Here's a little 'DVD extra bonus feature' from our last Spanish-style dinner party.......dancing baby octopi!! ;)

Project Food Blog Entry #3: 'Well I've never been to Spain.....But I kinda like the food there!'

So, 'luxury.'

It is a funny thing, isn’t it?

After all, one man’s seared foie gras is likely another man’s ballpark-dog-with-everything. When asked by Project Food Blog’s Challenge #3 to approach a luxury meal for a dinner party, I decided after some thought that what matters most is the way it makes everyone in the room feel, the elevation from everyday meal status to something higher. Using ingredients you wouldn’t normally use, spending amounts of time you wouldn’t normally spend, all these things contribute to the creation of a truly special meal.

Coco Chanel once declared, famously, that ‘luxury must be comfortable, or else it is not luxury.’ Ol' CC might not have been facing down the prospect of hosting a dinner party, but it's a wise approach. She was talking about ladies’ fashion, of course, and urging women of the early-to-mid 20th century to shed the outdated notions of modern corsets and other binding fashions and step into stylish clothes that truly fit their bodies and their lifestyles. Still, it’s one of my favorite quotes about luxury in general.

After all, what’s a $1,000 dollar meal with white tablecloth service if you don’t enjoy it? What’s luxury if it doesn’t fit your lifestyle?


Around here, chez Orange & Salt, we are emphatically not white tablecloth service people. If you come for a meal in this household, be prepared to put your elbows up on the scarred wooden table, drink from our recycled-glass glassware, and maybe even share footspace with a dog or two. You will, however, be treated like absolute royalty in terms of what comes to you from my kitchen on your plate. Hours will have been spent behind the scenes in a happy, steamy kitchen, crafting each course. Good music emanating from somewhere in the background. People are laughing, eating. Everyone sighing, relaxed, pouring a little more wine and anticipating the next round of plates. You can leave your tie at home.

Sounds like serious luxury to me.

First piece of advice when planning a dinner party of any kind? Have a clear idea in mind of the kind of event you want, and plan your guest list accordingly—sounds a bit simple, but it’s true, and an often-overlooked part of planning. Some folks wouldn't dream of hosting a dinner event without a centerpiece and adorable decorations on the table; I wouldn't dream of having anyone over without some really excellent music playing in the background (another quick dinner party tip: think internet radio! There are a few services that are offered completely free, and will keep a constant soundtrack of the music of your choice playing in the background for hours--because no one should have to fumble around with CDs while she's also trying to sort out her Romesco sauce!) If it should turn out you are a white tablecloth kind of person after all, that’s wonderful. Make sure to invite a group of people who love white tablecloth dining. For my event, I invited a handful of some of my best food friends, the ones I like to think of as my Adventurous Eaters Club. These guys make complicated soups, desserts, and homemade bacon at the drop of a hat, and we're all used to sitting down to dinner together. I knew I could feed them anything, even baby octopus, and no one would so much as blink an eye.

(Click menu to enlarge)

Second piece of advice when planning a dinner party of any kind? Plan the menu, silly. Oh, I know this seems as though it should be obvious, but I really mean it. Do you want to highlight seasonal dishes? Regional cuisine? And how much work do you actually want to do? The commonly held wisdom I was always given on dinner parties is that everything should be more or less ready to go when guests arrive so that you, the gracious hostess, may spend the maximum amount of time sitting down with your guests and presumably charming them all (if you figure out how to actually do this, by the way, please share the secret with me). I knew I wanted to do some serious cooking, and because our kitchen and dining room flow openly right into one another, I felt comfortable 'breaking' this classic rule to spend more time in the kitchen. I'm personally more comfortable holding court from the kitchen than from the table, anyway, chatting with a wooden spoon in one hand and a glass of wine in the other, a dishtowel wrapped around my waist, calling out to the dining room and occasionally delivering steaming hot plates of treats to the gathered guests. Your mileage on this, it goes without saying, will vary. But know yourself.

