Eating Dirt

Mark Bittman's Chopped Salad

Last year, for my birthday, I received Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. It is a big and impressive book, and because of its heft and lack of fancy photographs, I lumped it into the same go-to-first category as Irma Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking and Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. My friend Shelley does go to it for everything, but I have yet to be won over by its recipes. When my Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone was on hiatus, out on loan to a friend, and I had to make black eyed peas for thirty people on New Year’s Day, turning to Bittman’s book only made me nervous. 

His Black-Eyed Peas, Southern Style looked similar to Madison’s Southern Style Black-Eyed Peas. But they weren't quite right.  For one thing, her recipe is vegetarian and his is not. So I nixed Bittman’s ham hock and went on with the process. A ham hock offers salt, maybe a bit of porky flavor, but not all that much else...leaving me perplexed about what was missing. All I could come up with were a bay leaf, chipotle pepper and some allspice.  Which was close, but now that I have VCE back at home again, I see that it is not one but three bay leaves her recipe calls for, celery, thyme and, the real key, garlic. Also missing were the chipotle, allspice and green pepper, which should be left out because the flavor of cooked green pepper overwhelms everything under the sun.

But I do love Mark Bittman for his New York Times articles. His blog is great, not something I’m all that good at keeping up with, but his food section writings are the bomb. That is why I force my family to get dressed early and forgo breakfast most wednesday mornings, so we can walk over to the Irish market around the corner, pick up my paper, head to Arizmendi for pastry and a loaf of bread and then ride the muni to school. Two papers a day is just too much, so we only receive the Times on Sunday, when the kids can fight over the color funnies (luckily they are easy to separate into two pieces) while I attempt to read the important parts at high speed. As for the Chronicle, I pull out the Food and Home & Garden sections to read monday morning, when such slim pickings arrive on our doorstep that we rarely bother to bring them in. 

This year, Bittman stole the show with his first Sunday article Chop, Fry, Boil: Eating for One, or 6 Billion. Sensible, informative, insightful and inciting, he included three recipes that can be tweaked to prepare a year of seasonal dinners, trading in and out whichever ingredients are at their peak and choosing the recipes - stir fry, rice and beans or salad - according to your mood. So a few days after his article appeared, and a few days after we’d vowed to try to eat up every bit of produce that darkened our door this year, cabbage was on our mind. I like green cabbage - it is good stuffed with pork and baked, it makes a nice soup with potatoes and chicken stock, it sautes and takes soy sauce well and is excellent with chicken tacos. But we still never seem to eat it all. So a salad of raw cabbage to accompany lentils and rice, with a little bit of roast chicken sounded like just the thing. 

And it was - lemon juice is a magical liquid. Tossing your cabbage and other fresh salad items in a tablespoon of it, along with a little garlic and some olive oil can make most anything (especially lentils and rice) into a great meal.

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Cabbage Salad (adapted from Mark Bittman’s Chopped Salad):

1/2 small head green cabbage, cored and shredded or very thinly sliced

1 carrot, shredded

1/2 red or yellow bell pepper, diced

4 radishes, thinly sliced

1 handful parsley leaves, stems removed

2 Tablespoons fresh lemon juice (or red or white vinegar)

7 Tablespoons olive oil

1 garlic clove, minced or pressed

salt and pepper to taste

Put the cabbage, carrot, pepper, radishes and parsley in a big bowl. Then put the garlic and lemon juice into a separate lidded container. Let it sit for 5-10 minutes. Add the olive oil, salt and pepper. Snap down the lid, then pick it up and shake it to mix the dressing. Pour 1/2 the dressing over the salad, then toss it gently with tongs. Taste, and add more dressing if necessary. Serve immediately

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Quick Eggplant Chicken Curry and How to Cut an Onion

We came home late from school, again today. I started Sesame Street at 5:00, wanting the kids to be eating before 6:00, hopefully finished by 6:30, which is easy enough, since they either gobble dinner down or don't eat it at all. Today's scheduled recipe was eggplant curry with the leftover chicken from tuesday's paella. But, I hadn't salted the eggplant beforehand, and now twenty minutes of letting salty eggplant sit and drain into the sink seemed like a bad idea.

