Sassy Radish

Oh people, I tell you don’t mess with a good thing when you know you have one. It’s like this – you have this amazing, perfect food that is best at its simplest preparation, and you love making it and in fact you make it all the time, but always feel a bit of a cheat. I mean, take for instance Swiss chard – perhaps one of my and KS’s favorite vegetables. We eat it a few times a month and our method has most often been steaming it. With washing and trimming off the stems, the whole process takes a few minutes, no more. We sprinkle a bit of salt over our steamed chard and eat it plain as a side to our meals. It’s a “meaty” green and tastes best, to us anyway, this way.

But I always feel as if I’m cheating and being lazy. Anyone can steam chard – it’s not exactly cooking, nor is it particularly “sexy” blog material. No one will read about steamed chard and rush to the kitchen to make it – it’s as easy as it gets, a “duh” of the recipes – too embarrassingly simple to write about. But it seems to be that the “duh” is the hidden “aha” in this case.

The trouble was that this dish was like a good thing gone bad. Or as KS put it, I took a good, clean, wholesome dish, and turned it into a cheap, street hussy. And that’s kind of how I felt about it too – Swiss chard went from noble to common.

This recipe here was all kinds of wrong – the sauce was overpowering, it took over chard’s natural taste and flavor and as a result, neither the sauce, nor the chard were all that noteworthy. A disaster it was not, but really, it was a disappointment all around. Food Network, (Bobby Flay, even though this wasn’t your recipe, I’m looking at you!) I was hoping for a better recipe. I suppose a lesson learned here is that sometimes the simplest is really the best. Tomorrow, I will tell you about what happens when you mess with a classic, tried-and-true recipe by getting that last minute “creativity” spark – nothing good to say the least, but for that, you’ll have to tune in tomorrow. I hope the cooking blunders will stop at that for awhile.

Continue reading spicy swiss chard.

It never ceases to shock me that KS and I will disagree on food likes and dislikes. I naturally assume that we’re so well-suited that it’s simply impossible for me to like, nay love tomatoes, and for him to be tolerant of them. As a child, I would eat ripe tomatoes like one would eat apples, biting into them hungrily and devouring them with but a sprinkling of salt. KS looks at tomatoes as good and sometimes delicious even (when we find a good heirloom variety in season), but he would hardly trip over himself running to the market to find the best tomatoes available. Same with deep, dark chocolate desserts. I look at molten chocolate cake and I can’t help myself (kind of like last night at the New York Chapter MS Society Dinner of Champions where I devoured a cake in no time). A spoonful of it in my mouth is one of the closest heaven-on-earth moments I’ve experience. KS, on the other hand, can have a bite and push the plate over to me. How can one be so calm and composed about chocolate I will never, ever know. I suppose there’s always more of it left for me!

And so when we went to the market and I picked up a butternut squash, impatiently imagining all the amazing things I could do with it, KS gave me a bored look and pointed to the acorn squash. I shot the look right back and pointed to the butternut. He – to the acorn. And thus we repeated the process a few times, until I gave in and picked up the acorn squash, making him promise me that our next squash will be a butternut one. Compromise, after all, is one of the magical things that makes cohabitation possible.

After our pact to practice equal opportunity squash treatment, this little, cute acorn squash came home with us and lived on our counter for a few days while I devised a plan for its demise. I didn’t want to just roast it. And we’ve already steamed our fair share of acorn squash (we put our steamer to some good use). I would look at the squash, tilting my head from side to side, thinking, “What am I going to do with you?” And this idea came to mind, plus we had some leftover couscous that I didn’t want to go to waste. All in all, I love the idea of stuffed squash – it’s easy, delicious and it looks gorgeous on a plate. And while acorn squash is tasty and almost meaty-tasting when you roast it, I cannot wait to make the butternut this week. Maybe I’ll get KS to switch sides of this squash disparity and join the butternuts. I am always so hopeful.

Continue reading roasted acorn squash with a wine reduction sauce.

It’s Yom Kippur today, so why am I writing about food? Well, last night while figuring out our dinner options we were trying to come up with a quick and tasty way to use our carrots, which were hanging out happily in the fridge, but a few more days and Yom Kippur today and my Sunday business trip (Sunday, I know), it was either now or never with these carrots.

Now, I’m pretty weird when it comes to carrots. I love them raw and I love them in things like chicken soup. In fact, as a kid I loved carrots in my soup so much that my mom would always put in extra carrots in my bowl and they would be the first things I would eat. I think I even made up a song about eating carrots in my soup. The blurry memory is lazily rolling around in my head, but luckily I can’t remember the song! And yet, when my mom made stewed carrots (tzimmes), I would refuse to touch the mushy, orange mess on my plate. Boiled soup carrots were fine, but the stewed carrots were not. I’m still fickle with my carrots, not to such an extent, but some cooked carrots I won’t go near.

