The Dinner Files

We ate dinner last week in an industrial space that had been re-done into a residence and studio that was so stunning that Ernest jumped up and down as he shouted “Mama, this is so cool!”

I had to agree. The space was cool, the company delightful, and the food perfection. I was offered the serving bowl filled this endive, herb, kumquat salad and took way more than my fair share. I have since made it three times for myself for lunch. I’m making it now, while the kumquats are plentiful.

Kumquat endive salad

This is the ultimate end-of-winter-almost-spring salad. The bitter chicory of winter with the bright tart sweetness of citrus and the fresh green promise of spring herbs. You might not be able to have a real spring salad yet – there is no asparagus in here, no hidden fiddleheads – but it’s starting to seem like you will if you just hang in there.

4 Belgian endives

about 10 sprigs parsley

about 10 sprigs mint

10 kumquats

2 tablespoons lemon juice (Meyer lemon juice works nicely here, too)

1 1/2 tablespoons vegetable or olive oil (nothing too strong!)

1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon salt

Cut off ends of the endive and pull apart into leaves. Cut leaves into bite size pieces, if you like, and put all leaves into a salad or serving bowl.

Pull off the leaves from the parsley sprigs and put them with the endive leaves. Pinch off the mint leaves and tear them into smaller pieces and add them to the mix. Cut the kumquats into quarters and throw them in.

In a small bowl, mix lemon juice, oil, and salt. Stir or whisk together an drizzle over salad. Toss salad to coat everything evenly with the dressing.

Bright and bitter. Some days that describes me to a T. Purple and salty. Sometimes that works too, although in a more metaphorical way. They all get right to the heart of this salad, which hits the bright and bitter, purple and salty notes perfectly.

Radicchio green olive salad

This is my riff on a salad made at Toro Bravo in Portland. Their version relegates the green olives to the side, as a spread atop two slices of grilled bread. I put all the flavors in the bowl. With some good baguette and tasty cheese, you have yourself a simple and utterly delightful dinner.

1 head radicchio

18 green olives

1 cloves garlic

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 tablespoons sherry vinegar or lemon juice (good both ways!)

Salt to taste

Lots of freshly ground black pepper

Scads of freshly shredded Parmesan cheese

Trim radicchio and cut or tear into shreds or bite-size pieces. Put radicchio in a large salad bowl.

Mince olives and garlic into a paste and then mix with oil, vinegar or lemon juice, and add salt and pepper to taste. (You can also do this in a blender, if you like.)

Toss radicchio with the dressing. Then add a whole lot of Parmesan and toss it again. Serve topped with more Parmesan.

I have a weakness for celery. Good, fresh celery that has some solid celery flavor to it. I love the crunch of raw celery in particular. For years we’ve made a gingery celery salad with red onion sliced into it much like one served at the once great Eliza’s restaurant on Potrero Hill in San Francisco. The other night a bunch of fabulously crisp celery beckoned from the fridge, but neither ginger nor red onion were on hand.

So I sliced the celery as thinly as my attention span at the end of the day would allow, tossed in a handful of chopped mint, a few thinly sliced green onions, and a few drops of champagne vinegar. Sprinkle on salt as you like.

Easy, healthful, and just the thing to counter the heavy, rich foods of winter.

It was so good that Ernest asked why, exactly, it was so delicious.

I explained how the salmon came from a place that is very good for salmon, that the people who caught it took such good care of it. He looked over at me like I was a complete fool.

“I don’t think that’s why it tastes good, Mama. I think it’s because you took it off the grill at the right time.” Snap.

If that’s your point-of-view too, here you go – I grilled it using this super-simple method: I heat the grill to a medium heat (you can hold your hand about an inch over the grill grate for 3 to 4 seconds), I sprinkle the fish with salt, I brush vegetable oil on the grill grate and the fish skin, put the fish skin-down on the grill, I cover the grill, and I cook it undisturbed until the fish is done to my liking (I go by 10 minutes minimum, and figure about 10 minutes per inch if it’s thicker than an inch). If the fish has no skin or you’re worried about sticking, simply do the same thing but put the fish on a piece of tin foil with plenty of small holes poked in it. With salmon I always buy skin-on and cook it directly on the grill to crisp it up because if there is anything my dashing husband and inquisitive son love more than crispy crunchy salmon skin I don’t know what it is.

