Potato Salad Yumminess

Do you sometimes see a recipe and know immediately that you have to make it (or a version of it)? I've been reading La Tartine Gourmande for the past couple of years, and while the recipes are gorgeous and aspirational, I haven't found myself making that instant decision.

With the dressing for potato salad, it was different. She combines lemon and olive oil, my salad mainstays, with mustard and tahini, and I knew that it would be a winner.

I didn't follow the rest of the recipe - for me, the dressing was a main draw.

Lightly boil new potatoes, leaving on their skins. Only cook them until they are soft and doughy as only potatoes can be (I am not the world's hugest potato fan, but there is something nice about the soft powdery doughiness that can be achieved through some methods of cooking).

Combine dollops and squeezes of all of the above-mentioned ingredients, plus salt and pepper, to taste. You will get a rich and creamy sauce to dress the potatoes in. The rest is up to you - add spinach, cress, parsley, cheese, mustard seeds - and you have some gorgeous picnic food, and even better work-snack food.

Summer Summer Summer

I'd better get this post out fast before summer disappears!

This is the summeriest dish we had the whole season - breaded drumsticks baked in the oven with delicious roasted corn on the cob squirted with lime.


If you haven't made breadcrumbs from scratch before, I recommend it. It was a doddle, and they were so fluffy and gorgeous, and baked up brown and crispy. Just zap slices of bread in the food processor, and you get the cloud of bread pictured above.


It's funny to say goodbye to summer here in SF, just as the sun makes its first protracted appearance...

Second Annual Summer Pizza Post

It's that time of year again - time to figure out what to do with a barrel of tomatoes, fresh spinach, and an enormous bouquet of basil:


Particularly if you don't want to eat pesto at the moment because of its tremendous garlickyness.

Time for another summer pizza!

I've learned a few things about pizza in reading about it between last year and this year. The most crucial of all - bake it in the hottest possible oven - I'm talking 500 degrees here, people. It will crisp your crust and brown your cheese and all will be well. You may need to dismantle your smoke alarm to do it, but it's worth it.

It's a Bird, It's a Plane...It's a Mound of Zucchini

Say you get a CSA. Say your family gets a CSA too, and they happen to be going out of town after taking delivery of their vegetable box. What do you get?

That's right. You get buried under an enormous mound of zucchini. And carrots. And leafy veggies. All needing to be eaten asap.

After the kitchen sink crisp, I decided to tackle the zucchini. They were shiny and green and didn't deserve to be left to rot.


(On a side note, when will they start delivering these veggies with their beautiful blossoms? I long to make battered zucchini flowers stuffed with cheese.)

One effective way to get rid of a lot of veggies fast is to boil them down into a soup.

If you're in a hot part of the country, you may wonder at how I can see a fresh summer vegetable and conjure up the notion of a thick and hearty soup. And I would ask you, have you been to San Francisco in the summer?

Everything you have ever heard is true. It's freezing. Let's just say that today, I am wearing one of my heaviest sweaters. No coat, but this is a sweater I would only wear in the deadest of winter in Boston because otherwise I would overheat.

Now you know how cold it is and how I can even think of making soup.

Oh, and if you fancy making this in your heat, refrigerate it. It makes a lovely chilled soup.


Curried Zucchini Soup (adapted from Everyday Food)

Ingredients:

1 onion

1 tsp curry powder

1 tsp garam masala

lots of zucchini

2 slices of bread

4 cups chicken broth

Fry up the onion in olive oil until translucent. Add spices until fragrant, then add the zucchini, bread, and chicken broth. Bring to a boil, then simmer until veggies are soft, 15 minutes. Blitz in the blender, perhaps run through the strainer, and voila. Or if preferred, refrigerate, and then voila!

A Quick Non-Summery but Delicious Detour

There's this restaurant close to work. Part unassuming, part over-priced, and all delicious. They make crispy pizzas topped with wild boar and fig, or squash and goat cheese, and a mean, unlean pressed Cubano which drips grease like a member of the T-Birds.

