needs more salt

We failed to check the weather forecast when JMM decided to have...

Sun, 19 May 2013 23:58:00 -0400

We failed to check the weather forecast when JMM decided to have an all-day picnic in the park for his birthday. (The invite email went so far as to describe the coming weekend as “beautiful.”) Instead we blithely obtained a vintage tablecloth with blue lemons (!) all over it and baked saffron snickerdoodles (with no vanilla because come on, why would you want to lessen saffron’s impact), chickpea peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, and whole wheat bread for all-day snacking.

When we woke up to rain, it was no big deal: the picnic just moved indoors. Growlers, beer bottles, and the big pitcher of cold-brew shincha tea went into a big metal bucket filled with ice; the wicker chest I keep sweaters in served as a stand for JMM’s childhood boombox as we listened to weird radio stations; the farmers’ market greens, radishes, cucumbers, and mint that JMM ran out to buy in the morning were a hit dipped into deliciously from-a-bottle ranch dressing; and everyone brought something great to share: champagne, a fancy summer punch from P, charcuterie from K, strawberry-kiwi-ginger (!) jam from T, and more.

Even though we couldn’t play dodgeball inside with the blue ball we bought, everyone ended up quietly bouncing it around at some point. After many hours of slowly snacking and drinking (and, because JMM had no cake, making him blow out a candle stuck into a saffron cookie and then later into a mustard leaf), we went outside to play foursquare on the sidewalk and practice jumping rope. What a party.

A fast lunch to keep us from getting derailed from our...

Sun, 19 May 2013 23:43:34 -0400

A fast lunch to keep us from getting derailed from our respective Saturday todo lists: polenta (luxuriously cooked with milk because we had some around) topped with a fried egg and with half an avocado on the side.

May 18, 2013, 2:16pm

A meal to use up a bunch of farmers’ market produce that...

Sun, 19 May 2013 23:41:00 -0400

A meal to use up a bunch of farmers’ market produce that started ambitiously and ended up kind of goofy: rice paper rolls with mature spinach leaves (so much better-tasting than flavorless baby spinach!), sauteed asparagus, and poached shrimp with a dipping sauce of peanut butter thinned with lime juice and hot water, and a salad inspired by Roots with thinly-sliced radishes, radish greens, spinach stems, and boiled baby potatoes tossed with sour cream and more lime juice.

May 17, 2013, 10:15pm

Home late from a screening of Badlands to a dinner of avocado on...

Wed, 15 May 2013 00:33:00 -0400

Home late from a screening of Badlands to a dinner of avocado on this bread topped with balsamic and Manchego, plus these chickpea-peanut butter-honey-olive oil-chocolate cookies (!!!) that were so good they didn’t even need the chocolate part.

May 14, 2013, 11:29pm

A kind of spring vegetable paella — I sauteed ramp whites...

Mon, 13 May 2013 23:28:31 -0400

A kind of spring vegetable paella — I sauteed ramp whites and leeks in the shallot oil from the other night, added the ramp greens, gnarly baby carrots, quartered radishes, arborio rice, and water, and topped it all with asparagus, radish tops, and a sprinkle of saffron before letting it simmer away. (Everything but the leeks I bought at the greenmarket with M this weekend. Also the vegetables were a litttttle overcooked — next time I would add them all in only when the rice was halfway done.) We served it with the rest of the crispy shallots and a little bit of Campari over ice, and suddenly it was hard to remember that it had ever been cold outside.

May 13, 2013, 9:54pm

I went so far as to email JMM to suggest that we have more of...

Thu, 09 May 2013 23:56:00 -0400

I went so far as to email JMM to suggest that we have more of the so-so dumplings for just a quick dinner, but changed my mind when I got home in favor of the fancier, more time-consuming dream meal we’d been emailing about in a separate thread — what did we have to lose but an extra hour spent hungry and one fewer hour spent wasting time on the internet after we ate?

The meal was so, so worth it, prep and all: dan dan mien again (I used, uh, elbow macaroni instead of Chinese wheat noodles and peanut butter instead of tahini, but it was totally amazing regardless and looked hilariously like a Sichuan version of hamburger helper), a double recipe of this mind-blowing cilantro salad with red bell pepper, peanuts, sesame seeds, and homemade fried shallots (!!) — I didn’t realize how little vegetable oil I had left, but frying the cup of shallots in a half-cup or so of oil was fine — with a dressing made of soy sauce, a pinch of sugar, and a couple of spoonfuls of the intense shallot frying oil.

