a brilliant disguise

I moved to Louisiana around the new year, just in time for the start of crawfish season. My second week here, D's colleague A and his wife J, natives of the region, invited us to go out for boiled crawfish at a place in town called Louisiana Crawfish Time. They said that this early, the crawfish tended to be younger, sweeter, and smaller than they get later in the spring. Plus, they speculated, it had been a mild winter. The crawfish hadn't had to molt, so their shells would be softer and easier to get into.

When we walked into the restaurant, we were greeted by a cloud of brine- and spice-scented steam. Our server seated us at a table with a rough hole cut into its center. Underneath was a garbage can where we would discard our shells as we ate. I deliberated over the menu and asked questions (A three-pound order sounded like a lot. Was it meant to be shared? Absolutely not.) and finally settled on two pounds of crawfish, a half-pound of shrimp, a boiled whole onion, and an ear of corn. When the large, round tray laden with steaming goodness finally arrived at the table, I asked our seasoned friends how to do it. A said to twist the head from the body, loosen the shell a bit from underneath, and then pull gently to remove the tail meat. If you weren't squeamish about the yellow "fat" in the head (what I've since learned is the hepatopancreas of the critter), you sucked or scooped it out and ate it before pitching it into the garbage pail.

Well, when in Rome, as they say. A few minutes later, I looked up from my peeling, eating, and sucking to find D, A, and J smiling bemusedly at me, my Zatarain's-stained fingernails, and my already half-empty tray.

red cabbage salad

So! I'm working on several different posts. Who knows which one will be finished first, or when. In the meantime, I offer a little something to whet your appetite, plus a summer-reading recommendation.

When it gets hot outside, all I want are crunchy, leafy, generally vegetal things. Corn. Tomatoes. Basil. Chives. Lettuce. Zucchini. Half the time, D calls me a rabbit because of my inordinate love for a vegetable plate. (Other times he calls me a hobo because of my inordinate love for sardines.) The truth is, I suspect I would be right at home, crunching on illicit produce all day long in Mr. McGregor's garden.

to do it justice

For as long as I can remember, I've felt an obligation to testify, in the most basic sense of the word: to make a statement based on personal knowledge or belief : to bear witness. When I was a little girl, I wrote poems about the things that happened in my small world—seasons, teachers I admired, friends and relatives who died, holidays. As a second grader, I composed a letter to my Aunt Sherry telling her about how my friend had gone to the doctor and found out her breast was growing. "And I found out I had the same thing!" I explained, as if the breast bud were a tumor or an infection. This was no coincidence; for weeks I'd noticed that I could no longer lean my chest against the dash of my mom's van without wincing, which I saw as a sure sign that something malignant was growing inside my body. Then, as now, I always assumed that it was only a matter of time before I contracted the terminal disease that was coming to me. When I got my first period, even as an eleven-year-old, my first thought ran like this: Of course. Cancer. Even though the secret ate me up, it still took a full 36 hours before I could tell my mom. I don't know why. I think I believed I was really dying this time, and I felt ashamed, because I knew I must have done something terrible to deserve it.

the green flash

An early Happy St. Patrick's Day to all you lads and lassies. No, guacamole is not Irish, but it's green, and I love green food. You can skip to the recipe at the bottom now, if you just want the how-to. Grab a seat. I'll be there in a minute or two. 

For the past four years, D has attended an annual meeting in Pacific Beach, California, and I've tagged along, feeling lucky that I get to spend a few days gazing at the ocean, eating delicious sushi, wearing white jeans in February, and running on the boardwalk in the sunshine and the low humidity. Pacific Beach is also famous for its sunsets, which frequently feature something called the green flash. Residents of the town and of nearby La Jolla describe this phenomenon with varied attitudes. Some people are openly skeptical or derisive, while others avow that they've seen the green flash numerous times. D himself swore that he had glimpsed it, a couple of years ago, but I could never tell whether he was just teasing or not.

