Weekly Dish

Every girl knows that a plain old salad needs the proper accessory to stand out. This sherry mustard vinaigrette is one I learned how to make at the restaurant where I waited tables in college; it was a house favorite. I think I ate a salad coated in its tangy sweetness nearly every workday for lunch. The greens in this photo came from our backyard (arugula, I think?), and the grilled chicken is made according to this recipe. It’s busy around our house, and this salad was the perfect throw-together springtime dinner.

Sherry Mustard Vinaigrette

3 T. cooking sherry (sherry vinegar will do in a pinch)
1 T. cider vinegar
2 t. cane syrup or honey
1 T. dijon mustard (I used the sweet-hot kind, but any mustard you like will do)
5 T. olive oil

Whisk together the vinegars, syrup or honey, and mustard. Whisk in the olive oil a drop at a time, stirring constantly, to emulsify. You can also do this in a food processor or a blender (but I would double the recipe; this amount hardly warrants a dirty blender, in my opinion).

Notes about the recipe: Many people prefer their vinaigrettes with a higher ration of oil to vinegar, but I like mine almost 1 to 1 for a couple of reasons. The first is that it slightly reduces the fat content of the dressing. Secondly, if the dressing is very flavorful, I am apt to use less of it, which also helps to reduce fat and calories. After all, if you’re going to eat salad for dinner, it might as well be as good for you as possible. Right?

(the last of the Oscar-night series, I promise)

For the main course of our Oscar-night dinner, David and I chose ribs, purely for the appropriateness of the name. I’d never cooked babyback ribs before, and to be honest, I’m usually not a huge barbecue fan. Sure, I like to eat it every now and then (and of course whenever I’m in Memphis), but it just isn’t something I crave.

So I wanted more than just a plain barbecue sauce for these. Traditionally, ribs are either dry or wet, meaning the flavor comes from a dry spice rub or from a sauce. I decided to combine these methods, cooking the ribs at a high temperature for a brief period of time after they’d been coated with the spices, and then covering with sauce to cook at the lower temperature. Most rib preparations take hours and hours; the cooking time for these was reduced to about an hour and a half.

The sauce is by far the best part about this recipe–I love the smoky flavor of the chipotle combined with the marmalade, garlic, and molasses; the spice rub added an extra layer of depth that was nice too. The salad is a simple early spring-time one I make a lot with strawberries and goat cheese; the ingredients follow the rib recipe.

Brokeback Ribs

2 1/2 pound slab of babyback ribs

Spice rub:
1 t. Kosher salt
1 t. brown sugar
1/2 t. cinnamon
1/2 t. ground cloves
1/2 t. allspice
1/4 t. cayenne pepper

Sauce:
2 T. butter
4 cloves garlic
Zest and juice of one orange
2 T. cider vinegar
2 T. cane syrup or molasses
1/4 c. oyster sauce (hoisin sauce would work too)
1/4 c. chipotle peppers in adobo sauce
1/2 c. orange marmalade

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Cut the ribs into sections of 4, cutting close to the bone to separate. Mix the spice rub ingredients together. Rub the mixture evenly over the ribs on both sides. Arrange the ribs on a broiler pan or rimmed baking sheet, and slide into the oven. Bake for 8 minutes; turn them, and bake for 10 minutes more. Reduce the oven tempreature to 300 degrees.

Meanwhile, prepare the sauce. Melt the butter in a skillet over medium. Add the garlic and orange zest; cook until golden brown, about 4 minutes. Increase the heat to medium-high, and add the vinegar and the orange juice. Let it reduce for a few minutes, until some of the liquid has evaporated. Reduce the heat to medium-low, add the remaining ingredients, and let them cook until the mixture is thick and syrupy.

Pour the sauce evenly over the ribs and cover tightly with foil. Cook at 300 for about an hour (ours were done at this point, but you’ll need to check; you want to make sure that the meat is falling off the bone and that no pink remains). Because our sweet potatoes needed to cook at a high temperature for another few minutes, I uncovered the ribs and slid them into the oven too at 450 degrees. This step is probably not necessary, but it helps to seal the glaze, making the sauce into a dense, sticky coating, which we liked. Let the ribs rest for a few minutes after they’ve finished cooking.

