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

Chicken Provençal

When B and I read Sassy Radish's recipe for Chicken Provençal, we knew we had to try it. So we bought a four-and-a-half-pound bird from Highland Hills Farm (who don't seem to maintain a web presence, but do produce organic free-range chicken, beef, goat, lamb, and boar). Riverdog, from whom we get our veggies, also produces chicken, which we haven't tried (they don't bring them to the Thursday market); we'd like to, because we think that Riverdog's pork sausage is even better than the (very good) sausage from Highland Hills.

Begin by combining vegetables — lemon (very thinly sliced), tomatoes (in pieces), onions, whole garlic cloves, prepared olives, herbs — and a little salt in a 9x13 glass pan. Let the veggies cook and render their juices in the oven while you disassemble a chicken. Once the veggies have cooked down, snuggle the chicken parts amidst the vegetables. Cook the chicken another twenty to forty minutes, until the top is browned and an instant-read thermometer measures the interior temperature of the chicken to be at least 175°F.

Serves many. Save everything for a chicken soup later.

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.

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.

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.

Lunch: caprese salad and cappuccino

Nicoise salad with grilled tuna

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

Salade Niçoise

Salade Niçoise

Composed salad with deviled eggs

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.

Salade Niçoise

As you well know, I have been slow to post pictures of dinners. On the 21st of February, we had a traditional salade Niçoise, pictured above. The lettuce was dressed in a sherry vinaigrette with garlic. The potatoes were washed and halved, boiled ten minutes, and then dressed with olive oil and mashed garlic and dill seed. Butterfish was broiled unseasoned, and then made into a fish salad with red onion, carrot, celery, and olive oil. Hard boiled egg, niçoise olives and prepared anchovy fillet finishes the presentation.

Pizza with spinach, feta and mozzarella, and sundried-tomato-and-olive tapenade