He's not the only one caught by the fascination of this odd natural phenomenon. In 1882, Jules Verne published a novel called The Green Ray, in which a young woman sets off on an adventure with two very different would-be suitors to find the elusive green flash, which according to Scottish legend "has the virtue of making him who has seen it impossible to be deceived in matters of sentiment; at its appearance, all deceit and falsehood are done away, and he who has been fortunate enough once to behold it is enabled to see closely into his own heart and to read the thoughts of others." The opening paragraph in the second chapter of the novel gushes: "If there be green in Paradise, it cannot but be of this shade, which most surely is the green of Hope!"

little polished gold nugget poems + greek salad salsa

I often say that my cat is a bottomless pit of emotion: extreme highs and lows. In fact, D has said before that Esme has the same quality in her facial expression that my mom and Steve Spurrier have: even when they're happy, their smile looks kind of like a grimace. Esme is easily spooked, loyal to D and me to the point of insane hatred towards all other people, and often oscillates from vicious hissing to trilling and cooing (and back) in a matter of seconds. Her moods ebb and flow like the ocean. When Esme is upset, here is what she does:

My response to being upset is a bit different, but not much. When I am sad, angry, or otherwise angsty, instead of kneading biscuits like Esme, I chop things into little pieces. Hence the recipe at the end of this post.

truffled vichyssoise + butter lettuce salad with lemon-mustard vinaigrette

The first time I ever had vichyssoise, I was sixteen years old and staying in a rented house in the North Carolina mountains for a church weekend with my parents and siblings and several other families. As a first course one evening, our congregation's unanimously elected cook, Marcia, served us a cold potato and leek soup. We ate it out of mugs, sitting at a picnic table in the yard, all of us still flagging from the day's early July heat, which was formidable even after sunset and even at that altitude. Vichyssoise was the perfect food for that evening and its quintessentially blue Appalachian twilight, and Marcia's version was, not surprisingly, the perfect one to serve as my introduction to the dish.

Marcia was one of my first Sunday school teachers when my family started attending church again in 1982. Powell Presbyterian had a small congregation, and some Sunday mornings I was the only kid in the class. Stories have always appealed to me; I often say I'm a sucker for a narrative, which is probably why I became an English teacher. Marcia's explanations of biblical tales gave me a familiarity with the narratives of both testaments that would eventually help me win a partial Bible Scholarship to Montreat College ten years later. (I wrote my scholarship application essay on Noah and the significance of the rainbow's promise). Though Marcia always wore ladylike skirt suits to church, she was no shrinking violet. She had studied chemical engineering in college and then worked for eighteen years as a safety analyst in the nuclear industry, in addition to having raised three sons. Even now, whenever I think of the Biblical St. Paul, I always picture her bearded, intelligent, kind-faced husband of the same name. Marcia was kind, too, yet she was also outspoken and had a certain earthiness: she made my high school church friends and me blush furiously when she remarked baldly, during one youth group outing to her house to harvest peaches from her orchards, "Hmph! Sex is the smallest part of what marriage really is." (I suspect we had probably been giggling and whispering about something along those lines.)

noodle bowl with green curry broth

Every semester in English 102, I teach a unit on food. Every semester I assign Perri Klass's delightful article, "How to Invent a Family Recipe," for my students to read. And every semester, when we discuss the article in class, my mouth starts watering so much I can hardly talk, at the thought of spicy broth and noodles.

As I often do, yesterday I was craving some noodles in broth with maybe some chicken and vegetables. To put it another way, I was hankering for what I've recently nicknamed "slurpy pasta" (as distinguished from, say, "cheesy pasta").

For the broth, I took my inspiration from Heidi Swanson's vegetarian recipe blog, 101 Cookbooks, which I've followed since late 2007, when I had just moved to Manhattan and was trying to cook more adventurously. Swanson takes the most alluring photos of her food, and the woman loves interestingly flavored broths and vividly colored vegetables - also some of my favorite things to eat. She often does slurpy curries, and they always look so prettily yellow or red or green in the pictures that I've long wanted to try my hand at one of my own.

grandmother's lace cookies

I don't know where my grandmother got this recipe, but she used to make these cookies all the time when I was a kid.

My grandmother was a spitfire. Even her name, Eddie (her real first name, by the way, and not a diminution of something more feminine) made her the scrappy girl equivalent of a boy named Sue. It only occurs to me now that she was one of my best friends during my college years. On Friday nights I used to go to her house and watch The X-Files with her, and I took her to see the movie when it came out. She had always loved that weird sci-fi stuff. In fact, when my dad was a kid, the two of them had likewise been avid viewers of eerie movies and episodes of The Twilight Zone.

