The Dinner Files

One good friend just started a full time job after freelancing for years. Another friend has twins who are old enough now to eat real food so they’ve been trying to have family dinners most nights. Still another friend’s husband had a change at work and is no longer home in time to make dinner, which has always been his gig. In short, three friends in quick succession have asked for fast dinner ideas.

I’m going to try and keep them in mind in the coming weeks. Faster, quicker, easier. The fact of the matter is that I often cook that way and, due to some work-life circumstances this spring I’ll be cooking like that more anyway. At our house getting dinner on the table in a hurry often manifests in the form of pasta. Pasta with a lot of vegetables in it. I’m working on expanding that mindset (it’s difficult, though, since such pasta dishes are always a hit with all three of us).

This mushroom soba noodle soup is sort of a departure, right? Sure, it’s pasta and vegetables, but they’re in a soup! Hey, I’m trying here.

It may not be revolutionary, but it is delicious. Fresh, light, and perfect for this time of year when heavy winter foods don’t sound so great anymore but when you still need something to warm you up come dinner time.

Mushroom soba noodle soup

This noodle-y soup-y creation was inspired by a recipe for a mushroom hot pot in Japanese Hot Pots by Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat. It’s a great resource – especially if, like me, you like to make (and eat) big bowls of delicious.

4 cups broth (I used a mix of chicken and pork broth; one or the other or dashi would have been good, too)

1 cup sake

1/2 cup mirin

1/3 cup soy sauce

3 cups shredded Napa cabbage

1/2 pound shiitake mushrooms

1/2 pound oyster moshrooms

1/2 pound wild arugula (regular arugula or spinach would also work just fine, although with less bite)

1 pound tofu (firm, soft, silken – whatever you like) cut into three or four big pieces

1/2 pound soba noodles

some type of chile powder for garnish (we used ground ancho chile because it was in the cupboard)

Heat the broth in a medium pot. Add sake, mirin, and soy sauce. Bring to a simmer and cook, partially covered, for about 10 minutes. Taste and adjust seasoning – adding more mirin for sweetness or more soy for salt, if you like.

Add cabbage, cover, and cook until cabbage is wilted, about 3 minutes.

Meanwhile, bring a pot of salted water to a boil and trim mushrooms and cut into bite-size pieces if they are large.

Add mushrooms to the pot, cover, and cook until mushrooms and cabbage are tender, about 8 minutes. Add arugula, cover, and cook until the arugula leaves are wilted, about 3 minutes. Put large pieces of tofu on top of everything else, cover, and simmer until tofu is heated through, about 2 minutes.

Meanwhile, cook soba noodles in the boiling salted water until tender to the bite. Drain and divide between three or four large bowls.

Top noodles with the vegetables, one piece of tofu each, and broth. Garnish with chile powder, if you like. A few thinly sliced green onions would be tasty, too.

My dashing husband was out the other night and that has started to mean one thing: meat.

He tries to be a vegetarian, or at least eat vegetarian as much as possible. That leaves my son and me craving meat, especially classic meat-centered meals like a nice chop.

So I defrosted some pork chops, pulled out a jar of sauerkraut, and mixed some flour and egg together to make spaetzle.

I’ve seen boxed “spaetzle mix” at stores. Like pancake mix, it’s a convenience item I don’t really understand. How is mixing powder and water really so much easier than mixing flour and egg?

Spaetzle

I never had much luck with spaetzle until I found this formula in The Zuni Cafe Cookbook. This recipe makes a fairly runny spaetzle dough, so those spaetzle makers that have you “grate” the dough into the boiling water won’t work here. Better is a large-holed ricer or colander.

This makes enough spaetzle for 4 standard servings, but my son and I can eat this whole batch. Easily. Luckily, it doubles and triples with great success.

1 1/2 cups cake flour (all purpose flour works too, but cake flour does make a more tender, delicate dumpling)

2 eggs

Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Add enough salt so the water tastes salty.

Meanwhile, put the flour in a medium bowl and make a well or dip in the center of the flour. Crack the eggs into the center. Use a fork to whisk the eggs and gradually incorporate the flour into the egg. At this point you’ll have a fairly thick mixture that straddles the divide between dough and batter. Add 2 tablespoons warm water and mix. Add up to 2 more tablespoons of warm water to thin the batter out so it can “drain” out of the ricer or colander holes.

