The envelope, please.

I noticed the other day that I was getting more hits than usual from Susan’s link to me over at Food Blogga—yeah, I’m still new enough at this that I geek out and check such things. So I wandered over that way and saw that she’d nominated me as a Thinking Blogger. Wow. Coming from Susan, this is high praise indeed. She’s one of a handful of bloggers I read faithfully as much for her wonderful writing style and thoughtful ideas as I do for the great food she showcases. Thank you, Susan.

So the way this works now is I have to nominate five bloggers as fellow Thinking Bloggers. Or rather, I have to edit my list down to five. Susan got away with ten because this is the second time someone’s named her and she didn’t do a list of her own the first time. Or anyway, that’s her story and she’s sticking to it.

So here’s my list, not of the five but of five, in no particular order:

Molly over at My Madeleine. Anyone who reads her wishes, as I do, that she posted more often. But every story is a wonderful, thoughtful jewel. Her current post marks her second anniversary blogging—it tells the story of how unexpected events completely changed her life and her blog far more eloquently than I can here.

Nick and Blake at The Paupered Chef. These guys just blow me away with their view of food as adventure. Not in eating deadly blowfish or any such nonsense, but in exploring cooking techniques just for the sake of doing it. Roasting a chicken at the lowest temperature possible [140ºF, the temperature at which it is completely cooked], for instance, or cooking half a pork belly. And they’re not afraid to share their failures, an admirable quality.

Kristen over at gezellig-girl.com. What can you say about someone who boasts “Winner of absolutely no blog awards!” on her home page [Relax, Kristen—I don’t think this really counts]? She is smart and fresh and plain fun to read. And the day I found this snapshot on her charming blog titled hula-hooping until the chicken is done, I was totally hooked.

Ann at A Chicken in Every Granny Cart. Ann is another blogger who makes me think and smile with every new post. She often starts with something sounding completely off topic—a recent example: “I keep telling myself that the little old lady didn’t mean to do it, but I’m not really sure I believe it.” And then she entertainingly brings it back to food. Delicious food, beautifully photographed and discussed.

Oh, dang. I’m down to my last allotted Thinking Blogger. Okay.

How can I not mention Patricia and her wonderful Technicolor Kitchen? If this Brazilian native is this eloquent in English, I can only imagine how poetic her Portuguese-language version is. Patricia is funny, self deprecating, warm and forever upbeat and enthusiastic. And her amazing baked goods both entice me to try a little more baking and intimidate the bejesus out of me with their beauty.

So, there are five. If I were a cheating kind of person, I’d also be tempted to mention Last Night’s Dinner, French Kitchen in America, Kirsten’s Home Cooking Adventures, Smitten Kitchen… But of course, I’m not.

“Hot soup, comin’ through!”

Easy-to-make Creole Chicken and Okra Gumbo is flavorful, hearty and satisfying, with just the right amount of zing from hot pepper sauce. Recipe below.

The title to this post is a direct quote from my high school swim teacher and coach of the school’s swim team, Coach Otto. It was what passed for etiquette inside his grey crewcut-topped head. Constantly working in the damp, cold [even in warm weather] pool room, Coach Otto had hot soup every day in the cafeteria wihout fail. And every day, he cleared the path before him on his way to the faculty dining area, steaming soup in hand, with his own inimitable version of, “Excuse me, please”… “Hot soup, comin’ through!”

The weather’s been a real roller coaster ride this spring, especially temperaturewise. During one of those Six Flags Over Freezing My Butt Off spells recently, I started jonesing for some soup [for my non-U.S. readers, Six Flags is an amusement park chain—Six Flags Over Mid-America, Six Flags Over Texas, etcetera—that prides itself on having the scariest roller coasters around; they actually budget for a certain number of injury lawsuit settlements every year, rather than slow their coasters down]. But back to soup, I wanted something hearty and filling and warming. But it also had to be quick—it was a weekday, and I was at work.

That soup can even be quick was a revelation to me—and a recent one at that. I had totally bought into the notion that soup had to take hours to make. It was something you started in the morning and occasionally stirred, tended to, added to and fussed over throughout the day. And while there are plenty of soups that do indeed take this kind of time, there are also plenty that don’t. I was stunned and amazed the first time I saw a soup recipe whose total cooking time was in the neighborhood of 15 minutes or so.

