Weekly Dish

Because my daughter’s arrival coincided with the end of the semester (literally—I gave my final exam in the morning and went into labor that evening), I didn’t have much of a chance to wind down as I usually do, throwing myself into the kitchen and cooking furiously, in celebration of the time to do so.

No, instead, I started off my summer break with a newborn, not exactly prime conditions for having huge blocks of time to spend dawdling in the kitchen as I so pleased. But sweet little Josie did enter this world going to bed at a reasonable hour and staying asleep for a good while, which meant that once we got her to sleep, I could prepare dinner undisturbed. Not that I had a lot of energy for dinner, especially in those first few weeks, but I did itch to do something productive besides feed a baby.

So, I turned to the Farmer’s Market for inspiration and set about thinking how to accommodate our new schedule — what could be started early in the day or the night before and finished without too much time and effort after the baby was asleep? Well, salad, for starters.

And, salad worked so well that we have eaten an awful lot of it since Josie’s been in our life. I have a few basic combinations that I tweak here and there depending on what we have lying around. But since I had promised myself I’d try at least one new thing in the kitchen each week, I needed a significant variation on our old green stand-by. Shrimp are abundant and relatively inexpensive at our market this time of year, so we buy them fairly regularly. The little ones we ended up with a few weeks ago were begging to land atop some greens, so I boiled them and marinated them a day ahead of time to make easy work of assembling dinner the next night.

The idea for the marinade comes from Sara Foster, who calls these “Pickled Shrimp” because of the spice combination used to flavor them. Reminiscent of bread and butter pickles, the tangy-sweet marinade doubled as a dressing for our shrimp-topped salad. Next time, I’ll reduce the amount of sugar and marinate some vegetables along with the shrimp for an even quicker and healthier dinner assembly.

Now that I’ve gotten into the cooking groove, if I could only find some time to write about the things I make, then it wouldn’t take me 3 weeks to compose one post. At least I am finally planning our menus again (as you can see below); funny how the little things at this point seem like such big accomplishments!

What does help me to be motivated, I have to say, is all the encouragement from you sweet people who read this blog. It means much to me that after my long silences, some of you still return with heartwarming well wishes for me and my family. Especially for your kind words about Josie, I thank you.

Shrimp Scampi

Steak and cheese sandwiches

(recipe for shrimp after the jump)

(more…)

Although I’ve still not felt much like experimenting with our meals, I am back to a regular menu-making routine. Last week was a healthy dose of cool-weather favorites. These recipes are old stand-bys, ones I turn to again and again when it turns comfort-food season. I hope you all are enjoying the fruits of this season, too, whatever form they take.

Mostly, mine comes in this form:

My mom’s spiced tea is the cure for whatever ails–soar throat, bad day, hurt feelings. I’ve been making it with decaf tea bags, so it’s also replaced my morning coffee routine.

Other fall favorites that are getting me through:

Aunt Jennifer’s White Chili: simple, hearty, satisfying, especially if you take the time to make homemade chicken stock.

Italian Sausage and White Bean Soup: I discovered this soup last winter, and as soon as the temperature dropped a little bit at night this year, I knew I wanted to make it again (and serve it to friends!)

Homemade Applesauce: Oh, yes, I know it has a lot of butter in it, but if I’m eating dessert, this must be better for me than sitting down with a tub of mint chocolate chip ice cream. Right?

I do hope to have some new recipes to share soon…in the meantime, thanks for being patient!

A sandwich.

And a menu.

I wish I had more to offer, but school is all-consuming at the moment. I’m hoping things will slow down soon.

The thing that makes these sandwiches special is a seasoned black bean spread that will also double as part of the enchilada filling later in the week. Sweet potato fries make a great side for these hearty sandwiches.

Ham and Black Bean Tortas

For the black beans:
4 slices bacon
2 cloves garlic
1 jalapeno pepper
1 14 1/2-ounce can black beans
1 t. cumin
1 t. chili powder
1 t. seasoned salt
Juice of 1 lime

Cook the bacon in a large skillet. When crispy, remove and set aside. Drain off all but about a teaspoon of the fat, and return the skillet to the heat. Saute the garlic and pepper over medium heat until both are tender, a few minutes. Add the beans and their liquid, and turn the heat down to medium-low. Season with cumin, chili powder, and seasoned salt. As the beans cook and the liquid reduces, mash some of the beans with the back of the spoon. The mixture should become thick and spreadable. Remove from the heat, and stir in the lime juice.

