The Dinner Files

I had these yummy critters last summer at Magnolia gastropub here in San Francisco. I took a picture and swore to figure out how to make them… someday. Well, that day was last night. Two major factors played into the timing. First, we got yet another pound of green beans in our farm box and had failed to use some we already had, making the hydrator unusually green bean-heavy. Second, my dashing husband had to work late. You see, while he will eat and enjoy a fried food item, he will also spend the time during which he is eating it talking about how he doesn’t like to eat fried food and tries to avoid fried food and how fried food makes him feel (a subject on which he can sometimes go into unsavory detail). He has never asked me not to fry anything, because that’s not his way. He’s not bossy like that. But he also would never just not eat the delicious item coming out of the kitchen. Nor would he ever just eat a few and not say anything. It’s just not his way. So I spared us all and never fried the green beans.

Until, of course, last night. Ernie loves green beans. I love green beans. We both have little to no problem with the fried. So I had a plan. I would make a tempura-like batter but somehow use buttermilk. Thank god I was on the phone with crispy-treat lover and cooking-question trouble shooter Juliet Glass. She is also a big fan of buttermilk. She heard “buttermilk fried” and immediately thought of chicken, which, if you weren’t already focused on the green beans would be the natural place to go with such a phrase. When you buttermilk fry chicken you soak it in buttermilk and then dredge it in flour. She suggested I do that. I did. It was good. So good that is all I had for dinner. I’m not kidding. I just had a big old plate of fried green beans sprinkled with plenty of salt. I ate and ate until I was full and then I ate nothing else. It was delightful. Ernie ate a mess of them too. Then he tucked into the can of chicken noodle soup Juliet’s son had sent him in a care package (for the no longer broken arm). 

You want to hear the worst part? I ate fried green beans again for lunch today. You see, I hadn’t measured very carefully and I can’t get decent pictures in the crappy light in my kitchen after the sun goes down. So I really had to cook them again, to test them and get a good picture, don’t you know. And then there they were, all fried and golden and crispy and salty. And they seem to know my name. They called to me. Just like the Demon Lover.

Want to make them yourself? I highly recommend you do so. I posted the recipe over at Local Foods.

Say it with me: green bean slicer. Now, I am not a gadget girl. No herb mincers for me. I even threw out my pastry cutter because 1) it takes up space, and 2) I hardly ever used it, because 3) my fingers work better than it ever could.

But when I saw this green bean slicer–yes that is it’s stated purpose on the package–at Community Thrift about 5 years ago (I was accompanying my Very Tall Cousin Sam who needed a jacket because he had lost his; he also needed a pair of socks for a job interview and talked a woman at a shoe store into opening a package of three to sell him a single pair), I couldn’t resist. If I remember correctly Very Tall Cousin Sam and I both thought the $1.75 price tag was a bit out of line, but I just had to see if it worked.

It does. If you want really thinly sliced green beans. Which, when I make green beans with onion paste from Madhur Jaffrey’s Invitation to Indian Cooking (p. 150, my copy just opens to the page since my dashing husband adores them so), I do. So it’s a match made in heaven. Except for the 357 days a year when I don’t make green beans with onion paste. Then I have to make space in my limited cupboards for a truly absurd gadget.

The green beans were part of a glorious meal. Again, I was cleaning out the fridge, but I felt like cooking. Ernie was home because he had broken his arm in two (2!) places the afternoon before (yes, if you’ve worked in pedatrics or at an emergency room you know quite well he fell off the monkey bars) so I was home with him all day and by 3 felt the urge to cook. Cook a lot. Ernie wondered if guests were coming. Luckily, when I start cooking dinner at 3 in the afternoon I can log it as “work” as long as I come up with a recipe or two in the process.

So with the green beans (to which I added some diced red pepper–both sweet and hot), we also had some spicy sauteed okra (I declare myself a genius for brainstorming this recipe), potatoes in cilantro “sauce,” some spinach in yogurt, and spicy lemon pickles. Everything but the pickles had ample amounts of cumin seeds. Yum.