In the interest of total honesty, many quick soups—this one included—depend on pre-made ingredients like miso paste or cans of broth, tomatoes or beans. Otherwise, they’d be slow soups.

But all’s fair in love, war and soup. So one recent cold afternoon, I went to Epicurious and searched for quick, hearty soups. I found Creole Chicken and Okra Gumbo. The name was promising, but when I looked at the recipe, I was less enthusiastic. Have you ever read recipes that sound too simple, too stripped down to possibly be good? That was this one in letters five miles high. Only a handful of ingredients and most of those either canned or frozen or somehow processed.

Still, it had okra in it, always a plus in my book. And I reminded myself that the lion’s share of really good New Orleans creole/cajun cuisine makes heavy use of processed foods and herbs and spices. Looking at cookbooks from the region, you’d be justified in suspecting that half the ships you see docked at the Port of New Orleans must be hauling in garlic powder or onion powder. I also reminded myself that I really, really wanted some soup, and I wanted it fast. This soup would be good enough.

Only it was better than “good enough”—really good, in fact. Maybe not omigod-company-dinner good, but flavorful and hearty and satisfying, with just the right amount of zing from the hot pepper sauce. And on an unseasonably cold spring night, it was exactly what we wanted. Continue reading ““Hot soup, comin’ through!”” →

Sunday dinners and simple pleasures: Seared Salmon Fillets with Dill Dijon Sauce

The Dill Dijon Sauce on this Seared Salmon Fillet tastes rich, calorific and sinful, but is in fact 100% fat free. Recipe below.

dill_salmon — Seared Salmon Fillets with Dill Dijon Sauce

SUSAN OVER AT FOOD BLOGGA RECENTLY WAXED ELOQUENT AND PASSIONATE about reviving the tradition of Sunday dinners. Of course, the Sunday dinners of her childhood memories took hours to prepare, with “every Italian-American woman with any pride starting the ‘gravy’ (East coast Italian-American for tomato sauce) at breakfast to be ready for 2:00 Sunday dinner.” Continue reading “Sunday dinners and simple pleasures: Seared Salmon Fillets with Dill Dijon Sauce” →

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” →

In a bind[er]: Seared Tuna Pepper Steaks

Sesame oil, soy sauce and sherry give a subtle Asian taste to Seared Tuna Pepper Steaks. Recipe below.

The vent above our stove in the new kitchen has us cooking more seafood these days. And that has me looking for more recipes and ideas. Last week, I saw beautiful tuna steaks at the store. So I nabbed a couple with no real game plan, knowing I’d figure out something to do with them once I got them home. We have tons of cookbooks—well, actually more like pounds, but anyway lots—but I turned first to the binders.

The binders started out as a binder, one of those blue cloth-covered ones with maybe one-inch rings. And for a long time, that was plenty. Occasionally, we would clip a recipe from the newspaper or photocopy something from a library cookbook, and into the binder it went.

Then came epicurious.com. Does everyone go as nuts as I did when first stumbling on this site? From my first visit, I was hooked. There were recipes, thousands of them. There was the advanced search feature that let you specify cuisine, course, key ingredients, cooking technique… There were even dictionaries—one for food and one for wine, for crying out loud.

I visited every day, sometimes several times a day, checking out the Recipe of the Day [an evil feature designed to keep you coming back for more] or just doing random searches based on any ingredient or food substance that popped into my fevered brain. And like crack or eBay or any other addiction, it interfered with my work. Well, maybe a little. Not that it mattered—my creative director at the time was a fellow foodie, so as long as I shared my findings with him, all was good.

Perhaps most telling, though, I printed out vast quantities of recipes. Scads of them. Reams of them. The single blue binder was replaced by two, these with three-inch rings and dividers with tabs. This seemed like an ambitious step at first, even foolish. But soon these were swollen and ready to call for reinforcements.

And then the obsession stopped, as quickly as it had begun. Oh, I still love epicurious.com—I have a permanent link to it in my blogroll. But now I use it responsibly. I log on, find the recipe [or more often, a basic technique based on a few recipes], then get out.

And the binders are still around. They continue to grow, but at a much slower pace now. So when I came home with the tuna steaks last week [remember how this rant started?], I flipped through the seafood section of one of them and adapted this recipe from one I found there. It originally appeared in Bon Appetit, sent into the Too Busy to Cook column, one of my favorite sections of the magazine. Because as much as we love to cook, we’re all often too busy, aren’t we? Continue reading “In a bind[er]: Seared Tuna Pepper Steaks” →

With all due respect: Skillet Roasted Potatoes with Parsley

Fresh parsley and garlic turn small potatoes into a stellar side. Recipe below.

