The Dinner Files

I barely had the energy necessary to heat up the leftovers, but I did it. I made leftover broccoli tofu stir-fry and shanghai chicken and butter braised cabbage (see 2/27 and 2/6 postings) palatable and convinced a kindergartener that they made an awesome dinner. Okay. Not awesome. Edible. That made an edible dinner. And nutritious – don’t forget nutritious. I poured hot sauce over mine in an attempt to wipe out this plague I seem to have contracted. As my college biology partner used to always say: you have to show the cold who’s boss.

And then my poor dashing husband, who I had thought was going out for dinner, changed his plans. He had the then-lukewarm reheated leftovers straight out of the pot.

I am now putting delicious forkfuls of leftover shanghai chicken from Eliza’s – a very inauthentic but tempting Chinese restaurant in Potrero Hill – into my mouth. I hadn’t been to Eliza’s in awhile (two years? three?), but this crazy plague-like cold I have turned their hot-and-sour soup into my own personal curative siren song.

Before leaving to pick up my dining partner – former colleague, fellow writer, and funny lady extraordinaire LAT – at the train station, however, I prepped an entire dinner of stir-fried boccoli and tofu for my dashing husband to cook when he got home and we tagged-team the childcare. Why did I do that?

Take the quiz:

A) I am a control freak

B) I can’t stand to see food go to waste and we had broccoli up the wazoo from the farm box this week

C) My dashing husband and omnivorous son both love stir-fried broccoli and tofu and I wanted them to have a nice dinner without me

D) I felt guilty for going out

E) I didn’t want Ernest staying up too late and and so helped ease dinner time along

F) I knew my dashing husband had had a long day and was sick too

G) I am a control freak

p.s. Friday Food Files at sfgirlbybay. Be warned: It will be old hat to regular TDF readers. Did I mention I’m sick? Take pity on me and forgive me my laziness and I will forgive those who lazy against me.

We had a head of cabbage burning a hole in our fridge. My dashing husband is a huge fan of this butter-braised cabbage I make, but I wanted something with just the tiniest bit something more going on. So I popped a few mustard seeds and fenugreek seeds in a bit of grapeseed oil before pouring 1/2 cup of water to cool down the pan, melting the butter in that, and then braising the cabbage. Everyone was happy. Even Ernest, who ate a pile of shredded raw cabbage before I got a chance to get it all in the pot.

With the cabbage I cooked up a family favorite – brown butter dal – and some black “forbidden” rice that had been burning a hole in our cupboard, thus continuing Project Eat That Rice.

We are all a bit stuffed up and achy around my house. The boys have been sick for awhile, but it just hit me yesterday. I may have come down last, but it looks like I’m coming down hardest. So when dinner time rolled around I headed down to the basement and my beloved deep freezer. After rooting around for a few minutes I pulled out a container of green garlic pesto I made the last time it was in season. We tossed it with some angel hair pasta, made a green salad (with classic vinaigrette, which can be made in about the time it takes to sort through bottled dressings in a fridge, pull one out, pour it, put the cap back on, and return the bottle to the fridge), and called it dinner. Not too shabby.

I was in a bit of a hurry because I was headed out — cold and all — to help a friend who has a prolific meyer lemon tree of her own turn some of her backyard fruit into marmalade.

When my dashing husband and I first moved to San Francisco, lo these many years ago, one of the first things we did was take a little road trip down to L.A. He had lived there for a few years and his younger brother had just moved back after an unpleasant stint at grad school in upstate New York. I was going to meet his friends, meet a member of his family, and explore his old haunts. On the long drive down the coast many promises were made and delights proffered. Towards the top of the list was turkey tacos. There was this taco stand, my dashing husband told me, that made turkey tacos and they were amazing and unlike any other taco he’d ever had.