By the time she was in her seventies, she was spending most of her days watching inflammatory political news shows and C-Span, and these topics comprised the majority of her conversation starters when I came by to see her. Unfortunately, she and I had, shall we say, divergent political leanings. I say "unfortunately" because I'm the kind of person who tends to avoid conflict whenever I can. But I learned something important from knowing her: sometimes the best way to love someone is to give her what she actually wants, and not what you would want if you were in her shoes.

herbed balsamic tofu

A few months ago, I watched this video on TED:





I still haven't committed to becoming a weekday vegetarian yet; it's been kind of tricky, what with all the high-protein Men's Health diet and fitness plans we've been doing for several months. Still, I've been thinking seriously about it for a while, and the fact that I'm finding some excellent ways to prepare tofu doesn't hurt because it means that D and I are eating it more often than we used to. Maybe we can gradually work our way up from one-night-a-week veg to five.


I basically have three recipes for tofu. They all involve marinating the tofu and then cooking it at a high temperature so that it gets nicely browned on the outside. Two of them - one Indian-spiced and the other Asian-flavored - come from Heidi Swanson's miraculous blog, 101 Cookbooks, but for this post I'm including the one I came up with myself.


The tofu turns out delicious: it's kind of sweet, garlicky, and tangy, all at the same time, and it gets so wonderfully brown that you could almost convince yourself that you're eating meat. A serving suggestion: last week I served this tofu mixed into some brown rice, and in a brilliantly serendipitous move, D suggested that we also stir in some sliced almonds and raisins. Delicious. A sprinkling of cinnamon, and it might taste a little Moroccan. The best news is that it's really good for you. The only fat comes from the olive oil and the tofu, and it's mostly unsaturated.


So, on to the vegan goodness...


herbed balsamic tofu


1 package extra-firm tofu (the firmest you can get), cubed or in a block
1/3 cup good, dark balsamic vinegar
1 tsp. sesame oil
2 to 3 tbsp. reduced-sodium soy sauce
1 tsp. Dijon mustard
1 tbsp. olive oil
2 tbsp. fresh chives, chopped
1 tbsp. fresh thyme, stripped and chopped (reserve 1 tsp. for garnish)
4 cloves garlic, chopped
salt and plenty of freshly ground black pepper


Take the tofu out of its package and drain it. If it’s in a block, cut it into one-inch cubes. Lay it out in a single layer on a thick tea towel (not the fuzzy terry kind). Put another towel on top of it, and gently press and squeeze the cubes with the towel until some of the liquid has been blotted. Let it sit under the towel, pressing it again gently a couple more times, while you prepare the marinade.


In a medium-sized bowl with a tightly-fitting lid, whisk together remaining ingredients. Add tofu and very gently toss it with a rubber scraper until the marinade has coated all of it. Cover tightly and place in the refrigerator for at least a couple of hours. Once or twice, pull it out and gently turn the bowl upside-down and then right side up to recoat the pieces with the marinade.


Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Empty the tofu and marinade into a shallow oven-safe skillet and arrange tofu in a single layer. Bake for 15 minutes or so, and then pull it out, shake it or move it around a little to turn the tofu cubes. (WARNING: Keep your head back when you open the oven door unless you want a face full of hot, vaporized vinegar.) Repeat this step a couple of times during the cooking period so that all sides of the tofu cubes get browned. You’ll probably need to cook the tofu for about 30 minutes total, but just keep an eye on it. If it’s nicely browned but not burned, and most of the marinade has evaporated, then it’s ready.


Remove to a bowl and cool a bit – it’s much better at room temperature! Sprinkle with reserved thyme and serve.


Enjoy!
H.

cocktail and bar snack: gold rush + oven fried okra with smoked tomato aioli

Every summer for the past four years, I've traveled to Louisville, Kentucky, for eight days in order to read and score high school essays from the current year's AP English Literature Exam. There's much more good stuff from Louisville than you'd think: baseball, horses, Muhammad Ali, killer Ethiopian and Persian food, My Morning Jacket, cool fossils, and bourbon a-go-go... 