I spent those minutes throwing together our Constant Garden Salad, which consisted of greens, strawberries, green onions, and goat cheese drizzled with basalmic vinegar, olive oil, honey, and salt.

Thanks to everyone who has patiently endured my Oscar dorkiness; it has been fun, but now it’s time to retire the tiara until next year. Until then, Good Night and Good Luck. (how could I resist?!)

I’ve decided to take my battle with the cold weather to a new level. Making hearty food that warms me and standing in front of a hot stove are certainly tactics worth their salt. There’s nothing quite like the sensation of being warmed from the inside out, as hot or spicy food fills you up and radiates its magic.

But, what if, instead, I asked myself, I simply pretended it wasn’t cold at all? What if I channeled the warmth of spring by cooking springtime food? This sounds crazy, you say. You can’t trick yourself into a season!

Usually I wouldn’t be in favor of such trickery because it would probably mean cooking with out-of-season vegetables, which I don’t like to do (mealy tomatoes, anyone?) But perhaps it’s no accident that citrus is in season in the dead of winter. Perhaps the lemons and oranges on the trees this time of year are meant precisely to coax us out of our cold-weather slumber, to give us a glimpse of the light, bright flavors of spring, to tide us over until warm air returns.
Springtime in Mississippi has always been my favorite time of year. The whole green world seems to come to life in a matter of days, and the temperature is balmy and pleasant, not too hot like summer. This coming spring will be my first in Louisiana, but I’m already a bit disconcerted. The Japanese magnolias and pear trees have already bloomed out, and the azaleas are starting to show their vibrant pinks in full flower. And it’s 40 degrees outside!

Well, instead of complaining about it, I decided to channel the warm spring air from my kitchen. Last spring, as soon as it was warm enough, David and I spent many a Sunday afternoon with our friends Jerrod and Jessie and Lydia in a park not far from our neighborhood. We packed whatever food we had on hand that seemed appropriate, tossed a blanket in the trunk, and headed outdoors.

This pasta salad recipe is one Jessie gave me a long time ago, and it reminds me of springtime, picnics, and most of all, good friends.

Jessie’s Pasta Salad
I made this with leftover chicken from one of David’s Roasted Birds; it comes together in a snap and tastes even better the next day.
1/2 cup sour cream
juice of 1 lemon
6 T. olive oil
2 T. Cavender’s Greek Seasoning
1/2 T. lemon pepper
3 1/2 cups cooked chicken, chopped (I don’t think I use quite that much)
Olives, either a small can of the sliced black ones or a handful of your favorite fancier ones (I used Greek ones this time because I had them)
4 green onions, sliced
1/2 red bell pepper, diced (I omitted this, but I bet the color would be nice)
12-ounce package bow tie pasta

Cook the pasta until al dente; drain and set aside. Mix up the dressing in a large bowl by whisking together th sour cream, lemon juice, olive oil, and seasonings. Toss in the pasta and stir to coat. Add the chicken, green onions, olives, and bell pepper if using. Mix well, until everything is coated with the dressing. Eat immediately, or refrigerate until you’re ready for your (pretend) picnic.

Sometimes I simply crave salad. I’m sure it’s my body’s way of telling me I’m not eating enough vegetables, or I’m eating too much other non-vegetable fare. Or maybe I hunger for something bright and crisp and raw in place of the usual warm cooked meal. Whatever the reason, ever since Alanna, who writes A Veggie Venture, posted a lovely watercress salad last week, it has been on my mind.

I had seen watercress, both at the farmer’s market and at my local grocery the week before, so I was excited to have a recipe to try with the peppery little green. Unfortunately, this week, the watercress at the market was missing (or gone by the time I got there) and the two sad little bunches at the grocery were brown and wilted. Alas.

