Composed salad with beets, fingerling potatoes, shrimp, capers, heirloom tomatoes, and hard boiled egg

Brunch: baked eggs in tomatoes

Select unblemished, firm early-girl tomatoes, and hollow them out: remove the stems and scoop out the seeds and pulp. Sprinkle a little salt on the inside of each tomato, and set them in a muffin tin. Crack an egg into each tomato, and sprinkle the top with grated parmesan or romano cheese. Bake under the broiler about fifteen minutes: the goal is to cook the white most of the way through but leave the yolk runny.

Carefully scoop the cooked tomatoes (and any white the spilled out) out of the muffin tins, and serve in shallow bowls. Garnish the baked tomatoes with capers and nicoise olives.

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

Pan-fried perch with couscous and fresh tomatoes

Sometimes, we find ourselves with ingredients but absolutely no plan. Sometimes these are the very best dinners, especially when they also come together within a matter of minutes.

Mince a lot of garlic. Put half of it in a medium bowl, and the other half in a small pot with a well-fitting lid. To the small pot, add curry powder, cumin, raisins, and almonds. Add also a cup and a half of water, and bring to a boil. Remove from the heat and whisk in one cup couscous. Let the couscous steam itself, covered, off the heat for at least five minutes. Fluff right before serving.

Heat a little oil in a wide pan, and cook some thin fillets of perch, about two minutes to a side.

To the bowl with the garlic, add a sliced ripe tomato and a liberal handful of capers. Mix the tomatoes, garlic, and capers together.

Plate everything in the kitchen: fish, couscous on the side, and the salsa over the fish so that the juices run into the couscous.

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.

Salmon baked in parchment with tomatoes, onions, and capers

Prepare a salsa with one large jar canned whole peeled plum tomatoes (one of our best batches!), one red onion, greens of one spring onion, a large spoonful of capers, and some olive oil and black pepper. Check that your salmon steaks are completely descaled, and place one steak in the center of a large piece of parchment. Top with plenty of salsa. Fold up the parchment and staple it closed. Then fold the parchment packet up again in a large piece of foil. Bake in a preheated oven 15-20 minutes. Open up the packets on the plate, and enjoy!

Salade Niçoise

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

Tuna Niçoise salad; whole wheat baguette; lavender ice cream

It's my last night in Berkeley for a month — I leave tomorrow for Denmark, where I'll be studying at Aarhus Universitet. I'll miss my boyfriend a lot. So tonight, we made a particularly special dinner.

It started at the Farmers' Market, my last for a while, where we lingered at various stands and let ourselves be cajoled into buying prickly pears, roses, and most yummily whole wheat flour from Massa. I had been hoping they'd grind their wheat into flour, as we love their rice and wheat berry. They are charging $4 for a 2-lb bag, the same as rice; perhaps they'll offer a better bulk price if the flour catches on. As we found out tonight, Massa's flour is very sweet, with good flavor. Highly recommended.

In any case, in the kitchenaid with the paddle, combine 1 lb Massa whole wheat flour, 1 heaping Tbsp vital wheat gluten, 1 Tbsp salt, 1 Tbsp yeast. When the dry ingredients have mixed well, add 2 cups cool water, and mix until the dough has the consistency of cookie dough. Let autolyze 10-20 minutes, and then knead with the bread hook five minutes. Let the dough rise, and then roll into baguettes, coat with poppy seeds, and bake 25 minutes in a pre-heated 400°F oven. Let cool before serving.



The main course tonight was a tuna Niçoise salad. Rub salt and olive oil into the sides of a 1/2-lb tuna steak, cover with half a red onion and some carrots and celery, and bake 375°F for 20 minutes. Let cool.

The dressing for our Niçoise is a salad unto itself, and should be prepared with enough time to macerate. Combine in a medium bowl: 1/2 a red onion, finely diced; 2 carrots, thinly sliced; 2 small stalks celery, finely diced; 4 cloves garlic, minced; three canned anchovies, rinsed well and with their bones removed, minced; more capers than you can shake a stick at; olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and sherry vinegar, to taste.

