I emptied two bookshelves in the kitchen this weekend, wiped them down and relocated the tea mugs. The two shelves – which carried space for new cookbooks only if I situated them horizontally along the tops of the others – are now three, with books arranged by subject and room enough for the Suzanne Goin cookbook I was eyeing at Powell’s a few weeks ago. Plus a few more down the road.
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I’m picturing Julia Child’s kitchen right now. I don’t have a good idea of the structural details, if the flooring is wood or linoleum or tile, how the cabinets were configured or what her refrigerator looked like when she was living at their “Roo de Loo” apartment in Paris in the late 1940′s and early ‘50′s.
I’m just imagining a long counter lined with kitchen gadgets, copper pans, sieves and other shiny new cooking supplies bought from E. Dehillerin, her favorite Paris cookery shop.
I’m reading My Life in France as part of the Tea & Cookies Book Club. The book itself, from a local bookstore, is as unappealing as they come (I was looking for a deal). It’s romance-novel sized and the book’s length and page size are out of proportion so it’s too thick – the thing keeps springing closed, especially when I’m trying to hold it open with one hand.
But I’m so glad I didn’t judge it by its size or its Julie and Julia movie tie-in cover. It’s marvelous. It’s almost making me a convert to butter-only cooking. Her descriptions are so clear I was emboldened to make scrambled eggs according to her description of an early lesson she had during her time at Le Cordon Bleu: stirring minimally, sliding into melted butter in a skillet on very low heat and waiting a full three minutes before stirring (I tried but couldn’t stand it – I stirred after about a minute and a half). They were delicious.
I’m missing vegetables, though. She cooks them, sure. But they’re almost always a complement to the beef or pork or bacon (or all three), used as decoration or as a butter-infused bed for something like a cooked partridge. Otherwise, it’s a lot of meat and potatoes.
But I love reading about the start of her career and how she became a careful and dogged cook. Her enthusiasm is contagious – she tastes, experiments, tries again. (When she was testing her mayonnaise recipe, she ended up throwing whole batches down the toilet. Egads! They had more in the refrigerator than they could stand to eat.) I’m seeing how learning to pay attention to technique and flavor as she did will temper my haphazard habits in the kitchen. Don’t assume there’s enough salt. Focus, taste and practice, practice, practice.
Last week our CSA box started up again. I forgot how much I missed fresh greens. The box included an especially beautiful bunch of lacinato kale so I decided to make a salad. I found this one and adapted it to incorporate some orphans in my pantry, namely a half-jar of black quinoa I never seem to get around to cooking. The result is a simple salad with texture, a vinegar punch and the contrasting greens of dark kale and chopped pistachios. No nod-to-Julia butter, but perfect for summer picnics.
Kale Salad with Black Quinoa
adapted from Mountain Mama Cooks
1 large bunch lacinato kale, chopped into bite-sized pieces
3 T fresh lemon juice
1 T rice vinegar
2 T olive oil
1 – 2 teaspoons maple syrup
a pinch of sea salt
½ cup black quinoa, cooked and cooled
small handful chopped pistachios
small handful chopped dried cherries
Place chopped kale in a large bowl.
Add lemon juice, vinegar, olive oil, maple syrup and salt. Massage into the kale and let sit while you prepare the other ingredients.
Add quinoa and all but a few chopped pistachios and dried cherries. Toss to combine, arrange in a serving bowl and and sprinkle remaining pistachios and cherries on top.
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And a bonus today. The fabulous Vinny at Cook Up a Story nominated us for the Food Stories Award. Thank you, Vinny! A flower for you :)
Did you know I’m a sci-fi fan? I am. I’m not a fanatic, but as a teen I watched Star Trek and as an adult I love reading anything written by Ursula K. LeGuin. Watching Battlestar Galactica is on my to-watch list. So, there’s my random fact, something the panel for this award requested from nominees, which is kind-of fun!
As for my own shout-outs, here are five sites I find myself coming back to. We’re grateful for the ways each of them contribute to the vibrant food community online. The blogging experience is richer because of what they do. Bon appetit!
The other day I watched this TED talk by Penny De Los Santos. She said she’s learned that her success as a food photographer has little to do with her facility with the mechanics of the camera, attributing her ability to capture intimate, beautiful images instead to personal openness, presence and vulnerability; a willingness to observe (and chase down) pinpont-sized moments. You should take 10 minutes to sit down and watch it if, for no other reason, than to familiarize yourself with her work.
At the end of a talk that took the audience halfway around the globe, she ended by saying, “I ask all of you, right here, right now, to see this moment. See it. Really see it.”
Of course there are “be here now” kinds of phrases everywhere. Especially, inexplicably, in places such as the sides of mugs and stitched onto throw pillows. And it’s one thing to see them there. Quite another to hear it from the goddess of food photography.
I happened to be taking a break from photo editing while my kids were at school when I watched this and I thought about taking her advice in the form of a walk around the block with my camera, to capture images of whatever I found. But that felt forced so I started shooting my work space instead, a dusty desk covered with snacks, books, notes, my laptop and the prettiest lamp in the house.
My desk lives on the unheated open landing at the top of our stairs. The space feels cozy or cluttered, depending on my mood and the urgency of my projects. In that moment, it felt comforting, the clutter surrounded by the round, full hold of my family.
I write beneath a portrait of my mother, painted by my grandmother when my mom was about thirteen years old. On the wall to my right we have a small collection of family photos: our own nuclear family when my daughter was a preschooler and my son in the womb, a formal studio shot of my paternal grandparents, a family portrait with my dad and brothers when I was twelve, an informal shot of my mom and brother with their arms around each other.
