The Dinner Files

You know how sometimes you dread something and then you have a good time doing it but by the time everything is said and done you remember why you were dreading it in the first place? That, in a nutshell, was my Sunday.

I’ve never liked Sundays. I know my mother and brother have the same weird, unsettled, vaguely unhappy sense on Sundays. I only recently realized why. This summer the whole family came up to the family cabin in Northern Minnesota for a long weekend. Within two hours of everyone being there my brother and I started lamenting how quickly the weekend would go.

“Typical Watson behavior,” my sister-in-law laughed, “always dreading the end in the middle.”

I’m glad she can laugh at it. But it seems pretty entrenched and it does mean that we start mourning the weekend when there is still a full half of it left to enjoy.

So there I am, not liking Sundays anyway, dreading the end to my weekend – at the end of which my bosom buddy from graduate school would head home to Seattle from her weekend visit, making its passing all the more un-fun – driving to Sacramento in 100-degree heat. I know. It sounds like a bad idea, doesn’t it? Well, we needed to see a baby. A brand new baby who, despite our pleas to her mother years ago, lives in Sacramento. It’s difficult not to dread a drive to Sacramento. It’s 1 1/2 to 2 hours from my house and it’s not a particularly pretty drive (by my spoiled California standards, anyway), what with the strip malls and car dealerships that dot the highway’s sides. It’s not a space-out, zen-with-the-road kind of drive either. It’s crowded and you need to be on the ball the whole way and at any moment horrible, mind-numbing, anger-inducing, insane-making traffic could appear out of what appears to be nowhere (sorry, Fairfield, but that is how I think of you). Oh, and some part of my car had been hanging down and hitting the road making a horrible noise, so I was also worried that the whole thing will fall apart at any minute despite assurance that it wouldn’t because a friend’s husband had kindly duct-taped it (!) to hold for the day.

Did I mention it was hot? Like 100 degrees? Maybe over? The kind of hot that car air-conditioning can’t really handle? Did I mention that part?

But we did want to meet this baby. So away we went with Ernest in the backseat because the baby has a big sister who is a terrible amount of fun.

Just as we crossed the Carquinez Bridge – just at that moment when we were too far to turn back in any reasonable way – my friend realized she forgot the presents she bought for the girls and I, in turn, realized I forgot the carne adovada I made the newly expanded family. We made our way there, fortified with cool beverages and the knowledge that our company really was more welcome than our offerings of toys and food, and had a lovely time. Then we drove home. It could have been worse. There could have been more traffic. It could have been hotter. Ernest could have spilled even more juice all over himself and the backseat.

The upside, of course, is that – after the temperature dropped yesterday and San Francisco’s famously chilling westerly winds picked up – we got to have carne adovada last night. I first had this when my pal, Amy Traverso, made it when we both worked at Sunset. Then on our New Mexico-West Texas road trip last spring I had it for breakfast a few times, because diners in New Mexico tend to have it on their breakfast menus and who am I to argue with local tradition?

Stew pork, ground dried new mexico chile, onion… that’s pretty much it.

Carne Adovada

Note: Don’t let the full cup of ground red chile powder freak you out – New Mexican red chiles are relatively mild. Delicious dried ground New Mexican red chile powder is available at Chimayo To Go.

1 Tablespoon vegetable oil
3 pounds pork butt or shoulder, well-trimmed of fat and cut into 1-inch pieces
2 onions, chopped
6 cloves garlic, chopped
1 teaspoon salt
1 Tablespoon flour or masa harisa
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
1 cup (8 ounces) ground dried New Mexican red chile powder
6 cups water or broth

Preheat oven to 350°. In a large pot over medium heat, add oil. When hot, add pork pieces to brown (add only enough so the pieces are in a single layer and don’t touch each other; you will need to do this in batches). Pork should sizzle the minute it touches the pot; if it doesn’t, remove it and wait for the pot to heat up. Cook, undisturbed, until well-browned on one side, about 3 minutes. Turn and brown on all sides. Transfer pork to a large bowl or plate and repeat with remaining batches.
When all pork is browned and set aside, add onions, garlic, and salt to pot. Cook, stirring, until soft, about 3 minutes. Sprinkle with flour and pepper and cook, stirring, until flour smells like pie crust, about 3 minutes.
Add ground chile and stir to combine. Add 4 cups water and bring to a boil.
In a blender, whirl chile mixture until smooth. Return to pot and add another 1 cup water and reserved pork. Bring to a boil, cover, and bake 1 hour. Stir, add additional 1 cup water if stew seems dry, and bake until pork falls apart with a fork and sauce is thick, about another hour. Serve hot or at least warm.

