cups (spray with oil, butter, or line with paper).

2. In a small bowl, combine carrots, lemon juice, and salt. Set aside (by letting this sit just a bit the acid in the lemon juice and the salt start to break down and soften the carrot).

3. In a large bowl, combine flour, whole wheat pastry flour, sugar, brown sugar, baking soda, cinnamon, and nutmeg. If you’re cooking with kids, let them use a whisk to stir until the mixture looks homogeneous (in kid-speak: all the same)–I’ve found it’s a big hit. Set aside.

4. In a small bowl or measuring cup, combine water, oil, and vanilla. (Have the kid/s smell the vanilla–they’ll love you for it.)

5. Pour oil mixture into flour mixture. Whisk to combine thoroughly (since there isn’t any egg here you don’t need to worry about over-mixing the batter and having tough cupcakes, so let the little monsters/darlings stir away!). Stir in carrot mixture (again, let them revel in the joy of mixing!).

6. Divide mixture evenly among prepared cups. Bake 10 minutes, switch pan positions, bake until puffed, golden, and a clean toothpick inserted in the center of a cupcake emerges clean, about 15 minutes. Let sit on a wire rack until cool.

I wish I didn’t need to say it (isn’t it obvious?), but: © 2008 Molly Watson, just like everything else you see here.