For this challenge, I opted to go with a Spanish-influenced menu. I’ve never been to Spain, as the classic song goes, but I’ve always loved the dishes, the ingredients, the photos, the food stories and everything else I’ve ever seen relating to their culture. One of my favorite ideas to borrow from Spanish culture is tapas: the serving and sharing of a variety of ‘tiny bites’ courses on many plates, usually with wine. A tapas course seemed the perfect way to kick off my Spanish meal, and I knew I’d have to have one at this casual but luxurious meal, centered around close friends sitting down together and sharing.


It was a great reason to buy up a pile of tiny whole anchovies and lightly dredge in flour and quick-fry them, as I've seen done before but never tried. It's a classic Mediterranean snack, and I'm happy to report that they are delicious. Crispy, paprika-seasoned chickpeas, also a major tapas revelation--they're tiny and easy to share, but they won't last long! Everyone loved these.

Following this was a course of baby octopus simmered in rich, almond-and-tomato-based Romesco sauce and served over a golden bed of crispy roasted potatoes, then a sweet, tangy salad of shaved fennel and carrot, and a dish of braised chicken thighs (heavily adapted from of of the Great Thomas Keller's recipes from the Ad Hoc at Home cookbook) smothered in onions, fennel and olives. The octopus was amazingly tender (recipes for all these courses will be posted separately here on Orange & Salt), a treat for anyone who's ever suffered through a plate of rubbery tentacles, and the sauce was wonderfully nutty and rich. The raw fennel followed by braised fennel thing is a little trick I like to pull every now and again--it's really nice to have two versions of something so close together to contrast the flavors & textures between the raw and the cooked.

And then the dessert, oh my goodness......the dessert! Airy golden brown pillows of pastry, still warm and slightly chewy at the center and scented with cinnamon, soaked with honey, oozily melting together with a scoop of sweet vanilla ice cream and topped with ground pistachios. I think it goes without saying that I'll be making this one again sometime soon. Thank you, Spain, for the inspiration for this wonderful, wonderful meal. I thank you, and my guests thank you. Another borrowed Spanish idea to keep handy, by the way, is the late, late dinner......useful when things don't go quite as planned. When you forget some vital piece of prepwork and dinner is delayed an extra hour (not that this has ever happened to me, of course), you can just tell everyone you're eating at ten o'clock because it's the authentic Spanish way! Better living through cultural awareness.

Dinner parties are tricky, I’ll just throw that out there. In the case of this one, everything seemed to come together at the same time……..but not exactly in that hoped-for, ‘every dish is perfectly timed’ way. It went something more like this: my last-minute grocery shopping, needing to pick my husband up from the train station, still be home to greet early arrivals, and somehow finely dice the onion and the garlic and prep the chicken, well, they all seemed to need to happen simultaneously. What’s a hostess to do? What can you do, except get through it, put on a smile, get someone to pour you a nice glass of red wine, and keep stirring the octopus. Accept help when it's offered! Have someone set out the olive plate for you, designate someone to shred the carrots for you, and just keep going. And when it's all over, leave the dishes, kick off your shoes, and make sure to cozy up with a nice portion of the dessert plate.

Even Coco Chanel couldn't resist luxury like that.

Project Food Blog Entry #2: Just call me Miss Saigon Crepe......

Was it the weather?

It could, I suppose, have been the weather.

It's been unfairly hot and punishingly humid around the Valley all through September. Mosquitoes have been feasting on us, hair has been limp, eyeliner has been running.......but it all seems so very much more romantic if you close your eyes and imagine that instead of sweaty Phoenix you might be in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (once Saigon), clinging to the back of a motor scooter weaving its way through the humidity and the crowded streets, on your way to some fresh, streetside fare like phở.....or perhaps bánh xèo and chao tom?