For the sandwiches:
Black bean spread
Reserved bacon
6 slices ham
Havarti cheese, sliced
1 avocado, sliced
Thick, crusty bread

For each sandwich, spread each slice of bread with a nice coating of the black bean mixture. Top with cheese, avocado, ham, and bacon. Heat the sandwich if you wish, and save the remaining black bean mixture for enchiladas, fajitas or quesadillas.

For super-easy enchiladas, mix this black bean mixture with cooked, diced chicken, and a fourth-cup of salsa; divide the filling among 6 warmed flour tortillas; roll them up and arrange them in a baking dish; top with 1/2 cup salsa mixed with 1/4 cup half-and-half or whole milk; shred cheddar or Monterey Jack cheese over the whole dish; and bake at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes.

–Recipe adapted from Intercourses by Martha Hopkins and Randall Lockridge

This super-fast dinner was inspired by a post by Barbara at Tigers & Strawberries (who just gave birth to a gorgeous baby girl!) about using leftovers for breakfast. I read somewhere recently (and in true mid-semester fashion, can’t remember for the life of me where) that a hash is typically a meal made from leftover potatoes. Which certainly makes sense to anyone who’s every tried to make hash browns with raw potatoes: it can take forever. In light of my recent fascination with using up leftovers, the specifics of this dish were inspired by a ziploc bag full of sweet potatoes roasted the night before and a hankering for breakfast at dinner time (which strikes often, since I love breakfast food, but am not much of a morning cook).

Everything for this meal happens in one skillet, which my clean-up crew appreciates, and the salad greens give this old-fashioned high-fat breakfast more healthful clothing for dinner. I love the way the runny egg yolk becomes part of the dressing; once everything on this plate is all mixed up, each bite is packed with a zingy mixture of flavors. Next time, I’ll use spinach arugula instead of Romaine.

The recipe follows this week’s menu (I need a new dry-erase marker; sorry if it’s hard to read!).

Sweet Potato Hash Salad

4 slices thick bacon
1 cup cooked, chopped sweet potatoes
1 T. Dijon mustard
1 T. cane syrup (honey would also work)
2 T. cider vinegar
Two platefuls of salad greens
2 eggs

Cook bacon slices in a skillet until cooked to desire crispness. Remove and drain off all but about a teaspoon of the fat. Add the sweet potatoes to the skillet, and toss gently, browning as you cook.

Meanwhile, line two plates with the salad greens.

When the potatoes are fairly evenly browned, add the mustard and syrup and stir to mix well. Add the vinegar, stirring constantly, until all ingredients are well-incorporated. Divide the sweet potato mixture between the two plates.

Return the skillet to the heat, and fry two eggs, topping each plate with one of them. Finish each plate with two slices of the reserved bacon.

To eat, mix everything on the plate together thoroughly.

Reheated fish is just not to my liking. The texture is all wrong, and somehow the flavors sharpen unpleasantly in the refrigerator. When I make paneed tilapia, I like to make fish cakes with the leftovers, and cakes would work well with salmon too. But because we’d grilled a whole slab of salmon, I needed something that would last more than just one meal. My guess is that reheated fish cakes wouldn’t be so appetizing either.

So I made salad instead. The combination of salmon, dill, red onion, and capers is a common one, and I added a simple yogurt dressing flavored with lemon and feta cheese. The first night, I served the salad on toasted whole grain bread with rosemary potatoes on the side. For lunch the next day, the salmon salad sat atop a bed of spinach, dressed in a touch of lemon juice and olive oil. Both preparations worked well, and the best part is, once you have leftover salmon, little effort is required to make at least two meals.
Salmon Salad

Juice of 1 lemon
1/4 cup fresh dill, minced plus extra for garnish
*1/2 cup plain yogurt (I used nonfat)
2 ounces feta cheese, crumbled
1/2 t. Kosher salt
Leftover salmon (I used about a pound)
1/4 small red onion, minced
2 T. capers, drained

In the bowl of a food processor, combine the lemon juice, dill, yogurt, feta, and salt. Pulse a few times until well combined. In a large bowl, break up the salmon into chunks. Add the red onion and capers and toss to mix. Add dresssing and mix until the salad is moist enough for your liking. Serve on toasted whole grain bread or mound on a bed of spinach. This recipe made enough for 2 dinner-sized portions and at least 4  lunch portions.

*Note: If you want a thicker dressing, mayonnaise would probably work in place of the yogurt.

