I started this batch of kimchi – spicy, fermented cabbage (or other vegetable) that supposedly wards off colds and flu if only because it contains so much vitamin C – with high hopes. I was itching to go on my trip and would be gone just long enough – 6 days – for the kimchi to ferment in my absence. So I coarsely chopped 2 pounds of napa cabbage, put it in a large bowl, covered it with a brine of 3 tablespoons of kosher salt dissolved in 6 cups of water, and let it sit overnight. I then drained it (keeping the brine), and tossed the cabbage with 6 julienned green onions, about 2 tablespoons of finely grated ginger, and 2 dried red New Mexican chiles that I had stemmed, seeded, and ground in a clean coffee grinder. I packed that whole mess into a pitcher my adviser from grad school gave me as part of a wedding present, covered it with the brine, and sealed it shut with a piece of plastic wrap against the surface of the mixture and the sealable lid.

I set it on the bookshelf in my cool, dark study and headed up in British Columbia to ski with my dad, my brother, my Very Tall Cousin Sam, and two of my uncles.

To be a bit more specific, to heli-ski.

We are not insane. We do not, as one friend of mine thought, jump out of helicopters. Helicopters fly us to the tops of mountains and, with a guide who knows a thing or two about mountains and snow and skiing, we ski down glaciers and through forest glades. It is insane and fabulous and I’m eternally grateful that my dad is crazy enough about skiing that he thanks me for tagging along on such adventures.

As I glided down the mountain on the last run of the first day in snow the guys kept talking about being crotch-level but was up past my waist in spots, I turned around a tree and felt my right ski hit something deep under the snow – A rock? A tree branch hidden in all that snow pack? A snow gnome?

My ski twisted around, pulling first my knee  – pop! – and then my whole body down with it. I couldn’t stand, much less ski. The pity party was brief, but it was intense. My goggles – clear all day despite the falling snow – fogged up from the hot, concentrated tears.

“Do you think if we braced it you could just slide down on your left ski?” Todd, our guide, asked me. “We’d have someone ski right with you.”

“I think so,” I said as I packed snow around my knee to try and numb it as my eyes darted back and forth trying to make sense of this horror. I thought of telling everyone to ski ahead, not to worry about me, but I realized that it was completely and utterly out of the question. Not just this group, but all three groups of skiers out that day would now have their schedules re-arranged around my blown knee. We shared a helicopter.

Before long another guide, Jeff, skied up and unstrapped the leg brace from his backpack.

“So, Molly” he said in his Canadian accent, with that long “o” sound emphasized and my name pronounced with a slight, melodic lilt, “have you ever hurt this knee before?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

He looked at me quizzically.

“Not enough to remember,” I clarified. I had hurt a knee five or six years ago, but it healed and I still can’t remember which one it was.

In several inches of fresh snow he tried to arrange a brace made for a large man so it would fit onto my 29-inch-inseam leg.

“I’m afraid this is one size fits all,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, “they never actually do.”

After a false start during which snow kept the straps from sticking, he secured the bottom end around my ankle and strapped the section around my knee as tightly as possible. He then lifted me out of the snow and reached for my skis, which my brother had dug out of the snow.

“Just grab onto my back,” he said, “and lift your foot up as much as you can.”

My family jokes about skiers who don’t carry their own skis. We scuff at those who can’t tighten their own boots. We mock people who don’t seem to know how to put on their skis. And here I was, clutching onto a man highly trained in all things mountaineering as he bent over in the snow not just helping me get my skis on properly, but actually holding my leg in one hand and my ski in the other as he literally snapped my boot into the ski for me as I winced in fear of the possible pain.

To top it all off, this graceless snow-encrusted ballet was performed while 10 pairs of male eyes – I was the only woman in the group that afternoon – watched. I was embarrassed and grateful and resentful. Just when I thought I might burst into tears from the bitter combination of pain and shame, I found myself sort-of standing, skis on, poles in hand.