No, I didn’t eat the crab live. But I did eat Dungeness crabs that, upon my request, were pulled live from a tank of seawater next to the ocean in which they once scavenged before being tied into a mesh bag, steamed over boiling seawater in a giant cinder-block stove, cleaned and cracked, and brought (still warm!) to a picnic table overlooking the water at which I sat with with friends who have known me since before I could legally drink alcohol. We got some steamed clams too.

The shells on the left are filled with “crab butter” – a mixture of the crab’s natural fat and seawater that comes out as the crab is cleaned. I’ve eaten a lot of Dungeness crab in my day. I don’t want to start any fights or anything, but I like crab more than lobster. A lot more. A bite or two of lobster and I’m all set. But crab? I could eat it all the live-long day. I had never had “crab butter” though. I am now fluctuating between joy at having discovered it and rage at all the crab I ate without it.

These crabs and clams and friends and beers were all enjoyed in the clear, bright sunshine of a glorious stretch of summer weather on the Oregon coast. As I tried to pick crab with a plastic fork and a toothpick (FYI, in my experience the best crab-picking utensil is a chopstick) and cut my fingers on the shells and got spritzed with crab juice whenever someone cracked a claw by pounding it with a beer bottle, I felt lucky.

As the sign near the tables stated: “This is not a restaurant. Clean up after yourself.”

Sure, they cook food for you which you eat there, but the sign is right: it isn’t a restaurant. It is a boat launch/marina with a stand where you could clean your catch and/or buy crabs, clams, and oysters to take home live or steamed. There are picnic tables next to the stand. Inside the little store is the usual assortment of convenience store items (including soft drinks, beer and wine), as well as paper cups with 4 tablespoons of butter in them in the fridge, a microwave, lemons, a cutting board next to the microwave, and a wide array of pirate- and crab-themed hats hanging from the ceiling.

If you want to melt some butter in the microwave and cut up a lemon and eat your steamed shellfish there, no one is going to stop you. But it’s not a restaurant.

We went twice. Feeling pretty clever the second time at having figured out the system. Feeling pretty clever until a couple arranged themselves at the table next to us with a rice cooker, a pan of some sort of kim chi-looking dish, plates, cloth napkins, and a full spectrum of seafood-eating utensils including, yes, chopsticks.

We were instantaneously turned into a humbling combination of amateurs (for not having brought the right stuff) and barbarians (for being forced to do things like crack the crab claws by banging on them with our beer bottles).

And with that we threw our shells, as the signs instructed, back into the water from which they came and headed home. Summer, for me at least, was officially over. I’m already making plans to go back to the Oregon coast; this time donned in old clothes, with a shell cracker and side dishes in hand.

I realize, I really and truly do, that most of you are not going to make your own potato gnocchi. I can see that it seems daunting. It seems messy. It seems like a lot of work. I suppose it is all of those things, in a way. But it’s all relative, isn’t it? The daunting, the messy, the time-consuming – these are the kitchen projects I like the best. And, as my dad once said, “The homemade kind is always better.”

We were having some friends over and I was trying to keep things quite simple. It was just another couple and us – we were only hosting because we couldn’t find a sitter. (I have found that there are two types of people that work well as dinner party friends when you have a school-age kid – people with similar school-age kids and people without any children at all.) They insisted on bringing a starter and wine and dessert, claiming we always host because of the sitter issue. I didn’t even put up a fight but tried to figure out a meal that wouldn’t suck up my entire day but would also use some of the potatoes from our CSA that have piled up a bit in the fridge.

I was brainstorming with the family and Ernest suggested gnocchi. Daunting, messy, and time-consuming? Not really that much since I already had some pesto in the fridge I had made so all I had to do was make the dumplings – and I’ve done that before and, in the end, it doesn’t take that much time (fair warning: so says the person who loves to do things in the kitchen).

So I boiled a pound and a half of yukon gold potatoes, starting them in a pot of cold water, adding a tablespoon of salt once the water was boiling, and avoided pricking them to test for doneness too terribly much lest the potatoes get waterlogged.

