Salad days for peaches

Arugula Salad with Peaches and Goat Cheese, a delicious, lively mix of sweet and savory. Recipe below.

Peaches and I haven’t always been on the best of terms. In fact, I’ll go entire seasons without buying a single one. First, there’s the way they often go directly from being hard as baseballs to mold-covered science experiments, with no apparent moment of just being ripe and ready to eat in between. And even when they do begrudgingly ripen, there’s often something bland or mealy or otherwise disappointing about the taste.

And then there was the tree. When Marion and I bought an old house in St. Louis, the backyard came equipped with a large, ancient peach tree. It provided a shady spot in the yard and a little extra privacy from the house directly across the alley. We looked forward to eating fruit from our very own tree.

Unfortunately, as with many old fruit trees, it had become diseased. Every summer, it faithfully produced bushel upon bushel of peaches, none of them edible. They would drop to the ground, already rotting, creating a fragrant mess on the lawn. No matter how carefully I picked them up before mowing, the mower would invariably find at least one I’d missed. Every bit as pleasant as it sounds.

And then there were the drunken wasps. Or bees or whatever. Attracted by the rotting, fermenting fruit, hundreds of them would swarm loopily around the tree and the lawn, eating the spoiled fruit and becoming completely intoxicated and lethargic. And the problem was, you never knew if they were going to be happy drunks or mean ones.

Each season, sections of the tree would die off, and we would cut away those parts. Gradually, we whittled it down to something we could entirely cut down. That was one of my happiest days as a homeowner.

This year, though, the peaches are amazing. They’ve broken my heart so many times in the past that I usually just walk right by them in the produce department. But this year I couldn’t. Their deep, beautiful color beckoned, even from a distance. Up close, their heady perfume held promise. I picked one up. Not hard as a baseball—just nice and firm and, well, ripe. So I bought some, hopeful but still ready to be disappointed. They. Were. Incredible. Delicious and sweet, with a big peach flavor and a nice, not-too-mushy texture. And the ones that were maybe a day or so away from ripeness obediently ripened without rotting.

Since that first test batch, I’ve been buying them like they’re going out of style. Which, of course, they are—summer won’t last forever. Besides eating them straight, we’ve been cutting them up on cereal, mixing them with plain yogurt, adding them to fruit salads and constantly looking for new ways to use them. Which led to this salad. Continue reading “Salad days for peaches” →

Garlicky vinaigrette and a three-legged beagle

A very simple, very French vinaigrette elevates this mixed greens salad. Recipe below.

aunt_jo_salad — Aunt Jo’s Garlicky Vinaigrette

ALL OF US WHO LOVE TO COOK CAN THINK OF CERTAIN “AHA!” MOMENTS in our culinary lives. Moments when we’ve learned some new technique or connected a couple of dots and suddenly know something that changes how we cook or how we think about food or, as in the case of this simple vinaigrette, adds a lasting weapon to our food arsenal. Continue reading “Garlicky vinaigrette and a three-legged beagle” →

Spanish sausage and well-traveled legumes

Paprika-rich Spanish chorizo teams up with globe-trotting beans in this Warm Butter Bean Salad with Chorizo and Tomatoes. Recipe below.

Anything that prompts me to call my Aunt Veta down in southern Mississippi is a good thing. She is my favorite and most colorful of all my aunts—and I have been blessed in that department. She and my Uncle James raised a family and then proceeded to raise two grandkids until Uncle James passed away several years ago. Then Aunt Veta finished the job on her own. She is stubbornly positive and optimistic, even when the going gets rough—and if she can’t find something good to say about you, you are a sorry individual indeed.

What prompted my call the other day was this dish. Specifically, the butter bean part of it. Based on a dish served as a starter at London Moorish/Spanish restaurant Moro [covered in the May issue of Food & Wine], it also features Spanish chorizo—but more about that later.

Butter beans? Lima beans? The one thing everyone agrees on concerning these beans is that they originated in South America. Explorers and slavers of the early 1500’s carried them to the farthest parts of the earth—Europe, Africa, the East Indies, India, the Philippines. Depending on who’s telling the story, they’ve been cultivated since either 4,000 B.C. or 6,000 B.C. There are two distinct varieties: The baby lima—an actual variety, not just a lima bean harvested early—and the larger, plumper Fordhook. According to most sources, the names lima and butter are interchangeable, with butter beans simply being the popular name for them in the southern United States. But other sources say that southerners insist that the lima bean and the butter bean are two different beans altogether.

It was time to call Aunt Veta. “They’re as different as black-eyed peas and English peas,” she proclaimed. “James and me, we never much cared for lima beans. So James would always plant speckled butter beans.” [When mottled with purple they’re called calico or speckled butter beans—great, more names.] But Uncle James would harvest the beans early, when the pods were light green, so the beans would be white. Still, when Aunt Veta cooked them, they would turn the cooking liquid to what she called a “blue liquor.”

Whatever the name/size/color, these full-flavored, slightly kidney-shaped beans contain high quality protein, phosphorus, potassium and iron. They’re also rich in the best sort of fiber, soluble fiber, which helps to eliminate cholesterol from the body.

Spanish Chorizo. Last week I wrote about Spain’s love of all things pork and mentioned this dense, paprika-powered sausage. Chorizo is made from coarsely chopped fatty pork and seasoned with mild Spanish paprika, salt and garlic. That’s pretty much it. Spicier versions will also include small dried hot chiles. In Portugal, they make a similar sausage called chouriço. Both are completely different from the ground pork Mexican chorizo.

As an indication of how much paprika is used in making chorizo, when you sauté the fully cooked sausage, the rendered fat is deep red-orange and will color anything else you cook with it. I like cooking up some chorizo and maybe an onion and some red bell pepper, then scrambling some eggs with it—they take on a nice, orangish tinge. They are also quite delicious.

So is this dish. I adapted the recipe to use as a side instead of a starter. Either way you use it, it’s as impressive as it is easy to make. Continue reading “Spanish sausage and well-traveled legumes” →

A little hot but very cool. Like summer.

Hot giardiniera gives this summery Spicy Chicken Salad a little heat and big flavor. It’s great on sandwiches or on its own. Recipe below.

What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the word summer? Okay, then what’s the next thing? Well then, the thing after that? No, the thing after… oh, never mind. The correct answer is chicken salad. Continue reading “A little hot but very cool. Like summer.” →

Endive, blue cheese: A great salad remembered

This Endive Salad with Blue Cheese and Walnuts always reminds me of one of my favorite little New York bistros. Recipe below.

SOMETIMES A RESTAURANT JUST CLICKS WITH YOU. The food, the setting, the staff—even the moment it’s part of. Lucien, in Manhattan’s East Village, is just such a place for us. The moment it fit so neatly into the first time we ate there was the first time Marion and I managed to get to New York together. Marion had spent lots of time there, and I had made a number of three-day solo forays in search of art, jazz and booze [all plentiful there, by the way]. But we only got around to getting there together when I won a trip for two on Taco Bell’s website a few years ago. Seriously. Continue reading “Endive, blue cheese: A great salad remembered” →