The Dinner Files

Two loves. One I came by quickly and things haven’t always been smooth – I might never have technically strayed, but, as Jimmy Carter said, I’ve lusted in my heart. The other took a long time in the making, but I’ve never looked back.

I’m talking, of course, about San Francisco and tomatoes.

San Francisco. I first came to San Francisco the summer between my junior and senior years of college. My friend wanted desperately to go to Gay Pride. She had just come out to her family; they had then visited and refused to talk about it. She wanted to connect, to celebrate, to be larger than her own world. I had one boyfriend who was bugging the shit out of me, two part-time jobs, three days free, and a strong desire to get the hell out of Portland.

We hit the I-5 early with coffees from a new cool place called “Starbucks” and, thanks to some speed demon driving I learned from my mom, were in San Francisco in nine hours.

We drove over the Bay Bridge on a brilliantly sunny blue-sky Friday afternoon and for that one moment towards the end of the bridge it felt like we were driving straight into the buildings of downtown. It was magical, it was Dorothy’s Emerald City. We made our way to the Castro, I found a parking spot and managed to park on that stretch of 16th between Market and Castro without destroying the transmission on my Subaru Justy (a fact that still impresses me to this day every time I go by it), we got out of the car and I was gobsmacked by the hills and the houses and the color.

This was 1991. People were rebounding from the sucker punch of AIDS. People were more angry than sad; determined to celebrate rather than mourn. Anger and partying pretty much fit my mood at 21. It was bright lights and lots of dancing, with ACT-UP keeping it real every once in awhile.

I was back two years later, my dashing then-boyfriend in tow, moving from Paris to go to grad school. It was a drought year, so the gorgeous blue sky that greeted our U-Haul in August stayed through to the next fall, or so it seemed. The city was still beautiful, but it also felt small. A cow town. Then slowly and yet somehow suddenly, the 90s really showed up and we were living in a boom town. The restaurants we had loved became impossible to get into, the traffic insane. El Niño came with forty days and forty nights. We thought about moving, but by then my dashing husband had a business here. Then one week I ran into three different people I knew in places I wouldn’t have expected to see them and the city started to feel a bit like I really lived here instead of a way-station. The economy tanked and the city became somewhat livable – or at least you could get reservations at restaurants without a month of planning – again. I switched careers, I started going to farmers markets, I took up early morning open water swimming for awhile and would watch the sun hit Alcatraz on my way out and the moon set over the Golden Gate Bridge as I headed back. Then we had a child and bought a house and met our neighbors and found a school and now we’re here.

For now, anyway. I can’t help but look at real estate listings in New York, in Paris, in Vancouver, in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, in Bergen, Norway. Who doesn’t imagine a life rendered more interesting by geography? But for everything about it that drives me crazy – I’m talking to you, you hippie who knits in variegated rainbow yarn during school meetings and wants to talk about “process”! – I do love San Francisco.

Tomatoes. I didn’t like tomatoes until I was about 30. I didn’t eat tomatoes – other than just the teeniest bit of sauce in something – until I met my dashing husband. (His part Italian-American heritage made avoiding eating tomatoes any longer pretty near impossible.) I moved from eating actual sauce to eating the larger pieces of tomato that might show up in a sauce, to having a bite of raw tomato as part of a dish, to eating a plain piece of raw tomato. That all happened by the time I was 25. I didn’t really like them, however, for several more years.

Now, of course, juicy, meaty, sweet, acidic tomatoes are part of what I love about San Francisco (well, that and all the other fab produce), part of why it’s difficult to imagine moving. I like to eat them chopped and tossed with olive oil, spooned onto toasted bread that’s been rubbed with the cut side of a raw clove of garlic, sprinkled with salt. If I eat them on our deck with a glass of rosé while shielding my eyes from the power of the setting sun as it dips behind the city I call home and that I managed to cross despite the goddamn street closings for Folsom Street Fair (how did I space the date?), all the better.

My dashing husband calls these concotions – of rice and beans topped with salsa and pretty much anything he can scrounge in the kitchen thrown in for good measure – “thunder bowls.” He picked up the term when we were traveling in New Mexico and West Texas. Why thunder bowl? My theory is that they are named after the thunderous clap of a fart such a meal can create.

He made me this thunder bowl for lunch the other day. He heated up leftover short grain brown rice that had been cooked in chicken broth and some chickpeas. While those warmed up, he threw together a salsa fresca from all the tomatoes sitting around and chopped a perfectly ripe and amazingly delicious avocado. It was a reminder that sometimes some crap sitting around in the fridge or on the counter can make a crazy delicious meal. It also reminded me of how perfectly lovely it is to have someone cook for you. As I like to tell people who express nerves or concern about inviting me to dinner or otherwise cooking for me: everything tastes better when you didn’t have to make it and people hardly ever cook for me, so it’s a total (and much appreciated!) treat.

This is the new favorite chicken at my house. It’s a lot like eating a salt lick. In a good way.

I used pitted black olives here partly because they are so much easier to eat but more in order to use some of the lovely pitted naturally cured olives hanging out in my cupboard that some company at some point sent me to taste. I like them a lot but I’m also way too lazy to get up right now, go into the kitchen, pull the stool over, climb up onto the counter, and root around on the top shelf where live those cans to remind myself of the exact name brand, which is why I’m always delighted but surprised when people send me samples.

Pancetta olive chicken

Note that ideally you salt the chicken and let it sit overnight. A few hours, or an hour, is better than nothing, though. This both seasons it and helps the chicken hold onto its own juices and stay moist. It might seem counter-intuitive, but science makes it so.