I don’t have privacy in this space unless no one’s home. But its location also means my work is integrated into the rhythm of the house, vulnerable to the whims of heroes flying past and young artists who need to use the printer, yes, but also a part of everything. It’s a lovely, sometimes inconvenient, dedicated workspace with a high ceiling and fresh air when I crank open the window in the warm months. The perfect place to be, I saw, at that moment. Working. Thinking.
Soon after, I settled on what I’d cook for you with some curly-leaved spinach grown by Left Foot Organics. I decided it’s a good moment for spinach soup because for me the dish is linked, forever and happily, with my mom’s cooking. I ate it around the holidays when I was growing up but as the seasons go, it makes more sense to have it around this time of year when greens are just available and the weather is still chilly enough for a warm meal.
This soup is one my mom learned to make in a cooking class when I was an infant and she was in her early twenties. It’s a bright green combination of simple flavors: spinach, broth, cream, lemon, nutmeg. Enjoy it, preferably in a space that feels good to you at the moment.
Creamy Spinach Soup
1½ pounds spinach
2½ T butter
1 shallot, finely chopped
¼ cup flour
2½ cups broth (vegetable or chicken, not beef)
salt and pepper to taste
1¼ cups milk
grated nutmeg
3-4 T heavy cream
lemon slices
Wash spinach and remove stalks. Cook for 3 minutes in boiling,
salted water. Drain, removing as much water as possible.
Melt butter. Add shallot and cook for 2-3 minutes, until soft.
Blend in flour with a wire whisk. Add stock, then spinach.
Season with salt and pepper and stir until boiling.
Lower the heat. Cover, and simmer for 20 minutes. Purée.
Add the milk and taste for seasoning. Put a lemon slice in each
bowl and spoon soup over the top, or float a lemon slice on top.
Drizzle a bit of heavy cream in the center and add a pinch of nutmeg.
My boy, with the galaxy of freckles across his nose and cheeks, is almost big enough to go off to school by himself all day.
Even though this won’t happen until fall, I thought about it a lot last week. With all the rain, I felt glad for a chance to nestle in with him at home for a couple of days, without much to do other than working together on his Storm Trooper mask. Soon those kinds of days will be more limited, and nearly never the result of something so unremarkable as a playmate getting sick or the weather turning.
He’s been drawing a lot lately and during the past week he worked for long periods of time at the art table. This gave me extra time to work around the house or sneak in a few minutes on my own projects. He’d always call me in after awhile, to help him draw Boba Fett or add to one of his blueprints for a trap (to catch the bad guys). Once we took a walk. More than once, between cloudbursts, we went out back where he poked a stick in the pond and I ran my fingers over some mosses growing on the rocks.
When time is moving slowly like that, I feel okay about getting less done. It’s simple to be together, in parallel spaces, piddling around.
Later, when my daughter is home and the afternoon light hits the floor in the family room a certain way, that’s when I get back into the swing of things. That’s when I first think about dinner. I pull produce out of the fridge and jars out of the pantry.
I let my kids sample bits of ingredients while I’m prepping the meal. Unless, of course, I’m making kale chips. When that happens, I have to shoo away little hands so the serving dish makes it to the dinner table. I mean, the kids devour them. So do the grown-ups.
And I love that. But it often means the rest of the meal sits forgotten while olive oil-covered fingers scrape the salty remnants off the bottom of the dish. What about the soup? The buttered toast? The oranges, cut into pretty discs?
So today’s recipe incorporates crispy greens into the meal. Think of it as a salad and snack combined, salty arugula with citrus and a comforting vinaigrette.
I’d never made chips out of arugula leaves before so I tried it two ways, in the oven and on a stovetop grill. The baked leaves tasted better, probably because I remembered to dash in some sea salt as I was rubbing oil into the leaves. (Salt them, by all means, but do so sparingly. The salty flavor jumps out.) The grilled leaves looked nicer, keeping some of their bright green color and acquiring those pretty horizontal lines. In the future I’ll grill them and remember the salt.
I kept the long stems on the leaves, figuring they’d be nice handles for turning and would eventually crisp, like Chinese noodles. They were nice for grabbing with the tongs but they didn’t crisp, still soggy when the leaves were perfectly done. I ended up trimming the stems off before placing in the salad bowl. Next time I’ll crisp the leaves alone.
Crispy Arugula Salad with Citrus and Walnuts
adapted from The Reluctant Gourmet
1 large bunch of arugula, washed and dried well
olive oil, for coating leaves
sea salt
1-3 pieces of your favorite citrus fruit such as navel oranges or tangerines
1/2 cup walnuts, chopped
2-3 garlic cloves, minced
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon walnut oil
½-1 T sherry vinegar or white balsamic
½-1 tsp maple syrup
sea salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste
goat cheese or another soft cheese
Heat a griddle to medium or preheat the oven to 350°. Wash arugula
leaves and dry thoroughly with a dish towel. Toss leaves with olive oil
and a good pinch of sea salt, rubbing into any edges of leaves that don’t
get coated during the stirring by coating with your fingers.
Place in a glass baking dish or on a griddle, making sure leaves
are separated. You’ll need two glass baking dishes. On the griddle,
cook leaves in batches. Turn leaves every 3-4 minutes, until crispy,
10-12 minutes. Set aside.
Peel orange and cut into discs. Set aside.
For the vinaigrette, sauté the garlic and walnuts in the oil over
medium heat until the garlic starts to turn golden. Place in a bowl
and add walnut oil, sherry vinegar and maple syrup.
Whisk and adjust seasoning with sea salt and freshly ground black pepper.
Arrange arugula leaves on serving plates, top with orange slices
and vinaigrette, mounding walnuts in the center. Top with bits of
cheese and serve.