It might also have been because of the discovery Mike and I made this month of our new favorite Vietnamese soup house, a place so nice we visited it twice......in a single week. 'You--back again??" roared the cheerful female Vietnamese proprietor when I strolled back in just two days after having eaten a lovely meal there and chatting with her and her husband over steaming bowls of beef tendon and tripe in broth. I threw up my hands in an 'I give up' gesture, laughing at the absurdity and admitting to her the cravings that both my husband and I had been suffering for her soup ever since we'd first been. Vietnamese cuisine, as it turns out, can be a highly addictive substance.

Still, when the second challenge for Project Food Blog came along and challenged me to choose 'an ethnic classic that is outside your comfort zone,' Vietnamese didn't immediately spring to mind. After all, there are so many places I've never traveled, not even at the end of a fork, so many cultures I've never visited. I've never had taro in Tahiti or hákarl in Iceland, never known what it's like to sample ajiaco or arepas in Colombia, or sega wat with injera in Ethiopia. I think of myself as a fearless cook, ready to tackle even the most unknown-to-me dishes, but truthfully there are a lot of things that could be said to be 'outside of my comfort zone.' Finally, I remembered that first, ecstatic bowl of phở and my head cleared. I have a lot of enthusiasm for eating Vietnamese food, clearly, but not much experience actually preparing it myself. At home. From scratch. With authentic ingredients. Envisioning a trip to our local pan-Asian megamarket (the venerable LeeLee Market, originator of such previous posts as this one), I excitedly began researching recipes.

Phở was too simple, too obvious. Phở is arguably a food whose time has come, one which has gone mainstream in a major and well-deserved way. Even my non-foodie friends are starting to talk about it, a sure sign of the times. And soup, even divine, sublime soup just didn't seem.......challenging enough for a Project Food Blog challenge. Where's the flash, the drama, the sweat? Where's the oh-my-God-this-might-fail-at-the-last-crucial-moment cooking method? Soup just..........simmers. And then my brain rested on something else, something I've never cooked or eaten, from a country I've never visited. A dish I've never even seen except through others' descriptions and photographs. A street food sizzling-crepe classic known as bánh xèo.

As with any local specialty in the world, there are as many different ways to make bánh xèo as there are local regions where it is made. There may even be as many different ways as there are people in all of Vietnam. Most seem to agree, however, that pork, shrimp and bean sprouts are the preferred filling. I settled on a version that includes turmeric, rice flour and coconut milk in the banh batter. Also, interestingly enough, this particular recipe calls for........beer. Some recipes called only for water, but I reasoned that beer as an ingredient would result in the light, bubbly batter I needed to make the wafer-thin, crispy and ever so slightly chewy pancakes I was after. So, beer* it was.

( *Full disclosure: No Vietnamese beer of any kind being available, even at our beloved LeeLee Market, I reached for a popular Chinese brew instead. Still delicious.)

The name bánh xèo is adorably onomatopoetic, a fancy term meaning that to say the word aloud suggests a sound, in this case the sound of a thin crepe merrily sizzling in hot, splattering oil over a searingly hot skillet. Banh ssssssssssssaaaayyyoww. It's even fun to say!


To accompany our bánh xèo, I chose another popular dish known as chao tom, a juicy little shrimpcake made of finely minced shrimp, sugar, scallion and a little beaten egg, molded kebab-style around a skewer of sugar cane which also imparts its sweetness to the dish. These are then grilled over coals until lightly charred to perfection, then dipped in salty fish sauce and enjoyed. I've had chao tom before, including a fantastic version at a little Vietnamese place on a side street of Hong Kong, and they're amazing as an accompaniment to just about everything. Plus, if you're going to stand at your kitchen counter and peel and devein a pound of shrimp for an hour, you might as well get an extra shrimp dish out of the whole affair, am I right? Right.

Some slight trouble arose when Mike and I realized that the simple-enough-sounding little shrimpcakes, in order to achieve maximum deliciousness and authenticity, would need to be grilled outside over charcoal. We hadn't grilled all summer. We looked at each other and froze in horror, having both just remembered the day we threw out our rusted old Weber grill, several months prior to this moment, in a fit of extreme spring cleaning. True, the thing was on its last aluminum legs, rusted almost completely through the bottom, and had originally been purchased in rough shape by me at a Goodwill, five years earlier. But at that moment I would have given anything to have the old girl back. How on earth were we going to cook the savory-sweet, smokey, juicy morsels of fragrant shrimp paste of my dreams?