I have never understood the need for salting eggplant. In nearly every cookbook written before 2000, it says that one needs to salt eggplant and let it sit for twenty minutes, in order to get the bitterness out. But here's the thing - whether I salt and sit the eggplant or not, it doesn't taste bitter. Maybe the bitterness gene has been bred out of modern eggplant, or eggplant from our CSA is too fresh to be bitter, or perhaps I just don't have the capacity to taste the bitter in eggplant. 

Don't get me wrong - I don't love eggplant and have some special tolerance for bitterness. In fact, in years past, I've been perfectly happy to get only one or two from the CSA box per summer. That is really quite enough for me. But this year, we've had at least ten eggplant so far, and the season is just gearing up. Last week I roasted four of the ten, letting them collapse into a mushy brown paste, then mixed it with roasted garlic, salt, olive oil, and brought it to the preschool picnic. On crackers, the mush was very good. Even for someone who doesn't like eggplant.

Earlier in the week we ate something with chickpeas and tomatoes and basil and eggplant, from The Kitchen Diaries, but it was merely OK. Tonight I used one more for the curry, which was pretty tasty. Then four new ones arrived, glistening and globular, in today's produce box. What to do?

But back to the curry. It tasted good and was ready to eat in about 45 minutes, required no prep ahead or special ingredients. I served the kids' dinner up on a four partition plate: rice in the large section, three pieces of chicken extracted from the curry and half a banana on the two medium ones, a dollop of curried vegetables in the smallest space. Plus a cup of milk and their own access to the salt shaker, with my observation. All of it was eaten, except the veggies. My daughter ate one bite in exchange for a second helping of rice. To me, that's success.

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Quick Eggplant Chicken Curry (adapted from Camellia Panjabi's 50 Great Curries of India):

For the rice:

2-3 cups basmati rice, depending on how much your family will eat

1 cinnamon stick, broken into 2 pieces

3 whole cloves

2 cardamon pods

pinch saffron

2 Tablespoons butter

salt (if you use unsalted butter)

For the curry:

4 tablespoons canola oil (or some other mildly flavored variety)

1 onion, finely chopped

2 garlic cloves

1 half inch piece of ginger, peeled and finely chopped (or 1 teaspoon powdered ginger, if thats what you have)

1 teaspoon ground coriander (or substitute 2 Tablespoons curry powder for this and the next 3 spices)

1/2 teaspoon turmeric

1/2 teaspoon ground cumin

1/2 teaspoon paprika

1 eggplant

2 poblano peppers (or other mildly spicy variety)

1 or 2 zucchini or other summer squash

2 tomaotes

leftover raw chicken, white or dark meat (as much as you want, 1 chicken breast's worth is plenty)

cilantro to garnish

salt

First of all, start your rice. The easiest thing to do is use a rice cooker. Add as much rice as your family will eat, 2-3 cups or so, add the required amount of water for your cooker, and drop in the cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, and saffron. Then turn it on. When the rice is finished, add the butter and a little salt (if the butter is unsalted). With a little sugar this could probably be dessert, but my kids love it with dinner. You can use plain old basmati if you'd rather.

Warm the oil in a really big pan. You can use a wok if you don't have one. When you cut the onion, follow the directions my good pal Chris taught me, after he spent a month learning to cook somewhere in Italy with his Mother: cut the onion in half horizontally. Slice a bit off the round end of each half, so you can get under the skin easily, then peel the papery skin off. For each half, lay it cut side down on your cutting board. Slice the onion, as thin as you want (thicker for chopped, thinner for finely chopped and minced) in one direction, holding it together as you go. Then turn the onion 90 degrees, and slice it again, the same thickness as before. Now, because of the layers of the onion, you are done. Pick it up and throw it into the pot of hot oil.

Give the onion a stir or two, set the heat to medium low, and let it cook while you prep the rest of the ingredients. Be careful not to let it burn, just let it get golden brown. If it gets that color before you are done prepping, just turn the heat off. 

Cut the eggplant into 1/2 inch or so pieces, put it in a colander in the sink and toss it with about 2 tablespoons of salt. Or don't, if you're not worried about the bitterness. Core and remove the membranes of the peppers, then chop them into 1/2 inch pieces. Chop the zucchini into 1/2 inch pieces. Chop the chicken into 1/2 inch pieces. Cut the tomatoes in half horizontally, then squeeze them over the sink to remove seeds and juice. You might need to squeeze them fairly hard, depending on ripeness, but don't squash the flesh. Then chop them into 1/2 inch pieces. Finely chop the garlic, then peel and finely chop the ginger. 

