The Dinner Files

A giant pet peeve of mine is how everyone talks about how busy they are. It annoys me on two fronts. The more obvious one being that since we’re all so busy it’s not actually unusual enough to warrant quite so much conversation space, can we agree on that? The second part is more troubling. How can one possibly explain what’s going  on when one’s life really is exceptionally booked? Not the normal busy of modern life with its commuting and dual-working couples and the bright and shiny objects that distract us on the internet (you’re welcome!), which is enhanced by the nonsense of parenthood for some of us (not all of parenthood is nonsense, of course, but shuttling people to birthday parties and bringing snacks and all that – you know what I mean, the nonsense part, the part that isn’t what you were thinking about when you thought to yourself “I should have some kids”), but the kind of busy that sort of smacks the wind out of your gut and can leave you paralyzed at your desk wondering how, how on god’s green earth, you can possibly get everything done. Sometimes that sense hits for a few hours, other times it comes in horrifying weeks-long recurring waves. What do we call that when we’re always “busy”?

So I don’t know what to say except I’ve been quite occupied. Of course, much of that occupation has been of my own creation (I am such a hard-ass boss!) and I even enjoy the bulk of the actual work, but if anyone else wants to drive my son to a “Pump It Up” birthday party on Friday night, I wouldn’t complain one bit.

Some of the flurry has been recipe work for others, so I can’t post about that. And the bustle and focus on writing work (which I love!) has meant meals haven’t been all that fascinating around here lately. A new-to-me version of tuna pasta has made several appearances, but an accurate picture of that looks like a dog threw up on your plate. I could style it all pretty, carefully placing tuna and herbs on the tangle of noodles so as not to overwhelm them, but that isn’t going to taste very good and it also won’t be what you end up with if you follow my suggestions below. What you will end up with, however, are empty plates, so I feel my journalistic integrity, or at least my claim to be writing non-fiction, is intact when I try and tempt you with the picture above.

Spaghetti with tuna pepper and lemon

This dish was made at the suggestion of a friend when we needed to eat lunch. These things were all hanging around the kitchen. I’ve since made it three times in the last ten days because it is easy, delicious, fast, and I usually have the ingredients hanging around my house. I try to eat more sardines and less tuna, but the intensity of my work schedule lately has brought out cravings for the deeply familiar. Things from childhood: tuna, peanut butter, apples, carrots, cottage cheese. Sardines would work beautifully in this dish, and are a much better choice in terms of keeping the ocean functioning for a few extra years. If you use tuna, you might want to do as I do and shell out the extra money for hook-and-line caught pacific albacore tuna (here are a few brands I like). I also have been known to make a delicious tuna tomato pasta or a tuna olive and caper pasta. This sardine pasta can really fit the similar bill, too.

Put a pot of water on to boil. While that’s heating up mince a few cloves of garlic, finely chop 4-8 green onions, and mince about a cup (less is fine) of whatever fresh herbs you can scrounge up — I particularly like a mix of flat-leaf parsley, mint, and basil in this dish.

At this point there are two ways to proceed: the faster way or the fewer dishes way.

Faster way: Put a large frying pan over high heat. Add about 2 tablespoons of olive oil, swirl to coat the pan, and add the garlic and a few red pepper flakes or a dried chile or two if you want some heat. Let that sizzle for a few seconds and add the green onion. Cook, stirring, until the onion is softened. Add about 1/2 cup white wine, if you like, and a can of tuna, including the juices in the can. Break up the tuna and cook, stirring a bit and perhaps reducing the heat to keep things cooking but not flailing around wildly in there, until the wine is reduced by at least a half, about three minutes.

During all this, when the water starts boiling, add enough salt to make it taste as salty as ocean water and  1/2 pound of spaghetti (this sauce, with a bit more olive oil, could stretch to cover a full pound, but I might consider adding more tuna at that point). Note that this sauce works very well with whole wheat pasta. Cook until almost tender to the bite, when it needs just another minute to cook, remove a cup of the cooking water, and drain the noodles.