Place the ricer or colander over the boiling water. Use a spatula to scrape the spaetzle mixture into your device of choice. Use the spatula to push all the mixture through the holes and into the boiling water. The mixture should break into spaetzle-sized pieces as it drops into the water. If that isn’t happening (that is, if the mixture is thicker than I try to make it), use a paring knife to cut the dough as it comes out of the holes.

The spaetzle will sink, then float. Let them cook for about a minute after they float. Drain like pasta or fish out the spaetzle with a slotted spoon if you’re making more than one batch.

Serve spaetzle while hot or – and this is what I do 95% of the time – saute the spaetzle in a hot frying pan with any meat juices you might have another dish or just in plenty of butter. The spaetzle gets crunchy brown bits that counter the tender dumpling nature of the boiled nuggets to perfection. Add herbs if you’re so inclined.

The other night I seared the pork chops in a frying pan, transferred them to a hot oven to finish cooking, deglazed the luscious pork bits from the pan with about 1/2 cup of beer, stirred in a tablespoon of whole grain mustard, and cooked the spaetzle in that. Then I heated up the sauerkraut and we ate like kings. Stuffed, gluttonous kings.

It is, perhaps, unfair to characterize this soup as a “clean the fridge” creation. It was really terribly delicious and satisfying – neither my dashing husband nor grade school son said anything other than “more please” about it – but I was using stuff up. Using it up fast. Using it up before I’d have to throw it out. So I hacked a hunk of bacon that had been sitting in the back of the freezer into pieces and put it in a pot and sweated out its fat – adding a bit of water now and then to keep it from scorching before all the fat had melted. While that went down, I sliced a small onion that looked like it was thinking about sprouting, chopped a small savoy cabbage that needed a few wilted outer leaves pulled off of it first, and diced a carrot that was holding its own but I couldn’t remember when it had made its way into the fridge in the first place, which is never a good sign.

All of this was sauteed in the pot with the bacon and a bit of butter and a bit of olive oil (I was hedging all fat bets) until they softened a bit, then I threw in the potatoes that needed some trimming as they were chopped, a bunch  of chicken broth, and brought the whole thing to a boil.

I simmered it all down, cooked it until everything was tender and the flavors had all blended together nicely – about 25 minutes or so, and served it up with some chopped parsley on top for color. So pretty! So fresh!

A whole grain baguette and two half-eaten hunks of cheese were placed on the table along with the soup and we had ourselves a tasty, frugal, quite French (although the potatoes would have been peeled and the whole thing likely pureed) dinner. And the fridge? It’s all ready to be filled, yet again.

Do you think creamy cole slaw has mayonnaise in it? I did. That’s what I thought until I was 29 and visiting my friend in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. We made cole slaw and I learned that the good stuff – that creamy, luscious kind that reminds me of the little container that would come with my Kentucky Fried dinner as a kid – is actually creamy. As in, it has cream in it.

I’ll let you take a moment to recover – this comes as big news to many people who never make cole slaw. Of course, I’m sure there are plenty of mayonnaise-laden versions out there, but the good stuff? Cream. Heavy cream.

You mix a little bit of cream with vinegar and the acid in the vinegar thickens the cream into a dressing-like, some may say mayonnaise-like, consistency. Some celery seeds, if you like, some salt, some pepper, and maybe some sugar if you’re one of those people who like sweet cole slaw, and you have the best cole slaw ever. I posted a full recipe for Creamy Cole Slaw over at Local Foods. It only gets better if it sits in the fridge for a bit and it could serve you very well this summer if you get invited to many potlucks or barbecues or, if you live in the 1960s, “patio parties.”

I had the chance to make some cole slaw last weekend – perhaps it will fit into your weekend this week. We had a couple families over for a last-minute cook-out. I thawed a bunch of delicious homemade sausage I still had in my freezer (I’m telling you, my dashing husband’s largely vegetarian diet is really cutting into my meat consumption) and, in a last-minute moment of utter and complete panic that 21 sausages would not be enough for six adults and four children (one of whom isn’t quite two), little patties I made for the kids out of some bulk sausage I also had (upper left corner of the grill). In what world would 21 sausages not have been enough?

Indeed, we had a few sausages leftover at the end of the evening – but not as many as you’d think. Just three of the lamb sausages,* which were spiced and just the eeniest teeniest bit dry. I cut them up, sauteed them in olive oil with some garlic and spinach and a few basil leaves, tossed the whole thing with pasta shells, and topped each serving with black pepper and grated goat gouda cheese. The resulting dish was surprisingly delicious – not like leftovers at all – and I like to think demonstrated a real rise on my part to the challenge my dashing husband unwittingly made when he said, “We have a lot of food, but none of it goes together.” A sentence guaranteed to make me say, “Ha!”