When the onions are golden brown, add the garlic, ginger, tomato, pepper, spices and a cup of water. Rinse the eggplant in the sink, shake the colander to get off the excess water and add it to the pan. Turn the heat to medium and let it simmer for a while, about 10 minutes or so. When the eggplant is soft, add the chicken and zucchini. If the pan is getting dry, add another cup of water or so and stir. Taste and add some salt. When the vegetables are as soft as you'd like them to be, and the flavors are as blended as you'd like them to be, it is done. Feel free to add more water and salt along the way. 

Serve over rice with chopped cilantro as a garnish.

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Paella!!!

Today was a really good day. It started with a successful drop off of my daughter at her first day of Kindergarten, followed by a chicken fried steak with hash browns and a bloody mary. My son had a cheeseburger topped with grape jelly. Then a little bit of back to school shopping, an episode of Sesame Street, an iced coffee at Blue Bottle's sunny Kiosk location and after picking up the Kindergartener, a madcap dash through the Castro to Bi-Rite for ice cream, where the salted caramel is absolutely fantastic.

Four new Kindergarteners accompanied me to the ice cream shop, plus four of their younger siblings, four additional parents and three strollers. We set off at a trot through the streets to Dolores Park, where the sun was warm, the grass green and small wiggly dogs numerous. The kids sat still long enough to devour their treat on a low window ledge adjacent to the creamery, and then it was time to go back. It must have been a combination of being sun blind and sugar drunk that made us think herding twelve people, eight of them under the age of six, along 18th street was a good idea, but I suppose its important to have adventures. There was trash to kick and flowers to eat, old people to giggle at and hundreds of front stoops to climb on. Mission High School was there to explore, and so many dank bars to peer into, each spilling its own individual beery stench out onto the sidewalk. There was at least one sex toy shop - "Mama, what's that?!!"..."I'm not sure dear, I think those are decorations" - and a multitude of hair salons, flower shops, cafes, possible medical marijuana clinics and other curiosities along the way.

By the time we arrived home it was after five, hours later than when I'd planned to start cooking dinner, which was to be a great grand paella to celebrate with. Actually, we were having paella because the CSA box delivered a brown paper sack of red peppers last week, a key ingredient that we don't have very often. I've been itching to make paella since last summer's Canal House Cooking featured a recipe cooked out in the backyard, in the biggest iron pot in the world, propped atop cinder blocks over a fire on the grass. As much as I would love to risk burning the neighborhood down, the fog at our house kept us inside and me at the stove. But not for very long, because paella is a remarkably quick dinner to make.

I had no idea, really, that the dish most restaurants ask for extra time to prepare is nearly as easy as boxed mac and cheese. Well, plus a little chopping and slicing here and there. From start to finish it took me forty-five minutes. Thats less time than it took my kids to finish watching their second episode of Sesame Street. If only there was something so wonderful and easy to be made from zucchini and tomatillos.

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Paella (adapted from Canal House Cooking volume 1):

Serves 4-6

This is really infinitely adaptable, you can change the ingredients and the amounts you use, I think the real soul of the dish is the manner in which you cook it. This recipe makes enough for four people, but you can easily adapt it to feed more. You don't need to use all of the chicken, just as much as you'd like. Save the rest for stir-fry, and the bones to put in the crockpot overnight with a quartered onion, two celery sticks cut into 3 inch chunks and one carrot cut similarly. Fill the crockpot with water and let it cook on low overnight. In the morning,  strain the stock into freezer jars and put them in to freeze once they have cooled.

a chicken, cut into parts, skinned and chopped into 2-3 inch pieces, lightly salted

chorizo, a big link or two sliced into bite sized pieces

shrimp or mussels, as many as you want 4-6 per person is probably good

8 cups chicken stock

1/2 cup olive oil

1 onion, chopped

4 red peppers, seeds and membranes removed, sliced into long thin strips

1 clove garlic, chopped

rice (arborio works well, any is probably fine), 3 cup

half bunch parsley, chopped

1 teaspoon pimentón (smoked paprika)

salt

Find the biggest pot you have, preferably cast iron. Put it over medium-high heat on the stove and warm the olive oil. When it is hot (toss in a piece of onion to check, it will sizzle) add the chorizo and chicken pieces. When they are beginning to brown, add the onion and peppers. Let that cook until the onion softens, then add the garlic, parsley and rice. Give it a stir to mix everything together. If your stock is unsalted, add some salt to it (at least a Tablespoon) and the pimentón. Then add about 3/4 of the stock to the rice pot. stirring it a little, but not enough to disturb the bottom layer of rice. It should turn nice and crusty, eventually.