“So,” Jeff said, as though neither one of us should be contrite or bitter even though I was pretty sure we each should be both, “what we’re going to do is I’m going to slide down and you’re just going to follow me, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, ever the good student.

“Don’t worry about turning or anything,” he explained, “we’re just heading down and across. Just keep all your weight on that left leg, eh?”

We slowly went across and a little bit down. My heart breaking as we ruined a perfectly good line of fresh powder.

“You’re doing great, Molly,” he said as I stopped myself from running into him by angling uphill into the untracked snow around us. “That’s just what you want to do.”

After another across-and-a-little-down move he said, “You’re doing awesome.”

“Jeff,” I said, laughing, “your strategy is working. I respond very well to positive reinforcement and compliments of all kinds.”

He turned around and smiled.

“Most people do.”

We slowly continued across and down through and between the trees until we got to the bottom of the glade. Straight ahead was the long, bumpy traverse to the helicopter landing that we had been skiing to from different parts of the mountain most of the day. It included a few tricky turns to avoid a creek bed and ended with more trees to ski through but with much less snow left between them.

Jeff slid down a bit to talk to Todd.

I heard Todd say, “You’re going to do what?”

And Jeff say, “mumble mumble something something.”

“What are you guys talking about?” I asked. It was bad enough being a problem and knowing that I couldn’t offer much in way of a solution, but being talked about as I struggled to awkwardly balance a few feet uphill made me acutely aware of the burden I was.

“We’re just figuring out how to get you to the helicopter,” Todd said.

“I thought I was going to just keep doing this,” I said.

“You can’t,” Todd said, shaking his head with a bit of disappointment, probably having noted the grimaces and sharp inhales I’d taken every time my right leg had come into play as I made my oafish way down the hill, “not if you can’t put weight on that leg. You’ll never get across the traverse.”

“You remember what it’s like, La” said my brother, standing beside me like a mother hen. “You really have to make those turns.”

“Oh,” I said, looking at the guides, waiting for further info, picturing some crazy situation where I balanced against a fellow skier’s shoulder or was pathetically guided down between someone’s skis like a child learning to snowplow.

“So,” said Todd, “Jeff here is going to carry you.”

I looked around at my family and fellow skiers and noted, “Well, that’s not humiliating.”

They laughed. I then waited a moment, hoping they would tell me the real plan, the plan that didn’t play up what a feeble hurt girl I was at that exact moment. The plan – now sounding really good – that involved skiing me down the hill like a child.

“Even getting a toboggan in here is a real hassle and will take forever,” Todd said, sensing my doubt, “plus, it would be really uncomfortable for you on all this stuff coming up. This will just be easier and faster.”

I had hoped they were kidding.

“So, just slide down to me if you can, Molly,” said Jeff.

They weren’t kidding. They were handling the whole situation in a calm and humorous manner, but they weren’t kidding. As guides they had seen some serious shit. My knee was nothing compared to the injuries and accidents they had handled and trained for, but it was still their job to get me safely back to the lodge.

So slide I did. Jeff and I then engaged in the artless reverse snow wrestle of getting my skis off.

As Jeff took off his backpack I tried to figure out how on earth I was going to jump onto his back with the leg brace on. What with him still on his skis and me now sunk down into the snow without mine, he stood about 20 feet taller than I did. I realized someone would probably need to lift me up and I died a teeny bit inside. This was going to be really, truly, embarrassing. And awkward. And difficult.

“So,” he said, “how we’re going to do this is I’m going to carry you in front,” he patted the bottom of his rib cage with both hands, “facing me.”

I stared at him blankly. It ends up that I hadn’t really explored how humiliating things could get.

“With your legs around my waist,” he said.

“You’re kidding,” I said, because, well, that was simply insane.

“It’s way easier for me to balance that way,” he said, “trust me.”

When a Canadian with a big smile and a kind voice who has already shepherded you down through a forest you couldn’t imagine getting out of tells you to trust him, you do.