Because this small city's downtown suddenly swells with over a thousand high school and college English teachers during that week in June, it's always a bit of a mixed bag: it is admittedly something of a socially awkward nerd-fest (present company included), but also, and at the same time, it's full of some of the coolest and most interesting people you'll ever hang out with, all of whom are packed into one frigid, fluorescent-lit convention center for a week of eight-hour days spent scoring largely mediocre high school writing, and who are chomping at the bit by five o'clock in the evenings for anything else to do but read. So, to pass the time, we have been known to find good restaurants, go bowling, do silly karaoke, dance at Howl At the Moon (shout-out to my man Ed), and drink lotsa bourbon.

This just in: whiskey
futures are soaring.

One of the more surprising spots in the downtown area is Proof, the bar and restaurant attached to the 21st Century Museum Hotel on Main Street - part hotel and part museum - which is also so much fun to visit for its rotating art exhibits. My AP friends and I generally eschew Proof on the typical go-out-to-dinner night because it's nearly impossible to get a reservation, but we do insist on going there for drinks on the final evening, when most of the other English teachers are already in bed in preparation for their flights the next day.


Proof has a constantly evolving menu of the best-named cocktails I've seen in a while. Two years ago, I felt obligated to try something called the Dirty Presbyterian, which completely lived up to the name (I only hope I could do as well...). This year was no different: we had a couple of rounds of delicious drinks, including the gold rush (which I found so haunting that I actually hunted down a recipe for it), as well as a basket of fries with an intriguing smoked aioli. I had no idea how to replicate that one at home, but I had just watched a Top Chef episode in which a contestant mentioned a smoked-tomato-something-or-other, so here is my homemade version.


It's probably too fancy to call this aioli. This is basically just a spicy, smoky, tomato-n-mayo-based dipping sauce, but it is GOO-OOD, to quote Cousin Eddie in Christmas Vacation. 


I've posted the recipe for oven fried okra here, which I realize is only in season during the dead middle of the summer in the South. At any other time, the romas for the aioli will still be available at any grocery store, as will baking potatoes for this best home fries EVER recipe. I recommend substituting your dip-ables as needed, season-wise.


gold rush cocktail
3/4 oz. honey, warmed
3/4 oz. freshly squeezed lemon juice
2 oz. bourbon


Pour all three ingredients into a cocktail shaker without ice and stir until well combined. (Stirring before adding ice keeps the honey from getting cold and congealing into taffy consistency, which will mess up the drink.) Now add several cubes of ice, put the lid and cap on the shaker, and shake vigorously. Strain into a highball glass with a lemon twist or a sprig of mint for garnish.

oven fried okra

1 lb. okra, washed, dried & split down the middle lengthwise

1/2 c. corn meal

sea salt, pepper, garlic powder, and cayenne to taste

olive oil spray (or Pam)

smoked tomato aioli

2 to 3 small roma tomatoes

1 medium garlic clove, minced

sea salt, pepper, sugar, olive oil

2 tablespoons Hellman’s low-fat mayo

1/4 tsp. liquid smoke

a pinch of cayenne pepper

a few shakes of chipotle Tabasco sauce (for the spicy smokiness)

Roast tomatoes:  Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Slice roma tomatoes lengthwise into thirds and remove ribs, seeds, and pulp. Drizzle with olive oil and toss them a bit so that they’re covered completely. Arrange them peel side down in a shallow oven-proof skillet and sprinkle with garlic, sea salt, pepper, and a little bit of sugar – making sure that these ingredients are on top of the tomatoes and not on the bottom of the pan itself. Roast for 20 to 30 minutes, until they’re nicely caramelized and brown. Let them cool.

Don’t turn the oven off! Keep it preheated to 450 degrees.

In a paper bag, pour in cornmeal, garlic powder, cayenne, and salt and pepper to taste. Shake it around so that it mixes together. Put in halved okra, twist the top closed, and shake it around so that it’s all coated with the breading mixture. Dump the breaded okra into a not-so-fine sieve over the garbage can and shake all the extra corn meal off of it. Grease the bottom of a large rimmed baking sheet with olive oil and then arrange okra in a single layer, cut side down, spraying the top of everything well with Pam (or drizzling with olive oil). Roast okra for 30 minutes, shaking or turning it halfway through cooking time to make sure both sides get browned and crunchy.

