Composed salad with homemade bread

Rather than making our usual salad, we followed a recipe from Chez Panisse Vegetables, which asked for us to stew onions with wine, oil, slices of lemon, and fresh herbs/spices (whole garlic cloves, bay leaves, pepper corns), and then to add cauliflower florets. The cauliflower is cooked on heat only until it's just starting to turn tender, but then the stew is allowed to cool and refrigerated overnight before serving. We served the cooked lemon slices as garnish on the salad, and for the rest of the salad we included stewed beets, canned whole sardines, and green beans blanched in the onion stewing liquid.

We also made a whole wheat baguette, and set out butter and a wonderful Italian goat cheese that our friend M had given us.

Lunch: small lettuce salad with home-grown cherry tomatoes, Oregon cooked salad shrimp, baked beets, and kalamata olives

Salad with beets, potatoes, eggs, shrimp, celery, carrots, and heirloom tomatoes

Roast goat

Long-time readers of this blog know that a few years ago we were fairly committed vegetarians — I used to be the kitchen manager at a vegetarian/vegan co-op! But we have in the last few months started eating fish at every meal, and "lapsing" further: pork from our CSA, rabbit in Spain. I think we're currently not so much "vegetarians" as "Farmers' Marketarians".

To this end, for our second and final dinner with my dad in Eugene, we brought home two and a half pounds of leg-of-goat from the Eugene Saturday Market. We also bought potatoes, for mashing with garlic from my parents CSA; beets, onions, and carrots, for roasting with the goal; and green figs, for pickling. Yes, pickled figs: a week ago or so, B's uncle took us out to eat at Revival Bar and Kitchen (the new restaurant started by the owner of Venus), where I ordered the goat, and it was served with pickled figs. So, while I was out getting my hair cut, B began by bringing to a boil equal parts water and vinegar, with salt and whole cumin, and pouring the mixture over quartered figs packed into a jar.

Then he prepared the roast. (Did I mention that B did all the cooking, and made it all fantastic?) He chopped the root vegetables and layered them in a glass baking pan. We had some shallot-and-sage butter from the previous night, and he used it to stuff and tenderize the meat. The roast and a bouquet garni followed, and then red wine. He baked the roast for about an hour, basting it regularly. He added about half the figs near the end of cooking, and the acidity provided a nice counterpoint to the sugars in the root roasted root veggies.

Finally, B mashed some potatoes with the roasted garlic from the previous dinner. My dad broke out a particularly nice bottle of wine for the occasion, and we had a wonderful dinner.

Picnic at the airport

Last weekend we visited my dad in Eugene, leaving Thursday evening and returning Sunday. Our flight from Oakland was delayed almost three hours, which was annoying. But it wasn't as bad as it could have been: Oakland International Airport is reasonably comfortable, with free wireless, lots of plugs, not too many people, and a decent (if airport-priced) wine bar.

We had planned on a small picnic at the airport and then desert when we got home, although the latter meal turned into wine and olives at the wine bar. The picnic was wonderful, though. While B taught his morning class, I put together two small composed salads in disposable tuperwares. In the salad we had sliced armenian cucumber, heirloom tomatoes, beets, corn cut from the cob, olives, capers, hard boiled egg, basil from the garden, and shallot vinaigrette. To complete the "appetizer picnic", I also sliced a wedge of gouda and gathered up some crackers. If only I had thought to pack the camping wine glasses, we could have bought some wine at the already-mentioned wine bar to have with dinner! Next time.

Salad with fingerling potatoes, beets, garden cherry tomatoes, shrimp, capers, and a soft-boiled egg

Niçoise salad with homemade bread

Composed salad with soft-boiled eggs, cooked shrimp, beets, orange cherry tomatoes, fava beans, yellow haricots verts, niçoise olives, and anchovies

The haricots verts, favas, and cherry tomatoes are from the garden. The baguette is homemade.