I couldn’t get the combination of sweet, tangy citrus and rich, salty blue cheese out of my head, so I made the salad with spinach instead. Arugula would have been a better substitute for watercress, but we used the last of it from our garden a few weeks ago. And Alanna’s recipe called for clementines, but satsumas were the best I could do (they are both sweet, diminuitive relatives of the orange).

As I was already tinkering with the recipe–albeit reluctantly–I decided while I was at it to add a few chunks of avocado and a slightly different dressing. I’ve never been one to mix up dressings anyway–I usually just drizzle the ingredients right onto the salad. If you want proportions and an exact recipe, you should head over and check out Alanna’s version. What I have to offer is really more of a suggested toss, which turned out to be delicious, although more free form.

To accompany the salad, I topped some French bread with feta cheese, thin slices of tart green apple, and a drizzle of honey, and popped the toasts under the broiler. Minus the honey, this concoction is frequently what I have for lunch, and when Rorie at Milk & Honey posted about a similar snack last week,–plus honey–I decided to sweeten up my recipe with her addition. Yum! The salad was refreshing and healthy, the feta toast a little more decadent, and together, they made for a filling supper. If you need more protein to make a complete meal, I imagine that citrusy grilled chicken would make a great addition to the salad. As vague as it is, here’s my very approximate salad recipe:

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Cake and fry, that’s what. One of the ways that I manage to get dinner on the table in the midst of, well, life, is through recipes that use up leftovers, like this one. Leftover paneed fish all by itslef is no treat, but if you shred it, add a couple of eggs, a handful of bread crumbs, a bit of mustard, and a smattering of fresh vegetables, it morphs into a whole new dish. I serve these cakes over a bed of lettuce with a simple lemon juice and olive oil dressing and a sprinkle of cracked black pepper. Because I had it, I also topped these with the cilantro pesto from the night before. How I do love using things up in my fridge! The fish cakes are basically crab cakes made with fish instead–crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside. While it’s hard to beat fresh crab cakes, these are a pretty good substitute for a weeknight dinner. And I imagine they would work with any kind of fish.

Leftover Fish Cakes

About a pound of cooked fish
2 eggs
1 cup green onions, minced
Half a red bell pepper, minced (or a whole one–half is all I had)
Zest and juice of a lemon
1/3 cup bread crumbs, plus more for coating
2 tablespoons Creole mustard (or mayonnaise)
1/8 t. cayenne pepper

Beat the eggs in a large bowl. Shred the fish with a fork, and add it, along with everything else to the bowl. Mix thoroughly. Form into small balls, and then flatten (you’ll flatten them further with your spatula during the cooking, so leave them a bit round for now). Spread more bread crumbs on a plate, and coat both sides of the cakes. At this point, they can be refrigerated until ready to cook. When you’re all ready, heat about 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a very large skillet over medium-high heat. Cook the cakes until very brown and crunchy on the outsides, turning once, about 4-5 minutes per side. Serve on salad greens and drizzle with equal parts lemon juice and olive oil.

One semester of my life as a PhD student has officially come to a close, and I could not be happier. Well, I guess if it was my last semester as a PhD student and graduation was in my near future I could, possibly, feel happier. But this semester’s end brings with it the Christmas season, which I dearly love, and the promise of visits with family and friends I have not seen in a while, whom I have missed.

And, of course now I have time to go into my cooking-baking-holiday frenzy with full gusto! No papers to distract me, no students to correspond with, no grading to do. Blissful, undistracted cooking. Here’s what I have planned: tonight, my friends from Missouri, Casey and Christy are coming over for a kind of farewell holiday dinner (we will be going our separate ways for the holiday break), and so before they head all the way up to Missouri and Illinois, where their family lives, I am cooking them a southern feast. Fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, sweet potato pie. The weekend’s food festivities include more people I love: my girlfriends from college, Patty and Lydia, are headed down for a visit. We do have going-out plans, of course, but for their arrival on Friday, I promised to cook a meal, which you will have to wait until Monday to discover!

Before heading to Mississippi, my kitchen will be full and busy and happy, just the way I like it. My favorite part about cooking during this season is that most of the food I cook I’m making to give away or feed to someone I love. I hope to share many of those recipes with you in the coming days.