Drop the shellfish on top, then let the paella bubble for about half an hour, or until the rice is tender (that means the crunchiness of raw rice is completely gone). If it gets dry before the rice is tender, add a bit more stock. Once the rice is tender, turn off the heat and cover the pot with clean dish towels. Let it sit for 15 minutes, then serve and eat!

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Strawberry Pocky Sticks

This was one I just could not pass up today. I guess it says a lot, that I backpedaled halfway down the block after the "Giant" part of the Pocky package I'd seen in a window of Sakura made it into the active regions of my brain. Larger than normal food strikes me as an unusually American passion, I can't imagine people in Japan would want to trade their delicate packs of pocky for one of these huge curling iron sized items. But who knows. Maybe its the next big thing.

For those of you not familiar with Pocky, it is a sort of long, thin, dry biscuit of the type that come in long tubular shaped packages from the U.K., coated with chocolate or a strawberry stuff similar to the "yogurt" that sometimes covers American pretzels. Being Japanese, Pocky has a convenient handle that is free of chocolate or strawberry coating, so that your fingers do not get smudged. 

I first discovered Pocky back in the nineties, during my time working at a tech company affectionately called "The Rocketship" by our CEO, who was later jailed for investor fraud. Or maybe it was his right hand man who went to prison, I don't remember. But that detail is not important. What is important is the glitter and sparkle of the dot-com days. Everyone was rich back then, and we were all high on life, along with a variety of other things. 

My desk butted up against that of Ms. Pinky Weitzman, a woman who I believe is now playing electric fiddle for a band somewhere in New York City. She was long and lean, terrifically stylish with platinum blonde hair and pale creamy skin. "Daahhling..." she would croon, "You just cannot put your code in my database. It wheel not work..." Careening wildly about with a pocky stick dangling like Cruella Deville's cigarette, she would offer me one with a flick of her wrist and disappear back behind the screen of her monitor. Later in the day we would all head out to the incredibly sketchy bar next door for a gin and tonic, and months down the road she and another pal introduced me to my future husband.

Dinner tonight was uneventful - grilled seabass, corn and tomato relish on toast and a sort of zucchini salad. When I complained that the zucchini was too oily, my husband told me "that's because its Greek. Did you know that in Greece almost forty percent of their calories come from olives?" He liked the zucchini quite a bit. The kids loved the fish, toast and grilled corn, but wouldn't touch the rest. 

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Smoky Corn and Tomato Relish (adapted from Tori Ritchie's Tuesday Recipe):

2 ears of fresh corn

1 lb tomatoes

1 garlic clove, minced

1 small red onion (or white or yellow if thats all you have)

1/8 teaspoon pimenton (smoked paprika)

1 semi-spicy pepper, an anaheim chile is a good candidate

2 Tablespoons olive oil, plus more for grilling

1 Tablespoon fresh lime juice

salt and pepper

Shuck the corn, then oil the outside lightly and lay the ears on a hot grill. Also put the tomatoes and pepper on the grill, slice the onion in half, oil the cut side of each half and lay them on the grill too.. You can leave the tomatoes there for five to ten minutes, or until they get nice charred grill marks, and the other veggies for longer, until they are a bit charred on all sides (you'll have to rotate them every now and then). If you're making fish to serve alongside this, it is a good idea to put the fish on the grill when you remove the tomatoes, leaving the corn, onion and pepper on the grill while the fish cooks.

After removing the veggies, let them cool for a bit, then cut the kernels off the corn into a big bowl, slice each tomato in half and squeeze each half gently over the sink to remove the seeds. Next chop the tomatoes into 1/2 inch chunks and add them to the corn. Remove the skin from the onion and chop it into 1/4 inch pieces. Peel the skin off the pepper, slice it in half, remove the seeds and membrane, and cut it into 1/4 inch pieces as well. Mix the veggies together and sprinkle with a little salt.

