The Dinner Files

Pressing deadlines and a fridge full o’veggies meant we had this very odd vegetable stew for dinner last night. I made the mistake of referring to it, briefly, during the cooking process as “couscous” (cuckoo!), because I used the spice mix I made to make a most delectable dish inspired by Algerian restaurants in Paris and published in a formal way in Sunset magazine, so Ernie cried when I served it to him and it had, alas, no couscous. There was too much of this… stew that needed to be eaten (oh, that’s always a lovely way to think of dinner) to fill up on couscous (wow, I was fun last night, wasn’t I?). Plus, I had no time to be making couscous. Oh. That’s just sad. That means I didn’t have five minutes to pull together.

If for some reason you want to make a sumer veggie stew, make the ras el hanout in the Sunset recipe. Sautée 3 small summer onions, chopped, in olive oil with plenty of salt. Add 5 cloves minced garlic and an inch of freshly shredded ginger. Add more salt. Add 2 dried chiles (arbol!) and 1/2 tsp.saffron (I’m still working on the collection from when two of my dearest friends were Spanish historians and made regular pilgrimmages to Iberia and returned with scads of cheap saffron; now they’re both married with two boys apiece, so no more free saffron for me!). Sprinkle in 2 tsp. of the ras el hanout, sautée a bit more. Add bout 4 cups chicken or veggie broth (an aside: anyone have a good recipe for vegetarian broth?). Bring to boil. Add a mess of chopped green beans and zucchini. Bring to a boil again. Add chick peas, some leftover cooked potatoes, and kernels from 2 ears of corn. Again, boil. Stir in 5 chopped dry-farmed heirloom tomatoes. Add more salt. Serve topped with harissa and preserved Meyer lemons from the tree in your backyard, or, you know, whatever you find in the back of your fridge.

Here is my biased, unsolicited advice: If you are going to invite a food writer to a barbeque and if you are also going to ask said food writer if the tri-tip is done and if said food writer tells you that yes, in her opinion the tri-tip is at that exact moment grilled to absolute perfection, if all of these things are true, take the goddamn meat off the grill.

You don’t need to invite her (although she sure likes it when you do) and you don’t need to wave her over to the grill away from delightful conversation and put her to work at your party (although she really doesn’t mind), but if you do,  listen to her. Don’t, after all that hassle, over-cook the beef anyway.

Luckily, the beef wasn’t too terribly overcooked, just a bit more towards well-done than most people would probably like. The crowd was a forgiving one–former colleagues from Sunset–who I have witnessed dig into uncooked cake and burnt turkey. Everyone seemed too engrossed catching up and comparing the competing slaws to worry too much about the meat.

After three days of eating every meal in restaurants, and having the majority of them be for professional assessment or a signature event at which I ate what was served me, I reveled in returning to home and farm box. My dashing husband officially “tolerates” zucchini, but noted that the summer squash we get from the farm “actually tastes good” and wondered aloud “how do they do that?” How indeed. I turned some into a zucchini frittata/Spanish tortilla/omelet situation (thanks for the suggestion Luisa!) and sauteed some corn with a stray jalapeno I found in the hydrator.

My Mile-High adventure ended with a bang. A Grizzly Rose Bang!

I escaped the press trip (well, it came to a civilized end) and spent the evening with friends who find themselves living and loving in Denver. Adhering to my new restaurant practice (if I don’t know what something is, I order it without explanation; barring that option, I order whatever I’ve never had before) and with a nod to my desperation default-order strategy, I had a BLT pizza (a bit of white sauce, crispy bacon, slices of fresh tomato on a thin, yeasty crust, and a handful or two of mixed green salad thrown on top—not bad at all) at The Oven following a scintillating talk (“Mixed Taste”) at The Lab at Belmar—where brothers Jake Adam York and Joe York entertainingly covered Sun Ra and Southern Family Restaurants, respectively.

My friends were not only sympathetic to my interest in the Grizzly Rose Saloon & Dance Emporium, they go there for two-step lessons on Sunday afternoons. So to the country bar off the highway we went!

Was it everything I thought it would be? Internets, it was more. Much, much more. Let me break it down:

1. Thursday is Ladies Night. Ladies Night! At the Grizzly Rose this doesn’t just mean the ladies, like myself, get in free, it means we also get free draft beer. (Finally, sexism pays off!)