I drained them, donned a latex glove to protect my hand from the heat as I scraped the skin off each hot potato.

They were then pushed through a ricer (my favorite way to mash potatoes thoroughly and completely) and mixed with one and a half cups of flour.

This dough, still warm from the boiled potatoes, feels a lot like playdough and is quite fun to work with. I divided it into four and rolled out each quarter into an inch-thick snake on a very well floured surface.

This potato dough snake was then cut into bite-size pieces (a table knife works fine and reminds me of pre-school).

So far so easy, right? Next, to make the dumplings gnocchi-shaped, I simply took each little knob of dough and ran in down the tines of a fork, pushing it with my thumb so it ends up with the tine marks on one side and the thumbprint on the other. It takes a few dumplings to get the hang of it, but once you’ve figured out the motion you can gnocchify an entire batch of dumplings in less than five minutes.

The gnocchi were then laid out on a very well floured tray, covered with a clean towel and sat, waiting patiently, for their big moment to arrive.

The stage was set: Two big pots of water brought to a boil. Serving platter in warm oven. Water salted. Pesto brought to room temperature. A bit of the pesto spread on the serving platter. Bite-size pieces of green bean thrown in the water and cooked a few minutes before being fished out with a slotted spoon and put on the serving platter.

Then the gnocchi were added – half to each pot of water (otherwise cook in two batches). They sank right to the bottom of the pot and got a swift yet decisive stir. After about a minute they floated to the top of the water as were allowed to cook for about 10 seconds while they floated and then, like the green beans before them, they were lifted out of the water and onto the serving platter. Once all the gnocchi were out, the pesto was added and everything tossed. The platter was brought – triumphant – to the table with parmesan and a grater for each person to top their own.

Has is becoming my habit, a recipe -style recipe for Potato Gnocchi is over at Local Foods. Oh, and there’s one there for Pesto, too.

Yep, back to the grill. I’ve made these before. Many times. I’ve used the recipe my pal Jessica developed for Sunset. Not this time. This time I didn’t have any pancetta. I did, however, have prosciutto.

A small step for me, a great leap for halibut kebabs.

The pancetta never did crisp up quite enough for my liking without sacrificing the just-done texture of the halibut. Don’t get me wrong, if you follow the recipe and actually use “paper thin” pancetta, it works great. But the pancetta I get isn’t always paper thin…. But prosciutto? Which is almost universally cut at least almost paper thin? It made a perfect crispy salty coating for the Alaskan halibut I cut into bite-size pieces, tossed with olive oil and chopped rosemary (and bread crumbs), before threading onto skewers with pieces of prosciutto interlaced between them.

I didn’t even have that much prosciutto, so I had to cut it into quite thin strips. Having larger pieces to actually wrap around each piece of fish would have been ideal. But this isn’t about the ideal, this is about dinner.

I also followed my own principal of threading the different ingredients on different skewers. I tossed everything together, and rubbed the bread cubes with the prosciutto to impart some porky goodness to it, but put the halibut and the bread crumbs on separate kebabs. Yet another giant leap for halibut kebabs. I was able to cook the fish to perfection while also toasting up the bread properly.

Everything was then un-skewered onto a warm serving platter together, mixed up a bit, and served with a plate of sliced and salted tomatoes. The people, they were happy.

I can eat a staggering amount of fried okra. The grassy-meets-earthy taste of okra in general makes me think of asparagus that finally got serious and grew a pair. Since the okra in fried okra is protected from the oil by a coating, it cooks “dry,” which pretty much eliminates its famously (or infamously, depending on your feelings about the slick and the gooey) slimy texture and intensifies the grassy edge of okra’s flavor spectrum. That these bright grassy pods then act as a carrier for a crispy, nutty layer of corn flour seals the deal for me.

I love the crispy. I love the salty. When crispy and salty come together I fall in love. I do not keep potato chips in the house for one reason: I would eat them all. If there were a bag of potato chips in the cupboard right now I would not be here writing this post. I would be in the kitchen opening the bag and eating potato chips one after the other until they were all gone. I wouldn’t even pretend that I wasn’t going to do it. I wouldn’t pour a few in a bowl and tell myself that was all I was going to have but then be mysteriously drawn back to re-fill the bowl again and again until the bag was empty. I know myself too well. I’ve been there, I’ve done that. I know I am going to eat the whole bag. I embrace this and try to make the best of it. Every now and again I get a bag and sit down (perhaps to a new episode of Project Runway) and eat the whole thing. The moment I turn my cart up the potato chip aisle at the grocery store I know that is what is going to happen.

