The Dinner Files

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.