* Since the kids ate the four patties, that means the six adults ate a whopping 18 sausages – that’s three a piece. Me? I had one and a half. I’m a lady.

I’m not even kidding. I grilled cabbage. How drives a person do such a thing? Well, first, one reads a tempting post by Heidi Swanson over at 101 cookbooks about grilling fava beans and one thinks to oneself, “Heidi usually knows what she’s talking about and as nutty as it sounds to grill fava beans I bet they’re pretty good.”

Then, one attends a conference about sustainability at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and spends two days sequestered in a room with people who think a lot about a) how the planet is going to hell in a hand-basket, b) how to perhaps at least slow down if not stop the planet from going to hell in a hand-basket, or c) how to get people, at the very least, to eat more sardines and less imported farmed shrimp. As one learns that a 10 year-old has lived through the burning of a quarter of the carbon ever burned and a 22 year-old has seen one half of it used up, that breeding bluefin tuna will be gone from the Atlantic Ocean in about 3 years, and that 2020 is the new 2050 in terms of climate change and general horrific-ness* because things are moving faster than originally projected, one speaker makes an off-hand comment about pulling up a daikon radish from the field on his bio-dynamic farm and grilling it with a bit of olive oil. And, since one is, at this point, looking for something – anything – else to fixate on besides the fact that people might just be destined to keep using up resources like bacteria on a sugared petri dish, one wonders, “hmmmm, what does a grilled daikon radish taste like?”

So one asks the person next to them if they’ve ever grilled a daikon. The answer is no, but that person, it ends up, is also pretty intrigued by Heidi’s grilled fava beans.

And one goes home, and it’s hot in San Francisco, and using the stove or oven or any other heat-making device in the house seems like a bad idea, but, after three days of conference food and rich chefy offerings, cooking one’s own food seems like a good idea. So the grill gets fired up and the fact that a person can grill pretty much anything (i.e. fava beans, daikon radish) is right there, at the top of one’s mind fully and completely available for consideration. So one takes a cabbage, removes the outer leaves, cuts it into 8 wedges, puts them on skewers, brushes them with olive oil, sprinkles them with salt, and grills them until they have lovely charred edges, with some soft and tender leaves and some still somewhat crunchy salad-like leaves.

* Many thanks to Sam over at Chewswise for his post about the positive changes that are happening, the glimmers of hope that are shifts in consumer preferences that came out at the conference. Remembering that how we at and the food choices we make can all make a difference is part and parcel of how I sleep at night.

My dashing husband dashed this off for dinner last night. Broccoli, red cabbage, tofu, plenty of ginger and soy sauce, and “chow mein” noodles. Was a bunch of green garlic included but indetectable due to all the stronger flavors? Sure. Would I have ever thought to put red cabbage in a stir-fry with tofu that might get dyed a bit, um, blue? No. Was there, perhaps, just a smidgen too much soy sauce included in the dish? Yes, yes there was. Was it  delightful to have a piping hot dinner placed in front of me without ever having stepped into the kitchen last night? Absolutely.

And the red cabbage? Not a bad addition to a stir-fry. Not bad at all. As long, that is, that you don’t mind slightly blue tofu.

We had a head of cabbage burning a hole in our fridge. My dashing husband is a huge fan of this butter-braised cabbage I make, but I wanted something with just the tiniest bit something more going on. So I popped a few mustard seeds and fenugreek seeds in a bit of grapeseed oil before pouring 1/2 cup of water to cool down the pan, melting the butter in that, and then braising the cabbage. Everyone was happy. Even Ernest, who ate a pile of shredded raw cabbage before I got a chance to get it all in the pot.

With the cabbage I cooked up a family favorite – brown butter dal – and some black “forbidden” rice that had been burning a hole in our cupboard, thus continuing Project Eat That Rice.

I defrosted some of the country sausage I ordered from our meat CSA yesterday. I formed it into patties, fried them up in a cast iron pan, and then made caraway-scented red cabbage in that same pan with all the yummy sausage fat in it.

To tell you the truth we’ve had some mixed thoughts about the pork we’ve received so far. Don’t get me wrong, it is delicious. The best tasting pork I’ve ever had. But it has been a bit tough, which is to be expected from an animal that lived a life in which it got to walk around the beautiful hills of West Marin. You build up some muscle doing that. The tougher meat, however, is something we’re still getting used to (part of it is figuring out how to adjust recipes – some cuts need to be cooked faster, others need more time – and I haven’t yet mastered that balancing act).