While okra is cooking, in a small food processor combine cooled roasted tomato pieces, mayo, liquid smoke, and a tablespoon or so of olive oil. Blend until smooth. Add a sprinkle of cayenne and or few shakes of chipotle Tabasco sauce to taste (more if you like it spicy) and give a couple of extra pulses of the food processor to incorporate.  

Serve okra with aioli for dipping.

Sit back on your porch and enjoy your Kentucky-endorsed cocktail and bar snack.

Cheers,
H.

sautéed corn with garlic, basil, and parmesan

This recipe was inspired by a Saturday trip to the East Lake Farmer's Market last month (following our visit to Ruffner Mountain for "Breakfast with the Animals," where we were the only adults present who didn't have children in tow, and where we got to meet and pet a possum, a screech owl, a box turtle, and a corn snake). We came home excited, tired, and laden with a huge bag of local produce, which I ended up making into a vegetable plate - incidentally, one of my favorite things to have for a summer supper - including sautéed corn, quick pickles, oven fried okra, and black-eyed peas with onion and bacon.


I have made this dish on a half-dozen occasions since, always to rave reviews, and I can't help but feel a little guilty because it was totally serendipitous, simple, and thrown-together. But it ends up being surprisingly elegant and impressive looking. 


A couple of tips: it's fine to let the corn and onions get a bit golden and even a bit golden-brown, but do yourself a favor and don't let the garlic brown. Just clear a little space in the pan, melt a tiny pat of butter there, add the finely minced garlic, stir it a little into the pool of butter, and let it sit and cook for just a half-minute before you work it into the rest of the corn/onion mixture. It will be buttery and garlicky, and between that and the lemon zest and the basil, your kitchen will smell like heaven. Tip number two: be sure you use a very sharp knife when you cut the corn off the cob. Finally, it can be messy work, so if you have a porch, I recommend doing your cutting outside so that you can just let the kernels fly.

sautéed corn with garlic, basil, and parmesan

4 fresh ears of white corn, cut off the cob
2 or 3 tbsp. butter, divided
1 to 2 tbsp. olive oil
half of a white onion, minced (a couple of small shallots will work, too)
1 medium clove garlic, minced
5 or 6 large basil leaves, finely chopped
zest of one lemon
1/4 cup shaved Parmesan
coarse sea salt and freshly ground pepper


Melt olive oil and 2 tbsp. butter over medium to medium-high heat. Add onion and sauté for 2 to 3 minutes until it's softened and light golden.

Add corn and toss in the butter, oil, and onion mixture until it's completely coated. Sauté corn and onion until it’s golden and caramelized, about 5 to 8 minutes.

Make a little space in the pan and melt the remaining 1/2 tbsp. butter, and then add garlic. Sauté just until fragrant, about 30 to 45 seconds.

Remove from heat and stir in the basil and lemon zest, as well as salt and pepper to taste. A minute or two before serving, add the Parmesan and toss just a little bit, so that it doesn’t melt too much and stays in little chunks.

P.S. For my vegan friends, I have a suspicion that this would be perfectly wonderful with just the olive oil and without the cheese. 

My dad says this corn should be illegal.

And a pic of the whole shebang:

I love me some vegetable plate.

once-a-year cream of mushroom soup

...so called because, for the sake of my arteries, I don't think I should eat this soup any more frequently than that. Luckily - or unluckily, depending on how you see it - this recipe produces a pretty modest amount of soup, though it actually begins with a healthy amount of liquid.

