The Dinner Files

The lovely Marisa from Food In Jars sent me this recipe well over a year ago. That’s the kind of recipe backlog I have built up. I finally made this and don’t think I’ll ever stop.

Arugula salad with broiled lemons

The sweet tang of these lemons are the perfect foil for the peppery kick of good arugula. Look for small, dark leaves that are full of natural wild arugula flavor.

2 lemons (regular or Meyer both work here)

1 Tablespoon sugar

1 teaspoon salt, plus more to taste

3 Tablespoons lemon crushed extra virgin olive oil

1 Tablespoon lemon juice

6 – 8 cups arugula

Scrub lemons clean. Slice lemons as thinly and evenly as you can. Put the slices and any juice you can wrangle into a medium bowl. Sprinkle with the sugar and teaspoon of salt. Toss to combine and let sit at least 1 hour and up to a day.

Heat your broiler. Cover and baking pan with foil. Spread the lemon slices in as single a layer as possible given the number of slices and the size of your pan. Drizzle any juice in the bowl over the lemons.

Broil lemons, watching carefully, until they start to brown, 3 to 5 minutes.

Set lemons aside while you make the dressing. In a large bowl combine the olive, lemon juice, and any juices left on the broiled lemons. Taste and add salt to taste if you like. Add arugula and toss with the dressing until thoroughly coated. Top with broiled lemons and serve immediately.

So I’ve been bad about posting. I know. There are many reasons (including some bad mojo connected to an old post, but I think I’ve let that all go), but one of them – a hard to believe but quite serious one – is, well, winter. To be more precise the convergence of Daylight Savings ending and winter in the there-are-fewer-hours-of-daylight sense starting. By the time dinner is cooked, my kitchen is dark, the lighting is horrible, and everything looks yellow and kind of gross no matter what kind of photoshop magic I work (granted, it’s not magic at which I’m particularly skilled).

Enter the light tent. You can pay a lot of money for one or, if like me you enjoy an hour or two of making something, you can create one from:

After some measuring and cutting and taping and glueing, behold!*

So now instead of hideous yellowed food that isn’t fun to write or read about, I can show what things really look like. Along with the fab risotto cakes (which Ernie kept referring to as “rice meat” – um, whatever), we had an arugula and persimmon salad, dressed with a basic vinaigrette of 3 tablespoons olive oil, 1 tablespoon sherry vinegar, 1 clove minced garlic, salt, and a bit of ground mustard to help it keep its shape, if you know what I mean. Oh, and I like my persimmons peeled, but that’s just how I swing.

Doesn’t it look divine? It really was. I proclaimed it my new favorite salad. We’ll see how long that lasts. Persimmon season, after all, is pretty short.

*Cut windows in sides and top, cover them with vellum or tracing paper. Somehow line inside white. It seems to me spray paint would have been a better way to go, but lining the whole thing with poster board worked too. Note: I left the vellum over the top “hinged” by taping just one side down. That way I can do overhead shots too. And that top “flap” in the front isn’t taped in place so it can fold back to allow more angle possibilities.

Is wood glue the best choice? I’d say not. Spray adhesive would have been better. But wood glue is the first thing I found in the basement and it worked okay. Just okay, though. There’s some wrinkling and whatnot. But I think I can live with it.

Who is the family chicken champion? The smart money is on my mom. And my dashing husband can do some serious damage to a bird when he puts his mind to it. There is, however, a young pretender in our midst, as evidenced by Ernie’s plate after dinner pictured above.

Both wings, both drumsticks, and half a breast. Devoured. Systematically. And the boy gnaws on those bones. He crunches into the wing tips, and rips charred skin with his teeth. He picks out stubborn bits of meat with his fingers and pulls joints open in search of hidden morsels.

What inspired such fervent eating by Ernie? Roast chicken with arugula bread salad a la Zuni Cafe.

And let me tell you, I put my “you can do anything you want with a properly raised chicken” theory to the test and cooked the be-jesus out of that Clark Summit Farms bird. What happened is the chicken was done so I took it out of the oven, turned the oven off, and headed out to pick up Ernie from school. When I came home I couldn’t find the chicken. Where could I have put it? Surely nowhere outside of the kitchen. But where was it? My kitchen is pretty small. Not a lot of places to hide a hot, cooked chicken. An in-depth search revealed that I had left it in the oven. The turned-off but still plenty hot oven. For an extra 45 minutes. Oh my, I thought, this won’t be good.

Internets, it could not have been more delicious and tender and juicy.
Let it be known: well raised + pre-salting = chicken magic.

Of abalone or your attention. All I did was fry it up again. I know, I know. I was going to get all crazy and stir-fry it with lemongrass or something. But it’s so good floured and fried in butter. I just couldn’t resist. I did, however, put it on a bed of arugula dressed with a very lemony, garlicky dressing (2 Tbsp. meyer lemon juice, 1 Tbsp. olive oil, a clove minced garlic, 1/4 tsp. salt, 1/8 tsp ground mustard, 1/8 tsp. freshly ground black pepper).

What’s that other thing on the plate you ask? Oven-baked sweet potato fries, that’s what. They are pretty darn tasty. Just please, cut them evenly or you’ll have burnt fries and mushy un-browned fries and you’ll just be sad.

I made dinner while listening to Terry Gross interview Michael Pollan on Fresh Air. Except for the dusting of flour on the abalone and the various seasonings (salt, black pepper, cayenne), this meal was pretty god damn local. Well, regional. And somewhat removed, or at least side-stepping, the industrial food system. Arugula and sweet potatoes from our CSA, olive oil from outside Sacramento (sent directly from the grower/press), butter from Marin county (bought at local co-op), lemons from our yard, and abalone snatched from a wild and one imagines content life along the underwater sea cliffs of Mendocino. Oh, ethical consumerism really is a honeypot. So sweet. So satisfying.

And the radio tells me it’s good! That’s what makes it so sticky!

Seriously, though, if you missed the interview, check it out online–Pollan is a master at explaining just how screwy our ag policy in the U.S. is and why and how we need to to at least start to fix it.

I sort of wasted these luscious, creamy, small, red-skinned, golden-fleshed potatoes we got from our CSA this week. I sliced them, layered them with grated cheese, and baked the be-jesus out of them. They were tender and creamy and went well with the cheese, but I know they would have shined simply boiled and buttered, with a sprinkle of chopped parsley. But you know what? That’s not what I felt like eating. So a potato gratin it was, with an arugula salad. Oh, and we popped open a jar of the marinated baby artichokes I made in May.

By the way, I dressed the salad with a vinaigrette I’ve talked about before: 3 parts oil from the marinated artichokes, 1 part vinegar from spicy pickled garlic. A bit of salt and pepper, a dash of ground mustard if you’re so inclined.