2. I can only imagine that because of this generous policy, there were two (as if one wouldn’t have been delightful enough) bachelorette parties happening. Sadly, my vision of a bride dance-off never happened. (As a horrible consolation prize, however, I overheard one bachelorette friend ask another: “Does my mouth look ready to put a cock in?” To which the friend answered: “Yeah, it’s porn shiny!”)

3. Country dancing is super fun to watch. The house band played, the center of the dance floor was filled with line dancers, the two-steppers worked their stuff along the sides, expertly making their way around the perimeter a couple times each song. (One question remains: how do the line dancers know which dance to do? Can anyone help me with this one? Does one of them just start one and they all follow? Does each and every country song have a designated line dance attached to it? Help!)

4. Grizzly Rose is a hang out—from what I could tell—for all ages (well, all ages over 21). There were college kids there, older couples who clearly like breaking out their dance moves, couples of all ages and dance abilities on dates, and there were even some groups that clearly included parents and their pretty-much-grown kids.

Joe York presented snippets from documentaries he’s made with the Southern Foodways Alliance during his talk. Bits about Willie Mae’s Scotch House in New Orleans and Hot Chicken in Nashville. The unique deserves to be treasured, but more importantly it deserves to be experienced. There aren’t too many Grizzly Rose’s out there—at least not outside of the region. Things like that make a city worth traveling to instead of through. Mark my words: I’m going back someday.

My mile-high adventure continues. Before I get into it, let me make one thing clear: dinner at Rioja last night was fabulous. The food was inventive with purpose, the service attentive without being obsequious (it was a press dinner, so too much service tends to be more of the problem than anything else).

But the name. When I say I had dinner at Rioja, aren’t you picturing rustic Spanish dishes? Some tapas? Plenty of earthenware cassuelas? Seafood a la plancha? Saffron all over the place? The owners chose it because they love the wines of the region. Fair enough. But the name in no way adequately or accurately reflects the food they serve. The highlight of the meal–and I apologize to everyone in the kitchen there who has got to be sick to death of prepping and cooking this signature dish, but you y’all make it too good for me to ignore–was a bit of pork belly gently braised to melt in its fat before being seared to a crisp with a cardamom rub served atop a pureed of fresh chick peas flavored with a bit of curry powder. Sounds weird, I know, but it works. It really works.

The chef will be adding a smoked corn risotto as soon as Colorado corn is ripe. (After smoking the corn and cutting off the kernels, she infuses the cream for the risotto with the cobs to deepen the smoky corn flavor of the dish.) If I were in Denver this summer, I’d certainly stop by and give it a try.

“Rioja” doesn’t really fit any of that, does it? I’m no Name Inspector, but I find such a mis-match distracting. But then, the name doesn’t matter when you’re shoveling the candied lemon gnocchi–crispy and light–into your mouth….

For reasons I seem unable to adequately explain, I am in Denver. Last night I ate a dinner-of-never-ending-small-plates (thank goodness they were tasty, one and all) that began with this large plate of cured meats, marinated vegetables, and cheeses. Commonly known, as you well know internets, as an antipasti plate (or platter, if you or it are feeling grand). The rose jelly was particularly refreshing with the salty cured meats, of which I am always a fan.

*Let me publicly state my intention of developing a recipe for such a jelly.*

Much of the dinner conversation centered on whether or not the house frites (that’s freedom fries to you and me) were thumbs-up or thumbs-down. The Bistro Vendôme in this Rockies-adjacent city crisps up an excellent base fry, which the kitchen then coats with gastrique (vinegar and sugar mixture) before tossing with too many herbs. Other diners were more caught up in the pro- and anti-gastrique camps. But me? I found the herbs a bit much.

But when I really seemed to lose the group was when I found out there is an acre-large bar outside of town “off the highway” (off the highway, people!) called The Grizzly Rose where line dancing and cheap beer throw down together every night. I thought we should ditch the vaguely Mediterranean-themed jazz club/restaurant/bar in the ballpark-revitalized section of downtown where we were having after-dinners drinks and head to The Rose immediately. I was alone with these thoughts.

“Mama, you make the best of these,” my son said, pointing at the superball-sized  potato on the end of his fork, “in the whole world!”

And he was eating them without the pesto.

But that’s what happens when you cover new yukon gold potatoes (relatively fresh from the earth, ranging in size from quarters to baseballs, with thin skins that rub off as you wash off the dirt) with cold water, bring them to a boil, add a mess of salt, and cook until the potatoes are oh-so-tender all the way through, drain them, and serve them hot. People tend to get excited.