But first, let me explain why I got a bee in my bonnet about making up a mushroom soup recipe. A few weeks ago, I went to Florida for my annual beach trip with my girlfriends from the University of Georgia. The five of us are now scattered all over the country, but we reconvene every summer in Melbourne Beach to drink margaritas, sit in the sunshine, read glossy magazines we would never otherwise buy, and earnestly discuss the Harry Potter books while swimming in the ocean. This year, we actually had the chance to visit the newly opened Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios theme park in Orlando. Excited as kids, we showed up early in the morning just before the park opened, lined up to get in, and spent four hours touring Hogwarts Castle, drinking butterbeer, and riding dragons and hippogriffs. At lunchtime, predictably, we were all exhausted, overheated, and ravenous. Just outside the Harry Potter section of the park, we found a restaurant called Mythos, which is supposedly the Best Theme Park Restaurant in the World, and we put in our names for a lunch table. Forty-five minutes later, we were sitting in a cushy booth, drinking large glasses of water and eating freshly baked rosemary bread with butter. When I saw the cream of mushroom soup on the menu, I knew I had to try it because it's so rare to find a restaurant that carries it. Also, you know, what do you crave most when you're hot, tired, and hungry, if not something warm and dairy-based? ;)

So it was sublime. And it wasn't just the hunger or the exhaustion, either.

I've been thinking about making a version of that soup for weeks, trying to figure out how to do it. I looked at a bunch of recipes from cooks I love but finally decided against all of them. Instead, I started by riffing off of a mushroom-and-thyme sauté that I made earlier in the summer. It looked like this...

mushrooms with butter, thyme, and white wine - mmm!

...and here's the recipe I ended up with. My strategy was to make sure each layer - the broth, the mushrooms, the shallot-and-garlic mixture - had plenty of complex flavors so that the soup wouldn't be bland. 

This is so incredibly not bland.  Trust.

cream of mushroom soup

16 oz. sliced button mushrooms

2 c. chicken broth

3 or 4 small shallots, finely diced

1 huge (or 2 small) cloves of garlic, minced

1 bay leaf

1/2 tsp. whole black peppercorns

10 to 12 stems of fresh thyme

1 tbsp. olive oil, divided

1/2 stick unsalted butter, softened

1 1/2  c. white wine

1/2 c. dry sherry

1/2 tsp. paprika

1/2 c. whipping cream, warmed

3/4 c. half-and-half, warmed

coarse kosher sea salt

coarsely ground fresh black pepper

In a small saucepan, combine chicken broth, 1/2 cup of the wine, bay leaf, peppercorns, 3 or 4 stems of thyme, a few mushroom slices, and about a teaspoon each of the shallots and garlic. Bring to a boil and then simmer for 30 minutes until the flavors have infused the broth. Strain, keeping mushroom pieces. Set aside or keep on low heat.

In a large soup pot over medium-high, heat a couple of teaspoons of the olive oil and a few tablespoons of the butter. Add mushrooms, stir them to coat with the oil and butter, and crack some pepper over them. Don't salt them yet. Let them sit, without stirring them, until they’re slightly browned on one side. Stir and repeat a couple of times until all the mushrooms are a bit browned. Add another 1/2 cup of the white wine and 1/4 cup of the sherry. Deglaze the pan, stirring to lift the browned bits off the bottom. Add some salt to taste and another teaspoon or so of butter and stir to cover mushrooms. When mushrooms have absorbed some of the liquid, remove to a plate or bowl.

In the same unwashed pot, melt the rest of the olive oil and butter. Add shallots and a little cracked pepper and sauté for a couple of minutes over medium-low heat. Add garlic and keep cooking for another minute or two. Be careful not to brown it! When shallots and garlic are softened, add the paprika, some salt to taste, and the remaining thyme, white wine, and sherry. Stir and raise heat. Boil for a minute or so, just until the alcohol has burned off.

Add the broth and all of the mushrooms back into the pot and stir. (If you like some bigger mushroom pieces in your soup, pull a few of them out and chop them roughly before you puree it.) Remove from heat and puree the soup with an immersion blender. When it reaches the consistency you like, scoop out a cup of it and stir some it into the warmed cream and half-and-half, a little at a time, until you’ve combined them and they’re both relatively hot. Add the whole thing back to the soup pot. Bring it up to almost boiling, turn off the heat, and it's ready. Serve it in a shallow bowl with plenty more cracked black pepper and a few thyme leaves sprinkled over the top.

spicy tomato bisque with pesto + grilled cheese on sourdough

I first made a version of this soup in the late winter of 2004, when I was a doctoral student living alone in an apartment on the east side of Athens, Georgia, in the middle of perhaps one of the loneliest periods of my life. Not coincidentally, this bisque got spicier and spicier as more time passed, I started dating D, and my life went on the upswing. This is the best version yet, but I doubt I'll ever stop tinkering with it. The secret ingredient (much as it is for Heidi Swanson's sublime recipe for Five Minute Tomato Sauce, which I have used in every meal including breakfast) is lemon zest, which zings up the canned tomatoes and makes them actually taste fresh.