In a small bowl, mix the olive oil, lime juice and minced garlic. Stir it into the vegetables, add some freshly grated pepper and taste for salt.  This should be served on toast, either while still warm or at room temperature.

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Zucchini with Harissa, Olives and Feta (adapted from Canal House Cooking Volume 1):

4 zucchini, sliced into thick rounds

a handful of cured olives

1/2 cup coarsely crumbled feta

a small handful of parsley leaves, chopped

rind of 1/4 preserved lemon, chopped

1/4 teaspoon caraway seeds (or a combo of fennel and cumin seeds)

1 clove garlic

juice of 1 lemon

2 Tablespoons harissa paste (you'll find it at mediterranean markets and Rainbow Grocery)

5 Tablespoons extra virgin olive oil (the best you have)

salt

Bring a salted pot of water to boil, then add the zucchini and boil for about five minutes, until it is soft but not squishy. Drain the zucchini in a colander in the sink. Toast the caraway seeds in a frying pan over high heat, until they are fragrant, but before they start to color. Remove them from the pan and crush them in a mortar. Add the clove garlic and about 1/2 teaspoon salt and crush it all together with the pestle. If you don't have a mortar and pestle just chop it all finely. Stir in the lemon juice, harissa and oil. Season to taste with salt. 

Put the zucchini in a bowl, then add the dressing and toss to coat. Scatter the feta, olives, parsley and preserved lemon over the top and serve.

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Grilled Fish:

2 steaks (or the fillet with skin) of any white fish (about 1 pound)

1 lemon, sliced in half

olive oil

salt & pepper

Lay out your fish in a glass dish, then cut the lemon in half and squeeze half of it over the fish. Sprinkle a Tablespoon or so of olive oil over the fish, then salt and pepper it - about 1/8 teaspoon of each. Flip the fish over and do the same to the other side. Let the fish marinate while you prepare the grill and whatever else you have to make for dinner (I like rice and arugala salad with this). Cooking the fish should be the last step, aside from dressing the salad.

Heat up the grill to whatever temperature you use for fish - our grill is particularly wimpy, so I blast it up to high.  

Lay your fish on the grill.  Close the lid and leave it for five minutes or so, then check to see if there are nice grill marks on the fish. If so, flip it over onto the skin side. If not, let it cook longer and keep checking until the grill marks are there.  After flipping, shut the lid again and come back in five minutes to check for doneness.  I think the easiest way is to take a sharp knife and slice into the thickest part of the fish. When it is opaque inside, it is done. Serve the fish right away.

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Roast Chicken Tacos

Tonight's chicken tacos were the best dinner ever. In addition to both kids eating it, my daughter ate five radishes. Five!  I've been putting beautiful little radishes - in red, pink, purple - on the table and eating them with great relish around my family for years now, but I I've never seen her eat more than one tiny nibble, until tonight. Truth be told, I don't even like radishes that much. I used to worry about what to do with the bunches we would have stacking up in our produce drawer, and at one point resorted to making a sort of radish cream cheese spread, which actually is quite good on toasted brown bread. The funny thing about radishes is that the longer you keep them, the spicier they get. So depending on whether you like them hot or not hot, leaving them in your fridge for a while may not be such a bad thing. And now that the majority of my family will eat them, I can grow them in the garden!  

But I digress...the tacos were grand. Really delicious. Everybody loved them. They were easy, though I mistakenly waited to roast the chicken until after picking up my daughter from preschool, which seems to have led to one of her more massive bedtime meltdowns this evening. The chicken could have easily been roasted this morning, or even last night or the night before. Of course, then we would have missed out on the crispy salty roast chicken skin, which is one of the most delicious things on earth (it goes soggy after a night in the fridge), but I guess we could just eat it with breakfast or whenever the chicken comes out of the oven. 

When you're making this, be sure to get really good produce - a rancid avocado or flaccid radish would be a deal breaker. This afternoon my son and I picked up a chicken over at Alpha Market in Cole Valley, where they also had baskets of little organically grown apples that look like they came from someone's backyard, for $1.85. I know, I know, apples aren't really in season yet, but my son keeps asking for them. He is one of those kids who never wants to eat what we have a lot of. Then we swung by Fresh Organics on our way home, which is expensive as hell, but has great produce. I love shopping at Rainbow Grocery, but we cannot walk to it. When I'm heading east and staying close to home, these places are the next best thing.

