The Dinner Files

We had our first day of school in the San Francisco public schools last week. It seemed early in theory, but just about right in practice. I was ready to have the predictable schedule of school back in our lives. My son didn’t necessarily agree, but was excited to see his friends. He was also excited when I told him that we could make dumplings for dinner.

Ernest’s favorite foods are dim sum, sushi, tacos, and pizza (plain cheese pizza, he would emphasize while holding up his index finger in a way that reminds me of my grandmother making an important point). As with fried chicken and mac-n-cheese, he was deeeee-lighted to learn that we could actually make dumplings right here in our own kitchen.

Unlike our other adventures of making food he usually only gets when we’re out, we did and will be making dumplings again. Ernest got so into helping make the dumplings that when we made them again on Sunday (and my dashing husband got his hands dirty, too) we had them done – start to finish – in less than 30 minutes.* (The first round took a bit longer simply because the filling included Swiss chard which required cooking down before turning into the filling.)

Pork and Swiss chard dumplings

These dumplings are fairly quick and very easy to pull together. Yes, the pork cooks when you boil the dumplings.

1 bunch Swiss chard

2 scallions

1 tablespoon freshly shredded ginger

1 tablespoon dry sherry or rice wine

1 teaspoon soy sauce

1 teaspoon chili oil

1 teaspoon toasted sesame oil

1/3 pound ground pork

about 40 won ton wrappers

Rinse Swiss chard leaves until clean. Cut out the white stems from the Swiss chard leaves. Finely chop the stems. In a large frying pan over medium high heat, cook the chopped stems with a tablespoon of water. Cover and cook until tender, about 5 minutes. Add leaves, cover, and cook until leaves are completely wilted. Transfer leaves and stems to a cutting board – carefully leaving any liquid in the pan behind – and let sit until a bit cooled off. Addendum: You need to remove as much liquid still in the chard as you can. There are several ways to do this: put chard in a fine mesh sieve and press on it with a spoon, put chard in a clean kitchen towel or layers of paper towels and squeeze it, or simply pick up the chard in small handfuls and squeeze the liquid out. Whichever method you use, try not to think of all the tasty vitamins and whatnot going down the drain. The supreme texture and loveliness of the dumplings will comfort you soon. Finely chop the chard and transfer to a medium bowl.

Finely chop the scallions and add to chard. Add ginger, sherry, soy sauce, chili oil, and sesame oil. Use your hands to combine everything. Add the pork and, again, use your hands to gently mix the ingredients together.

When you start, just work with four to six wrappers at once. When you get going, though, you can lay out a dozen at a time. Set up your filling station with a clean work surface, a small bowl of water, a spot for the bowl of filling, and a large baking sheet sprinkled with cornstarch.

Note: If you plan to cook them right after making them, you might as well put on a large pot of water to boil now.

Lay out four to six won ton wrappers on the work surface.

Dot the center of each one with about a teaspoon of filling.

Use your fingers (or a pastry brush, I suppose, if you like to clean things) to wet the edges of the wrappers. This is a very important step because the water is what will allow you to seal the wrapper shut, so don’t skimp!

Now fold one corner over the filling to its opposite corner to make a triangle and use your fingers to firmly press the edges together and seal them.

Now pull up the two corners that are farthest away from each other and press them together to seal them.

Voila!

Set this dumpling on the cornstarch-sprinkled tray and make three to four dozen more.

(These were made using the technique of bringing up all four corners to the center and sealing the edges; a method that we found 1) trickier and 2) not as attractive after boiling.)

When ready to cook, make sure the pot of boiling water is well salted and put the dumplings in somewhat gently. Boil, stirring gently now and again, until cooked through, about 3 minutes.

While they boil, move the baking sheet on which you held them next to the stovetop and put a cooling rack over it. Drain the dumplings by lifting them out of the water with a slotted spoon and placing them on the cooling rack.

Transfer to shallow bowls. Serve with soy sauce, chili oil, or whatever sounds yummy to you. We ate ours with a sauce of 2 cloves minced garlic, 2 tablespoons soy sauce, 3 tablespoons chili oil, and 1 tablespoon vegetable oil and topped with minced cilantro.