Grate some lemon zest over the sauce mixture – about half a lemon’s worth. Add the herbs and at least 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper (I’ve been known to add more, but I have a thing for black pepper) and stir everything together. Add the reserved cooking liquid, stir to combine, and dump in the pasta. Use tongs or two forks to help combine everything. Cook until the liquid is mostly absorbed and the pasta is al dente. Squeeze a tablespoon or so of fresh lemon juice over the whole mess, toss again, taste, and add more salt, pepper, or lemon juice as you see fit. This makes three or four reasonable servings or two “I cranked out the pages this morning and my brain needs carbs” starving-writer servings.

The fewer dishes way: Prep everything while the pasta cooks, but wait to cook the sauce in the pasta-boiling pot after you’ve drained the noodles.

We took a little trip during our vacation last June. I mean, sometimes you need a break from all the sun and white sand and clear water. Sometimes you need a little fog and drizzle. Sometimes you need to go to a volcano.

We did not see the lava flow – it wasn’t flowing anywhere where people can see it while we were there – but we did walk through a crater that had a volcano erupt in it in the 50s and is now a creepy black moonscape surrounded by forest, so we had that going for us.

Since the volcano and Volcanoes National Park are on the full opposite side of the large island from us, we stayed overnight up in Volcano, Hawaii. And we did as we were told by many many people and ate at the Thai restaurant there. We were, in fact, ordered by two separate people to be sure to eat there. It is no exaggeration to say that people had raved about the place. Raved.

In fairness, the Thai food was perfectly tasty. We were all quite happy with our dinners. What we were not was blown away. What we would not do is rave about it. If you live in a city with any decent Thai food at all, the Thai place in Volcano, despite what you hear, will not thrill you. What it will do is fill you up and taste good doing it. Just don’t get too excited.

What you can get exited about, however, is the Hana Hou Restaurant in Naalehu, the southern most restaurant in the U.S. For us it was on the way home up the west side of the island.

Homey, fresh, tasty food and a cheery aloha atmosphere. We ordered from the daily specials board as they were being written.

The mac nut chicken salad was tasty, the chowder fresh and hearty, the fish and chips crisp and light.

That crazy delicious macadamia nut cream pie up top (nuts in the crust, too) thrilled the lot of us. They pour delicious coffee at Hana Hou and the guy who grows it was there eating his plate lunch at the table next to us, so that, of course, thrilled me.

Dear old friends were excited to tell me about their latest discovery. During a kitchen remodel they became deeply dependent on their grill. And one of them thought to put dough on the grill and grill the bread. The other of them thought that her husband was a genius for coming up with this. She thought I would be excited and amazed. She thought I’d want to write about it.

“I know!” I said, “I love making grill bread.”

“You know about it?” she asked, disappointed. “It’s a thing?”

“Yeah,” I said, “it’s a thing.”

Her husband nodded. He had been less impressed with his innovation from the beginning. He knew it was a thing.

This summer I branched out from my classic it’s-like-a-crack-pretzel version and took inspiration from a cilantro-scallion bread in the July issue of Bon Appetit. But I didn’t have cilantro or sesame seeds at the cabin and… well, there were several changes. The most important one, however, was popping the scallion-laden spirals on the grill. Some fell apart, some got a bit, um, charred, but that was a grillmaster/cook’s error rather than a recipe problem. Overall they were scrumptious.

Scallion grilled bread

This dough is much softer than others that I’ve grilled. Keep the grill at a steady, medium heat so they can cook through without burning and without you having to try and move them before the dough is nicely “set” so they don’t fall apart as some of mine did when I had to move them away from the intense heat on my overly-hot grill (in my defense, I had to move the lit grill up a stair to get in beneath an overhang when it started to rain and the coals shifted around most annoyingly).

Dissolve 2 teaspoons dry active yeast in 1/2 cup of warm water. Make sure it gets a bit foamy to make sure the yeast is alive and activated. Stir in 2 teaspoons sugar and 2 teaspoons fine sea salt to dissolve. Then stir in 4 tablespoons melted and cooled butter and 1 egg. Stir about 2 cups flour into this wet mixture. You will have quite a sticky dough. Cover and let rise until doubled in bulk, about an hour or so or overnight in the fridge.

When the mixture has about doubled, chop up 4 scallions/green onions and combine them with 1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds if you’re so inclined.