In what I like to think of as the true street food vendor spirit, we devised an improvised plan that worked suprisingly well, involving hot coals, an old saucer-shaped metal firepit that was also hanging around the yard (no photos of our yard will be shown, for obvious reasons....the theme song from 'Sanford & Son' is already running through my head), and long, oiled strips of twisted aluminum foil. Mission Grill? Accomplished!

With the chao tom out of the way, I set myself to the task of putting together the bánh xèo, which comes together at very, very high temperature in a short matter of minutes. The batter was whisked together and set aside while I chopped scallions and sliced pork shoulder. The bean sprouts and small brown beech mushrooms were lightly stir-fried in a small amount of vegetable oil and a pinch of salt, then also set aside. Finally, it was time to put everything in the pan, super-heated and shimmering with vegetable oil. First in went the slices of pork, which were swirled briefly until almost cooked, and then the shrimp. The batter I poured directly on top of this and swirled again until it was as thin a crepe as I could possibly make it. The characteristic sizzle was happening here, the desired crispy edges appearing. The bánh xèo cooked from the edges inward, and when the cooking had all but reached the center I spread the rest of the filling of bean sprouts and mushrooms on one side, then lifted the other side of the crepe and gently folded it over--bánh xèo at this point should be hot, oily and crackling but still soft enough to manipulate.

I slid one masterpiece onto a plate and held my breath, feeling like someone on the verge of a new discovery. It smelled amazing. It even sounded amazing. It was sizzling. Sssssssssssssaaaayyyoww!

And then Mike whisked it, and the plate that followed, away for photo-taking and our once-sizzling Saigon crepes eventually became cold bánh xèo that needed to be reheated--gasp!--in the oven. Such is the lot in life of a food blogger, I suppose. We suffer a little so that you may enjoy photographs taken right at the moment our lovely newborn food enters the world, steaming hot and already dying a little every second. And anyway, even rewarmed from the oven they tasted amazing--each bite is wrapped in cooling lettuce leaf and mint leaves, then dipped in your condiment of choice, pickled chili-garlic paste, lime juice, nuoc mam. The fresh, herbal zing of the greens containing the rich sliced meats and crackling pancake, bound together by a splash of salty sauce was true heaven.


So, bánh xèo: the ingredients, the method, the taste, even the pronunciation......it's no longer outside my comfort zone but has become a true comfort food in my mind.

Say it with me again..........baaaanh sssssssssssssssssssaaaayyyoww! It's a good, good thing. A classic, even.

Bánh Xèo - 'Sizzling Saigon Crepe' (serves 2 hungry people comfortably)

1/3 lb. shrimp (I bought 1 lb., the remainder was used in the chao tom)
2 T. beer
splash of fish sauce
sugar
1/2 lb. pork shoulder
1/2 C. bean sprouts
1/4 C. brown beech mushrooms

2/3 C. rice flour
1/2 tsp. turmeric
1/3 C. beer (use something light in color and taste, a pilsner, lager or similar)
1/3 C. coconut milk, unsweetened
2 scallions
6 T. vegetable or canola oil

For serving:

lettuce leaves
mint leaves
dipping condiment of choice (pickled chili-garlic paste, lime juice, nuoc mam, etc)

Peel and devein shrimp (chef's tip: a cold beer helps accomplish this task much more enjoyably), place in bowl and splash lightly with beer, fish sauce and sugar, mix briefly and set aside. Thinly slice pork shoulder, set aside.

Heat skillet to high, add 2 T. oil and quickly stir fry bean sprouts and mushrooms with a pinch of salt until just soft. Remove from pan, set aside, and wipe out pan.