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Roast Chicken Tacos (adapted from Canal House Cooking Volume 4):

1 whole roasted chicken

a dozen or so corn tortillas (taco size)

1 avocado (or more if your family likes them), peeled and cut into slices

1 fresh poblano chile pepper, roasted, peeled, seeded and sliced thinly

cotija cheese (as much as you want), crumbled

2 limes, sliced into wedges for squeezing

1 bunch fresh radishes, scrubbed clean with the leaves left on

salt

This recipe will feed four, with lots of chicken left over. If you want to feed more people just get more tortillas, another pepper, avocado and pepper. To make it into a really quick dinner you can roast the pepper and the chicken ahead of time. Both will keep for a day or two in the fridge. I suppose you could even buy a chicken already cooked at the market and bring it home, were that a more convenient option.

To roast the pepper, hold it with a pair of tongs over one of the gas flames on your stovetop. If you have an electric burner that heats up, you may be able to just lay the pepper on top, but I've never done it. Either way, be very, very careful to pay close attention to your chili, otherwise you may burn the house down. Have ready a small paper bag before you roast the pepper, and when the pepper is blackened and charred all over, drop it into the bag and close it. The pepper will steam a little bit, and in twenty minutes or so you can remove it from the bag and peel its skin off. Then slice it in half, cut out the stem, scrape out the seeds (being careful not to scrape out the flesh) and cut it into thin strips.

To roast the chicken, first make sure that it is brought up to room temperature before you put it in the oven. Otherwise, what should be an hour cooking time will become much longer. It takes at least a couple of hours out on our kitchen counter to warm up, but then we live in a place where the temperature is 55° on the first of August. At your house, the chicken may come to room temperature more quickly. You don't want to leave it unrefrigerated for too long in a warm location because bacteria will grow that can make you sick. 

After the chicken has been out of the fridge for however long seems appropriate, preheat the oven to 400°. Lay out some paper towels on a big plate, and wash your chicken in the sink, then pat it dry on the plate. Next rub the inside of the body cavity and the outside of the bird with salt. Lots of salt. If you want your chicken to look pretty, use some cooking twine (you buy it at the grocery store) to tie its legs together, as though it were crossing them. You can even throw a few fresh herbs in the body cavity beforehand if you want, thyme, parsley and rosemary give the meat a nice flavor. Place the chicken breast side up on a shallow oiled baking dish or baking sheet with high sides (at least a half inch or so) and put it into the oven. It will need to cook for about an hour, you can check it after 30 minutes, and when the skin is starting to look nice and browned, slice a knife into the thigh joint. If the juices run clear, then the chicken is done. Let it rest for a few minutes before carving.

Once the chicken is done, and the other ingredients have been prepared and put out in small bowls, call your people to the table and then toast the tortillas. Like roasting the chile pepper, lay a single tortilla over a low gas flame on your range for a few seconds, then flip it over using tongs. Once it is warm enough to fold in half, put it on a plate and pass it to the table, the lucky recipient can assemble their taco and eat it. Also like the pepper, be very careful not to let it catch on fire. Stovetop tortilla heating requires vigilance, and I'm willing to bet that your local fire department would recommend you use the microwave instead. Should one happen to light up, quickly grab it with your tongs, drop it in the sink and douse it with water. If the fire is too big for your tongs, grab the fire extinguisher that you (should) have installed close to your stove. Its easy to keep one hidden in a cabinet.

To assemble the tacos (all ingredients should be out on the table in small bowls, with the sliced chicken on a larger plate), just put a couple small pieces of chicken on the tortilla, then add avocado, roasted chile, cheese, salt and pepper, a squeeze of lime. Radishes should be eaten separately, you can sprinkle a little salt on your plate and dip it in that.

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Fideos with Greens

I have the most helpful children in the world, today. After a trip to the Bay Area Discovery Museum with their Dad, they came into the kitchen to assist me with dinner. The pasta needed breaking, the onion needed skinning, and my three year old son even chopped the onion with a knife from his play kitchen. He is a chef in training, I can tell, I just hope he doesn't grow up to do coke and smoke cigarettes like Anthony Bourdain. I'm sure their good behavior and unusual willingness to please had something to do with the fact that I did not see them all day long, other than meeting for lunch at Darla's down the street. Instead of taking care of my children this morning, I went to a class featuring Pam Peirce, author of everyone's goto book for gardening in the Bay Area, at the Garden for the Environment on seventh avenue.