I recently bought a bag to serve as a snack with drinks when some friends came over. I went to the store at 9:30, the friends were coming at 6:30. The bag was empty by 12:20. In the face of potato chips, I am powerless.

And so it is with fried okra. I can eat it like potato chips – one after another with no end in sight. The pound of okra pods I bought, tossed with two beaten eggs to coat it, drained, tossed to coat in a cup and a half of corn flour with about half a teaspoon of salt and plenty of black and cayenne pepper mixed in, fried in an inch of vegetable oil heated in a large heavy pot (the tall sides help minimize splattering and clean-up), and drained on a layer of paper towels was hardly enough. Especially since I had to share it. Ernest and I stood at the kitchen counter eating the slender crunchy green pods, waiting for my dashing husband to come home and join us for dinner.

Indeed, I had to call an end – or at least a pause – to our snacking so there would be some left for my dashing husband to try. It was an odd move in some ways since he doesn’t like fried things (whereas Ernest and I do, very much so) and he can take or leave okra (whereas Ernest and I love it). So why save him any? Especially when there were also some eggplant sticks toasting up in the oven that would be ready when he got home and which he loves?

The answer is easy: fair share.

The concept of “fair share” vis-à-vis food runs deep in my extended family. My father is one of four boys. Being raised in a house of growing male appetites and Midwestern sensibility meant they were raised portioning out every platter of chicken, every dish of candy, every bottle of soda in the house. They never experienced scarcity, there was always more than enough food for everyone, but at any given breakfast there were only so many pieces of bacon fried up. And, as we know from food memoirists and our gut sense of common wisdom, food is love. Everyone wants what’s there’s. Especially when it’s crispy salty bacon.

It becomes instinct: You know with a glance how many pieces of bacon are “yours.” One trip to the freezer for some ice and you know, without even trying, how many ice cream sandwiches have your name on them. The practice of counting people and counting food and dividing one into the other works its way deep into your brain. You do it without thinking, without trying, subconsciously, in your sleep, before you’ve even had your first cup of coffee. I know. I do it too. No one even ever had to tell me about my fair share and how to assess it, something in my Midwestern super-ego simply sopped it up like a giant sponge. We spent most weekends when I was a kid at the family cabin, with grandparents and great-grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins and first cousins once-removed and second cousins and friends around. At breakfast it was the bacon, at dinner it might be spare ribs or ears of corn. The best foodstuffs, everything that was most delicious was silently divvied up as it arrived at the table.

A die-hard fair-share-er, like my dad, would explain it this way: Someone had done the shopping, figuring so many chicken wings or shrimp or cupcakes per person, and everyone should be allowed to have what’s theirs.

Someone who has lived for a long time with someone without the fair share perspective, who has tried in vain to explain the fair share to people not raised with it, might come to a different conclusion: Fair share is no fun.

Fair share involves a lot of self-regulation and a lot of moralizing. It goes beyond good manners – you know, taking a small portion that would allow everyone to have some of whatever is being served, offering more to others before taking more yourself. It assumes there is something fundamentally wrong with having more than your fair share, even when there is plenty of food for everyone. Even when someone doesn’t even care about the fried okra. It parcels out deliciousness as if it were something of objective value. It leads to ridiculous (but charming) statements like this from my Minnesotan friend, “I always take more than my fair share of candy, but I always have less than my fair share of alcohol.”

I ask you, dear reader, if she is with me and I want no candy but lots to drink, how and why is any of the candy “mine”?

Fair share assumes we all want the same amount of pie. But we don’t. What happens if someone doesn’t want their fair share of pizza? Is it still theirs? Can they allot it to a specific cause or does it go back to the platter to be divided with the rest? (Note: that is a rhetorical question. I know exactly what happens: it stays on the platter and is evenly divided among those who want it.)

The fair share mentality assumes there is only so much of a coveted foodstuff, and that makes you think small, makes you think that, at best, you might only get a dozen and a half oysters when what you want is two dozen. The whole concept is based on the assumption that people are greedy and, by its internal logic, ensures that they act in a greedy fashion. As much as you need to count the food and figure out your fair share to make sure you don’t take more than is yours (which is, in my experience, the official explanation for its existence), you also need to count and divide to make sure you get what is yours. It makes you think of seconds before you’ve taken your first bite.