And happily for me, they also make breakfast. Not simply of the egg-and-cheese sandwich variety, but healthier fare like granola and steel-cut oats with banana and walnut.

I ordered the oats after a harrowing trip to the DMV. I meant to be healthy and good, but what I got was the oatmeal equivalent of a vanilla sundae - rich, creamy, with all of the right little ingredients to make it memorable. Possibly honey, definitely cinnamon, and a generous helping of heavy cream to round it out.

So, I made it at home. No heavy cream. No lightly-roasting of the walnuts. But filling, warm, delicious.

Also, on a health-kick note, steel-cut oats are better for you than rolled oats in that they haven't been as processed and had half of the goodness thrown away. This is why they take longer to cook and are more filling than regular oats. All that extra goodness.

*As an addendum, I just read yesterday that you could make this in your rice cooker. Well, I tried it. With milk. And as I was sitting in the living room waiting to hear the click, I thought, what if it doesn't work? Doesn't milk boil over? The answer is...kinda, and it made an unholy mess of the cooker. It was cooked, but it would be much better on the stovetop or cooked only with water in the cooker.

Kitchen Sink Crisp

What to do when you have too much fresh food in the house? This has been the dilemma in my house the past few weeks.

Today's option - throw it all into a crisp.

First, I prayed that this was rhubarb (we inherited this from a vacationing relative):


My other thought was that it could be chard, which also has red stalks and veins, but I decided to take the plunge and treat this as rhubarb. And I only know how to do one thing with rhubarb.

Bake it in a pie.

It was the perfect excuse to rummage around and find other items in need of lovin' - peaches with a rotten piece to cut out, wrinkly plums in the fridge, cherries that should have been past their sell-by-date, yet were surprising firm and shiny looking - and plop them altogether into what I shall call The Kitchen Sink Crisp.


If you find yourself in the same boat, find your fave crisp recipe, which will go something like:

Toss the fruit with X amount of sugar (I always halve this), flour / cornstarch (as thickener), and lemon juice (to brighten the flavors).

Cover them with a crumble made from butter, flour, sugar, oats, and nuts. Nuts are my new favorite thing to put on top of a crispy crumble. Always incorporate these - they roast and soften and caramelize and are quite the loveliest thing.

Et voila! Here you have it:

Whatta to do with Ricotta

Although it may seem like I'm doing no cooking at all, I promise I am. It's been quite a whirlwind of finding new recipes to try and having a go.

I settled upon a recipe for pasta with spinach, ricotta, and pine nuts, and learned that I don't get ricotta. Granted, I bought the kind that Marcella Hazan warns against. The kind (gasp!) in a plastic tub that oozes both curds and whey (Little Miss Muffet would be in heaven until the spider showed up). It's tasteless and grainy, and quite frankly spinach + ricotta was a really bland combination.

As I still had more than half a tub left, I decided to go the fail-safe way, i.e. BACON. This recipe for pasta with bacon, ricotta, and peas was much better - heartier, saltier, tastier, and for a brief moment, I could understand the allure of ricotta (except I still can't get over the graininess - is expensive ricotta grainy? Should I splurge?).

This recipe is from Everyday Food Fast which has nice recipes, and they are indeed fast. I am going from memory here:

Pasta with Ricotta, Bacon, and Peas

You need:

8 oz bacon
1 onion
all or some of a tub of ricotta
butter
two handfuls of frozen peas
parmesan

Fry up the bacon until cooked how you like it. Take it out, drain most of the fat, and fry up the onion in the remaining fat. Chop up the bacon to bite-sized pieces. Boil up the pasta, throw a little bit of water into the pan with the onions and fat, add the peas. When the pasta is done, toss it with ricotta and butter, and mix in the onion, peas, and bacon, and the juices from the pan. Finish it off with some grated parmesan. I can't really remember if I salted much - these are some salty ingredients - but ground pepper goes a long way in this dish, so don't forget to add that.

Bon appetit.