Dessert was this basil-lemon jello — it tasted like summer and now I just have to figure out how to merge this with rosé jello — heavily modified because whyyyy would you ever heat lemon juice and also it’s way better just barely sweet and also sheesh, why don’t you get some more dishes dirty while you’re at it. (My version: simmer 1 1/2 cups water and a scant 1/2 cup sugar in a saucepan til it starts to bubble around the edges, add a big handful of ripped-up basil, cover, and let it steep for a while. Meanwhile, juice 4-ish lemons and 1 orange through a fine-meshed strainer set over a big measuring cup to get about 1 1/4 cups of juice. Pluck the basil out of the saucepan, sprinkle a packet of unflavored gelatin over the syrup, and let it soften for a couple of minutes, then heat it gently, stirring, until the gelatin dissolves. Stir the juice and syrup together, pour into serving dishes, and chill until set.)

May 9, 2013, 10:14pm

Some nice black sludge for dinner: sauteed broccoli with olive...

Wed, 08 May 2013 22:18:59 -0400

Some nice black sludge for dinner: sauteed broccoli with olive oil, anchovies, onion powder, and cayenne mixed into black rice halfway through cooking and served with hot sauce and kombucha.

I’m here to tell you that these potstickers are not the...

Tue, 07 May 2013 22:30:52 -0400

I’m here to tell you that these potstickers are not the greatest potstickers of all time.

Got home from my first day of work to make a quick curry thing...

Mon, 06 May 2013 22:14:25 -0400

Got home from my first day of work to make a quick curry thing over basmati rice with the panang curry paste left from testing this lasagna for TMN, plus ginger, garlic, fish sauce, sweet potatoes, and some asparagus thrown in just at the end to keep it a little crunchy.

May 6, 2013, 8:22pm

Remember how much we loved the pudding that went into the cream...

Sun, 05 May 2013 15:31:00 -0400

Remember how much we loved the pudding that went into the cream puffs for the croquembouche? We made it again, lightened with whipped cream and all.

After devouring an enormous bowl the afternoon we made it (“Let’s save it for after dinner but have just a bite now,” we lied to ourselves), the rest went into a 28-oz Weck jar to keep in the fridge. After that, none of the pudding ended up in any kind of serving dish — we’d just stand over the counter eating straight out of the jar with our spoons. Three or so “servings” later, it’s all gone.

Before we got the wok, I made P’s Pad Thai dish several times...

Fri, 03 May 2013 23:42:01 -0400

Before we got the wok, I made P’s Pad Thai dish several times with varying degrees of success while recipe testing it for TMN. I need to work on improving the pan’s seasoning — the eggs stuck to it like anything — but I figure there are worse fates than having to eat a lot of stir-fried food.

May 3, 2013, 9:05pm

Thanks for the sandwich guy story. It was really funny and I never knew how a sandwich from a vendor could be awful but you just opened my eyes to all the ways it could be.

Thu, 02 May 2013 22:07:24 -0400

Sandwiches are really important!

So the new wok has totally upped our kung pao chicken game over...

Thu, 02 May 2013 21:55:42 -0400

So the new wok has totally upped our kung pao chicken game over last time.

Tell me about the bad sandwich guy.

Thu, 02 May 2013 18:14:05 -0400

From JMM:
NSH came in with the bad sandwich so angry she could hardly talk. On only a few occasions have I seen her so angry. She was just yelling incomprehensibly about the little butcher-paper-wrapped parcel in her hand. Eventually it became clear that she was holding an egg sandwich without an egg in it on squished sandwich bread. After the too-angry-to-talk phase passed, she ranted in blow-by-blow fashion about the entire sandwich-ordering experience. While NSH ranted, we stuck the sandwich in the toaster for a while. I nibbled on it. NSH got mad at me for eating too much of the bad sandwich she was too angry to eat, then she ate it. And that was just one of the bad sandwich guy’s sandwiches. Even bringing him up is a sure way to get NSH mad, so you’re really asking for it.

From NSH:
Oh my GOD he is the WORST! Like, there are very simple rules to making sandwiches (ask me about THOSE sometime) and he manages to break ALL of them while making YOU seem like the crazy person for asking that your bread be toasted in the toaster and not, uh, the panini press (does it anyway, squishing the bread), or requesting that your condiments get spread evenly over the sandwich and not in a single squirt in the middle (says “what?” and pretends not to hear), or wanting to know that they aren’t serving egg sandwiches anymore BEFORE the entire rest of the sandwich is constructed (isn’t the ONLY RULE of NYC that you can get an egg sandwich at any time, day or night?), or believing that wasting avocado is a minor sacrilege (flicks bits from the avocado half onto the bread with a knife then TOSSES the rest), or saying that MAYBE the bacon should be regriddled or the meatballs should be reheated or whatever instead of going straight on the sandwich cold (ignores you outright).

