The Dinner Files

Can we all agree that cleaning artichokes completely sucks? I mean, there isn’t anything fun about it. You can’t even get all meditative because the minute you do one of those thorns is going to embed itself under a fingernail and torture you for days after wards.

So those artichokes above – which were tasty delicious, by the way – were perhaps not the freshest and most divine of all artichoke specimens I’ve ever encountered. They were tough and fibrous, so cleaning them was extra super sucky. It took forever to clean just four of them.

Luckily, I passed the time with my hands-free and a friend in Seattle. We were strolling along, exchanging news and thoughts about kids and parents and husbands and friends and selves, when I quite rudely interrupted her by yelling “fuck.”

I know, classy.

She kindly asked what happened. I explained that I was cleaning artichokes and a thorn attacked me. She said quite firmly and with great conviction that she never, ever, under any circumstance, cleans artichokes.

Never.

I just might have to join her. The thing is, these artichokes really were crazy delicious. But, as I found upon a second cooking, you can get a similar result with a method that leaves the labor happily in the hands of the eater. Both methods are included below.

Lemon garlic artichokes with plenty of mint

To clean the artichokes or not? That decision is yours.

4 to 6 large artichokes (depends on how many people are being fed and how many artichokes they want to eat; the method and sauce amount really works for the range just dandy)

1/4 cup fresh lemon juice (1/2 cup if you’re cleaning them)

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil, plus 2 tablespoons

1 teaspoon salt

3 clove garlic, minced

12 sprigs mint, leaves minced

Trim the stems of the artichokes and clip off their thorns if you like the people for whom you’re cooking, or go ahead and really trim them into fully edible specimens: set up a bowl of cool water with 1/4 cup of lemon juice in it, trim stem, pull off outer leaves until a solid 2-inch section of them are very light green (really almost yellow), cut off green tops of the leaves, use a paring knife to cut off all the dark or medium green stuff around the stem and heart, cut in half lengthwise and scoop out the heart, put in the lemon water and repeat with the remaining chokes (this guide to cleaning baby artichokes shows everything except scooping out the choke; this step of cleaning artichoke hearts shows scraping out the choke).

Put the 1/4 cup lemon juice, 1/4 cup of the olive oil, salt, garlic, and half the mint in a saucepan large enough to hold all the artichokes with 2 cups of water and bring to a boil. Add artichokes, stem-end down (or in whichever way you can if you’ve cleaned and halved them), cover, and reduce heat to maintain a steady simmer. Cook, undisturbed, until the bottoms of untrimmed artichokes or the entire cleaned artichokes are tender when pierced with the tip of a knife.

Lift artichokes out of the cooking liquid. Transfer trimmed artichokes to a baking or serving dish and full artichokes to individual serving bowls.

Increase heat to boil the liquid left in the pan is reduced to about 1/2 cup. Add remaining 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Pour evenly over artichokes and sprinkle artichokes with remaining mint. Serve warm, at room temp, or even chilled. Any leftovers are to die for.

This is the new favorite chicken at my house. It’s a lot like eating a salt lick. In a good way.

I used pitted black olives here partly because they are so much easier to eat but more in order to use some of the lovely pitted naturally cured olives hanging out in my cupboard that some company at some point sent me to taste. I like them a lot but I’m also way too lazy to get up right now, go into the kitchen, pull the stool over, climb up onto the counter, and root around on the top shelf where live those cans to remind myself of the exact name brand, which is why I’m always delighted but surprised when people send me samples.

Pancetta olive chicken

Note that ideally you salt the chicken and let it sit overnight. A few hours, or an hour, is better than nothing, though. This both seasons it and helps the chicken hold onto its own juices and stay moist. It might seem counter-intuitive, but science makes it so.

1 chicken

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 head garlic

3 thick slices pancetta, finely chopped

1 cup white wine

Black olives

Cut the backbone out of the chicken (save it for stock!) and cut the chicken into 10 pieces – 2 drumsticks, 2 thighs, 2 wings, and each breast half cut in half. Put in a baking pan, sprinkle with all over with salt, cover, and chill overnight.

Heat oven to 450. While oven heats, peel the garlic cloves.

Drain off any juice that’s accumulated in the pan and pat chicken dry. Rub chicken with olive oil. Scatter garlic and pancetta over and around the chicken. Pour wine into the pan. Roast until the chicken just starts to brown, about 20 minutes.

Add black olives to the pan and roast until chicken is cooked through and the skin is well browned, about 30 more minutes.

Serve with plenty of bread to sop up with winy garlicky bacon-y olive-y chicken juices.

Have you figured out that I love leftovers? I love having food already cooked and ready to eat. I love that many dishes taste better after a little time to themselves (stew being a classic example). I love that some dishes transform into whole new creatures as leftovers (you know how enchiladas sort of morph into a real casserole after sitting around for a day?). And I love that others offer themselves up to be turned into completely new creations, but with so much less fuss than the original dish. Leftovers? To me they are convenience food at its finest.

So what’s with the yummy looking cake, you ask? It’s a winter squash spice cake made with leftover roasted squash. I used my new secret baking weapon: whole wheat pastry flour. It’s not as heavy and dry as whole wheat flour, but it has some whole grains unlike all-purpose flour. I find I can substitute it 1-to-1 for all-purpose flour in most recipes – certainly any for homey cakes or cookies like this.