Then prepare the rest of the salad. Pick and shell 1/2 pound beans from the garden; boil these 10 minutes, and then plunge the beans into ice water. Wash, remove the tips, and chop in half 1 lb green beans; boil 3 minutes and plunge in ice water. Wash 2/3 pound very small potatoes, cut in half; boil 10-15 minutes depending on size, and then plunge in ice water. Also fill a quart-sized yogurt container with orange cherry tomatoes; wash and de-stem these.

Separate the leaves from a large head of green romaine lettuce, and arrange the lettuce and veggies artfully in serving bowls. Now that the tuna is cool, slice it into medallions and place atop the veggies. Spoon the dressing over everything. Serve with whole wheat baguette and a Chardonnay.






We finished the evening with packing and lavender ice cream. I followed my standard method for making ice cream these days. Heat 2 cups milk in the double boiler, and steep 5 stalks of dried lavender for 10 minutes; remove the lavendar and fish out any stray flowers. Meanwhile, whisk together 4 egg yolks and 1 cup sugar (a little much for tonight, I thought; maybe 3/4 cup next time?). When the milk is flavorful, label a few Tbsp at a time hot milk into the eggs and whisk, repeating until half the milk has been incorporated into the eggs. Then transfer all the egg mixture into the double boiler and heat, whisking, five minutes. Allow the mixture to cool, first out and then in the fridge, for a few hours. Then add 1 cup cream, process, freeze an hour or two to set, and enjoy!

Eggplant stuffed with cheese and tomato sauce

On Wednesday, we found ourselves at a bit of a loss. We had two small eggplants, lots of tomatoes, some sweet peppers, a full bunch of basil, and that's about it. After much cookbook reading, we walked to Berkeley Bowl for cheese.

Wash, remove the greens from two eggplants, slice them in half, and bake them face-down on an oiled pan for at least 40 minutes.

In a medium sauce pot, sauté thin-sliced onions in salted olive oil. When the onions are translucent, add diced tomatoes, and cook until the juices have rendered. Add capers, remove from the heat, and set aside.

In a medium bowl, mix ricotta, grated provolone, and a little grated romano. Add minced basil and oregano, and one egg. Or, in our case, the garlic aioli and the leftover egg-white from the previous day.

When the eggplant is cooked, remove it from the heat, end let cool until handleable. Scoop out the inside of each eggplant, and save, because eggplant is yummy. Fill each eggplant with the cheese mixture, and place the eggplants in a baking dish with high sides. Cover everything with the tomato sauce, and if like me you have leftover everything, fill in around the eggplant with the cheese and tomatoes. Bake 10 minutes, so that the tomato sauce starts to bubble.

If you start with large eggplants (ours were very small), rather than stuffing half eggplants, slice the eggplant thin, salt each side and fry for a few minutes per side in oil, and then roll the cheese in the eggplant slices, cover everything with tomato, and bake ten minutes.

Pasta with sweet peppers, tomatoes, basil, and capers

January 20: Pasta

Seviche

Seviche is normally prepared with 3/8-inch cubed fish, and tomato juice makes up much of the sauce. Instead, we bought quarter-pound filets of sushi-grade snapper from the Berkeley Bowl, and soaked them all day in a small glass pie pan in the juice of three limes and three lemons. The raw fish turns opaque as if it had cooked from some reaction between the acid and the lemon juice.

We made a salsa consisting of a giant beefstake tomato, cubed, a small onion, minced, capers, fresh oregano from the garden, and olive oil. The seviche from Joy Of Cooking replaces the capers with chopped green olives, uses dried oregano, and adds cilantro and jalepeno, and optionally avocado.

On the side, we had a "Spanish rice": we cooked brown rice with paprika added to the water, then lightly sauteed the greens of a spring onion in olive oil, a small tomato, the rice, some turmeric, and a hint of ketchup.