The Dinner Files

I’m girding my loins for the holidays. We have a great Christmas planned and it sounds like tons of fun. But even with all the fresh air and exercise my Minnesotan family will seek out, plenty of time will be spent sitting around noshing. My mother-in-law will bring delicious cured and smoked fishes, friends and neighbors will inundate the house with cookies and candy, and then there will be the actual meals.

I’m not complaining – it’s part of what the holidays are – but I have been purposefully keeping dinners simple. Last night, with greens and pasta, was no exception. 

Looking for simplicity at the table too? Bring a pot of water to a boil. Add more salt than you think you should. Drop in the leaves from a bunch of dino kale (the straight, very dark kind) and cook until they bend more than they did when you put them in. Use tongs or a slotted spoon or two forks to fish them all out and drain them. Now boil up 1/2 to 1 lb. of pasta depending on how hungry everyone is. Cook until just tender, scoop out about a cup of the pasta-cooking liquid, and drain. While the water come to a boil and things cook, thinly slice a few cloves of garlic (I use 4 – you may want more or less). Squeeze the excess water out of the kale and chop it.  Put the pot back on the stove and add a few tablespoons of olive oil. Add garlic and cook until just starting to look like it might turn golden. Add a handful of pine nuts, if you’re so inclined, and a sprinkle of red chile flakes, again, if that sounds appealing. Alternatively you could use a fresh chile, or add a filet or two of minced anchovy, or nothing at all. Really, it’s your dinner.

Add the greens and the cooking liquid and cook until liquid is reduced by about half. (FYI: If you have a cup of chicken broth on hand you can use that in place of the pasta-cooking liquid for extra flavor.) Stir in the noodles and cook until liquid is absorbed. Stir in as much grated parmesan, pecorino, or asiago as you’re inclined to add (I tend to stir in about 1/3 of a cup or so, one could certainly add more or leave it out entirely).  Sprinkle more of said cheese on each serving.

It’s a dinner that’s simple to make, simple to eat, simple to clean up (one pot, baby!). Enjoy.

Does chicken soup really cure a cold? It’s hot and steamy, mostly liquid but with plenty of nourishment. I figure it couldn’t hurt. What I’m sure of, though, is that it cures cold. And it is cold here in our unheated and uninsulated San Francisco manse. Single pane windows, thin wood walls, inch-wide cracks under doors that lead outside. Essentially, we’re camping, but with furniture. All the space heaters are cranked, sweaters and slippers are donned, piles of quilts are within reach from any given point in the house, and we’re still a bit chilled. Well, my dashing husband and I are a bit chilled. Ernest is fine. He goes barefoot and refuses a long-sleeve t and wonders why I want him to put on pajamas to sleep in when underwear is so much more comfortable. He is a tiny super-charged heater. If we could only harness his energy for the rest of us.

He may not be cold, but he does like soup. So I cooked up some broth (which warmed the kitchen), rolled out some noodles (which warmed me), and made my family soup (one slight change to this recipe I made last night: I added a chopped parsnip to the mix–nutty!). We then slurped our way to some level of warmth.

I defrosted some of the country sausage I ordered from our meat CSA yesterday. I formed it into patties, fried them up in a cast iron pan, and then made caraway-scented red cabbage in that same pan with all the yummy sausage fat in it.

To tell you the truth we’ve had some mixed thoughts about the pork we’ve received so far. Don’t get me wrong, it is delicious. The best tasting pork I’ve ever had. But it has been a bit tough, which is to be expected from an animal that lived a life in which it got to walk around the beautiful hills of West Marin. You build up some muscle doing that. The tougher meat, however, is something we’re still getting used to (part of it is figuring out how to adjust recipes – some cuts need to be cooked faster, others need more time – and I haven’t yet mastered that balancing act).

The thing about sausage, though, is it doesn’t matter much how tough that meat was before you ground it up, all you’re left with is the amazingly deep, pork-y flavor and all the almost sweet fatty juiciness. It melded quite nicely with the cabbage, too.

Ernie ate his sausage Minnesota-state-fair-style: on a stick. He speared the sausage patty with his fork, held it up, and ate from there. I knew I should stop him, because it’s not very impressive table manners. But he was being neat about it and seemed to be enjoying himself so much I didn’t say a word.

I didn’t bake cookies yesterday because it’s Christmas and I didn’t bake cookies yesterday because it was so cold out that running the oven for a while just seemed like a good idea. No, the reason was more classic, more practical, more time-honored than either of those. I baked cookies yesterday to cheer up my kid. A much-aniticipated playdate turned into a much-postponed playdate and the result was heart-breaking. At least for me.

We were both much cheered by these Swedish Rye Cookies* from 101 Cookbooks. I couldn’t keep Ernie away from them. Last night my dashing husband wondered if I could estimate how many calories were in each cookie. I told him that I couldn’t, but that there weren’t very many in any one cookie for the simple reason that they were so small and thin, but that there were, essentially, butter cookies (with some cream cheese thrown in for good and effective measure) meaning they were composed of flour, butter, and sugar. This morning I noticed the vast majority of the cookies were gone. Over coffee my dashing husband mentioned that “those cookies were really good.” When I offered to make them again he begged off, saying that, perhaps, the cookies were “too good.” He is not usually such a cookie hound. But then, he’s a good New Yorker who loves his rye.