I used to always eat my “fair share” of bacon, no matter how much of it my dad fried up. Then one day I ate the amount of bacon I wanted. That morning, a bright and sunny July day in northern Minnesota at the family cabin a few years ago, that amount was two strips. This left a strip sitting on the serving platter, since my dad had cooked three strips per bacon-eater and my fellow diners had all taken what was theirs. After the fried eggs were sopped up with heavily buttered toast, after the last drop of my mother’s famously strong black French roast coffee was sipped from my cobalt blue ceramic mug, that strip of bacon was sitting there. Torturing my father.

“Honey, that’s yours,” he said helpfully.

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m done.”

I could now tell a whole long story about me, my brother, a whole hell of a lot of oysters, sneaking said oysters onto a dinner tab we knew my dad was going to pick up, and needing to almost force the oysters my dad ordered for all of us into his mouth instead of mine once I’d eaten my fill. But that happened before I met my dashing husband, before he started to wean me away from thinking about my fair share of food, before he began the slow and painful work of chipping away at my Midwestern fear of scarcity with his East Coast eyes that see abundance everywhere. The thing about abundance is it makes you less grabby, less needy, less likely to eat a piece of bacon just because it’s “yours.” You know there is more bacon to be had in this life. You know that, if push came to shove, you could drive into town and buy more bacon.

“You’re not going to eat that?” he asked, as if surely I had plans for it and his own short sightedness kept him from figuring out what those might be.

“No,” I said. “I’m good. You can have it.”

He did, shaking his head with disbelief as his teeth worked their way through the browned, fatty, deeply savory meat.

The work isn’t over. I’m making progress away from the fair share mentality, but it’s like digging out a wart or scraping away a callous – it comes back despite my very best efforts.

I stopped Ernest from having more fried okra – partly to share our snacks as a family and partly because my sense of fair share-ness kicked in despite myself. We stopped eating for a few minutes, my dashing husband came home, we poured glasses of wine and water, and we carried the eggplant sticks and okra into the living room. As we ate we talked about eggplant and okra and what we did with ourselves that day.

Ernest was busy setting up Monopoly Junior as I offered up the last okra pod to anyone who wanted it. My dashing husband, his work never done, said, “No thanks, sweetie, you should have it, you love it so much.”

I have lived with this man for more than sixteen years. It is only from the resulting bevy of empirical evidence that I can say, and fully believe, that he didn’t even know how many of “his” okra I’d already eaten. He never counted them up and divided them by three. I popped that last bit in my mouth, savored the dry, grassy, almost chewy texture I love, and was finally full.

Want to test the power of fried okra yourself? A recipe-style recipe is over at Local Foods as Fried Okra.

I love Project Runway. I know it’s a popular show and I’m not alone but I don’t think you understand what I’m saying: I LOVE it. Until they were pulled off-line, I could watch segments of old episodes on You Tube all the live-long day. I like seeing the range of designs – from the absurd to the sublime – and I don’t mind a bit of catty talk on the video diaries, but the real draw is two fold.

First, I want nothing more than to have Tim Gunn stop by my desk, read over my shoulder, point out some problem areas, ask some pointed questions, and tell me to make it work. Then maybe he’d go upstairs and fix my wardrobe, but that would be unnecessary but delicious frosting on the nourishing and moist cake of his visit.

Second, and just as importantly, I find it truly inspirational to see what a person can get done in a day. From idea to concept to design to execution to polishing. Sure, they’re working on dresses, but I can extrapolate to my own projects easy enough.

This is all to say: the above grilled tomatillo salsa makes me feel like Kenley from Season 5 of Project Runway. She made it to the final three and then took a giant tumble because the wedding dress she featured in her collection was a dead-ringer for one Alexander McQueen had recently shown. She claimed she hadn’t seen it. I – and, more importantly, the judges – believed her but, as Michael Kors explained (see I’m really quite far gone), she should have known. It was a big deal at the shows and everyone in the fashion world was a-buzz about it. Not knowing about it really wasn’t okay.

So I thought I was super-duper clever: I learned to make this salsa from the dishwasher when I went to cooking school, who stressed the importance of blistering all the aromatics and tomatillos, and I had the brilliant idea of just skewering them and throwing them on the grill instead of blackening them in a very hot cast iron pan.