Parsley has long been the Rodney Dangerfield of herbs, getting little or no respect. For years [in America, at least], it was always curly and its only role was as a look-but-don’t-eat garnish on dinner plates at restaurants just slightly above diners on the food chain—social climbers that fancied themselves “fine dining” establishments. The irony, of course, is that places that use the term “fine dining” are as much about fine dining as people who use the term “classy” have class.

Lately, though, parsley has come into its own as a legitimate herb, especially with the increased availability of the more strongly flavored Italian or flat-leaf variety. Still, parsley doesn’t even appear on the radar screens of many cooks when they’re thinking of herbs, and that’s too bad. To me, parsley has a wonderfully fresh flavor that brings a lot to the party in a wide variety of dishes. It also has a slight peppery taste, not unlike arugula. And it’s the perfect foil for big flavors like garlic—think shrimp scampi.

For all these reasons, I thought I’d do something with parsley for Weekend Herb Blogging. Hosted this week by Sher over at What Did You Eat?, it was started a year ago [that’s seven years ago in blog years] by Kalyn over at Kalyn’s Kitchen. Be sure to check out Sher’s Round-up of WHB Sunday evening or Monday [whenever she gets them all reviewed and posted]. Continue reading “With all due respect: Skillet Roasted Potatoes with Parsley” →

Small kitchens, big solutions

Chicken and Rice in a Pot, a quick one-pot dish adapted from the Itty Bitty Kitchen Handbook. Recipe below.

Update: See Other Notes below for a timely food blog find.

In at least one previous post, I’ve mentioned New Yorkers’ collective penchant for ordering delivery instead of cooking, and my Brooklyn buddy Ronnie has backed me up on this. One huge reason is the tiny kitchens in most New York apartments. Real estate is expensive in New York. Really expensive. And usually, kitchen space is the first thing sacrificed on the altar of square footage.

For New Yorkers determined to cook at home—or for space-challenged cooks anywhere—there are solutions. Smaller sized appliances, for instance, that pack all the features of their bigger brethren, just in a smaller footprint. Forget hot plates and dorm fridges—these are high-end appliances made by the likes of Jenn-Air and Viking. It’s possible to drop a grand or two [or more] on an undercounter fridge, as an example. But for creative cooks, solutions to small kitchens come in all sizes, shapes and price ranges.

Which brings me to Apartment Therapy: The Kitchen’s Smallest Coolest Kitchen Contest. Last year, parent site Apartment Therapy held its first annual Smallest Coolest Apartment contest and showcased some wonderful apartments whose residents packed maximum living and versatility into minimal square footage. This year, they’ve rolled it out across all their sites: The Apartment, The Kitchen, Home Tech [home office or audio visual] and The Nursery. Site co-founder Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan and his wife Sara Kate live with their baby, born in November 2006, in a 265-square foot apartment in Manhattan’s West Village, so they know whereof they speak.

When you live in an apartment, smart use of space is an ongoing challenge, no matter how big or small your place is. So checking out last year’s entries and their solutions that ranged from brilliant to creative to sometimes a little bizarre became a daily obsession. Besides, let’s be honest—seeing other people’s apartments is just plain voyeuristic fun. Now that there’s a kitchen-focused category, I may need a 12-step program once it’s over.

There’s still time to enter, by the way. The deadline is April 16. So if you’ve got a small kitchen, apartment, nursery or home office you’d like to show off, go to the site for details.

If anyone is qualified to give advice on organizing and working in a small kitchen, it’s Justin Spring. For more than a dozen years now, he has cooked in a kitchen that is just 45 square feet. And he grew up cooking weekends, vacations and summers on the 36-foot family sailboat, where the kitchen consisted of a camp stove, ice chest and bucket. Spring has written an appropriately diminutive book on small kitchens with a ridiculously oversized title: The Itty Bitty Kitchen Handbook: Everything You Need to Know About Setting Up and Cooking in the Most Ridiculously Small Kitchen in the World—Your Own.

Unlike most kitchen books whose ideas are guaranteed to make your wallet bleed, Itty Bitty is refreshingly all about editing and purging, making pots and utensils do double duty and making space work efficiently. Besides lots of solid advice on equipping, organizing, cleaning, cooking in and entertaining from a small kitchen, you’ll find plenty of encouragement and inspiration, all in a friendly, fun, quick read.