Punch down the dough and knead on a well floured surface so it’s a nice smooth mass. Roll or pat and stretch the whole mass into a 12-inch long rectangle about 1/2 inch thick. Spread the dough all over with the scallion-cumin seed mixture, loosely roll the rectangle the long way into a log (the dough will expand and you want the spirals you’ll end up with to stay flat spirals and not puff up into cones), set the seam-side down and cut into 12 even disks about 1-inch thick each. Lay the disks out on a floured surface, pressing them a bit more flat or shaping them back into round disks if they got squished as you do so, cover with a clean towel, and let sit until a bit puffy.

Heat a grill to as even a medium heat (you can hold your hand about an inch above the cooking grate for 3 to 4 seconds) as you can. Brush the clean cooking grate with oil and brush the top of the disks with oil. Set the disks, oil-side-down on the grill and cook until the dough is a bit “set” and breads are well browned on one side, 3 to 4 minutes. Oil the raw tops of the breads and turn them over to cook on the other side until cooked through and well browned on both sides, another 3 to 4 minutes. Serve somewhat immediately because fresh, hot bread is such a treat.

I have three sisters-in-law. They are each massively impressive in their own way. Their most important trait, of course, is the immense love they have all shown me and mine. A most treasured additional characteristic they share is the ability to make me laugh out loud. And really, that is all I ask of anyone.

What they may not realize, however, is how much they have helped me professionally.

They would not have realized this because none of them are writers. Or cooks.

What they are is this: smart, on-the-ball, professional women with children. Two of them work really amazingly full-time at rather beyond-demanding jobs, the third is career-shifting while raising three kids which hurts my head to even think about. Ow. They have all, over the years, sat and watched me cook. They have all, on various occasions, complimented the results. They want to feed themselves and their families in pleasurable and healthful ways.

And so when I write up a recipe I always image Heidi and Michelle and Mary cooking it. They are, collectively, my recipe barometer. On good days they are merry companions and we swing along through soups and salads with great fun. On bad days they are the witches from MacBeth, thwarting me at every turn with bad news and extra work because they do not already know how to grill a turkey or can’t agree on what, exactly, “blanching” is. How quickly will they, in all honesty, be able to mince those shallots? Do they keep (or want to keep) whole wheat pastry flour in the house? Will Heidi be able to find Asian eggplant easily in Minneapolis, or will it require an extra errand? Am I sure Michelle’s market in Los Angeles carries harissa, or must a substitution be stated? Will Mary, in her Greenwich Village apartment, need an alternative to grilling proper? I must admit that I do not answer their (imaginary) concerns as often as I might, but at least I do think of them, and that is thanks to my sisters-in-law.

One of them (Heidi) made a grilled corn salad this summer that got me thinking. It got me thinking about how to make an even more delicious grilled corn salad. I then made that even more delicious salad last weekend and another of them (Michelle) was quite taken by the results. Dare I hope that the third (Mary) finds a grill and cooks this up? (Hint: char the corn under a broiler instead of on a grill!)

Spicy grilled corn salad

This is yummers, plain and simple. Good all on its own, I’ve enjoyed it served with a lovely grilled tri-tip, a grilled chicken, and some grilled bratwurst (less of a perfect marriage, but tasty nonetheless). The green chile dressing could, of course, be used in plenty of other ways if one were so inclined.

Shuck 6 or 8 ears of fresh sweet corn. Brush them lightly with oil and set, along with 2 jalapeño or serrano chiles, on a hot grill. Cook, turning as you think of it, until the corn is lightly charred all over and the chiles are nicely blackened. Take everything off the grill as it’s done and let sit until it’s cool enough to handle.

Remove the blackened skin, stem, and seeds from the chiles. Chop them up – if they sort of fall apart as you do this, all the better. Put them in a large salad-type bowl and add 1 tablespoon of lime juice, 2 tablespoons of olive oil, some generous grindings of black pepper, and enough salt to make the taste pop. Finely chop a small red onion or a few shallots. (You can put the chopped results in a sieve or strainer, rinse with cold water, and turn out onto paper towels to pat dry if you want to tame the pungency of the raw onion.) Add the onion to the bowl and toss with the dressing. Cut the grilled corn kernels from the cobs and toss them with dressing and onion. Chop up as much cilantro as you have (about 1 cup of leaves works nicely, but more or less is fine) and add that to the mix. Serve it up. Note that a handful or two of crumbled cotija cheese (feta is a fine enough substitute) would not be out of order.