So one day for lunch we headed this taco place. We perused the menu posted above the counter while we waited to order, scanning it for turkey tacos. No such option was listed. In fact, no turkey was listed anywhere. We got to the counter and asked: “What happened to the turkey tacos?” No such tacos had ever been served there, we were told. There weren’t any other taco places nearby and we never did figure out what happened with that. Years later I think my dashing husband had salbutes, Yucatecan-style tostadas, traditionally made with, yes, turkey. They are topped with pickled onions, cabbage or greens, and super-duper hot sauce: right up his alley and, indeed, completely unlike other tacos. Where did he have it? We have no idea.

We were left, however, with a craving for these “turkey tacos.” I came up with this recipe and for years – years I tell you! – we ate these as often as once a week but at least once a month. I’ve passed the recipe to friends and family, I’ve even pitched it for easy weeknight dinner stories (no takers on that – whatever!), but somewhere along the line I stopped making them. I’m thinking it happened around the time I developed a salbutes recipe for Sunset and we ate a lot of turkey taco-like things for awhile. And, truth be told, salbutes are better and far more interesting than my rather pedestrian – yet still delicious! – turkey tacos.

Yesterday morning I casually asked if anyone had any ideas for dinner. “How about turkey tacos?” my dashing husband asked. How about indeed. Now we just can’t remember why we ever stopped eating them so often: they are delicious.

You can use your favorite guacamole – recipe or store-bought – but I really like this chile & cilantro guacamole I developed specifically for these tacos.

I was going to make this leek tart Saturday night, but while putting the crust dough together I sort of lost the will to see it through and realized that I didn’t really have time to let the crust chill properly and I wasn’t really sure it would all work out, so I overcooked some rice instead.

I pulled the well-chilled dough out of the fridge last night, rolled it out, sliced and cooked the many leeks that came in the farm box this week, rooted around for some dairy products to enrich my creation, and wondered what kind of cheese it was that I was grating to sprinkle on top. The whole wheat buttermilk crust was dandy. Was it perhaps a bit silly to work that whole grain into a dish so laden with butter, cream, and cheese? Perhaps. But it also added a bit of substance to the dish. Grounded it, if you will.

The sky is crying. It’s that kind of rain: It actually feels sad. It’s cold and still and wet, wet, wet. Boy am I glad I made wild rice congee last night and got to heat up the leftovers for lunch. Regular readers will well guess that this dinner fit very nicely into Project Eat That Rice – it used three kinds! Feel free to experiment with different types of rice, although the wild rice retains more of its texture under the long cooking and gives the porridge a slightly less porridge-y consistency.

This dish is always a big hit with the family since everyone can customize their bowl with the garnishes of their choice. Green onions or chives or some sort of allium are sort of key, from my point of view, and most uncharacteristically we didn’t have any in the fridge. So last night found me pulling long green leaves in the backyard in the dark, smelling each handful to identify the garlic chives that were deeply integrated with rogue grass in our un-weeded garden. Our fridge did contain some lemongrass, though, so I peeled off the tough outer layers and chopped up the tender inner core, which was a lovely addition to the congee, adding a little bright kick to this warm and cozy dish.

Last night Ernest took particular interest in the garnishing process, asking, when he was done, “Does that look beautiful?” Yes, we told him. Yes it does.

People tend to get nervous when I come to dinner. They seem to think I am there to judge their food. They forget something very important: I am happy I didn’t have to cook. I didn’t have to come up with something to cook. I didn’t have to go to the market. I didn’t have to unload groceries. I don’t have to clean up. Not that I really mind any of these things, but it’s always nice to have someone cook for you. And it’s nice to not have to make a reservation and menu decisions in order for that to happen. For me part of the joy of being invited to someone’s house for dinner is this simple: I only have to decide what to wear. After that, it’s up to them.