And I was super-duper clever to think of it. Problem is, as I discovered when I was perhaps bragging a bit about this cleverness to a fellow food writer, Food & Wine magazine ran the same thing this summer.

I missed a lot of food pubs this summer. I was away and, in a slap-dash effort to clean up the house before I returned, my dashing husband threw plenty of paper in the recycling. That’s my excuse: my husband tossed my homework.

My food writing students often ask “how do you know when a recipe is yours?” After all, anyone paying the least bit of attention can figure out that recipes for pancakes continue to be published and yet the basics of pancake-creating are pretty well established. I give them guidelines developed by the International Association of Culinary Professionals, I talk about making three major changes (amount of salt doesn’t count), I explain that you can’t copyright a list of ingredients, I remind them of the Golden Rule. And in the end I advise that you know. When you cook a recipe or develop a recipe, you know when you’ve made it yours – when you’ve created something, whether from out of the blue or inspired by a restaurant dish or from slowly and surely changing a recipe over years and years of cooking it.

This recipe is mine. I stand by it as firmly and passionately as Kenley stood by her wedding dress. It is mine. It isn’t poofy or covered with feathers like her dress, but I’m pretty sure it tastes waaayyy better.

My recipe for grilled tomatillo salsa is simple: thread 12 tomatillos, 3 or 4 cloves of garlic, 1 or 2 chiles cut into halves or quarters, and 1 onion cut into quarters on 2 or 3 skewers. Put on a hot grill until everything blackens and blisters a bit and the tomatillos are soft, somewhere around 5 or 10 minutes. Let the skewers sit until everything is cool enough to handle. Push everything into a blender or food processor and whirl until as smooth as you like. Add salt to taste and scoop it up with chips while it’s still warm. The three of us stood around the kitchen counter and ate the whole bowl in about 10 minutes.

Crostada, galette, free-form tart, pan-less pie – whatever you want to call it I made a peach one. Our CSA claims the bumper crop of peaches we’ve been enjoying this summer has come to an end and that these were the last of them.

I made a crostada last week when some dear friends visited. I churned a bit of homemade vanilla ice cream to go along with it, too. The adults oohed and aahed while the kids hit the freezer for Popsicles.

But the crust was so flaky (I used half butter and half lard, a dangerously good combination) and the peaches so sweet and juicy and the bit of cinnamon and nutmeg so perfectly highlighted that sweetness that I wanted to try again and pay attention to what I did.

Nothing could be easier – well, this one would have been easier if I hadn’t bothered to peel the peaches, but bits of peach skin end up being the reason I thought I didn’t like peach pie, so I always peel them.

I then tossed the peaches with some sugar to taste (I used about 1/4 cup, many people would want more I imagine), a sprinkle of cinnamon and a few gratings of freshly grated nutmeg, and a teaspoon of instant tapioca because I like my crostada filling to thicken up a  bit. While that hung out in a bowl for a bit I rolled out the crust into a large circle. I may have mentioned this tip before, but it bears repeating that the trick to rolling out dough is to start on a well floured surface and turn the dough a quarter turn after each roll to make sure it isn’t sticking. No need to flip over or any other such fussy nonsense.

I transferred the quite delicate and soft dough (which became an amazingly tender and flaky crust) onto a baking sheet and piled on the peach mixture.

Then you just need to fold up the sides and pinch them lightly into place before sprinkling the whole thing with some castor sugar that you have hanging around in the back of the cupboard from when you made Rye Cookies.

The whole thing then needs to be baked in a hot oven for a good long time – this one took almost an hour and a half (45 minutes at 400 and the rest at 350). Since I hadn’t bothered to seal up the cracks along the edges, it leaked quite a bit. It may not have looked so fabulous on the pan, but it was lovely on the plate, and tasted like the last burst of summer.

A full recipe-style recipe is over at Local Foods as Peach Crostada.

In true Labor Day tradition, the grilling never stopped. Nor did the work.

When I was a kid, Labor Day still marked the official end of summer. The Tuesday after Labor Day was the first day of school and Labor Day itself was the day we closed up the cabin for the summer. The fridge was cleaned out, the docks taken up onto land, the boats driven to the marine, and the water turned off. We wouldn’t go back up until the opening of fishing season – which always fell on Mothers Day weekend leaving moms and kids alone in the city while the fishermen headed north for putting in docks, fetching boats, and some fishing worked in between card games and generalized debauchery.