You can add marinades or rubs or whatever you dig, but did you notice that the fish does not get flipped? That, I think, is the key to happy fish grilling. And those fish-grilling baskets? I don’t have a place to put one, but when I tried them in the Sunset test kitchen I was not impressed. Sure, the fish didn’t stick to the grill, but it always made a bit of a mess in the basket itself.

So I grilled this Copper River sockeye salmon using the above method and it turned out perfectly – we all agreed (partly because I took my dashing husband’s fillet off the grill way before mine or Ernest’s because he likes his salmon pretty much not cooked). And next to it? It’s this fattoush salad minus the feta and olives. The lemony dressing and cumin seeds were fab with the plain grilled salmon.

I am burying the lede. I forgot to take a picture of the lede. The lede should be (and in life was) the rib-eye steaks from our meat CSA. I defrosted a pair – they were cut a bit thin and I was worried they would cook up ill, but they were delicious simply grilled over a hot flame for 5 minutes on each side having only been lightly drizzled with a bit of oil and salted fairly liberally a moment before being laid ever-so-gently on the piping hot grill grate. I was so excited to eat them that picture-taking was the last thing on my mind as I sliced them diagonally and dabbed them with a garlic compound butter.

I served them to my dashing husband and young Ernest along with some grilled potatoes (with more of the butter slathered onto those, you can be sure) and the salad you see above. It was all very summery and satisfying. It was my last dinner in San Francisco for awhile. Ernest and I are headed to Northern Minnesota for a nice long stay again this summer. What draws us there? Well I could go on and on about the clear lake water for swimming and the extended family for fun and the walleye pike for eating but let me sum it up thusly: the living is easy and the child care is cheap.

I’ve made this mistake before. In fact, I’ve made it three times now. We have people coming to dinner and I think, “I know, I’ll make those Vietnamese salad bowls we ran in Sunset last year. They’re simple and delicious and people can assemble them themselves and make them vegetarian if they want to.” And then I do the shopping and start the cooking and remember why so much time passes between my making of Vietnamese salad bowls: they are amazingly time consuming to prepare. I didn’t even make the beef this time, but it still took over two hours to get everything chopped and fried and ready. The guests were super-duper appreciative and endlessly entertaining, but I was quite happy to simplify the concoction the next night as my dashing husband, Ernest, and I each assembled our own:

Rice noodles, spring salad mix, spring onion (green onions would have been too), mint, shredded carrot, and a sliced chile.

We would have used leftover tofu from the night before, except Ernest bogarted the entire batch after it had been passed around the table but once. It was very bad form, and he was chided for his poor manners, but we all couldn’t help but find it somewhat hysterical that a 6-year-old would want to scarf down over 1/2 a pound of black pepper tofu. Since we had no leftovers, I made another batch to round out our salads. I highly recommend it – it took a grand total of 10 minutes to make.

Many of you avid readers can make these yourselves from the picture above. But if you’d like to include the black peppered and saucy tofu or want more instruction, I’ve posted this Vietnamese Spring Noodle Salad recipe over at Local Foods.

While there were no garnishes/toppings leftover, that whole new batch of tofu and new round of rice noodles meant there were plenty of both sitting in the fridge the next morning. Somewhere in there I also found a bit more mint and some escarole leaves that looked great even though I could not for the life of me remember when I bought them. Since I like to live on the edge and have failed – despite many bouts with the f***er – to develop a healthy fear of food poisoning over lo these many years of cooking, I chopped up the escarole, heated up the tofu and rice noodles, put it all in a bowl topped with mint and the drizzle of nuoc cham left, and called it lunch. Yum. It really was the meal that just kept giving.

I recently went to TWO in the space formerly known as Hawthorne Lane. We were there for happy hour, trying to grab a dinner between various hectic schedules. We needed a place within a pretty small radius downtown that served food and cocktails at 5. TWO fit the bill. Bonus prize was their “5 for $5″ menu on offer this month. It’s pretty self-explanatory (or, really, just very well named): each week they feature five of their regular dishes sort of pared-down (I imagine fancy garnishes are removed, for example) for $5. We didn’t end up ordering any of them simply because there were things on the bar menu – warm pretzels, house-made lamb sausage in flakey pastry, various pizzettas – that sounded better to our crew, but the very possibility of such a deal excited the whole table. Correction: it excited the whole table except for Ernest. He was excited by 1) the aforementioned warm pretzels and 2) the root beer we let him order. “Mama,” he said, “this root beer is almost as good as in Minnesota.”