Grilled chicken is a tricky thing. Or so people would have you believe. When I was at Sunset there was a lot of interest in grilled chicken. To clarify: based on marketing surveys and reader feedback, the editors were convinced that the readers have an insatiable appetite for grilled chicken recipes. They were also convinced that grilling chicken was difficult, or at least that there were many “secrets” and “tricks” involved to make the chicken delicious. I would say, no, there are no tricks, just facts. You need to:

1. Buy good chicken–a creature that was allowed to be a chicken when it was alive, scratching and pecking and being outdoors now and again
2. Pre-salt or marinate said chicken
3. Grill it slowly (medium indirect heat for about 30 minutes for breasts, an hour or more for whole birds)
4. Let it sit 10 to 15 minutes (up to 30 minutes for the whole bird) before you cut into it

That’s it. Follow that advice and, quite frankly, you can even overcook it a bit and it will still be juicy. Whole chickens stay juicer than pieces; bone-in pieces stay juicer than meat left to fend for itself against the flames.

Oh! You wanted me to tell you how to make hormone-laced factory chicken taste good? Now that would involve some tricks. That you’re going to need to make taste like something besides chicken. The chicken flavor left that stuff a long time ago.

My parents followed my method method last night. The chicken was outstanding. I have never had a juicier piece of chicken. Never! I drizzled some steamed green beans with a mint-chili powder dressing and tossed the salad with an avocado vinaigrette (1 mushed avocado, 3 Tbsp. olive oil, 1 Tbsp. lemon juice, 1 Tbsp. red wine or sherry vinegar, 1/2 tsp. Dijon mustard, plenty of salt and pepper) to have alongside the chicken. We also had a baguette my mom had brought up north, stuck in the freezer, and heated up before dinner. I always forget how well bread freezes. Very well, it ends up. Very well indeed.

Rice and double beans, really. I bought the green beans at the jalapeño-less wild-rice-saturated market the other day. They looked good. Then I got them home and started trimming them. No snap. They were old. Not in-the-store-too-long old; they were on-the-vine-too-long old, with that slightly woody texture thing starting to happen. The upside to that is the beans inside were bigger and taking on a toothy starchiness that I rather like, in its way. So I cooked them a little extra and marinated them overnight. They were edible. Even tasty. But again, in their way. Qualified, circumstantial deliciousness.

I made a simple rice pilaf–sautéed a chopped onion in olive oil with salt until it started to brown, added a few cloves of chopped garlic, added a cup of long grain white rice, sautéed that until the rice looked opaque, added 2 cups of water (broth would have been better, but I had none), brought it to a boil, covered it, reduced heat to a simmer, and let it sit for 15 minutes, turned off the heat, left it covered and sitting there for 5 minutes, uncovered it, fluffed it, and voila! Oh wait, I almost forgot: I also added a handful of orzo to the rice right before adding the water. It makes it a bit like homemade Rice-a-Roni.

You like the look of that dal? Here’s how to make it: devote a decade or so of your life to studying French history, drop that and become a “food writer,” take about 5 years figuring out how that works during which time you spend six months writing for what may have been the worst magazine ever published and another six months at an overpriced cooking school where you learn very little and get even less professional help, be lucky enough to have a friend who gets a job at a large and well-respected regional lifestyle magazine who leaves said job and recommends you as a replacement, have another friend corporate-savvy enough to tell you how to ace interviews, ace the interviews, work there for almost three years, bust out as a freelancer, end up on Amy’s Kitchen PR list, receive an unsolicited box of their new canned soup varieties, bring said soups to the family cabin because you’re never going to try them at home, open the can of “Indian Curry Lentil Dal,” heat it up, and serve with rice pilaf and marinated green beans.

Necessity in the mother of invention. Last night my need to use the green beans that came in last week’s farm box, a bunch of mint, and an old, half-wrinkled jalapeño I found in the crisper inspired me to create the best green beans ever. Steamed green beans tossed with a minty vinaigrette in which the jalapeño and a few cloves of garlic were puréed. I already posted it over at Local Foods if you want the exact recipe. I’m thinking it might be even more delicious if the chile weren’t quite so dessicated….