The hungry boy wanted noodles for dinner. Since I had no brilliant idea for dinner anyway, noodles it was. I tossed them up with some leftover dino kale with chiles and garlic from the other night. I put plenty of parmesan on Ernie’s and doused mine with the last of the leftover garlic yogurt sauce from the dumplings last week. Just yogurt, garlic, salt. How can it be so delicious? And yet it is. Even more so, some may say, from the extra garlicky-ness it exudes from having sat around for a week. Garlicky enough to be deliciously tempting but also garlicky enough to make a person think twice about drowning her pasta with a solid 1/2 cup of it if she had any chance of getting lucky.

Alas, my dashing husband is traveling. So I slept with cold feet and garlicky breath. Really garlicky. Garlicky enough to sort of bother me. I could hardly wait to wake up and quell the stench with coffee.

May I highly recommend keeping some tamales in your freezer? My lord, but they make a quick, delicious dinner when you’re maybe not so much in the mood to cook or otherwise inspired.

While Ernie would like to live on tamales and other carb-heavy fare alone, my dashing husband and I had both had late, big lunches. So, instead of tamales my aunt threw in a plastic bag for us to take home after my cousin’s graduation party last weekend (thanks Nancy!), we tucked into this lovely spring salad. Mixed baby greens, thinly sliced raw asparagus, and a generous few handfuls of fava beans (see how to double-shell them). Each item tossed in a vinaigrette made from 3 parts left-over artichoke-curing olive oil and 1 part left-over vinegar from pickled garlic before the whole thing was sprinkled with some slightly over-toasted pine nuts. I used the last bit of that dressing, itself made from the last bits of the last jars of each from last year’s batches.

So Sunday’s complete insanity will pay off with much delicious vinaigrette as well as scads of impressive antipasti plates. That’s a real comfort.

I made green garlic pesto a few weeks ago. A lot of green garlic pesto. So I froze a few servings of it. Last night I pulled one out of the freezer, tossed it with some spaghetti and pecorino cheese, tossed a green salad, and dinner was made. Ernie started off with his “plain noodles with cheese” but quickly asked where “the green stuff” was on his noodles. I told him he never likes sauce on his noodles, so I didn’t give him any.

“But Mama,” he said, “I like green stuff. Not sauce. Green stuff.”

Can I quote you on that, kid?

The strawberry-eating portion of the family also enjoyed a bit of fool–mashed strawberries folded into whipped cream–at the end of the meal. Reports were positive. Requests for seconds were made. Seriously, you just mash berries with a fork, add some sugar to taste (and to help pull out their juice), whip heavy cream to soft peaks, and fold the two together. You could add grand marnier or some other liqueur to fancify it, but you really don’t need to and people will beg you for the “recipe” such as it is. Plus, it’s real purty.

As mentioned yesterday, we had some asparagus soup in the fridge at home. With some gremolata swirled in, it hit the spot tonight. We also pretty much finished off the cheeses I’ve been putting out at dinner almost daily for a week.

But the highlight last night was the salad. Red oak lettuce tossed with a vinaigrette made from oil in which baby artichokes had been preserved and vinegar in which garlic had been pickled. I’ll work on getting those recipes to you. It’s a ridiculous amount of work to go to to end up with this salad dressing–and I didn’t know the end point when I put up those artichokes or pickled that garlic–but I’d do it again. The vinaigrette is just that good.

Late yesterday morning I asked my little family, “What shall we have for dinner tonight, my dear loved ones?”

My beloved husband said, “Why don’t we have something fun?”

My heart sank. With every ounce of my being I suppressed the tidal wave of annoyance and visions of more homemade pizza or a bunch of shellfish or anything else time-consuming, messy, or both as I asked back in a gentle, loving tone, “Like what?”

“I don’t know… Good Frickin’ Chicken, maybe?”

And that, dear reader, is why I married this man. He meant fun for everyone–me, his obviously exhausted wife*, included. And Good Frickin’ Chicken is both frickin’ good and fun for the whole family. Why is it so fun? Because, the chicken is so frickin’ good. And this family loves frickin’ good chicken. Plus, it comes with herby pita bread and a thick garlicky “sauce” that is more spread than sauce and which I demand “extra” of but have never had the guts to ask for what I really want: Hey, instead of that tiny dab, which, garlicky as it is, should suffice for any human being, could I get more of a soup-bowlful amount? Enough to eat as a main dish that I could simply garnish with bits of your frickin’ good chicken?

Ernie loves GFC–both chicken and pita bread, which is interesting because, officially, when asked, the child doesn’t like bread. That’s right. He claims to not like BREAD. (And you know what that means. If he doesn’t like bread he couldn’t possibly like sandwiches. Yes, now that you mention it, this categorical food aversion is terribly convenient. A joy, really.) But he does like pita and tortillas. To sum up, as observed by my former editor, he likes “ethnic flat breads.” A chewy, crusty baguette? Hearty walnut bread? A homemade spiced pecan loaf? No thank you. But good luck to anyone who stands between my boy and a piece of naan. He will use his giant eyes and long lashes and take you down.

*The insomnia plague has targeted me again. I’m not sleeping and the effects are starting to show, as was remarked several times today by both son (“Mama, why are your eyes like that?”) and husband (“Are you okay? You look really tired. I don’t mean it in any bad way, but are you okay? You just look so tired.”).

Last night, after I whipped up a little broccoli and walnut pasta with plenty of garlic and pecorino, we sat down to dinner. Ernie, my four-year-old, pulled a thin sliver of garlic out of his dish.

“Mama, what’s this?”

“That’s a piece of garlic, sweetie.”

Piece of garlic goes into young lad’s mouth. Young lad chews and swallows with determination.

“I like garlic,” he proclaims proudly and with the pointed enthusiasm of discovery , “I’m a garlic man.”