I’ve got to confess I’ve cooked nary a thing this week. It’s been a confluence of events – my office relocated further uptown and east, and coming from Tribeca has managed to make my work commute 45 minutes door to door. I know, living in Manhattan and spending 45 minutes each day twice a day commuting, is pretty sad. And work has picked up so much. There are meetings and conference calls and business trips and of course work that you do at your desk to add!! So when I would come home at 7:30 or later, my lovely KS had dinner waiting for me – so the next few entries will be about his magical and filling concoctions. We’d eat, and by 8:30, I’d be pretty much a tired, lackluster monkey.

Ah, but the carrots! I thought, at first, to shred them and mix them with a generous serving of freshly chopped garlic, some raisins and olive oil. But then my heart (and stomach) earned for something warm. Since I just told you about my cooked carrot dislike, you understand my conundrum. And then, a little idea appeared in my head and I was all aflutter – I could warm the carrots with some sesame oil and sesame seeds and voila – I’ll have a meal I like. I added some garlic to the carrots along with a little bit of curry mix. Some salt, a couple of minced dates, and the warmed carrots were done. The whole process grating and all took about 15 minutes. How’s that for dinner in a hurry? We ate our carrots with the remnants of the picadillo KS made the night before. While I liked my carrots just fine, KS loved the orangey warmth. The trick is to just warm the carrots and not cook them – this way you preserve the texture and taste of raw carrots, but give it a little more of that fall comfort. Looking back, I would have added a dash of cinnamon. And if we had any cilantro, the dish would have sparkled even more! But in no time, we ate a tasty dish and salvaged the contents of our crisper!

And now that I’m sufficiently hungry, Yom Kippur seems even longer to me. Fasting isn’t a food blogger’s strongest suit. How long will I last? I have low expectations for myself!

Continue reading carrot salad with garlic and dates.

Oh man, sometimes I get into the mode when I want to write about a recipe and words just flow, you know. And sometimes, I make a dish and it is heavenly. And I can’t wait to share it with all of you. And then – my mind goes all fragment-y and vacant. I write a few pieces and nothing quite flows and I scrap the whole thing and begin all over again. And this recipe is one of them.

And yet I cannot figure out why – because if anything this dish is so amazing, easy, delicious and healthy that I should have no problem singing it praises. I should just feel so inspired by the fact that there is nothing about this dish not worth noting, but instead I look at the pictures, salivate a bit and go back to the blank sheet to type something, anything that might induce a bit of sex-appeal for the dish. You know, every dish wants to be sexy in some way or another. It needs to have its edge, its je ne sais quoi, its mojo!

But here’s the rub – if say gossip magazines were loaded with nothing but positive and wonderful news of celebrities, the gossip magazine industry as we know it would cease to exist. Or sell a lot fewer magazines. Because people like to read stories with a little bit of hair on them. No one wants to read a happy-go-lucky story. We eat up negative tabloid news like nothing else – and someone’s making a mint on this! Some actress falling off the wagon and the next day a picture of her passed out in her car is front pages news; an innocent looking heartthrob getting caught with a hooker in an alley; a cherubic, stunning model videotaped doing cocaine. This is the stuff that really propels the sales into the stratosphere. I guess because this dish is the equivalent of a Meryl Streep celebrity-type, there’s little edge that it has. Talented, elegant, appealing, but not in the least bit scandalous or mysterious – when was the last time you read about Meryl in People, US Weekly, or OK?

I guess the missive is this – unless you dislike any of the ingredients listed, you need to make this dish. Soon. And if you dislike, pine nuts for example, just take them out and make the dish without them. I suppose if you don’t like zucchini, then you’re pretty much out of luck as the rest of the dish goes out the window, but few people I know dislike zucchini. In fact, no one I know, dislikes it.

So, it’s quite simple, you see. Make the dish. Taste for yourself. And let me know if you don’t love it – because I’ve yet to make this and have leftovers the next day. And there you have it, short, sweet, to the point. Nothing controversial about stuffed zucchini (unless you want to make a juvenile crack about me saying “stuffed”) – but I tried to come up with something zany for you, and it amounted to nothing. I suppose this would make me a failure at a tabloid magazine – I like happy stories both in print and on my plate!

Continue reading zucchini stuffed with feta, pinenuts, and dill.

As a child, I once attempted to eat a daisy. My younger cousin, who was my opposite in each and every way (I liked to cook, she didn’t; I liked sitting quietly and reading, she liked to run around and climb tress) wryly noted that only cows ate daisies. People don’t eat flowers, she said. She had a point.