We have a lot of ideas floating around our house for future dumpling fillings these days. I’d love to hear yours.

* The Sunday dumplings had a shrimp and chive filling. Pulse 1 pound shelled raw shrimp (I used some great wild-caught Florida pink shrimp that were wonderfully flavorful) and 3 bunches chives in a food processor. Then fill dumplings as above – seriously it is just that simple and crazy delicious.

I am aware I just posted a soup with a fun little swirl on top. Well aware. People, it is cold in San Francisco. And buildings here are not properly insulated. And it’s a long and sad story, but I live in a house that lacks central heating. All I want to eat all day long during these bone-chilling damp months that pass for winter here is soup.

I have a feeling most of you know about the wonder that is barley bean chard soup – you cook up some barley (I boil mine in salted water until it’s tender to the bite which seems to happen in about 15 or 20 minutes), cook up some white beans (or use canned, but the canned ones are mushier – soak the beans overnight or use the quick soak method, then boil until just tender to the bite, add salt to the water and let them cool in the cooking liquid, then drain and use), heat those two things in some chicken broth, and add shredded chard leaves, cooking until they wilt. This soup is then most commonly topped with some grated Parmesan and some black pepper, maybe a swirl of olive oil if you’re feeling kicky.

When I made this, however, we had a small bowl of garlic- and chile-infused/cooked olive oil sitting on the counter – leftover from making pizza. I swirled it in. Divine. Perfection. Why the hell haven’t I been eating this for years?

And that’s how “recipes” are born.

Barley beans chard soup with a chile swirl

This soup can be as easy as dumping several cans together and throwing in a bag of baby spinach or as fancy-pants as making your own broth, cooking up dried beans, and growing your own chard. No surprise for regular readers, but I fall into that latter camp, although the chard I planted seems determined to stay at the baby stage, so we’re eating it in salads instead of working it into soups. Do you think it’s not growing bigger because we keep eating it? Maybe?

Note: You can cook the barley in the broth (you’ll need a lot more broth in that case), but I find it muddies the soup a bit – the barley releases starch and turns the whole thing cloudy.

1 bunch chard

3 Tablespoons olive oil

6 cups chicken broth (I like to make my own)

2 cups cooked white beans (or 1 can)

1 cup barley, cooked

3 cloves garlic

Red chile flakes

Cut white ribs out of green chard leaves. Slice stems crosswise as thinly as possible and set aside. Cut leaves into thin strips and set aside.Slice garlic into Goodfellas-style thin slices and set aside.

Heat a bit of the olive oil in a soup pot over medium high heat, add chard stems and cook, stirring, until they’re soft, about 5 minutes. Add broth, beans, and barley and bring just to a boil. Add chard leaves and cook until wilted, just a minute or two.

Meanwhile, heat remaining olive oil in a small frying pan. Add garlic and cook, swirling a bit now and then, jst until the garlic starts to turn golden. Add chile flakes to taste (I use about 1/4 teaspoon) and take off heat. Let sit in pan until garlic just starts moving from golden to brown. Pour flavored oil in a small bowl to stop the cooking.

Serve soup with a swirl of browned garlic- and chile-oil. Take it one more step with a grind or two of black pepper.

Yep, that’s my nightmare. Right there. A giant crowd. Just huge. There was a soap box derby race at Dolores Park in San Francisco yesterday. Since my dashing husband is out of town, I felt the need to keep Ernie busy and distracted this weekend. So I did the very last thing I wanted to do because I thought he’d like it: I took him to the race. Even though I knew it would be crowded. Even though I knew it was likely to resemble a street fair. Even though it was one of the prettiest days of the year and I knew that meant the crowd would be even more huge and street-fair-like than I originally thought.

There were two things keeping this plan on track: first, we can walk there; second, my cousin Katie was going to join us. So we went, we fought the crowds, Katie carried Ernest on her shoulders, we saw a few cars (a doughnut, a shark, a log), and Ernie begged to go home. “It’s too loud, Mama,” he said. Whether it’s nature or nurture at work there, he is just like his parents.

