Hot town, salads in the city............

Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty, indeed. It's hot here. Summer is cranking up to full blast here in mid-June Phoenix, and everyone's feeling the effects. We're constantly fanning ourselves. My little dog spends most of his time limp on the floor like a steak frying on a grill--I know how he feels. You could, in fact, fry an egg on the sidewalk.......but I wouldn't want to eat it. In fact, there's an awful lot of cooking I don't want to do these days--whether it be on sidewalk or stovetop--but of course we still have to eat, and there's a limit to the number of garden-variety green salads I can eat over and over again. What is the solution? How do we go on without firing up the stove? Is this going to be a cooking blog without any cooking, or what??

My dear readers, let me show you the way.


Mediterranean-style stuffed tomatoes are the answer to everyone's green salad ennui (come to think of it, it solves a few problems with traditional 'tuna salad' as well, mainly that it's not oozing mayonnaise from every pore), as a light and delicious lunch packed with light protein and stunning flavor. Take several fat red tomatoes, carefully remove the stem end and core with a sharp knife and gently squeeze the tomato innards, seeds and all, into a bowl and set aside. This step is especially satisfying, I find. Squeezing things tends to have that effect.

Next, you spoon into the freshly excavated tomato cavities a sharp and well-balanced mixture of tuna, kalamata olives, fresh cilantro and minced red onion. Finally, you top it with a crunchy cap of buttery, toasted bread crumbs (okay, you will have to use your stovetop for sixty seconds to make these, but it's worth it) and drizzle over top a homemade tomato-olive oil vinaigrette. It's tasty, it's fast, it's healthy, and it's so much easier to look forward to than tucking into yet another bowl of green leaves!


Oh yes. My feelings on salad. Did I mention that I get what I like to think of as 'salad fatigue'? I can't help but think, during the salad days of summer, of Jeffrey Steingarten's hilarious 1997 essay 'Salad, the Silent Killer,' in which he debunks the myth of the 'healthy salad' by cataloguing all the various toxins, mutagens and carcinogens lying in wait in the depths of our bowls. In addition to which, he adds, these salad eaters with their 'heads bowed, snouts brought close to their plastic wood-grained bowls, crunching and shoveling simultaneously' are unfeelingly keeping him from his dessert (read the entire essay here). He was kidding. I think. It's hard to tell, it's Steingarten!

I eat big bowls of green leaves (sometimes the traditional lettuce but not often, if we're going to eat bowls of leaves around here we like to stick to things that I think of as having more nutrition, like spinach, cabbage or arugula) and various vegetables dressed in homemade vinaigrette pretty often. It's tasty. It's virtuous (well, except on those days when bacon or sauteed chicken livers manage to sneak themselves into the bowl). It's also extremely boring, and I get fatigued with my big bowls of salad faster than I ought to admit, but I'm admitting it now. But there is hope! There is a light at the end of the salad tunnel, my friends, and it is THIS SALAD:


.......which has two wonderful things going for it. First, that it is plainly not made of boring green leaves but of vividly orange scraps of carrot and other wonders peeking out from underneath, herbal flecks of green, salty white glints of feta cheese. Second, that it is a recipe from the Smitten Kitchen blog (originally posted here), and it's just nearly impossible to go wrong with a recipe from Deb's kitchen. That woman knows a gem when she sees it, and her 'Carrot Salad with Harissa, Feta and Mint' is a summertime gem indeed.

This salad is earthily sweet in the way that good raw carrots often are, balanced perfectly by the sharp tang of lemon juice and crumbled feta cheese. The mint, parsley and blend of spices in the dressing give this dish a fantastic North African flavor, and the swell of heat lurking in its depths (how spicy you make this is, of course, up to you) give it real authority, as well as helping you to cool down on a sweltering day. I never expected to have my mind blown by a carrot salad--a bowl of shredded carrots, come on!--but I bow before this recipe. My mind was blown. Salty, sweet, juicy, spicy, crunchy, earthy with spices.....and it was fantastically simple to make! Thirty minutes after having eaten it for the first time, still full from that first bowl, I was nonetheless craving it again.