In a large or medium sized mixing bowl, whisk together coconut milk, turmeric and rice flour. Chop scallions and add to batter. Add beer, whisk lightly just to combine, and set aside.

Add 2 T. oil (you will use the last 2 T. to cook the second crepe) to skillet and heat on high until oil is shimmering. Throw pork slices (enough for one serving, serving size is up to you) in pan and swirl in oil for about 20 seconds, add shrimp (again, enough for one serving) and continue to swirl pan until meat is just cooked. Pour half of batter into pan and quickly swirl until batter forms as large and thin a crepe as possible. When crepe has almost fully cooked (the edges should appear slightly drier and more cooked, while only the very center still looks a little raw and batter-y), spread half of the bean sprout and mushroom filling on one side of crepe, then gently fold other side of crepe over this as though making an omelet. Slide onto plate and listen for the sizzle! Make second crepe just the same as the first, using everything you have left.

To assemble, I recommend picking up each bite wrapped in a leaf of lettuce and a few mint, then dipping in sauce of your choice (fish sauce, nuoc mam, is great here).

Chao Tom - Sugar Cane Shrimpcakes (makes about 12 skewers)

2/3 lb. shrimp
1 tsp. cornstarch or rice flour
1 beaten egg
1/4 tsp. five spice powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. sugar
1 scallion, finely chopped

one fresh sugar cane stalk, cut into 12 equal, skewer-sized pieces

Heat charcoal in a grill (or improvised grilling device of your choice!). Peel and devein shrimp, place in bowl of food processor*, pulse until coarsely chopped. Add all other ingredients, process until mixture has become a sticky paste which is not completely smooth (it should hold together as a paste, but there should still be small chunks visible in the mixture, for texture). Form in equal amounts around each sugar cane skewer, refrigerate until coals have reached their optimum temperature.

( *Instead of using a food processor, you can also use a chef's knife to finely mince ingredients, or a traditional mortar and pestle to grind them together into a paste.)

Grill on a well-oiled grate over coals (this is important, or they will stick badly), turning once, until cooked to your desired level of doneness. Enjoy straight off the skewer, or wrapped in mint leaves and dipped in fish sauce. Chewing the cane and squeezing a little sweet juice out with your teeth after each salty bite is a wonderful idea. Enjoy!

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.......... :)

Somewhere, on a time-traveling island...........

.......this blogger consoles herself over the end of her favorite long-running tv show with a bottle of sixty year old 'MacCutcheon whisky.'

Sigh.

Once upon a time, back in 2005, a group of my friends convinced me to start watching a tv show. I hated it at first. There were too many characters to keep track of, plus flashbacks, relationships, jungle monsters and polar bears. I complained week after week. Until, that is, I found myself loving our weekly get-togethers (at which dinner and good post-show conversation were always a main feature) centered around the show, and loving the show for its many 'Oh-my-God-did-you-just-see-that??' moments. Finally, I was just plain hooked.

Now it's 2010 and my group of friends, like our weekly LOST nights, have scattered and changed. And as all good things must, LOST itself came to an end this week. While I may no longer have a crew of rowdy 20-somethings with which to watch my favorite television show (toasting with a raised can of beer every time Jin said something in Korean, the smoke monster appeared onscreen, or Michael screamed for 'WAAAAAAALLLLLT!!!!'), I do have my trusty and beloved husband. He has watched every single episode of this show right by my side (I believe it should have been in our wedding vows....'Will you love, honor and cherish her....and will you watch six seasons of her favorite sci-fi island soap opera with her with minimal complaint and without asking silly questions like what exactly the smoke monster is or why the hell the bald wheelchair guy can walk and the Southern guy has to nickname everyone?'), and I could think of no better way to close this chapter of my life than with one final LOST dinner night.




And an excellent dinner it was! We had mahi mahi tacos in honor of the late Jin Kwon, fisherman of The Island (and close runner-up for my favorite LOSTie*) with roasted tomato salsa, creamy avocado slices and shredded cabbage. We had a delicious sliced mango salad in honor of the seemingly neverending supply of mangoes provided by The Island, lightly dressed with a pinch of sugar, salt, and fresh mint. And finally, we had brown sugar shortbread 'fish biscuit' cookies, branded with the DHARMA logo, for dessert.