Today’s recipe comes from Martha Hopkins and Randall Lockridge’s scandalous but delicious cookbook Intercourses, a rice salad that would be the perfect side dish to take to a dinner party, or main course to serve for a light lunch. It is better the second day, so I like to make enough to have on hand for a quick leftovers lunch. It is very flexible too; you can serve it warm, cold, or at room temperature. I liked it best at room temp.

I hope you all are enjoying this holiday season–I’d love to know what you are cooking!

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I really want to start making really autumn-ish dishes and telling you all about how warming and comforting they are. I’ve been trying to get in the spirit of the season. See, I made soup yesterday? But here’s the thing. It’s in the eighties still. I am wearing t-shirts and flip-flops to class. How am I supposed to assume my place stirring a big steaming pot of soup when I have the air conditioning running? I couldn’t fight it anymore this week…salad it is (or was).

To dress my salad appropriately for the season, I started by gathering the greens right from my backyard. David’s first official vegetables in our garden include an assortment of greens, but we aren’t sure exactly what all of them are. As best we can tell, there’s some kind of curly lettuce, a red-leaf one, kale, and a bright green one with small round leaves (baby lettuce? butter lettuce? David doesn’t remember).

Grilling seemed a good option since it had cooled off a little bit by dusk, so I marinated some chicken breasts in a sweet and sour mixture, and David grilled them for me. For the dressing, I wanted it to be warm to wilt the greens a little bit. So I started by frying some bacon, and then added shallots, pecans, and some diced pear. It turned out to be a lovely combination of flavors, and the warm dressing made it feel more like a fall dish (without the my-standing-over-a-hot-stove-for-a-really-long-time part). After the chicken is cooked, the salad comes together really quickly. Here’s how it worked:

SWEET-HOT GRILLED CHICKEN SALAD

For the chicken:

2 pounds chicken breasts

3/4 cup soy sauce

1/2 cup rice vinegar (cider vinegar would work too)

2 T. dark cane syrup or molasses

2 T. sesame oil

1 T. fish sauce

2 T. hot chili sauce (I use Sambal, a Thai version)

Juice of 1 lemon

Mix all; marinate for a few hours or overnight. Grill chicken over medium flame.

For the Warm Balsamic Vinaigrette:

4 pieces bacon

2 shallots, minced

1/2 pear, diced

1/2 cup pecan pieces

1/4 cup balsamic vinegar

1 t. dark cane syrup or molasses

1/2 t. salt

Cook the bacon in a medium skillet until done; remove. Add the shallots and cook until tender, about 4 minutes. Add the pear and pecans, and cook about 5 more minutes until the pear is very soft. Add the vinegar, syrup, and salt, and cook another minute or two, stirring constantly.

To assemble the salad:

Mixed salad greens, washed and torn

Remaining half of pear, diced

1/2 cup chopped green onions

Spread greens on plate; top with pear, green onions, chicken, and bacon slices. Pour dressing warm on top of salad.

Things are getting really busy at school–a stack of papers to grade, a presentation to prepare, reading, reading, reading, etc., and David and I made a quick jaunt to Jackson this weekend to see Jerrod and Jessie and the new baby (click here for a really cute picture of David holding him). All that to say, I’m fixing more and more dinners that can be ready on the fly (and probably these posts are going to ramble less and less).

For my busiest weeks, the formula is usually: salad, pasta, pizza, a meat dish, and something else that could use up leftovers. For this week, my pasta and salad center around gorgonzola cheese, and the phyllo spinach pie uses up all the leftover spinach from the one main-dish-and-sides night. Most all of these meals can be prepared in less than an hour, and good food that’s also quick makes me happy when life is busy.

This Cobb Salad is a great example of a simple, fresh meal in not a lot of time. I am averse to salad dressings that come in a bottle, so I make my own (which takes about 2 minutes), but other than that, a little chopping, and this meal is ready.