So what does this have to do with dinner, you ask? Well, after all the “fun” and sun, I was in no mood to cook much. But we were hungry come dinner time. And maybe even in need of a wee bit of comfort. Ricotta chard gnocchi to the rescue! Wait, don’t stop reading internets! I’m not suggesting that whipping up some homemade ricotta gnocchi with chard in them is a quick and easy dinner. I’m suggesting tossing packaged gnocchi with ricotta and chard makes a quick one-dish supper.

Ricotta chard gnocchi

1 big bunch chard (I prefer Swiss, but red was used in the dish above and rainbow or golden works just dandy as well)

1 500 gram/1.1 lb. package gnocchi

About 1 cup ricotta

Parmesan

Salt, pepper, a bit of butter

Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Meanwhile cut out the stems of the chard leaves (make a “v” to get a fair amount of the stem). Chop stems and set aside. Cut leaves and set aside. Do not set them aside together. We don’t want them fighting.

Add salt to make the boiling water salty. Add chopped stems. Cook until almost tender. Add gnocchi and chard leaves. Cook until gnocchi is tender (usually about 2 or 3 minutes–look on the package). Drain throughly, put in a large bowl and toss with the ricotta. Add salt and pepper to taste. Butter a baking pan (8×8 works, but slightly larger is better–I use a 9×12 Spanish casseula, but a gratin dish works well too), put gnocchi in it, sprinkle with plenty of freshly grated parmesan. Broil until brown and crispy on top. Serve to happy campers.

… um, kill each other with knives?

Just kidding. Dashing Husband and I cooked a lovely meal together last night. (There’s the silver lining of this broken-hand business.) He cut, I stirred. Ernie? He played with Baufix–his new German wooden toy obsession–in the dining room.

Behold! Our creation:

Yes, it looks a lot like the gratin from the other night. What can I say? We’re on a role. And we need to use the cool-weather and cold-storage crops we’re getting (along with lettuces and asparagus) from our CSA. This was sort of a bubble-n-squeak, I think. Leeks (2), green garlic (3), and cabbage (1 small) chopped and sautéed in an ample amount of butter (3 tablespoons?) and salt (1/2 teaspoon?) until tender, with a bit of homemade chicken broth (1/2 cup) added along the way. The chopped red potatoes (5) were stirred in, more salt added along with some freshly ground black pepper, and the whole thing thrown in a 375° oven. After about 30 minutes, when everything was tender, I made a command decision–with some slight initial reservation but eventual consensus from my co-cook–to top the whole thing with freshly shredded cheese (about 1 cup of mixed varieties found in our refrigerator–this is a time to use what you have) and stick it under the broiler to get dinner on the table. The cheese made the dish. On that, we agreed.

While that baked and I helped Ernie make a Baufix truck, Dashing Husband braised some red chard with anchovies and harissa:

SO DELICIOUS. Cut out the stalks of a bunch of red chard. Chop stalks and leaves separately. Sauté two minced oil-cured anchovy filets and any oil that cleaves unto them until more fragrant than they start out as. Add stalks and cook, stirring, until they’re a bit tender. Stir in a tablespoon or two of harissa and 1/2 cup water. Cook, stirring, a bit to combine everything. Stir in leaves and cook (covered) until delicious, which you’ll dedect by the meltingly tender texture of the leaves once they properly submit to the heat. Add salt to taste before the whole thing’s through.

Still under the weather plus my husband had a dinner meeting. You know what that means! More pasta for Ernie! Yes, my son’s fantasy of an all-pasta diet made headway last night as he dug into a bowl (well, three) of orecchiette with parmesan. Nothing else. Not in the fantasy. He’ll eat pasta with various sauces, but never as a first choice. No butter! No olive oil! Why are you ruining it? Just plain, cooked, dry pasta with grated parmesan. He prefers to grate the cheese himself. You know what? I prefer that too.

Our “farm box” arrived overflowing with delights, including the ever-popular “farm carrots” which were munched on during dinner preparation. Ernie pulled out some lovely golden chard when allowed to choose the vegetable we had for dinner. I then promptly over-hot-pepper-flaked it when sautéeing it with garlic and hot pepper flakes. “Too spicy” was Ernie’s assessment. I liked it, but had to agree.