It wasn’t until Martha Stewart’s beautiful how-to on making candied flowers to decorate cupcakes that I actually entertained thoughts of once again putting a flower in my mouth. They were pretty and sparkly, almost jewel-like in their crystallized splendor. And while I stayed indifferent to cupcakes for many years thereafter, candied flowers were always a weak spot. Was it the aesthetic? Having tried my hand at these candied flowers awhile back, I have to say to you this – Martha, good things or otherwise, has too much time on her hands. On second thought, this is her empire, what she makes her living on. Me? I just try to make dinner a few nights a week when I get home from work/gym/fill-in-the-blank-errand-of-your-choice so that I could photograph and write about it as some not terribly distant future. Oh yeah, and I use flash. Like, a lot. Because poor souls like me actually have office jobs, and not trying to discover the next “good thing” (Radish Mice? Is this idea cool or what? And why didn’t I think of it?). But I digress. Back to the story now.

A few years ago, I saw fried zucchini flowers on a restaurant menu, and had to try them – they were delicious. A love at first bite, I wanted to make them at home the next day! The only problem was that I couldn’t find them in the store, or at the farmers market – apparently the chef got them from a farmer friend of his as a favor. The zucchini flowers are very seasonal and up until now, haven’t crossed my path. That is until my last grocery order – when I saw them and pretty much assembled a basked of highly perishable produce (more on that later!) just so I could get my hands on these beautiful, delicate golden-yellow blossoms

KS seemed somewhat excited about these when I told him I was going to make him fried zucchini blossoms, but understandably he wasn’t jumping out of his seat until he tried them and found them as tasty as I do! These are so easy to make, I feel almost ashamed writing about it, but perhaps that’s sort of the point – good food can and should be simple. And that’s a good thing.

Continue reading fried zucchini blossoms.

And so we woke up on Saturday morning to find ourselves knee-deep in morning errands, but the weather was so thrilling and bright that we postponed everything and went for a long stroll with our friends’ dog, whom we were babysitting. But then morning errands were still calling, and off we were, running in different directions.

Afternoon held promises of brunch with friends and the sun pouring so generously upon our heads, we said al fresco brunching it is! But then KS had an even better idea – why schlep all over lower Manhattan in search for an outdoor idyll, when we can serve mimosas and barbecue on our own deck? Why indeed?

And so in a blink of an eye, ingredients were bough; deck furniture uncovered; and the barbecue fired up. KS, showed off his expert manly barbecuing skillz (that’s with a z for y’all, ‘cause we ain’t playin’ here) while I tended to all things vegetarian – an avocado mint salad with citrus dressing and strawberries in sugar/balsamic syrup over blood orange and coconut sorbets.

It is with mint in mind, that I went to the store and picked up a ripe avocado, some Boston lettuce (to pay homage to my hometown) and a red onion.

With some phenomenal barbecued chicken, grilled sausage and beef as well as vegetable/turkey burgers (that is four types of meat, people!), we sipped our mimosas and tropical screwdrivers, and accessorized our plates with the avocado mint salad. It was after 3 o’clock and as far as brunches go, it was a rather late one. By the end, we were sufficiently pickled in our brunch liquor as we rolled into a Saturday evening, hiccuping and giddy, wishing all brunches were like this.

And I think it will be wrong if I don’t plant some mint for us this year – I’ll just wind up buying it every other day, making mojitos, lemonades, limeades, salads, iced mint tea, yogurt dip! Let’s hope I have a green thumb!

Continue reading avocado mint salad.

Summer and fall months are unusually good to tomatoes letting them ripen until the fruit is so full of sugar, it requires no background on which to rest it. To me, often, salad greens upstage the tomato itself, often the main star of the dish. I’ve been known to bite into a tomato or two and eat them straight up, as one would an apple.

Or at times, I’ve sprinkle a little Maldon sea salt onto it, and relish every bite. The sweet and the salty in one taste.

However, most people think me funny for allowing my summer tomatoes to be divas all on their own. Sometimes, I would be asked if I had run out of mixed greens. I’d say no and then find myself greeted by a confused look. Why just the tomatoes?

Well, for those who cannot imagine the tomato without its leafy friends, this simple salad should do the trick. Mixed greens, tomatoes, and red onions soaked in a solution of apple cider vinegar and sugar. All tossed together with the best balsamic and extra virgin olive oil you can find, and sprinkled with crushed, black pepper.

For those of us who are missing the summer produce – this is the salad to get us through the cold wintry months.

Continue reading heirloom tomato salad with pickled onions.