I get excited about the whole pesto-on-potatoes scene I’ve been re-enacting around here this spring. And tonight I figured out why. It allows one to eat considerably more pesto than when the pesto gets tossed all evenly and reasonably with pasta. Much, much more. And, as I mentioned before, I’ve rediscovered pesto. There’s a reason everyone went so pesto-crazy in the 80s (that was the 80s, right?). The good stuff is insane. And this recipe is the good stuff, though I say it myself.

With the pestoed potatoes we had a salad made with dressing made with red wine vinegar I “made” myself. Yes, I poured leftover bits of red wine into a pitcher with a bit of vinegar mother a former co-worker gave me. It was all very taxing. The pouring and the waiting. Very taxing indeed. Worth it, though. I have my first batch sitting in bottles. Word on the street is as it sits it ages and as it ages it becomes even more delicious. We were pretty pleased with it last night, and I only filtered and bottled it the day before. I can’t wait. See? It is taxing.

What can I say? We had a lot of leftovers around the house and I’m slammed with competing deadlines (each more boring and soul-sapping than the last). So we pulled everything out of the fridge and divided it up. Ernie took on the leftover Vietnamese chicken noodle soup he didn’t finish at the lunch my dashing husband took him out to because of the aforementioned deadlines; my dashing husband tackled the potato salad and a re-do of the tomato-red onion salad I constructed for him the other night; I commandeered this leftover rice and beans from the taco lunch Ernie and I enjoyed yesterday with friends who came into town from Gold Country, as well as some now extraordinarily marinated green beans. Each of us were pleased in our own way.

For dessert we tucked into this grapefruit honey gelatin, all wiggly and jiggly and giggly in the pretty vintage green glass dessert bowls I got for Christmas from a certain younger brother and sister-in-law who shall remain nameless. They may be nameless, but they have the most exquisite taste. Plus, they can read me like a book. A book of challenging narrative non-fiction, but a book nonetheless.

(While my dashing husband was eating his portion of gelatin he came across a grapefruit seed. Fifteen years in and his opinion is still so high of me that he asked: “And so are the seeds supposed to give it a rustic feel?” Never seemed to have crossed his mind that something so tiny as a grapefruit seed could cross my path without my knowledge, consideration, and consent.)

A BLT. It’s my default order. I’m at a restaurant, I know no good can come of the meal ahead, I order a BLT. My reason? Even a bad one is pretty good. You can always remove the mealy tomato or scrape off the excess mayo. Nine times out of ten you end up with something edible.

And then there’s the one time.

When I’m back in Minnesota visiting family my mom and I often meet my grandfather for breakfast. She and her siblings meet him for breakfast once a week–they’re not all there every time, but if I’m in town the event usually draws a decent crowd of 3 or even 4 of his 5 kids. We often go to Keys Cafe in St. Paul where I’ve been known to order their Minnesota Supreme omelet with wild rice in it.

And then one time we went for lunch. As the platters that serve as plates passed by the table piled high with gravy-laden meats at Keys that afternoon, I ordered a BLT. A sure, safe, reasonable BLT.

I had not read the menu. Above the sandwich section it stated “all hot sandwiches served with melted cheese.” First, a BLT is not a “hot” sandwich. The bacon should be hot, but that’s it. Even the toasted bread should be cooled enough to not melt the mayo, on that point I am firm. Second, there is no cheese–melted or otherwise–on a BLT. Clearly. Finally, to say there was melted cheese on the sandwich I was served is putting it mildly. There was a solid 1/2 pound of melted cheese worked into every crevice of that poor thing.

So when I made BLTs last night I made them right. Perfectly ripe tomatoes, crispy bacon, toasted bread, snappy lettuce. Homemade aioli in place of the mayo would have been great, but that would have required a lot more work and the heat wave didn’t break until after dinner.

98 degrees. That’s what it was yesterday in San Francisco. After a lot of talk last week with my parents about how one might guess that we, living in California, might eat dinner outside more than they, living in Minnesota do, but how, no, it is quite the opposite, my dashing husband took matters into his own hands, scrubbed off the table on our seldom-used balcony, and carried plates outside. It was lovely.

While brandy-ing cherries earlier in the day I had also cooked up some marinated green beans and this perfect potato salad I developed for Sunset last summer (and that I made more perfect by using new yukon gold potatoes with skins so thin they rub off, so why bother?). We added  some sliced tomatoes with basil. I had the traditional fresh mozzarella, I added sliced red onion for my cheese-avoiding and onion-loving dashing husband. We were both quite pleased. As was Ernie when he heard there were popsicles for dessert.