Part of the magic of these cookies is how easy the dough is to work with which translates into how easy it is to roll out which means you can get them extremely thin, if you’re so inclined, which I am. The recipe calls for a much more reasonable and sanity-saving thickness of a 1/4 inch. I was getting into the 1/8 if not even the 1/16 area (is that even possible?). I acknowledge that’s nuts, but I would also assert that a super-thin cookie sprinkled with coarse sugar is a magical thing. And we needed a bit of magic around here yesterday afternoon.

The downside, of course, is you do need to roll them out and cut them, and that’s a pain. The other downside – for me anyway – is the the much postponed playdate showed up about 5 minutes into cookie making. So instead of a mellow, mother-son cookie baking session we ended up with an episode of crazy boys each cutting out a few cookies, running off to construct legos, and me in the kitchen rolling and cutting and baking by myself for over an hour when I really had other things to do. I realize, of course, that this last complaint has nothing much to do with the recipe….

*Please, I beg you not to tell my Norwegian grandfather that I baked anything Swedish. If he asks, tell him I whipped up some Norwegian rye cookies. If that seems like too much of a lie, just call then Scandanavian rye cookies.

Let’s face it: cream is a magical thing. We don’t eat much of it at our house because, well, we’re coastal elites concerned about our health and fitness and cream is “bad.” But, of course, cream isn’t bad at all. Too much cream is a bad idea, but a bit of cream used strategically here and there is a wonderful, satisfying, smile-making thing. It is, after all, creamy and has the power to make other things creamy. What is creamy? Creamy is smooth and mouth-coating. Creamy – with the fat necessarily associated with it – literally highlights other flavors by very effectively “carrying” them around your mouth.

Last night I used the last half-cup of cream that was sitting in the fridge from the creamy turnip soup a few posts down, whisked a bit of coarse-grain mustard into it, and poured it over a potato and cabbage casserole/gratin thing I was whipping up and created something fabulous. It was so much more than the sum of its parts. I credit the cream.

Well, it worked at dogpatch pizza. But even though I used Meyer lemons, and sliced them very thinly, they were as bitter as bitter can be. I still rather liked them against the golden beet greens and manchego cheese, but I acknowledge that it was, perhaps, an acquired taste. I’m thinking the masters at Piccino salted the sliced lemons and let them sit for a few hours or overnight to de-bitterize them. My dashing husband happily ate a few slices without removing the lemon, though, so it can’t have been that bad. And you must admit, it does look lovely.

Have you figured out that I love leftovers? I love having food already cooked and ready to eat. I love that many dishes taste better after a little time to themselves (stew being a classic example). I love that some dishes transform into whole new creatures as leftovers (you know how enchiladas sort of morph into a real casserole after sitting around for a day?). And I love that others offer themselves up to be turned into completely new creations, but with so much less fuss than the original dish. Leftovers? To me they are convenience food at its finest.

So what’s with the yummy looking cake, you ask? It’s a winter squash spice cake made with leftover roasted squash. I used my new secret baking weapon: whole wheat pastry flour. It’s not as heavy and dry as whole wheat flour, but it has some whole grains unlike all-purpose flour. I find I can substitute it 1-to-1 for all-purpose flour in most recipes – certainly any for homey cakes or cookies like this.

The hungry boy wanted noodles for dinner. Since I had no brilliant idea for dinner anyway, noodles it was. I tossed them up with some leftover dino kale with chiles and garlic from the other night. I put plenty of parmesan on Ernie’s and doused mine with the last of the leftover garlic yogurt sauce from the dumplings last week. Just yogurt, garlic, salt. How can it be so delicious? And yet it is. Even more so, some may say, from the extra garlicky-ness it exudes from having sat around for a week. Garlicky enough to be deliciously tempting but also garlicky enough to make a person think twice about drowning her pasta with a solid 1/2 cup of it if she had any chance of getting lucky.

Alas, my dashing husband is traveling. So I slept with cold feet and garlicky breath. Really garlicky. Garlicky enough to sort of bother me. I could hardly wait to wake up and quell the stench with coffee.

My dashing husband is in a dashing place doing dashing things for a week. So I’m doing the single mom thing. Let me just say this: I don’t know how actual single parents do it. For a week it is totally manageable and even sort of fun – life is a bit simpler, I ratchet down my expectations, I decline work-related evening invitations – but there’s no one to pick up eggs on their way home, no one with whom to have an adult chat with while I make dinner, no one who cares quite so much about Ernie’s switch to Spanish doing his homework.

And yes, you heard me right. Kindergartners now have homework. It involves a lot of drawing, but they have homework.

So while the boy wrote “tigre” and “taza” in his notebook, I silently cooked up turnip soup. The result of my efforts meant we each got to chose which turnip soup we wanted to eat:

We both went for the one with the turnips’ own greens stirred into the soup. It was pretty darn tasty.

I had the creamy version for breakfast. Yes, breakfast. I am a big fan of savory breakfasts (don’t get me going on Scandinvaian breakfast buffets! the cheeses! the cured meats!) and love to eat dinner leftovers for breakfast. Soup included, or, rather, especially.