(* dude, I'm a Hurley girl for life.)


We had a great time watching the series finale. I'm not what you'd call a 'tv person' under normal circumstances; in fact, we cancelled our cable over a year ago, and the only television show I've bothered to keep up with regularly is LOST. In many ways, it's the end of an era. But in many other ways, it's just a tv show, and it's just as well that it came to an end when it did. The finale answered some of my questions about The Island, left many unanswered forever (no, really, what IS the smoke monster, dammit??), made us laugh (Mike) as well as cry (okay, me).



In order to truly look & feel the part of a crazed LOST fan, I wore my sweet 'WWJLD?' shirt. Please disregard the jammies and obvious bedhead.

Want to make your own fish biscuits, in tribute to the best show about a pair of feuding brothers, a time-traveling island, a handful of polar bears and about a thousand love triangles?? Well, now you can, brothah! These cookies are a twist on classic shortbread featuring brown sugar and a crisp, ever so slightly salty finish. They're as addictive as a Virgin Mary statue full of heroin, so beware--ours disappeared inside of two days!

DHARMA Initiative 'Fish Biscuits' (aka Brown Sugar Shortbread Cookies)

1 cup flour
1 stick (4 ounces) unsalted butter, sliced and chilled
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt

Preheat oven to 300°, and line a cookie sheet with parchment paper. Using a food processor, pulse the flour, butter, sugar and salt until dough barely begins to come together like damp island sand!

Turn out mixture onto a work surface and gather into a smooth, compact ball. On a lightly floured surface, roll the dough into a 7-by-9-inch rectangle, about 1/4 inch thick. Using a sharp knife, slice fish shapes out of shortbread dough. Set fish shapes on parchment-lined cookie sheet; I got about 16 but your mileage may vary depending on the size of your fish biscuits. Using a pointy instrument (I found a wooden chopstick to be perfect here), carve the word 'DHARMA' into each cookie.

Refrigerate the tray of cookies for 20 minutes. Remove from refrigerator and bake at 300° until light golden brown, about 20 minutes. Let cool for 10 minutes, remove from tray and enjoy. Namaste (.......and good luck)! :)



Goodbye, LOST! We'll miss you!

I'm easy like Sunday morning..........

Without a doubt, there are days around here when I wake up ready to tackle some new challenge in the Tricky Food arena: my first souffle (not so tricky, as it turns out), a complicated curry, a brand new cake with three kinds of flour, a page from Mastering the Art of French Cooking........there are days when this all seems like a great adventure and nothing could possibly go wrong! There are days, chez Orange & Salt, when we are just positively rarin' to go.

And then. Well. There are days when the morning alarm fails to go off, the dog needs to be walked, the deadlines need to be met, and the people need to be fed, period. Days like this call for recipes that can be eased into gently and fit as perfectly as an old, washing-softened pair of favorite blue jeans. Comforting, maybe even slightly forgiving, and ready to go in almost no time at all. Welcome to comfort cooking, Orange & Salt style.

It's not all soufflés and mousses around here, people! In fact, since we're both actively trying not to gain any weight (everyone's favorite New Year's resolution), Mike and I tend to fall back on the same marginally healthy meals quite often. Things on Bread is a popular category around here (broiled tomato bruschetta with mozzarella slices and fresh basil is our staple summer meal), as are Things Scrambled with Eggs, Things in a Bowl with Homemade Vinaigrette (otherwise known as 'salad,' although it looks different every single time), or Things Blended into Some Kind of Soup. Oh, I know you've been fooled lately by my fancy photos of pastries and homemade delicacies, but we certainly don't eat this way every day; the true fact is we're lazy folks just like everyone else who just want something good that hopefully isn't going to bloat us up to orca- or Macy's-parade-balloon-sized proportions over the long run! This is where our comfort recipes come very much in handy.