Come to think of it, I'm craving it now.

I think it's time for lunch. No cooking required.



Mediterranean Stuffed Tomatoes

(serves 2 comfortably for lunch)

4 ripe, round tomatoes
2 cans water-packed tuna (this actually made slightly more tuna salad than we could stuff into 4 tomatoes, but your mileage may vary. We were happy enough to scrape up and eat the leftovers straight from the bowl)
2 tablespoons sliced kalamata (or other variety) olives
2 tablespoons chopped cilantro
2 tablespoons minced red onion

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 clove of garlic, crushed
splash of balsamic vinegar
salt and pepper

2 tablespoons bread crumbs
1 tablespoon butter (or olive oil, or a mixture of both, whatever suits you)

Carefully remove the stem end and core from each tomato with a sharp knife, leaving the bottom intact so that the tomato form a 'bowl' shape. Gently squeeze the seeds and water from each tomato into a mixing bowl, set aside. In another bowl, combine tuna, olives, cilantro and onion. Spoon this mixture into the 4 hollow tomatoes.

In a food processor or blender, blend the 'tomato innards' with olive oil, garlic, and a small amount of balsamic vinegar, salt & pepper to taste, until well pureed.

Finally, in a small skillet, heat butter or olive oil over medium high heat. Add bread crumbs, stir to coat thoroughly. Cook briefly until bread crumbs are toasted to a light nut brown color, then remove from heat immediately. This takes very little time (maybe a minute or two, maybe less, depending on the kind of bread), so keep a close eye on it.

Drizzle stuffed tomatoes with the vinaigrette, then top each with a sprinkling of butter bread crumbs. Enjoy!

P.S. - If these recipes don't help to cool you off, you can always try what my little dog does when the heat is just too much! Stay cool out there, readers.......... :)

'Smitten' with Warm Mushroom and Arugula Salad........

It should come as no surprise that, as a food blogger, I read other food blogs. Clotilde's Chocolate & Zucchini arouses a little Parisian frisson every time I read a new entry (and you have to love a good ampersand), David Lebovitz always inspires, I have read the entire famed 'Julie/Julia Project' blog from virtual cover to cover, and Deb's smitten kitchen and Molly's Orangette very often make me actually laugh out loud. Even the venerable Judith Jones (she of discovering-Julia-Child fame) blogs, for God's sake, and the woman is in her mid-80s! There's a wealth of food bloggery out there for the taking, the reading, and the (pardon the inexcusable food pun) digesting. And yet I read somewhere that most people don't actually use the wonderful recipes they come across online via food blogs; most people are in it largely for the breathless thrill of food porn alone. Whatever takes your fancy, I've been guilty of the same in the past......but when we're backed up against the wall over here with no dinner ideas in sight, and our imaginations fail us, we turn to three possible sources: The Library, The Files, or The Blogs.

The Library, as the name suggests, refers to Mike's and my collection of cookbooks. No tidy, Dewey decimal'ed shelf of books is this, but rather a sprawling, uneven clutch of books whose epicenter is the far corner of our small kitchen. Hardcovers, paperbacks, large and small books and pamphlets of all kinds squat together, punctuated by the occasional corner of a white sheet of paper protruding from a book, on which might be a handscrawled recipe for cornbread from Mike's dad, or printed out instructions from Alton Brown on how to construct the perfect holiday turkey from all the way brining to roasting. A pickling cookbook sits next to one specifically for soup, a book of traditional Austrian recipes nestles between Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles cookbook and Thomas Keller's French Laundry cookbook, and even Julia Child and Martha Stewart manage to bunk decently together without any elbowing or girlish hair-pulling.