I am late coming to this party, but food bloggers have been busy compiling lists of the 5 foods they would most recommend for everyone to try at least once in a lifetime, at the behest of Melissa at The Traveler’s Lunchbox. Sweet Claire of Cooking Is Medicine invited me to participate weeks ago, and I am just now getting around to it. Narrowing down my list of favorite foods to only five was quite a challenge, so I tried to pick things that were local to my little corner of the world (after all, to try all of the things on Melissa’s ever-growing list, travel must be part of the equation; why not add southern Louisiana to your list of places to visit?)
1. Fresh, raw oysters

Raw oysters will always remind me of my dad, who taught me to eat them. His method? First, mix up a big batch of cocktail sauce (ketchup, horseradish, fresh lemon juice, and salt), then cut a few lemons into wedges. Spread a saltine cracker with the cocktail sauce, top with an oyster and a squeeze of lemon, and slurp. This still remains my favorite way to enjoy these slippery little delights.

2. Fresh figs

My love affair with fresh figs has been no secret on this site, but the surprising thing about the comments I received on those posts was just how many people have never tried fresh figs. I guess because they are so delicate and can’t travel very far, they aren’t accessible to many people. And, most of the time they aren’t sold in grocery stores. But, please, for me, if you ever find yourself near a fig tree when its fruit are ripe, pluck one off and see what I mean for yourself. Or, if you feel the need to travel on down here to Louisiana about the middle of July, I’ll take you to Mr. Buddy Miller’s stand at the Red Stick Market on Saturday morning, and you can take home as many figs as you can carry.

3. Real southern fried chicken

Fried chicken is so ubiquitous now, I’m sure you can get it most anywhere. For me, a southern girl at heart, real southern fried chicken means chicken fried by a real southerner (or someone taught by a real southerner), soaked in buttermilk, and coated with the right mixture of flour and spices, served with homemade biscuits, mashed potatoes, and cream gravy, made from the chicken drippings. A meal like this one says Sunday dinner at home in Mississippi, and I wish everyone could have a taste of that at least once.

4. Crab cakes made with fresh lump crabmeat

I know I am terribly fortunate to live in a place that grants me access to such wonderful produce and Gulf-fresh seafood. Crab meat picked from fresh crabs tastes sweeter and more decadent than the meat from any other seafaring creature, in my opinion, and my very favorite way to enjoy it is packed into a cake, diluted with as few other ingredients as possible, and fried.

5. Boiled Louisiana crawfish (and the corn and potatoes too!)

A Louisiana crawfish boil is an experience everyone should have once in his or her lifetime. Lucky for me, I was born in to the tradition, and have feasted on mudbugs for as long as I can remember. From March to June, crawfish boils are how people celebrate most anything around here, from a baby’s baptism to a sunny Friday afternoon. Standing around a picnic table, peeling crawfish, and consuming mass quantities of the flavorful red meat, super-spicy corn and potatoes and cold beer with people you love (and some you don’t know) is a time-honored tradition that Louisianans love to share (so head on down here and pull up a bench!)

On the menu this week: nothing quite as adventurous or special as those 5 favorites, but food for a busy life instead.

Links:

• Mushroom Risotto
• Kalyn’s Marinated Pepper Salad (with goat cheese instead of Parmesan and no garbanzos)

Quick and easy is the theme of our weekly menus these days. The problem, of course, with posting a menu board full of quick and easy meals is that most likely, I’m throwing these meals together in a hurry, not thinking about exactly how much of this or that I’m using, and sometimes not even stopping long enough to photograph said meal (gasp!) Which makes the part where I communicate to you how to make fast, easy food rather difficult.

But I’m trying to do better. David’s carbonara was a step in the right direction (of course it helped that I wasn’t actually cooking that meal, so I could document what was happening).

One thing that works for me is to make a large batch of something or the other on Saturday or Sunday and then use it in different ways throughout the week. For instance, last week I made a big batch of ratatouille, a lovely stew of end-of-summer vegetables, using this recipe from the beautiful blog La Tartine Gourmande. One night we had it over spaghetti, topped with freshly grated Parmesan cheese; later on in the week, I spread a thick layer of the ratatouille on top of a pizza crust and finished with slices of fresh mozzarella cheese. Both variations were delicious, and because the ratatouille was already made, each meal came together in a snap. See, it was even still light enough for us to eat outdoors:

And, even better, it’s actually gotten below 80 degrees in the evenings, so being outdoors is bearable; pleasant even. I hope the weather is cooling off where you are too!

Oh, how I love the start of school. I’m such an undeniable nerd that I revel in the smallest of ritualistic pre-school activities. I meticulously fill my pencil case with new mechanical pencils and my favorite black pens. I open and close my new, perfectly organized 3-ring binder, imagining all the possiblities of filling the blank pages with brilliant insights. I print out my course roster and pore over the names of my students, creating these 22 people I get to teach for the semester in my head, delighting in who they might be. I type up extraordinarily detailed daily schedules for myself which I never, ever follow, but keep on my desktop. I make lots and lots of lists. I fret and worry and have nightmares (the kind where I always show up to my class inappropriately dressed and completely unprepared). Once the madness begins, for weeks, I thrive on the excited frenzy I’ve created for myself in the weeks leading up to the first day.