Along with the pizzas and sausages and cocktails we asked to be brought to our table, I ordered a salad that I couldn’t quite imagine how it would taste:

Shaved Brussels Sprout Salad
Pecorino Cheese and Marcona Almonds
Garlic and Chili Vinaigrette

I figured if it was good it would be really good. It was. The tender shaved sprouts were completley coated with chili and parmesan and the crunchy almonds were their perfect foil. So I made it last night. A little less cheese and dressing than the restaurant version, natch. And I remembered there being mint in the salad, which there was not at the restaurant but which there was in mine and it was fabulous. A fresh, bright note against the rich almonds and spicy chile flakes. Accomplished cooks out there can probably use what I’ve said about it so far to go forth and make their own versions. If you’d rather follow a recipe, I’ve posted the one I made last night over at Local Foods, where I’ve called it Spicy Brussels Sprouts Salad With Almonds and Mint.

A month ago I was whining on Facebook about not knowing what new to do with beets. I got some ideas from well-meaning folks, but in the end I think I just needed a little beet-break. Having had just such a hiatus, the rich earthy sweetness of red beets called to me anew. The dull dirt-red ords and their dramatic red-slashed greens stood out at the market, begging to be eaten. So I grabbed a bunch and did something I’d been thinking about for awhile: I cooked them together. Starting with the beets, then adding the stems, and finally the dark leafy greens that I cooked just long enough to wilt.

The resulting warm beet salad, as I’ve decided to call it, was a big hit at my house last night. We just grated a bit of meyer lemon zest on top and called it a day, but some hazelnuts or a bit of goat cheese – globs of fresh chevre or gratings of an aged version – would be a lovely addition if you’re feeling fancy.

My recent adventures in New Mexico and West Texas left me with a great many happy memories, including those of some fabulous meals. Yes, most of them involved chiles and plenty of cheese and meat, and I’ll be working on re-creating those soon. For now, however, I need some salads. And fattoush salad is on my mind. Why? Well, we had two excellent, if completely different, versions of it in Marfa, Texas.

Yes, two excellent if different versions of fattoush in Marfa, Texas. It’s a crazy place, Marfa.

The first one was at Cochineal, an amazing little place with a charming dining room and an even more compelling courtyard serving food I would happily pay to eat in San Francisco. The fattoush there was spare and, unlike any other version of the salad I’ve ever had, contained cauliflower.

The second was at Food Shark. Food Shark is a food truck that operates out of the old train station in Marfa, where there is also a farmers market on Saturdays.

Their fattoush was a bit more, um, Texan. Big, bold, filling. It had a crunchy, fresh falafel on top, a ton of well-oiled pita chips, and was drizzled within an inch of its life with tahini and yogurt sacues. It was the perfect lunch to re-vivify during the mid-day break of the Chinati Foundation tour.

My own version was inspired by both. I tossed romaine, peeled and seeded cucumber slices, chopped tomato, sliced red onion, plenty of chopped mint, and toasted pita pieces with a lemon garlic vinaigrette. I then topped it with feta, olives, and crushed toasted cumin seeds. I drizzled tahini on my dashing husband’s portion and garlicky yogurt on mine (Ernest perferred just lettuce and pita). We were out of pepperoncini, or I would have put a few on the side for good measure. Need more of a recipe? I’ve posted one at Local Foods.

I’m still sick enough to want soup for dinner, but I’m feeling well enough to make the soup myself. So I went back in time, just a bit, to my senior year of college when I ate a lot of egg lemon soup. A lot. It was cheap, easy, fast, and delicious. I could also stomach it if I happened to be hung over or completely stressed out or not eating dinner until 2 in the morning, and one or the other of those situations was pretty much the case for most of that year. (And yes, sadly, all three were known to create a perfect storm of nutritional need on a fairly regular basis.)

Back then I made it using bouillon cubes, for which I still have a sick fondness. But last night I defrosted some homemade chicken stock as the base, which does make it seem more nutritional, you know? But trust me, it works just fine with whatever form of salty cube or canned broth you may have hanging around your kitchen.

While I was flashing back,  I went ahead and doused the accompanying salad in avocado vinaigrette – another throw-back to college days when my various hippie classmates loved nothing more than finding new ways to use avocado, and a few – like this one – were worth remembering.