A fantastic way to cook eggs for salad is to bring water to a boil and simmer the eggs for only five to six minutes, depending on the size. Plunge the eggs into ice water to help the protein retract from the shell. Carefully crack and peel the eggs without blemishing the white, and serve them whole. The idea is that the yellow is still completely runny, so that it mixes with the lettuce when the you begin to eat the egg during the meal. (This is particularly nice for composed salads in which the lettuce is very strongly dressed — since I don't dress the rest of the veggies much, I tend to mash a clove of garlic per person into the lettuce's dressing.) For a yellow that's completely cooked through, I like to simmer my extra-large eggs twelve minutes (less time for smaller eggs).

The best way to cook beets for a salad is to remove all but half an inch of stem, wash well, and wrap the beets unpeeled and still wet in foil. Bake for at least an hour (you'll need the oven hot for the bread anyway), and then plunge in ice water. The skin should slough off easily.

We've tried various tins of anchovy fillets, and been somewhat unhappy with all of them. Part of the problem is that each tin has about twelve fillets, whereas even three fillets per person is generous. Our only really good anchovies have been from the cafe at Berkeley Bowl, but they only seem to come wholesale in tins of many hundred. In any case, this tin of anchovies-rolled-around-capers was OK, but very meaty-fishy tasting, and too overpowering for our tastes. If you have a favorite inexpensive anchovy fillet, please let me know.

Composed salad with fennel, beets, and prawns

B and I just got back from two weeks in Spain, so expect a post and slideshow soon. In the meantime, there were a few meals from before we left that must be posted.

For this composed salad, we cooked the beets the way we've learned to from the Alice Waters books: wash the beets well but do not peel them, and wrap them tightly while still wet in foil; place in a hot oven (whatever temperature you need for the rest of your baking that day) and bake for at least an hour, and better an hour and a half; transfer the hot beets to a bath of ice water, and the skins should easily slough off; cut the beets and place in a bowl with some salt and vinegar (no oil!) to marinate for at least half an hour. We boiled fennel greens to make a thin broth, and poached the peeled fennel hearts. We hard-boiled eggs, and also butterflied and briefly boiled prawns. To complete the salad, we dressed lettuce in a garlic vinaigrette, and garnished everything with some capers, kalamata olives, anchovy fillets, and sprigs of fennel. We served the salad with fresh home-made whole-wheat baguette, parsley butter (lots of parsley, some butter, some garlic, some salt, some lemon juice, processed in the cuisinart), and a French rosé.

Salade Niçoise

Composed salad with deviled eggs

Picnic in the city

We regularly attend concerts at the San Francisco Ballet. On 27 March, before seeing The Little Mermaid we had some extra time to wonder the city, and took the requisite tourist pictures:




Rather than spend exorbitant amounts of money for mediocre food at the restaurants near the Opera House, we have taken to bringing in picnics. Sometimes the picnic is nothing but two dozen oysters and a baguette and brie, but on March 27, we brought in all the fixings for a composed salad. Namely:

• Lettuce dressed in a light vinaigrette
• Golden beets, marinated in red wine vinegar
• Rockfish, steamed and broken into chunks, mixed with diced red onion, sliced carrots, and capers
• fresh raw extra-small oysters to shuck

You can't beat the dinner, and it's hard to beat the view.

Salade Niçoise

In the salad:

• Chioggia beets, cooked in the oven, then halved and marinated in salted red wine vinegar
• Asparagus, cut on the diagonal and roasted in the broiler in a marinade of balsamic vinegar, olive oil, salt, and black pepper
• Eggs, hard boiled 12 minutes, then plunged in ice water, peeled, and halved
• Nicoise olives
• Anchovy fillets
• Lettuce tossed in a garlic vinaigrette.

As we usually do, we served the salad with fresh bread and a rosé.

Salade Niçoise

In early Spring, the farms around here start selling tiny artichokes. The best are chokeless and tender enough to eat raw. Trim off all the outer parts and submerge immediately in lemon juice to prevent discoloration. The raw artichokes end up tasting a bit like apples.

Also in our salad we had beets, defrosted frozen green beans, broiled butterfish, canned anchovy fillets, and olives. The lettuce was tossed with a garlic vinaigrette, and we paired the meal with a rosé and a ciabatta.