“So I’ll just hold you by your legs,” he said holding his hands out in front of him, “and you’ll hold on up top,” and he gestured around his neck.

I nodded meekly and said, with more than a touch of resignation, “Okay.”

“Okay,” he said, “so here we go. Ready?”

Like a sick and tired child, I reached my arms up and around the neck he bent down to offer me, hopped up as best I could, and I clung to him for dear life.

He started into the traverse. To the degree that I had been able to think about it, I had figured the ride down was going to suck. I assumed it would be jarring and jerky, as he struggled to maneuver on difficult terrain while loaded down with an entire extra person outfitted in full ski gear and, fearing low blood sugar above all else, with a fair number of dense snacks in her pockets. I figured he would strain and pant and I would generally feel guilty about making him suffer. But, in the words uttered with awe and a touch of envy by my brother that night at dinner, “that guy can ski.” I felt like I was floating. It was all the motion of skiing with none of the impact. It was, quite simply, awesome.

Perhaps he was trained to keep people calm or maybe you just can’t overestimate the polite in a Canadian or possibly he is just a nice guy who wanted to normalize the crazy vertical lap dance we had going on, but after we were a few yards down the hill, once it became clear to all that this crazy plan was going to work, Jeff asked, “So, Molly, where are you from?”

We engaged in cocktail party chit chat about hometowns and work as I looked up at the tree-covered mountain and gray, snowy sky behind us.

“I’m sorry I keep grabbing your ass, eh” he said, “but it’s the only way I can keep steady.”

“That’s okay,” I said, thinking that it was amazing how a perfectly placed Canadian “eh” could really lessen the pervy implications of that statement, “I have a kid. I know how hard it is to carry someone. Whatever you need to grab is fine by me.”

After I made it into the helicopter and out of the helicopter, into the van and out of the van, into the lodge and up to my room, into clean clothes and down to the bar – all on crutches as outsized for me as was the leg brace – the skiers in the other groups all wanted to hear what had happened. I took the beer someone ordered me, turned down the shocking plethora of painkillers that were generously offered up, and told my tale of the snow gnome and the collapsed knee. The men tried to deduce what my injury actually was: A torn ACL? Perhaps the meniscus was damaged? The women wanted to know if, as they had heard tell, Jeff had really carried me down the mountain.

“He did,” I said.

“Well,” one of the women said, “I wouldn’t mind being carried by Jeff.”

“Me neither,” said another, “he’s hot.”

The fact of the matter is that all heli-ski guides are hot. Male, female, young, old, they all have a general air of hotness about them. They are fit and really good skiers and have secret mountain knowledge and, at least to me, that makes them pretty hot. Is Jeff hotter than the other guides? Isn’t the firefighter who carries you out of the burning building by definition hotter than the other firefighters? I could have simply thought to myself, yeah, and he smells like skiing all day in the cold snow, too. But both the pot-stirrer and the story-teller in me kicked in.

“Yeah,” I said, “plus, he smells like pine trees and he likes to talk about feelings.”

The ladies howled.

“Seriously though you guys,” I said, back-tracking a bit, “he’s a really nice guy. He’s so polite that he actually apologized for grabbing my ass.”

A universal “he grabbed your ass?!?” was shouted through the bar and the die was cast.

Ass-grabbing jokes proliferated and I heard that at lunch on the mountain the next day Todd tried to auction off an afternoon ride with Jeff. I was happy to play things out that way because the damsel-in-distress role is not one I relish. I like to imagine that I can take care of myself, or at least put on my own skis and get down a hill. So I let the jokes hinting that the whole thing was hot or lewd carry on because it deflected attention away from me and onto him, and because that was the funny part.

The obviously true part is that I did need rescuing. I was hurt and slightly panicked as I waited for that leg brace. I may be more dame than damsel, but I was definitely in distress. I suppose that if I had been all alone I could have found a way to get down the mountain. I could have removed a layer of clothing and wrapped my knee up tight. I could have slid down, partly on my left ski and partly on my grab-able ass. It would have been slow and painful but possible. Yet whether carried like a koala bear or dragged out on a toboggan, I wasn’t getting to the helicopter on my own in any timely or graceful fashion.