As for the grilled cheese sandwich, I've learned the hard way that patience is a virtue. Toasting it slowly over medium-low heat ensures that the cheese melts and the bread gets the perfect shade of golden brown - and it means that there will be little crunchy, yummy edges where the cheese has seeped out the sides of the sandwich and hit the hot pan. On the other hand, cranking up the heat too high means lukewarm cheese and burned bread.


spicy tomato bisque
1 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
2 tbsp. butter
1 white onion, finely chopped
4 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 26.46-oz. carton Pomì chopped Italian tomatoes (or regular canned crushed tomatoes)
1 c. dry white wine 
2 c. chicken broth or water
5 or 6 large fresh basil leaves
1/4 tsp. dried thyme
1/2 tsp. dried oregano
1/4 to 1/2 tsp. cayenne (depending on how spicy you like it)
zest of one lemon
1 c. half-and-half, warmed (fat-free is fine if you're making it skinny)


Melt butter and oil in a soup pot and stir in the onions. Sauté over medium heat until soft and golden. Add garlic and stir for 30 to 45 seconds, just until fragrant.

Add wine and stir for a minute or two to deglaze pan. Pour in the carton of tomatoes with juice, white wine, chicken broth, basil leaves, thyme, oregano, cayenne, salt, and pepper. Bring to a boil, and then reduce heat and simmer uncovered for about 30 minutes, or until reduced to the consistency of a thick marinara sauce.

Take the soup off the heat for the moment. Using an immersion blender, purée the mixture in the pot. Stir in the lemon zest and the warmed half-and-half. Let soup heat back up almost to boiling, and then turn off heat.

Ladle into bowls. Garnish with a little Parmesan and a generous dollop of pesto in the soup bowl, and serve with a grilled cheese sandwich.


*      *      *      *      *      *


Grilled Cheese on Sourdough

4 slices of fresh sourdough bread 
light mayo
butter or margarine
plenty of your favorite cheese


While soup is simmering, heat a skillet over medium-low. Spread one side of each sourdough slice with mayo and the other with butter. Place one slice butter side down in the skillet, cheese on top of that, and the other slice on top, butter side up. Slowly toast the sandwich until it's light brown on one side, and then flip and toast the other side. Remove to a cutting board and slice in half.


*      *      *      *      *      *


Homemade Pesto
the rest of a package of basil leaves (whatever you didn't use in the soup)
1/4 c. toasted walnuts or pine nuts
2 to 3 tbsp. Parmesan
1 medium clove garlic, smashed into a paste with a little salt on the side of your knife
1 to 2 tbsp. olive oil


Chop everything as finely as possible, and then mix it all together well.

arugula salad

My friends know that the word "arugula" makes me giggle. When you say it, it sounds like the noise that an old-timey car horn makes: ah-rOOOO-gu-la! 


Anyway, this is one of the easiest salads I've ever made, and I can't seem to stop eating it. It's lovely: crunchy, peppery, salty, and a little bit tart. Even D likes it with his pizza, and he is emphatically anti-salad when it comes to pizza accompaniments. 


Another way we love to eat it is piled on top of a homemade thin crust pizza - we got that idea from an episode of The Best Thing I Ever Ate, where Ted Allen describes his favorite pizza, the arugula and parmesan pie from Graziella's in Brooklyn.


arugula salad
2 to 3 c. arugula leaves, washed & dried
juice of a lemon wedge (or two)
2 to 3 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
1/2 tsp. coarse kosher sea salt
1/4 tsp. coarsely ground black pepper
2 to 3 tbsp. shredded or shaved Parmesan


Feel free to eyeball all of the ingredients and adjust the amounts for your own taste - you can't really go wrong here. Toss everything together just before serving and pile into salad bowls or on top of pizza. Enjoy!


Cheers,
H.