Here’s what you’ll need for 2 salads:

Baby spinach leaves

Sliced ham

1 avocado, sliced

1 plum or Roma tomato, chopped

2 green onions, chopped

2 ounces blue cheese (I used gorgonzola)

Arrange the spinach on the plates. Top with everything else, arranging each ingredient in its own little stripe. Drizzle with Blue Cheese Dressing.

Here’s how to make that:

1 clove garlic

1/4 cup mayonnaise, homemade if you’ve got it

1/4 cup plain nonfat yogurt

Juice of half a lemon

2 ounces blue cheese (again, gorgonzola for me)

Add the garlic clove to the food processor with the motor running; when it’s minced, add everything else.

Aaahh, pesto. That lovely oily amalgamation that I nearly kill my basil plants over every single summer. When I was a waitress at the Brick-Oven, I often worked the long lunch shift, which usually left me and the kitchen staff alone in the restaurant for at least a couple of hours. Steve, a vegetarian chef extraordinaire, taught me how to make pesto one afternoon in late summer, and I’ve made it every summer since. I usually stick to his basic version, with basil leaves, pine nuts, fresh Parmesan, garlic, and olive oil, but I’ve also made it with walnuts (my friend Angela is allergic to pine nuts, so when I lived in Jackson, I usually substituted the walnuts on her account). One of my favorite food blogs, Cooking with Amy, recently posted a whole host of variations on the traditional pesto; if you’re interested in mixing it up, you should check out her suggestions. I make mine as a paste with only a little oil at first, and then add oil as needed as I use the pesto in different ways. One of the tricks I’ve found that really enriches the flavor is toasting the pine nuts first; they become more buttery and flavorful when they brown. This week, pesto’s in chicken salad and dolloped on pasta, next week on pizza! It’s so versatile, and a little goes a long way. For this recipe, I made the pesto and then mixed about 2 tablespoons of it with 1/2 cup of the homemade mayonnaise left from the sandwiches on Monday. These proportions can be adjusted, depending on how much pesto flavor you like, and how “wet” you like your chicken salad. Add some small-diced chicken (also leftover from Monday) and toasted pine nuts. It’s wonderful on foccacia bread, if you have any left. I served the sandwiches with a simple green salad. Here’s how I made the pesto:

1 cup basil leaves, washed and thoroughly dried

1/4 cup toasted pine nuts

4 cloves of garlic

1/4 cup fresh grated Parmesan cheese

1/4 cup olive oil

1/2 t. Kosher salt

1/2 t. cracked black pepper

Toast the pine nuts in a 350 oven until brown and fragrant, about 15-20 minutes. In a food processor or blender, mince the garlic as finely as you can. Then add the basil leaves and pulse until they are also chopped finely. Add the nuts, cheese, olive oil, salt and pepper, and process until a paste forms. Will keep in the fridge in a tightly covered container for about 2 weeks.

Tuesdays are my busiest nights. I have class all day, until 7:30, and when I get home, I’m both exhausted and starving. Tossing ingredients onto a plate is a great way for me to fix the hunger part without adding to the exhaustion. With grilled chicken from the night before, some strawberries, goat cheese, red and green onion, bacon, and a simple dressing, this salad comes together in no time flat. AND, it tastes good. (Which when I’m really, really tired is sometimes beside the point. But not often). Here’s how this one comes together, for 2 servings:

Cook 6 slices bacon in the microwave. While the bacon’s cooking, slice about 8 strawberries, small-dice about a quarter of a red onion, slice 2 or 3 green onions, chop the leftover chicken, and chop some nuts (I used walnuts; pecans would have been better.) Lay out some greens on 2 plates, top with your prepared ingredients, sprinkle with a good handful of goat cheese, and top with the cooked bacon, crumbled. Drizzle each salad with about 2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar, 2 tablespoons olive oil, and 1 teaspoon honey. Sprinkle with Kosher salt and cracked pepper. If you have some crusty French bread (as you can see I did not), it would be a great accompaniment. The key to the dressing is to make sure you toss the salad together on your plate really well before you eat it, mixing it so that all the salad ingredients are coated with some of each component of the dressing.