And he’s always working nights when you’re maybe drunk or just home from working really late and ahhhhh it’s him again!! All you wanted was a sandwich!!

Like I said, furious. To be fair, the morning sandwich guys are excellent.

Olive-oil-grilled cheeses with mustard, mayo, avocado, and just...

Thu, 02 May 2013 14:36:50 -0400

Olive-oil-grilled cheeses with mustard, mayo, avocado, and just a little bit of goat cheese for lunch.

This meal contained so many upstarts! The creamed spinach was...

Wed, 01 May 2013 10:26:00 -0400

This meal contained so many upstarts! The creamed spinach was your basic milk-and-thawed-spinach deal, but I made the roux with olive oil instead of butter and let the onion and garlic get a little more brown than usual. That plus the crushed pink peppercorns and sprinkle of cayenne made the dish bright and savory against its mushiness. (Not that there’s anything wrong with mushiness.)

The eggs were cooked in a new way, too. I started them using our normal method (heat olive oil over high heat, add the eggs and salt/pepper them — although that’s charcoal-y black salt from H in the photo, not pepper — turn the heat to very low, and cover til the whites are set) when I mistakenly thought the socca — I used this recipe this time, and it wasn’t as good as this one — was done baking under the broiler. I kept trying to pry it out of the hot skillet like a dummy, forgetting The First Rule of All Skillets That Require Seasoning: the things in them unstick when they are done — if it’s stuck, it needs more time.

Anyway, I put the unset-centered socca back under the broiler and then got nervous about the eggs, which were still barely cooked. I ended up just turning off the burner and letting the pan sit there, covered, and lo and behold about 6 minutes later we had runny-yolked eggs and crispy socca and mushy spinach and it was great.

April 30, 2013, 7:58pm

A big, shared, simple plate of baguette slices (I’d never...

Wed, 01 May 2013 09:56:44 -0400

A big, shared, simple plate of baguette slices (I’d never bought bread at Bakeri before, just coffee, and this loaf was really great), cucumber slices, garlicky pickles, and hummus and olive oil both sprinkled with Aleppo pepper.

April 24, 2013, 7:45pm

Here’s what we’ve been having for our lunches...

Wed, 01 May 2013 09:27:40 -0400

Here’s what we’ve been having for our lunches lately: I’ll make an enormous pot of a really boring thing like beet-bulgur-parsley salad (okay, that one had ricotta salata, which was awesome) or white bean and millet “baked beans” or just a big pot of plain millet, and we’ll have it over and over for lunch with maybe some bread or an egg until I want to die. (Unsurprisingly, JMM loves it. Also unsurprisingly, I work more efficiently when I just eat something and keep going instead of stopping to cook a meal.)

On this day we paired our baked beans and black bread with a quick salad from my mom’s childhood of grated cucumbers and red onion tossed with vinegar and dried mint.

April 23, 2013, 12:14pm

After the last aborted attempt, I was nervous about making...

Wed, 01 May 2013 08:58:41 -0400

After the last aborted attempt, I was nervous about making chicken fried steak again. Nothing went wrong this time, though, and we even remembered to add butter to the biscuits, unlike last time. I was happy that JMM loved the food of my homeland — I used to go back as many as three times through the lunch line on the days they served chicken fried steak at my high school, and I’ve dragged my family to weird highway diners to eat it since — but I was also happy that we had that salad to lighten the meal at least a little bit.

April 22, 2013, 7:38pm

There were two Seville oranges left from the ones my parents...

Wed, 01 May 2013 08:29:52 -0400

There were two Seville oranges left from the ones my parents brought to have with our new year’s dinner, and I figured I might as well make a tiny batch of marmalade. Using this recipe with the ingredients scaled down by weight, I chopped and measured and boiled and just a couple of hours later had three tiny jars of jam, which is exactly the right amount of jam before I get tired of it and never want to eat any again.

Also see those cookies on the side? They’re these tahini-rye cookies, and they’re as amazing as a shortbread with tahini and rye flour sounds like it would be.

April 22, 2013, 2:30pm