And I love every moment, even though complaining about school starting is usually part of the routine.

In all of this activity, I have little time for cooking (or blogging, for that matter, but I do have it on one of those detailed schedules!) But we have to eat, I’m entirely too picky for fast food, and we don’t have the budget to eat out, so I cook anyway. Our summer meals tended to be leisurely and sometimes labor-intensive, simply because they could be. What will follow in the coming months will be how we fit food into an already-packed schedule. Cooking becomes part of my planning obsession during school days, and part of my ritual. It won’t always be beautiful or gourmet, but I’ll do my best to make it healthy and delicious. The menu above represents the last week before the official start of school, but really the first week of my crazy frame of mind as I prepared. I don’t have links for you because I haven’t made any of those things before, but I promise to post about them soon.

Or at least, I have it written on my schedule.

Happy school days everyone!

Links:

• Paneed Tilapia 
• Lemony Spinach
• Guacamole, by the Barefoot Contessa (minus the Tabasco)

Sometimes I get an uncontrollable urge to fry something. I say uncontrollable because if a girl were to be logical, she might envision herself standing in front of a boiling pot of oil in hundred-degree heat and be able to talk herself into something less, well, hot. Perhaps it’s my southern blood forcing its will right through any sensible notion of health, or comfort. Or perhaps I’ve just eaten one too many salads. Either way, when the urge strikes, nothing will do but to whip up a batch of fried something or the other, and zucchini is what I had in my fridge.

And, because Barbara is collecting recipes that feature local ingredients for this month’s Spice Is Right, I used locally ground spices — cayenne and paprika — in the batter. Both the cayenne and paprika are made from red peppers — one spicy, the other sweet — grown and ground by Papa Tom Bonnecaze Farms, who I see every Saturday morning at the market (they also make the best pepper jelly in town). The zucchini is straight from another Louisiana farmer just down the road, the buttermilk came from a local dairy, so besides the flour, seasoned salt, and oil, this dish is completely south Louisiana. And, of course, as far as techniques go, you can’t get more locally southern than frying.

These crunchy little spears are a cross between fried dill pickles–popular at state fairs around these parts–and some eggplant fries I had once at a restaurant. The zucchini held up nicely–it turns very soft, but doesn’t fall apart–and I love the mild flavor of the vegetable dressed up by the spices in the batter. Comeback sauce would, I’m sure, make a delightful dipping sauce for fried zucchini, but it’s not necessary in my opinion.

After a half-hour of frying up this zucchini, a heck of a mess in my kitchen, what with dribbles of buttermilk, splatters of grease, and bits of uncooked batter strewn from counter top to stove, one bite into the well-seasoned crunchy batter satisfied my craving and assuaged any sense of craziness I’d felt as droplets of sweat dribbled down my forehead during the frying process.

I’m already thinking of other things to fry in these precious weeks before school officially starts, so don’t be surprised if I show up here again with a batter-laden concoction to present to you.

Until, then, here’s the menu for the week and the fried zucchini recipe:

Links:

• David’s Roast Chicken
• Chipotle-Glazed Ribs
• Lemony Spinach

Locally Spiced Fried Zucchini

2 medium zucchini, cut into long, thin, spears
Buttermilk (about 2 cups, maybe less)
2 cups flour
1/2 t. cayenne pepper
2 t. ground paprika
2 t. seasoned salt
Vegetable or canola oil, about an inch deep

Heat about an inch of oil in a large frying pan over medium-high heat.

While the oil is heating up, prepare the zucchini. Place the spears in a large zip-top plastic bag, and add enough buttermilk to immerse the spears. In another zip-top bag, mix together the spices and the flour. When the oil is hot — a drop of water should sizzle and pop when dropped into the pot — transfer some of the zucchini to the flour bag and shake to coat well. Add one spear at a time to the hot oil, being careful not to overcrowd the pan, and fry until golden brown, turning once to ensure even frying. Mine took about 4 minutes per batch. Remove with a slotted spoon, and drain on paper towels. Sprinkle each batch with additional seasoned salt.

Repeat the process until all of the zucchini has been coated and fried. Serve immediately. This recipe makes enough for 4 people as a side, or two hungry people as a combination appetizer/side dish/late-night snack over Scrabble. What can I say? Fried things don’t keep well, and it would be a shame to let such goodness go to waste.