1 chicken

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 head garlic

3 thick slices pancetta, finely chopped

1 cup white wine

Black olives

Cut the backbone out of the chicken (save it for stock!) and cut the chicken into 10 pieces – 2 drumsticks, 2 thighs, 2 wings, and each breast half cut in half. Put in a baking pan, sprinkle with all over with salt, cover, and chill overnight.

Heat oven to 450. While oven heats, peel the garlic cloves.

Drain off any juice that’s accumulated in the pan and pat chicken dry. Rub chicken with olive oil. Scatter garlic and pancetta over and around the chicken. Pour wine into the pan. Roast until the chicken just starts to brown, about 20 minutes.

Add black olives to the pan and roast until chicken is cooked through and the skin is well browned, about 30 more minutes.

Serve with plenty of bread to sop up with winy garlicky bacon-y olive-y chicken juices.

Through a long and convoluted route of emails and packages and hand-offs I found myself with a baggie of coarse ground heirloom red flint corn.

Whoever ground it didn’t hull the corn first, and I could see the bits of hull in the mix that otherwise looked like polenta. Those bits simply never cooked and were clearly never going to cook. So we had a dish that had, at its core, an amazingly deep and provocative corn flavor, but which was cursed with bits of tough, obviously nonsoluble fiber littered throughout.

It was sort of a bummer, but we all ate our bowlfuls anyway. The quickly sauteed wild-caught Florida pink shrimp and spicy okra with tomatoes helped ease it all down nicely, I must say.

I will admit that I loved my dinner despite the corn hulls because while I was chopping the okra my son came into the kitchen and out of nowhere asked if he could help make dinner. I was almost done with everything but realized that the shrimp weren’t peeled. I was going to cook them with the peels on (they stay moist and more flavorful that way and none of us mind shelling them at the table, least of all my dashing husband who, I kid you not, just eats them peel and all, a habit I find distressing but that he relishes), but I’d rather risk slightly overcooked shrimp than kick a willing kid out of the kitchen. So he stood at the sink and expertly peeled the shrimp while I cooked the okra.

I saw two ways to read his offer of help. The bad news would be that I’m so inaccessible and inattentive that the one way he can get my attention is to offer to help me in the kitchen. The good news would be that he wants to hang with me, really enjoyed our recent episodes of dumpling making,  loves being with me and loves cooking. I semi-tortured myself going between these two extreme readings as I stirred the okra and he peeled the shrimp.

Then we sat down to eat and I had my answer. His willing effort came from love. Every good cook knows food tastes better when you remember to add the love, and I could taste it in every bite.

When summer finally hit San Francisco we have found ourselves in need of cooling refreshment at our house. Because we have a miracle ever-abundant lemon tree in our yard, as well as a thriving rosemary bush, and my son loves nothing more than a soda pop and was having withdrawal from his Minnesota cabin séjour during which he probably had a pop every day (at home soda is a treat treat, not a common treat; he gets ginger ale when he’s sick, which isn’t often, and can have a soda when we have a party and the adults are all having cocktails, once in a great while I make root beer floats for dessert), I decided to make something sweet and fizzy. I made a simple syrup using lemon juice in place of water and infused it with lemon zest and rosemary, then mixed it with seltzer water to great acclaim.

The whole flavored-sugar-syrup-and-fizzy water creation has now become a bit of a staple. We’ve done experiments. Ginger, mint, basil, peppercorns, and more have been toyed with. Our favorite, hands down, is still the lemon and rosemary one we started with. Another batch sits in a pint jar in the fridge, ready for refreshing any one of us at a moment’s notice.

Rosemary Lemon Soda

A syrup of the zest from 1 lemon, 1 cup lemon juice, 1 cup sugar, and a 4-inch sprig of fresh rosemary was made in a medium saucepan and brought just to boil and then simmered for a few minutes. I let it cool and then fished the rosemary out of it, leaving the zest in there because who feels like cleaning a strainer in this heat?

Spoon a tablespoon or two into a glass, add club soda or sparkling water, stir vigorously, add ice, and feel the inner breeze. If you need more than a simple refresh, a shot of vodka doesn’t ruin this beverage in any way at all.

Much like the chickpea salad in July, I feel sheepish posting this. Too easy. Too simple. Yet it’s also too delicious not to share in case anyone out there isn’t making it.

Caprese pasta

The short version is this: chop tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil and toss with hot angle hair pasta. The longer and slightly more accurate version is –

1 – 1 1/2 pounds very ripe and sweet and meaty tomatoes

3 – 4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

4 – 8 ounces fresh mozzarella ball(s)

Stack of basil leaves

Salt

1 pound angel hair pasta

Put a large pot of water on to boil. While that gets boiling, rinse tomatoes clean and pat them dry. Chop the tomatoes and put them in a very large bowl, being sure to include as much of the juices that may have escaped during chopping as possible.

Add olive oil to tomatoes, toss a bit, and let sit.

Drain mozzarella and dice it. You can add it to the tomatoes, if you want it to get a wee bit melty when you add the hot pasta. If I’m making this for myself, I do this. My dashing husband prefers this dish without the mozzarella, however, which is fine. No, really, it’s totally cool. So i leave it out and just add mine on top of my serving, as you see above.

Stack some basil leaves, roll them up, and slice them into thin ribbons. Set aside.

When the water is boiling, add enough salt to make it taste salty, add the pasta and cook until tender to the bite. Drain and quickly add to the tomatoes. Start tossing. Add some basil and toss to combine. Add more olive oil, if it seems at all dry.

Divide among serving bowls and garnish with basil (and mozzarella if you find yourself married to someone who for some insane reason doesn’t want mozzarella in their portion).

I should note that, despite my husband’s mozzarella-induced insanity, I must agree that the dish is perfectly delicious without it. I just really really like cheese. Like a lot. A bit of mozzarella in my tomato basil capellini keeps me from feeling weak or getting the vapors.