After two information packed hours I now have new defense strategies for dealing with leaf miners and cabbage maggots and much more respect for planting things at the recommend time. My garden could be so much more fabulous if I could only get into gear and put seedlings in the ground earlier in the spring and summer, in the fall at all, and later in the winter. Perhaps the most exciting thing I came away with is how to avoid mildewy peas. They should be started from seed outdoors in the garden in November, so that they have time to produce food before the warmer days of late spring bring on the mildew, instead of just being planted whenever I feel like it (or manage to get around to it), as has been the case so far. I did, however, just pickup a packet of mildew resistant snap pea seeds from Rainbow Grocery the other day, so I'll give those a try with my usual method, for comparison. I'd be perfectly happy to eat snap peas year round, were that to happen.

At the end of class I got a great deal on brussels sprouts and romanesco seedlings, as long as I remember to plant them tomorrow after the two birthday parties and garage sale hosted by Gary Fisher my husband is taking us to. But the best part of all was the bunch of Magenta Spreen Pam Peirce gave me to take home. Related to spinach, packed with vitamins A and C along with other healthy things, I think it is usually thought of as a member of the Chinese Greens grouping of vegetables. I added it to the chard in today's dinner (you can see it above in the photo), and might have to plant some seeds of my own. I would love to serve up a salad with purple leaves. 

As for dinner, it was a big hit with my husband - he just loves whole wheat spaghetti, for reasons I am unable to comprehend. Next time I will use capelllini, whole wheat or otherwise, because the spaghetti takes too long to cook. The fideos was not such a big hit with the kids, but they did eat a few bites, which is a good start. Now that I know how much they enjoy preparing it, I'll definitely make it again. I have a feeling that leaving the greens out of their noodles would have had a different outcome, but really, I'm tired of that. They can pick it out themselves. At least then they'll get some of the residual vitamins, right?

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Fideos with Greens (adapted from America's Test Kitchen's 30-Minute Suppers):

3/4 pound capellini, broken into 3 inch pieces (whole wheat works, or spaghetti in a pinch)

2 Tablespoons Olive Oil

1 onion, chopped

5 garlic cloves, minced

1 cup dry white whine

1/2 teaspoon saffron threads

1 1/2 cups heavy cream

2 cups water

1 bunch swiss chard (or other greens), stems and leaves separated and chopped

1 cup drained jarred roasted red peppers, thinly sliced (if you happen to have fresh peppers around, roast them over your stove burner until charred, put them in a closed paper bag for a few minutes and then peel the skin off - viola! roasted peppers)

salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 375° with rack in upper middle position. Spread broken pasta on a cookie sheet and toast in the oven for about ten minutes, stirring once.

While the pasta is toasting, heat the oil in a dutch oven over medium heat. When it begins to shimmer, add the onions and a teaspoon or so of salt, cooking over medium low heat until they soften, about ten minutes. Don't let them take on too much color, though golden is OK. Add the chard stems and garlic and cook until fragrant, a minute or two, and then pour in the wine and add the saffron, simmering until the liquid is absorbed. 

Add the cream, water and pasta, then let it simmer until the pasta is tender. Add the greens (add chard and other tougher greens earlier in the cooking process, spinach closer to the end) and let it cook until they are bright green and the pasta is done to your liking. Stir in the red peppers and season with salt and pepper to taste.

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Lemon Chicken Salad

 To come clean, lemon chicken salad makes our dinner sound more special than it actually was. Ina Garten's recipe in The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook calls for grilled lemon chicken, which I'm sure is delicious, but was just not in the cards tonight. I used the remainder of our roast chicken from earlier this week, and while slicing it up, marinating it and then cooking it again on the grill was enticing, it was also too ridiculous. 