That world is long gone, which is a funny thing to say about a world I knew well when I’m still in the process of pushing forty. Cabins are mostly winterized, so the whole opening and closing for the season aspect is less clear when it happens at all. I’m sure most of the fishermen who head up north in Minnesota in mid-May are still men, but when I looked around the lake this summer when I was there it seemed that there were just as many women casting into the still waters next to fallen trees as there were men.

But I digress. I hadn’t grilled halloumi, that firm salty Greek cheese you can grill, in a long time. I made halloumi and veggie kebabs – the key being separate sticks.

Why separate skewers? Simple: veggies, meats, shrimp, cheeses – whatever you’re grilling – probably each cook at at least slightly different times. By putting the different items on their own skewers, you can cook them each properly. But what about each person having their own skewer, you ask? I do the table and my guests the service of taking everything off the skewers first – it’s always so awkward at the table to have these giant metal swords – and putting the offerings on a platter so everyone can take what they like.

It works great. The separate skewers are especially useful should you forget to oil either the halloumi or the grilling grate. Then you can let the veggies cook properly as you grab the cheese off  the grill and artfully wield a metal spatula to salvage bits from the grill to maintain a semblance of a balanced and complete dinner.

If you spent the day digging up bushes you’ve never liked and creating piles of branches as tall as yourself from all the pruning you’ve done and transplanting unruly potted palm trees and cleaning out a storage area on the cement slab to one side of your yard and falling backwards onto the same cement slab as a wood deck chair crashes on top of you which leaves you slightly beat up and traumatized, scraping bits of burning cheese off your grill may not be super-duper fun. I’m just saying.

So brush the halloumi with olive oil, skewer it with some olives for yummy fun, and make skewers of whatever vegetables you like grilled (we did mushrooms, zucchini, red peppers, and chiles – and we would have had red onion wedges and cherry tomatoes if we’d had them). I served the whole skewered, grilled, and de-skewered mess with lemon herb orzo.* Lovely lovely end-of-summer dinner.

While the cheese or meat and the veggies all end up being more precisely and perfectly cooked (again, as long as you oil something) with the single-item-on-a-skewer method, I will admit that I miss the strategic threading that was one of my favorite ways to help with dinner at the cabin as a kid. There were often gobs of grandparents and aunts and uncles and first cousins once-removed and friends and fiances around for dinner, so kebabs were a popular dinner item. Making sure each skewer had an equal allotment of each item, and placing them for what I believed to be maximum flavor impact (onion next to meat, for example), kept me delighted for what seemed like hours. A young cook-in-the-making or an early display of some mild OCD? I’m guessing it was both.

*Lemon Herb Orzo

Bring 3 cups chicken or vegetable broth and 2 cups water to a boil. Taste it – it should be plenty salty, but if it isn’t about as salty as sea water add enough salt to make it so. Cook a 1-pound box of orzo until tender. Drain and toss warm orzo with 3 Tbsp. delicious olive oil, the zest of 1 lemon, the juice of 1 to 2 lemons (to taste), and whatever fresh herbs you have around and sound good. I’m a particular fan of adding about 1/2 cup of minced mint to the whole thing, although others may find that a bit much. About 1/4 cup minced parsley, basil, cilantro, and/or mint is a good amount to start with – you can always add more. Serve warm, at room temp, or even cold (although you may want to add both more olive oil and more lemon juice that way).

You are absolutely right. Tomato conserva looks exactly like tomato paste. Tastes like it to, but only the way one could say that homemade gazpacho tastes like V-8.

I’ve been wanting to make this for years. Ever since my friend Max made it, wrote about it, and let me taste some. Tomato conserva is tomato paste, but freshly made by your own hands and with super-delicious tomatoes. Plus, as my dad said this summer when I elicited his opinion (that is, fished for a compliment) of the homemade butter I’d made: “Well, it’s just like everything, isn’t it? The homemade kind is always better.”

Words to live by. At least words for me to live by.

So my dashing husband has been raving about these super sweet tomatoes our market has been selling recently, then the price dropped to $2.50/lb, then I found myself unable to concentrate on words and keyboards and screens yesterday morning and turned my attention to the 5-lb. pile of tomatoes on the counter.