The Files, as they are so vaguely referred to, represent years' worth of pulled recipes from magazines of all sorts that long ago met their fate in the recycling bin. These include such venerable publications as the New York Times Sunday magazine, Food & Wine and Bon Appetit, but also Every Day with Rachel Ray (what can I say? She's had some good recipes) and even the now-defunct JANE magazine (R.I.P.). When I see a recipe I'm likely to try (or even one I'd like to think I'll get around to, you know, someday), I pull it for The Files. Don't let the name fool you. Much like The Library, The Files are no glossy, organized affair, but an unbound, messy, sliding stack of loose magazine pages that have occupied various spots in the house and occasionally gets lost (as it did a few weeks ago when we misplaced the whole stack somehow and were desperately searching for a certain treasured jerk chicken recipe that was certain the be in The Files.....if only we could have found them! Alas.). The Files currently occupy one corner of a low ottoman in the dining room, next to some back issues of the Times and empty boxes we are saving one at a time for our move. At least, I think.



Finally, we also sometimes turn to The Blogs, a category which includes all the blogs I listed above plus many, many others. And it was in turning to The Blogs this past Monday that I found this gem via smitten kitchen: Warm Mushroom Salad with Hazelnuts (original recipe can be found here). My heart went pitter-pat. Warm mushrooms! Hazelnuts! Peppery greens and slivers of sharp pecorino! I had to have it, exactly as Deb suggested, with a slice of crusty bread alongside it and a warm poached egg snuggled on top. I even baked a loaf of bread specifically to have some on hand to go with this salad.

After making a few substitutions (okay, I hesitate to say 'compromises'), the tale of the warm mushroom salad had a happy ending.....it was delicious! I used grated parmesan as the cheese, formerly-dried morels and baby portobellos instead of an assortment of fresh wild mushrooms, and pecans stood in for expensive hazelnuts (oh, for the day we move to Oregon, where the streets are paved with hazelnuts and fresh morels!), it's true. But once the runny golden yolk of the poached egg was pierced and spread silkily throughout the warm innards of the salad, I was hooked on the nutty, rich, crunchy flavors. A little compromise worked out just fine in this case. With crusty bread in hand, I wiped the plate clean, readers.

(Originally posted 8/9/09)



Crepes with chicken & sauce velouté, ciabatta toasts with chicken liver mousse, and cucumber-dill salad. Where to begin, where to begin?? The crepes are the infamous Julia's recipe from MtAoFC, of course, filled with some diced chicken (we had some leftover chicken thighs to use up that day, is how the whole thing got started) sautéed with minced shallot and finished with a splash of balsamic vinegar and grated gruyère. The sauce, sauce velouté, is a classic white sauce (one of the four famous 'mother sauces,' according to those wacky sauce-loving French). The chicken liver mousse recipe comes from the NY Times Sunday magazine of a few weeks ago; they suggested serving it with cornichons but i knew better, having been served almost the exact same dish a few weeks ago at another lovely restaurant in Portland (a wonderful place on Couch called Ten 01) only with lovely golden fig jam. So, fig jam, it is!

If the accompanying cucumber salad (nothing more than sliced cucmbers, dill, and a drizzle of red wine vinegar) seems a bit of a weird choice, well, it was because we had been given yet another bag of pretty organic produce by my friend (the one whose dad has the green thumb) and the cucumbers needed to be eaten IMEDIATELY. Luckily, in my experience, cucumber-dill salad is a nice palate cleanser and goes with just about anything. Mmmmmmmm........

Martha Stewart's pecan shortbread cookies.....I'm no Martha-hater, although i have been, on occasion, a bit of a Martha-mocker. It's in my nature! However, when you need cookies, Martha is the queen of all queens to whom you must appeal for help. And when you're pulling your hair out over computer software and wedding invitation graphic design and a friend calls and offers to do the whole thing for you that very evening if you just bring everything over.....well, the only appropriate thing to do is to also bring cookies! I modified the great Martha's recipe just slightly by toasting the pecans prior to mixing them into the dough and by adding more salt than she called for. I like salt. She seems to like very, very sweet cookies...I personally like them a little more challenging, with a somewhat salty finish (especially when they are largely butter-based, and let's not kid ourselves that that's exactly what these are, ha ha) for added roundness. I'd possibly tweak them a little further in the future for the sake of experimentation, but this recipe as it stands is simple and delicious, so let's just leave it at that. All hail Martha.