Instead I made the dressing (it contains lemon - and so justifies the name), tossed the chicken in it, added  some peas, snap peas, lettuce and sliced red pepper. Hooray - easy! And the most amazing thing?  My semi-vegetablephobe daughter cleared her plate. Lettuce with vinaigrette, chicken, toast, those are easy things. But red pepper and cooked peas? Never! Until tonight, when after four years and ten months of withholding dessert unless she eats the rest of dinner, my ploy worked. All for two stale Girl Scout shortbread cookies (what are those called? Samovars?). Unbelievable.

My son, on the other hand, wouldn't touch it. But that's fine with me. I'm sure he'll love the next thing his sister hates, it just seems to work like that. And he'll surely gobble down breakfast tomorrow.

I'm not terribly familiar with Ina Garten, my friend Rosanna gave me her cookbook as a gift a couple years back, and from time to time I'll make something from it. Lots of tasty salads, beautiful desserts I haven't tried (its so hard to put in all that effort when my kids won't get any, which meansI have to eat half of the thing myself). She has a show on the food network, but, I have to own up, I don't watch the food network. I'm sure that if I did, I would never actually do anything. According to her Wikipedia Bio, she is a former White House nuclear policy analyst. That is very interesting. Does this influence her cooking? Does she make funny political references on TV? Will someone just tell me so I don't have to watch it myself?

For dessert, strawberries. And stale cookies, for those who finished the meal. These strawberries arrived in our Frog Hollow CSA box, following closely on the heels of strawberries from our Eatwell Farm CSA box, which followed the flat we bought for my son's birthday party from the UCSF Wednesday Farmer's Market. And now there are some in the garden!

Life is good when we have abundant strawberries, and production should be ramping up over the next month or two. We picked our first ripe-ish strawberry from our garden today. It was not, sadly, the beauty I mentioned earlier in the week. That wonderful, perfectly shaped, rosy red glowing first berry of the 2010 garden disappeared. Completely. The entire thing. I fear it it was a raccoon, but hopefully one of the tree pruners who visited us that morning ate it. I really don't want to be battling raccoons for my strawberries. That sounds like a losing battle. 

This morning we also tried some little tiny white berries that are growing on our largest plant, which we bought last summer at the Ferry Plaza Farmer's Market. It is an alpine strawberry plant, and I thought that meant it grew tiny red berries, but it seems they are tiny white berries. For weeks these berries have been dangling seductively, each about the size of the tip of my pinky finger, not changing in color or size. Not even a blush of pink. This is the plant that for a while seemed to be raising its own colony of fruit flies. And finally, this afternoon, I clued in. 

We tried the berries, and the kids loved them, but I'm not sure why. Maybe they stayed on the plant too long. Maybe our sandy soil (do I dare even call it soil?) needs more compost. To me they were strawberry flavored, but not terribly sweet - a little bit bitter. Now that I know, I won't wait around for the next batch of berries to turn red, we'll snatch them up right away. Maybe that will sweeten them up.

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Lemon Chicken Salad (adapted from The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook):

leftover chicken (a breast and leg, or whatever you've got)

1 lemon

2-3  Tablespoons olive oil

1 red bell pepper, sliced

lettuce, cut into approximately 2x1" pieces, washed and dried

1 cup sugar snap peas, shelling peas (shelled) or a combination

salt and pepper

First of all, make the dressing. Squeeze the lemon into a measuring cup, then, holding your spoon over a jar with a lid (but off, right now), pour the lemon juice into the spoon then dump it in the jar, to measure the amount. After putting all the lemon juice in the bowl, add an equal number of Tablespoons of olive oil. Add salt and pepper until it tastes good to you, I like about 1/2 teaspoon of each. Put the lid on the jar, shake it up, and set aside.

Slice the chicken meat into small strips - about 2" by 1/2". put them into a small bowl, then dump half the dressing on top and stir it around. Let that sit while you chop and wash the lettuce and wash the peas. While you're washing, put a small pot with about an inch of water in the bottom on to boil. When it is boiling, add the peas. If you have a combination of snap peas and shelled peas, add the shelled peas first, then the snaps after about five minutes. Let it cook for another three minutes, then pour them out into a colander in the sink and then into a bowl full of cold water to stop the cooking process. After a few minutes drain them into the colander. Shake as much water as you can off the peas, then get out a really big bowl. Put in the lettuce, peas, peppers and chicken - pour it in to get all the dressing. Toss it with tongs, then, if more dressing is needed, add some and toss again. Serve immediately, and grate some fresh pepper over the top.

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