Pressing deadlines and a fridge full o’veggies meant we had this very odd vegetable stew for dinner last night. I made the mistake of referring to it, briefly, during the cooking process as “couscous” (cuckoo!), because I used the spice mix I made to make a most delectable dish inspired by Algerian restaurants in Paris and published in a formal way in Sunset magazine, so Ernie cried when I served it to him and it had, alas, no couscous. There was too much of this… stew that needed to be eaten (oh, that’s always a lovely way to think of dinner) to fill up on couscous (wow, I was fun last night, wasn’t I?). Plus, I had no time to be making couscous. Oh. That’s just sad. That means I didn’t have five minutes to pull together.

If for some reason you want to make a sumer veggie stew, make the ras el hanout in the Sunset recipe. Sautée 3 small summer onions, chopped, in olive oil with plenty of salt. Add 5 cloves minced garlic and an inch of freshly shredded ginger. Add more salt. Add 2 dried chiles (arbol!) and 1/2 tsp.saffron (I’m still working on the collection from when two of my dearest friends were Spanish historians and made regular pilgrimmages to Iberia and returned with scads of cheap saffron; now they’re both married with two boys apiece, so no more free saffron for me!). Sprinkle in 2 tsp. of the ras el hanout, sautée a bit more. Add bout 4 cups chicken or veggie broth (an aside: anyone have a good recipe for vegetarian broth?). Bring to boil. Add a mess of chopped green beans and zucchini. Bring to a boil again. Add chick peas, some leftover cooked potatoes, and kernels from 2 ears of corn. Again, boil. Stir in 5 chopped dry-farmed heirloom tomatoes. Add more salt. Serve topped with harissa and preserved Meyer lemons from the tree in your backyard, or, you know, whatever you find in the back of your fridge.

I love Romano beans. In a way they are just big, flat green beans, but they are oh-so-much-more. I cooked up the first batch of the summer last night. Beans, olive oil, garlic, salt. That’s it. Oh, and a bit of water. The “recipe” is over at Local Foods. You won’t believe how good these are. It might be difficult for some of you to cook the beans long enough–you’ve been brainwashed into thinking that all vegetables should always be served crisp-tender and anything else is “overcooked.”

I hereby posit that any given vegetable can be cooked many ways. I also declare that varying cooking methods and times is a way of changing the flavor and texture of vegetables so that they taste different and you don’t get too sick of them when they’re in season. So try these “overcooked” beans. Then tell me what you think.

(Oh, we also had boiled corn with butter and spaghetti with the pesto leftover from the soupe au pistou. During the 2 hours that encompassed dinner time, Ernest also ate 2 hard-boiled eggs, a glass of orange juice, a glass of milk, 4 packages of seasoned seaweed, 4 “slices of parmesan cheese cut up on a plate,” 2 farm carrots, about 1/8 or 1/4 of a mini watermelon, and a Wallaby yogurt. He’s only 5. What are we going to do when he’s a teenager?)

Over on Local Foods I’ve called it “Summer Vegetable Pesto Soup,” but you and I know it’s really soupe au pistou, don’t we internets? It’s sort of the ultimate San Francisco summer dish, since it uses summer veggies but is, well, a soup and thus hearty and warming, in its way. I used chick peas instead of fresh shelling beans because I haven’t come across fresh shelling beans yet. I would get a bit put-out, but then I’d look like a brat. The rest of the country waits for corn and here I am demanding my shelling beans.

Oh, and now I’ve gone and reminded myself of my poor Midwestern brethren in Iowa with their sandbags and potentially failed crops. I am a brat. I take it all back. I’m grateful for my skinny zucchini and vine-ripened, non-salmonella-infected tomatoes, not to mention delicious green beans marinated in a red onion-y vinaigrette (recipe at Local Foods).

Plus, my son took this awesome picture of me tonight. His little hands can’t hold still long enough for an in-focus picture (focus is way too conventional for little mister “Look Mama, I took a picture of the floor!” anyway), but as age is setting in, I find I don’t find the gauzy-filter effect.

‘Fess up: Who else has the brightly striped lime green apron from Ikea?