You’ll also find recipes. A hundred of them, to be exact, all of which can be accomplished with no more than two burners and a toaster oven, if necessary. And while you won’t find haute cuisine, you’ll find some decent, doable eats. The recipes all feature what Spring calls “the combined imperatives of (1) being breathtakingly simple and (2) being interesting enough to merit the trouble of cooking.” The quick one-pot dish above is my adaptation of one from Spring’s teeny kitchen. The recipe follows. Continue reading “Small kitchens, big solutions” →

Spicy Salmon with Mango Salsa

Mango salsa with a touch of chili powder brings bold taste to salmon fillets with a hint of cayenne pepper. Recipe below.

The kitchen is open. Again. Sort of. Our new apartment is still filled with boxes and chaos, but we’re making headway. I was on the phone with a friend the other day and said, “It still looks like a bomb went off in here, but a much smaller bomb.” Marion added, “And a bomb that folded a little laundry.” I’ve decided that we either have to move more often, so we don’t acquire too much stuff, or else never move at all.

But I’ve actually managed to cook a few meals now. It feels good to be back in the kitchen—even a kitchen where I can’t find anything yet and the stove and fridge are in completely different places from where my brain says they should be. It’s almost like cooking in a parallel universe—pans and utensils seem reassuringly familiar, but everything is slightly out of whack, slightly off kilter. Cue ominous background music.

The good news is the new stove is vented, a first for me. I’ve been itching to try it out since the first time I saw it; I figured pan seared salmon would be the acid test. I had learned from Helen over at Beyond Salmon that one reason my Salmon Tarragon on a Bed of Vegetables didn’t stink up the place with my unvented stove was that I was using a cooking method involving liquid, steaming it. She also said that pan searing does cause the house to smell, particularly with fatty fish. Enter the salmon.

The mango salsa is a variation on one I’ve been making for a while. Fruit alone—the mango and strawberries, in this case—would be too sweet for the fish. The addition of green onion tops [you could also use chives] gives it a fresh wildness and just a bit of a bite, making it play nicely with something savory—the salmon, for instance, or grilled chops or chicken. You could also use minced shallot, but I think this would cause a definite onion taste to take over, rather than just the lively green flavor of green onions or chives.

Adding the chili powder gives the salsa just the tiniest bit of heat, but it really ramps up the taste. Similarly, the cayenne pepper only adds a hint of heat to the salmon; don’t expect a fiery Thai dish intensity with this meal. Continue reading “Spicy Salmon with Mango Salsa” →

Champagne, a missing cat and Abbott & Costello

We moved last weekend. Actually, the process has been ongoing in earnest for a few months now, but Saturday morning the actual movers came with the truck. We’d hired them to move the big stuff—furniture, mainly. That meant we were moving everything else, carload by exhausting carload.

Friday night we made two runs, then packed the car again to drive it full when we led the movers to the new place. We ended up getting to bed at 3 o’clock Saturday morning and got up at 7:30 to finish getting ready for the movers arriving at 9.

I don’t recommend moving on four and a half hours’ sleep.

We’d heard and read all kinds of horror stories about movers showing up late or not at all, but our crew arrived about 15 minutes early. Which was the cue for our 17-year-old cat Cosmo to add to the drama of the day by disappearing. He’s been an indoor only cat for the last ten years, but springtime always awakens the prowling gene in him, and he starts hanging out around windows and doors, sniffing the air and looking hopeful. We were afraid he’d already managed to slip out somehow—or would do so once the movers were going in and out. Finally, though, he nonchalantly sauntered out of a room we had each searched top to bottom, twice. How the hell do they do that? We promptly confined him in the room he’d just exited, and the move got under way.

The movers were amazingly efficient; when they finished unloading on the other end, it was only noon. And Marion and I were only getting started. We made another run to the old place, picking up another load, this one including Cosmo. Once he was safely installed in the new place, we unpacked boxes for a few hours, then made a run to what I’ve dubbed the holy trinity: Target, Home Depot and Petsmart [otherwise known as the cat food store in our household]. By the time we’d hit all three, it was eight o’clock and no dinner plans had been made, other than we needed to eat some. Fast. Continue reading “Champagne, a missing cat and Abbott & Costello” →