The best part of winter in California is the citrus. Every year my family and I celebrate the season by ordering a box of tarocco blood oranges from Frog Hollow Farm for sorbet. Their juice makes a delicious dessert: sweet, tart, refreshing and cold as the snow we never have here in San Francisco.
It's winter, so our CSA boxes are packed with citrus: oranges, lemons, grapefruit, to name just a few. Most varieties are great for juicing, salads and main courses, too, like risotto! I never would have guessed that barley and citrus make beautiful dinner together, but they do, especially when paired with other winter superstars like arugula, walnuts, barley and chicken stock.
Posole from Nopalito restaurant is one of my favorite lunches ever, so I thought I'd try making it myself. This version of posole has pork in a green broth, instead of beef in a red broth, and is quick to prepare, as long as the hominy has been cooked ahead of time or comes from a can.
One of my kids will always eat her oranges, while the other waffles between sometimes and maybe. But if I cut off the peel, pith and membrane that holds all the good parts together, he eats them up. This is one of my favorite ways to get us all some vitamin C and fiber in the mornings. Thank you Marcus Samuelsson, for teaching me the easy way to cut citrus fruit into segments!
I love a roasted chicken. My entire family will eat it without complaint, there are always leftovers and a crockpot of stock can be made from the bones. Lately I've been investigating how other people roast their chicken, and in this case Marcus Samuelson's adaptation of his Grandmother's traditional recipe was the perfect thing, to celebrate my own children's Grandmother.
I don't usually love bitter greens in my salad, but this one is quite good. It turns the more typical mix of grapefruit and a less disagreeable flavor (like butter lettuce or avocado) on its head, with frisée playing the part of cranky old endive. Orange, fennel and balsamic vinegar join the bowl to sweeten things up. A combination of cara-cara and blood oranges work especially well here.
This dish puts an Indian spin on orange-beef, which I would usually consider Chinese. But adding Madras curry powder makes it something altogether different, a one-dish meal with the homey warmth of curry and a sour-sweet kick.
The problem with beets is that they turn everything pink. So why not do it deliberately? This salad is fast to put together and serve if the beets and eggs are cooked ahead of time. Which I didn't mind doing before breakfast, because dying eggs pink is fun.
Roy Choi's memoir L.A. Son, the story of how he came to create the world's most popular taco truck, is a crazy fun ride of a read. In it he describes cabeza (aka beef cheek) tacos as "some of the best things this planet has to offer as food." So of course I had to try them.
My kids love blood oranges because they are a little bit disgusting. “Mommy! Get some really bloody ones!” By this late date in winter they are no longer interested in eating plain old oranges: only the red variety or fresh squeezed juice of the orange one will do.
Homemade polenta can be an intensive affair, it requires half an hour of near continuous stirring. Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone has a walk-away version, but it needs to simmer for an hour and a half, after two separate pots of water are brought to a boil, one at a time, on top of each other. That takes more pre-planning than I can handle.
We had a wonderful lunch today - and the best part? I didn't cook it. My husband, who likes meat, cooked a leg of lamb and a pot of beans. He made fennel and blood orange vinaigrette. My friend Laure brought cream puffs. All I had to do was go out into the garden and snip some lettuce and arugala. Luckily, I have a nice raincoat, because it was wet out there.