My dashing husband and I went to a dinner party last night. New people, fresh faces, lively conversation. And grilled trout. Presented, mercifully without messy heads, on a large platter:

I was brought instantly back to Lac du Bois, the French camp I attended for many years as a kid. Where, truth be told, I also worked as a counselor for two summers. My time at French camp (and my love, love, love of it) is a fact about myself that I don’t usually trot out right away when I meet people. But that platter of trout… it brought me right back to the dining hall* at camp, where the kitchen served up vaguely French-like food. Baguettes, butter, jam, and hot chocolate for breakfast; a big lunch with a starter of pâté or shrimp, a main dish of stewed chicken or bœuf Bourguignonne, a green salad for which each table made their own dressing (3 parts oil, 1 part vinegar, plenty of dijon mustard, salt and pepper), dessert of chocolate mousse or apple tart; a lighter dinner of soup and more salad with perhaps some cheese and fruits afterward. It wasn’t gourmet fare, but the spirit was French. One day, though, the kitchen got ambitious and put in a little extra effort: Platters of trout – with the heads and tails still attached – were paraded out to the tables with great fanfare as the kitchen staff stood ready to receive our delighted thrill at the special treat.

They were met instead with shrieks of disgust. Fake barfing sounds filled the air. The crowd went wild with horror, which was odd since most of the kids there were from Minnesota and must have seen fish caught and gutted before. But it’s true, Minnesotan fishermen tend to leave the heads and tails outside.

Later that day we all got a lecture from the director on what can only be described as basic manners and the frailty of human feelings. She had to connect the dots a bit, breaking it down, if I remember correctly, to explaining that the kitchen staff were human and thus had feelings.

Did I shriek and feign disgust? Probably. But I also ate that trout. It was good. It wasn’t quite as moist and perfectly flaky as the one I downed last night, but it had the delicate texture and faintly earthy flavor that makes me crave fresh-water fish.

* The buildings at French camp were all named after cities, towns, and regions in France. The dining hall was, as you might guess, Paris. The beach was the Côte d’Azur. We learned Breton-style lace-making in arts and crafts. We had folkdancing. Camping trips were modelled on the French-Canadian furtrapping voyageurs. And every Bastille Day we “re-enacted” the French Revolution, drawing lots the night before to see who got to be “aristocrats.” I’m telling you, they were good times for a dork like me.

We ate at Bar Bambino last night. Used to be a person could not get a table there during any decent hour for love or money. Now a party of four can eat prime time on a Thursday with no warning. An upside of the economic decline? I guess, but only if the good restaurants manage to stay afloat…. And Bar Bambino is a good restaurant. That food is delicious. But, it must be said, those pastas portions are small. Really small. “Mama, I want more raviolis” small. It seemed like I had barely tucked into my pappardelle with braised rabbit before it was gone. Of course that might have had something to do with giving the lion’s share to poor Ernest who is used to more than five raviolis (yes, 5, they served 5 raviolis for something like $14) for his supper. Note to self: order more food at Bar Bambino than you think you need to.

Like soup? Check out Friday Food Files at sfgirlbybay today.

It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes I really do just want a salad for dinner. The boys ate more of the chickpea and spinach curry — Ernest ate his with rice, my dashing husband preferred it with toasted walnut bread — while I used the just-picked spinach from our farm box to make this slightly wilted spinach salad. I found a nub of buttermilk blue cheese in the cheese drawer. It was covered with a nice thick carpet of fussy gray which I carved away to reveal a bit of perfectly edible and tasty cheese. I’m not going to die, am I? Or, more precisely, that cheese isn’t going to kill me, is it?

Wilted spinach salad when you have no bacon

Thoroughly pick over, wash and dry a bunch of spinach leaves. I like to then cut them into strips for easier eating down the road — plus it helps me fit more leaves in the bowl.

Heat 3 Tbsp. olive oil in a small frying pan over medium-high heat or, if you’re feeling kicky and don’t want dinner to be too terribly healthy and feel like a treat and happen to have some duck fat in the fridge, melt 3 Tbsp. of that instead.

Cook a clove of garlic or, in this case, three chopped up green garlics in the oil, add salt and cook until the garlic is soft. Add 1 Tbsp. sherry or balsamic vinegar. Swirl to combine everything and pour it over the salad. Quickly toss salad and then put a plate or pot lid over the bowl to let the leaves wilt a bit more. Let it sit a few minutes while you toast some bread or chop some nuts to add to it or do a little dance in the privacy of your kitchen. Add plenty of freshly ground black pepper, some crumbled blue cheese, and a handful or so of chopped walnuts or pine nut if you’re so inclined.