.........behold an entry from my personal favorite category, Things Scrambled with Eggs. Shown in this photo, 2 eggs scrambled with sauteed kale, garlic and red onion, dressed with a dollop of fire-roasted salsa and a sprinkling of white cheddar. Fold this charming mess into a whole wheat tortilla (hunt around at your supermarket for the kind without preservatives and extra flour additives...you have to eat them all within a few days, but they're so tasty that you'll want to!), and it's good, in my opinion, for breakfast, lunch or dinner. Done in five minutes.

There are about a million interesting way in which this could be modified, as well, which is what makes Things Scrambled with Eggs such an enjoyable category. Spinach substituted for kale would be great, of course. You could add a sprinkling of cilantro or parsley, a plop of yogurt and harissa, or swap the cheddar for crumbled feta or ricotta salata. This meal kind of begs to be taken in different directions: Mexican, Middle Eastern, Asian. It's a no-brainer, so play with your food.

Next is an important entry in the Things on Bread category! Shown above is an example of the instant flatbread we learned to make from none other than Jacques Pépin himself. It's nothing more than flour, water, baking soda, a pinch of salt and a drizzle of olive oil, but it's absolutely sublime. It's also a lifesaver when you're hungry and having nothing in the house but random ingredients that might be candidates for Things on Bread. Instant bread! Better than pizza! What could be better?

To make Jacques's flatbread, heat a 12" skillet to medium high with enough olive oil to generously coat the bottom. In a bowl, combine the following:

2 C. flour (I have used every kind of flour known to man for this, including wheat and soy flour. While they give perfectly respectable results, you might want to use regular all-purpose flour, at least the first time around)

1 T. baking soda
1 tsp. salt

1 1/2 C. water

Stir until everything is combined, the result should be something like a thick batter or very, very loose dough. Pour into hot pan and spread with the back of your spoon until bread more or less reaches the sides of the pan and could be called, you know, 'flat.' Continue cooking on one side until bread starts to form attractive little brown blisters on the side facing down (see photo), 5-7 minutes. Drizzle the side facing up with a little extra olive oil. Flip it. If the thought of flipping it in one smooth motion like Jacques or Julia fills you with unholy terror (and who can blame you?), use a spatula, but be warned: This bread is fragile! Think of it as more like a giant pancake or biscuit which, at its essence, it is. It's liable to crack apart on you if you hesitate, so whatever your method, be quick with the flipping.

This recipe in its above incarnation is actually a Frankensteined version of two Jacques recipes wedged into one (in case it hasn't become obvious by this point, we are big Jacques disciples around here, in fact, my husband even credits the man with having taught his adolescent self to cook in the first place! Through the power of television, that is, alas, not in person. Jacques, call us!). His original recipe for 'Smoked Salmon Pizza' used storebought lavash bread as a base, which is also quite tasty but not as sturdy as you might hope. We knew when we
found his flatbread recipe that we had a winner!

To make this 'pizza,' layer one finished flatbread with a thin smear of sour cream (Greek yogurt might also be nice), thinly sliced red onions (raw or pre-marinated in a little red wine vinegar), smoked salmon pieces, capers (it's obvious the grocery budget was running a little low this particular week, because in the photos we actually have finely chopped green olives standing in for pricey capers. Both are good, the main point is the hint of salt.) and plenty of freshly ground black pepper.

As with all of our comfort recipes, this one has appeared on our table with endless variations. The same way you can pair a different top every day with those favorite old blue jeans and come up with a thousand 'new' outfits, comfort foods are by their very design easy to fool around with and recombine in subtle new ways. The above entry in the Things on Bread category is also especially good under a thick green blanket of chopped baby arugula, or with a sprinkling of fresh dill. One ambitious evening, faced with a little leftover roast chicken, a tomato, and half a ball of mozzarella, we even made something more closely resembling a traditional pizza. It was delicious, and best of all, it was easy. Just like Sunday morning. Or any time at all.