Composed salad with beets and deviled eggs

In the fish salad are: spring red onions, capers, purple carrots. The potatoes are boiled and tossed with garlic and dill, as usual. There are two types of beets — golden and the usual deep red — and are prepared the way Alice Waters says: wash but do not peel, remove stems leaving about 1 inch, bake in a covered pan with a splash of water about an hour, plunge in ice water, remove skins and chop, and let sit in vinegar (no oil) and salt for at least half an hour. The deviled eggs are very simple: along with the yolks, the filling has some prepared mustard and some paprika, and that's about it.

Coyote Point Picnic

I've home for a very short weekend visit right now, and I forgot my camera. Last night we made catfish (breaded a fried: mix flour, garlic salt, paprika, and cumin; coat fish fillets in flour mixture; mix up an egg and coat fish in egg; coat again in flour; heat oil in a pan; cook fish on each side) with tartar sauce (Wildwood garlic aioli, minced capers, minced celery, minced red bell pepper, minced chives). Tonight we will have pizza.

The best dinner I've had in the last few days, however, was my picnic with B before the flight. If you ever find yourself flying out of SFO in the early evening, I highly recommend bringing a picnic and heading to Coyote Point Recreation Area, a small park maintained by San Mateo County, only nine miles south of the airport (fifteen minutes if you avoid the freeway). The park is beautiful, and there is a very fun small museum.

I did all the cooking for the dinner the night before, and packed the cooler in the morning. The dinner consisted of separate salad dishes to have together. We have:

• Lettuce salad with shaved fennel and a light red wine vinaigrette.
• Beets, cooked the Alice Waters way. Wash but do not peel beets, and keep about 1 inch of stem attached. Place in a covered baking dish with a splash of water. Bake for at least an hour. Move beets to an ice water bath, let cool, and then the skins will slough off easily. Quarter the beets, sprinkle with salt, and douse liberally in vinegar (I used a mix of balsamic, to highlight the sweetness, and some red wine vinegar, for the acidity). Let marinate at least an hour, or overnight in the fridge.
• A fish salad, which was the highlight of the meal. Bring a few inches of water to a boil in a very large pot, with a colander set in as a steamer. Steam a fillet of rockfish until the fish is cooked through, about 10 minutes. Break the fish apart into large pieces, and pick out any lingering bones. Meanwhile, coarsely chop fennel and spring red onions. Mix together the fish, the vegetables, and some capers, and maybe just a touch of olive oil, but not too much. Depending on how many capers you include, you probably do not need any salt or vinegar. When the salad marinates overnight in the fridge, the fish ends up picking up a wonderful fennel flavor.

The colors in the salad were wonderful: the fattier parts of the fish and also the red onions pick up the same reds and purples as the beets, and the greens and whites pair nicely, for a very attractive plate. To finish the meal, we had baguette and a brie, and carrots as a pallet cleanser. As with most picnics, serve this one with your favorite red wine.

Pink salad dinner

We didn't quite have this beautiful pink dinner on Valentine's Day: we had it on the 15th instead. We peeled and chopped the beets and baked them covered with a splash of water until tender. Then we tossed the beets with red-wine vinegar and the rest of the salad: fresh lettuce, blue cheese, walnuts, croutons (stale baguette, cubed and tossed with olive oil, salt, and dried herbs, and baked in the broiler), and some minced shallot. Serve with a rosé. (And be sure to find rosés that are not too sweet. The Red Bicyclette is a good choice, but most cheap California rosés and "white zinfandels" taste like bubblegum.)

Homemade linquini with beets greens, leeks, capers, and smoked fish

February 11: Salad with Beets

Wash, peel, and slice beets, and place in a single layer in a glass pan, with a splash of water. Cover with foil, and bake 30 minutes, until beets are tender. Let cool and have in a salad with a shallot vinaigrette.

The rest of the meal consisted of turmeric rice, dhal (not pictured), and a curry of carrots, romanesco broccoli, and radishes.

January 21: Roots in cast iron