I followed the same basic method Max used, which is the method Paul Bertolli outlines in his inspiring Cooking by Hand. Unlike Max, I would like to note, I didn’t fall asleep while baking down the paste. In the spirit of honesty, full-disclosure, and embarrassing moments in cooking that are at the heart of this blog as much as is good food, I should also note that I did go out on a quick errand while the conserva was baking and almost forgot all about it. I am extremely grateful I sensibly decided to get the produce I was buying home and put away before embarking on the jaunt across town to pick up a sewing machine part that had suddenly occurred to me as the perfect thing to do on a day when I couldn’t concentrate anyway while I was at the store. After that, I stayed put. The sewing will have to wait for the next time driving across town into the fog sounds like a good idea.

First you rinse and cut up the tomatoes – Bertolli wants you to dice them but since they get cooked and run through a food mill that seemed unnecessary to me so I just halved them instead and tossed them in a very large, heavy pot:

Then you add a bit of olive oil (I used about 1/4 cup) and salt (about a teaspoon) and bring the whole thing to a boil and simmer for about three minutes:

Then you run the whole mixture through a food mill:

I wasn’t in the mood to dirty up more dishes than necessary, so I didn’t test and see if just pushing the half-cooked tomatoes through a sieve or colander would work just as well. My guess is it would work fine, just be messier and more work – what you’re doing is both turning the tomato flesh into a pureed pulp and getting out the skin and seeds:

Now – and this is all rather fun, I thought – you pour the tomato mixture onto a large, rimmed baking pan (if you only have smaller pans you may need to use two:

Carefully put the sheet in a 300° oven. Bertolli recommends convection and I bet that would be great, but I don’t have one and it turned out fine. Bake, stirring the mixture every 30 or 40 minutes or whenever you think of it – make sure you really scrape up the edges and work them into the mixture as a whole each time – for about 3 1/2 hours (convection would take less time):

Reduce heat to 250° and bake until “thick, shiny, and brick-colored.” I had a hard time imagining how that was going to happen when this whole thing started, but Bertolli is right, that’s exactly how it looked after another 3 hours in the oven:

See how shiny it got? The transformation sort of floored me. My dashing husband was working at home and I made him come down and see just how very shiny it was. Since he, too, had thought that description unlikely when I had read the recipe to him earlier (he really does humor me a great deal). He did a lovely job of feigning interest and delight.

I let it cool and then transferred it to three half-pint jars, leaving plenty of room at the top for a protective layer of olive oil. At that point I realized I could have cooked it down a bit more – then it would have made an amount that would have pretty much filled two half-pint jars perfectly. But I’m okay with the somewhat goofy amount in each jar. If I were a more patient person I would have gotten more of the air bubbles out of each jar, but I’m really just not very patient. Plus all the methods I know for doing that with jams and pickles didn’t work with this stuff – it is sticky and gooey and quite frankly not super-cooperative about being put in jars.

Olive oil went on top, lids were screwed on, and the jars popped into the fridge where they will wait, quietly, for us to gobble them up. A tablespoonful into a sauce here, a thin layer spread on crostini there… I’m thinking I better make another batch. Seems like this would be perfect for hot-water processing so it would be shelf-stable, doesn’t it? Bertolli is mum on the subject. Any canning experts out there have two cents to share?

When a recipe by someone who knows what’s what tells you to line a baking sheet with silpat or parchment, one should probably at least grease the pan. I made these absolutely delicious Buckwheat Cheese Straws by Heidi Swanson over at 101 Cookbooks to bring to a dinner party. I was feeling pretty clever and pleased with myself – I had been wanting to make these anyway, I was hungry and craving a crispy snack, it was a bit gray and foggy that morning so turning on the oven sounded cozy, if I brought them to the party I wouldn’t eat the entire batch,  and I was going to be bringing something a little more attention-grabbing than a bowl of olives to the party.

So I made the dough and chilled it and rolled it out and cut it and rolled it out some more and popped it in the oven. And then I went to turn them over and my eye caught the part in the middle of the recipe that says “line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a Silpat” as I bent to open the oven door and my heart sank just a little.

Those things were stuck. Professional spatula-wielding skills came in handy, as did the new “medium impact” athletic bra I was wearing, what with all the jiggling and jarring necessary to salvage the straws, at least as edible bits if not as “straws” of lean elegant cheesiness.

All was not lost. I had 1) more dough and  2) plenty of parchment paper: