Sassy Radish

Ok, there’s no way of getting around this. This post. Well, it’s just sitting down, looking me squarely in the face and refusing to budge. It’s taunting me, taking its time, making me carefully search for each word. I hate writing like this: arduous, painful, unnatural. There are days when these posts practically write themselves; my excitement is usually so hard to contain. But today, I’m just out of my element. Which is quite opposite of how I feel about this salad. I think my ardor for this salad is inversely proportional to my ability to convey it.

This salad is officially my cure for winter doldrums. Gray skies and snow banks, you’ve got nothing on me as long as I’m armed with this little burst of sunshine on my plate. It brings a smile to my face even as I type this because this salad is so delightfully happy, you can’t possibly be in a bad mood once you bring a forkful of it to your mouth. The fragrance alone is sparkling, giddy and invigorating. And to say I’ve become obsessed, would be a slight understatement. Minutes after I served this at book club, it was gone, second helpings and all. And pretty looks aside, this salad’s got looks and “brains” so to speak. It delivers on flavor even more than it delivers on looks. And just look at it – isn’t it a stunner?

I should also confess that had I not fallen for this salad hook, line and sinker, I would still have been forced to make it given that I’ve about twenty pounds or citrus sitting at home, on the account of getting a wee bit overzealous in ordering citrus for my grocery delivery. I sort of lost track being so excited to have some in-season fruit, and when grocery boxes arrived and half of them were oranges, lemons, grapefruit and clementines, I initially thought of starting my own juice bar. Vitamin C and I are such BFFs right now – we’re tight like you wouldn’t believe.

My zeal for all things citrus can be easily explained – what other fruit, besides bananas, looks good right now? None! The apples and pears are looking sad and taste uninspiring. Our local grocery store is carrying cherries at a price that made me gasp and price aside, they weren’t looking so great either. Berries are bland, as are melons and stone fruit. This leaves citrus looking quite attractive. And pretty too. My dining room table looks so much brighter with these orange and yellow orbs sitting pretty in a bowl. If nothing else, they cheer me up visually. But as these citrus guys are at their peak right now, they taste amazing as well.

All this salad needs is a little shallot, some slivered mint and cilantro, and a light vinaigrette sweetened with maple syrup to highlight the sweetness of the citrus. What you get is bright, clean, uplifting flavors full of sunshine. I eat this salad and I can’t help but grin from ear to ear; it makes me downright giddy and inspired. Much unlike this post.

Continue reading citrus salad with cilantro and mint.

Oh mid-December with your mercurial weather! I cannot figure you out! Are you freezing cold with temperatures nearing zero or are you the kind of December that lingers in the forties, rainy and damp, like this morning? Do I put on a pot of soup and curl up with a book dressed head to toe in fleece, or do I just go into deep hibernation mode? Because either of these choices is making me want to stay indoors and make lovely things in the kitchen and then eat them, but there’s also deep desire to make good friends with my couch is just sooooo overwhelming. Not terribly ambitious, am I? You see, inside my head, I am cooking all kinds of things for the holidays: cookies and cupcakes and brittles and toffees. But in actuality, I can’t even bring myself to put the book down and wash my dirty pot from last night. I promise, I’ll do it as soon as I post this.

But, here’s what I really want to do. I don’t to tell you about poached pears. No. But, I do want to invite you over, sit you at my table and serve these pears to you still warm from the stove, in a deep, pretty bowl. With a soup spoon at your side. Because a dessert spoon just won’t do here. Instead of telling you about this pear compote, I want to eat it with you, share it with you, rather than wax poetic about how amazing the house smells when you cook it. You can read about the smell, but you can’t smell it in real time, right? Nor can you lick the screen of your monitor and really know what it tastes like, either. And I so hate being a tease.

What can I tell you about these pears? Well, for one, pears are one of the few fruits that truly look alluring at the market this time of year so you should, as they say, make hay while the sun shines. Perhaps because so much of the other fruit is so meh right now, I am finding pears impossible to resist. I like to think of them as a true winter fruit – they’ve got a flowery sweetness combined with a woodsy earthiness. And ever-so-versatile, pears lend themselves well to standing in as a snack, sneaking into a cake, or brightening a salad. Or just letting themselves be gently poached and served as they are, or as an accompaniment to a very wintry cake.

You might even forget the gray, rainy skies outside while you’re having it. It’s that good, that comforting and so easy to make that you might just find yourself returning to this recipe over and over again. I know I certainly will be. And while we can’t all sit at my dining room table eating these out of deep bowls with soup spoons, we can at least pretend that we can, bound together by this simple dessert, across stateliness, country borders and oceans. It’s the next best thing.

Continue reading pear compote poached in vanilla bean and star anise.

Meet my new favorite dessert. Come over and say hello. No, really, take a good look at it, take it all in. Wine stewed prunes, folks. Yes, that’s right, my new favorite dessert is something that doctor might prescribe older folks for, well, lack of better word, regularity.

I know it seems perfectly unbelievable that something as, um, boring as prunes can go from Cinderella to belle of the ball in forty-five minutes flat. I would’ve never even considered it were it not for a recent meal at Frankie Spuntino, one of my all time favorite haunts, a place considered by some as the most important restaurant in New York City.

Usually, I am too full to look at dessert, but last time, I wanted to see what the offerings were and let me tell you, I’ve been missing out! These red wine stewed prunes topped with the creamiest of mascarpone around, was about the most stunning dessert I’ve had in a long long time. Its simplicity is what astounds me the most.

Luisa waxed poetic about them some time ago, and I’ve had the New York Times recipe bookmarked for ages (and yet never made the connection!) and I suppose it’s time for me to throw my hat in because these are incredible! The dessert is both comfort food and haute cuisine. Something about the thickened, reduced wine, infused with nothing more but sugar and two cinnamon sticks with prunes that absorb these flavors, takes you from pedestrian to decadent. And as we are very clearly entering fall season, eating this at the end of your meal is just about the coziest, most lovely thing you can do. Like pulling a nice woolly sweater over your head and just settling into the fuzzy warmth.

And though I know we’ve been cheated of a proper summer, I am welcoming fall with open arms. When at the end of a long day, I can sink into my couch holding a bowl of these prunes in my hands, I don’t even think of shorter daylight hours or the sweaters I’ll have to eventually unearth. This alone will be enough to carry me through the darkest and coldest of seasons. And I hope it does the same for you.

Continue reading wine-stewed prunes & mascarpone.