The thing about sausage, though, is it doesn’t matter much how tough that meat was before you ground it up, all you’re left with is the amazingly deep, pork-y flavor and all the almost sweet fatty juiciness. It melded quite nicely with the cabbage, too.

Ernie ate his sausage Minnesota-state-fair-style: on a stick. He speared the sausage patty with his fork, held it up, and ate from there. I knew I should stop him, because it’s not very impressive table manners. But he was being neat about it and seemed to be enjoying himself so much I didn’t say a word.

Let’s face it: cream is a magical thing. We don’t eat much of it at our house because, well, we’re coastal elites concerned about our health and fitness and cream is “bad.” But, of course, cream isn’t bad at all. Too much cream is a bad idea, but a bit of cream used strategically here and there is a wonderful, satisfying, smile-making thing. It is, after all, creamy and has the power to make other things creamy. What is creamy? Creamy is smooth and mouth-coating. Creamy – with the fat necessarily associated with it – literally highlights other flavors by very effectively “carrying” them around your mouth.

Last night I used the last half-cup of cream that was sitting in the fridge from the creamy turnip soup a few posts down, whisked a bit of coarse-grain mustard into it, and poured it over a potato and cabbage casserole/gratin thing I was whipping up and created something fabulous. It was so much more than the sum of its parts. I credit the cream.

My absence has been worth it. Seriously. I come to you bearing…. Bourbon Glazed Pears.

I cook a lot. I cook a lot of delicious, scrumptious, delectable food in the process. But I’m a simple girl. Even my elaborate cooking projects tend to have an old-fashioned, homey appeal. Sausage making, for example, or way-too-homemade cassoulets (there is really no need, I learned, to confit your own duck). So even when I come up with something yummy, like those enchiladas earlier this month, I’m not usually surprised or even really excited. Satisfied, I would say, is more often the feeling. But these pears! There is only one way to describe them: I am a genius.

Wait, that’s not really about them, is it?

What happened was this: my dashing husband was not home for dinner. (Wait, didn’t that just happen with the brilliant green beans? Perhaps I should bar him from coming home for dinner ever again….) You see, along with avoiding fried food, he is also “trying to be a vegetarian.” You might think someone either is or isn’t a vegetarian. Not my guy. He would like to be, he says he feels better when he doesn’t eat meat. But he is faced with this problem: meat is delicious. He can’t resist. Plus, he’ll be the first to point out that the non-meat options often available just are not very tasty. So he slips. He has a turkey sandwich at lunch, tries a bite of my carnitas at a restaurant, shares pork-laden dim sum with our son. And he’s lucky. In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t really cook much meat. I was a vegetarian for years, formative, starting-to-cook-for-myself years, so meat is not my go-to item. I like meat and notice I get sick less often if I eat it now and again, but it’s not as if he is faced with delicious roasts he must resist every night at dinner.

If I’m going to eat meat, however, I want it to be high-quality meat from animals who lived like animals. So I joined a meat C.S.A. That’s right. I belong to a meat club. Every month I get my share of the animals slaughtered at the lovely Clark Summit Farms in Tomales in Marin County. So my beloved deep-freeze has a fair amount of free-range chicken, grass-fed beef, and well-petted pork sitting around, waiting for my husband not to be home for dinner.

So I defrosted the two pork chops I got in the last share, picked up Ernie from school, and told him on the way home that we were having pork chops for dinner.

“What are pork chops?” he asked.
“They’re meat,” I said.
[pause]
“Mama, what animal is pork chops?”
“They come from a pig,” I answered.
“Oooooohhhh!” he replied as a *huge* grin spread across his face.

So I quickly cooked the chops in a frying pan and set them aside to rest. And then, inspired by the memory of an awesome pork shoulder with garlic, chiles, and pears I did for Sunset (they even made it for me at my good-bye lunch), added a bit of butter to the pan, de-glazed with bourbon (inspired by the Pear Upside Down Cake from the same story), sauteed some garlic and chiles with wedges of peeled pear and amazed myself. I will never serve applesuace with pork again. I will serve sauteed pears. And I’ll probably glaze them with a buttery-bourbony-pork drippings concoction if I can.

Oh yeah, I also made this Butter Braised Savoy Cabbage. It was also fab. Highly recommended. So simple! You could add some caraway seeds if you were feeeling fancy, I suppose, but the simplicity of the butter, cabbage, and salt is terribly effective at being delicious.