The also true part is it wasn’t just my small stature, but the fact that I’m a woman that made carrying me both physically and culturally possible. I’m not so sure the plan to carry the injured party would have been floated had I been a man, even a small man. I’m also pretty sure that were I a man I wouldn’t have accepted the plan quite so quickly, if at all. Having been there and knowing my injury and seeing the terrain, carrying me really was the quickest way out. Being a small lady hasn’t always been the greatest when skiing, but this time it worked out in my favor.

The more true part is that when my son was a baby I became obsessed with the fact that I couldn’t remember being a baby. It wasn’t that I wanted anyone to push me around in a stroller or carry me in a Baby Bjorn, but I wished I could remember what it was like. Now I know. It feels like a layer of gravity has been removed. You’re not in control and you need to hang on and trust you won’t be dropped or thrown or fallen upon. It is oddly intimate. It is very sweet. And it is wonderfully, touchingly human.

But no one wants to hear about any of that over beers.

My ACL is torn, my meniscus wasn’t left completely out of the picture, and I’m looking down the nose of surgery and months of physical therapy. In the meantime ice and ibuprofren are my constant companions. That’s the cloud. The silver lining – and it’s not as inconsequential as I would have guessed if I’d ever thought about it – is that I know what it’s like to be carried down a mountain.

Plus, after all that, I came home to find a batch of perfectly fermented kimchi waiting for me. It was as if my pre-koala self had known my post-koala self would need something bright, something spicy, something full of magical, curative powers.

Whenever my dashing husband and I find ourselves in the happy position of being able to go out for a quick meal together – which, let’s be honest, just isn’t that often – we head over to Piccino an almost embarrassing percentage of the time. It’s close, it’s easy, it’s delicious, it’s no big deal while also being insanely pleasant.

We darted over there for an early dinner the other night when our son was at a friend’s house for his own last-minute dinner plans.

One thing I love about their salads is they are never quite what you expect, despite the ample menu description. I suppose this would annoy some people, but it fits my eating out strategy perfectly. I eat a lot of good food. Or, rather, a lot of the food I eat is good. I don’t worry too much about whether any given dish is going to be good – at this point I’m often looking to be surprised, if only a bit, when I eat out. This salad did that. Who, as my dad might say, would have thought?

Warm asparagus and cabbage salad

The key to the success of this dish is to use a cast iron frying pan. It gets nice and hot and gives the cabbage and asparagus a bit of a charred edge.

1 egg

3 shallots

Vegetable oil

1/2 head Savoy cabbage, chopped or shredded

1 bunch asparagus, trimmed and sliced on the diagonal

2 teaspoon lemon juice

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Put the egg in a pot and cover with water. bring to a boil, cover, take off the heat and let sit 14 minutes. Drain and peel the egg under cool running water. Set aside.

Peel shallots and slice them.

Heat a thick layer (almost 1/4 inch) of vegetable oil in a cast iron pan over high heat. Add shallots and fry until they are browned and stop sizzling so swiftly. Lift shallots out of the oil and drain on a layer of paper towels. Set shallots aside. Pour out any excess oil from the pan.

Return pan, with its now-scant covering of oil, to the heat. Add cabbage, sprinkle with about 1/2 teaspoon salt and cook, stirring frequently, until it wilts and starts to brown. Lift cabbage out of the pan and transfer to a wide shallow bowl.

Add asparagus to the pan, sprinkle with salt and cook, stirring often, until tender and starting to char on the edges. Add to the cabbage, sprinkle with lemon juice, and toss to combine. Taste and add salt and pepper to taste.

Add fried shallots and toss to combine. Divide onto serving plates or serve family style – but first finely chop or shred the egg and use it to garnish the salad.

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.