The sauce of summer?

For this Italian guy, there are very few aromas more enticing than that of summer basil. I can bury my face in a big bunch of it, and come close to becoming intoxicated. In fact, I know some people for whom the smell is just too strong, too powerful. My old therapist used to say that it "bordered on vulgar." Well, I don't know about that, but if you've held even a leaf of fresh basil in your fingers, and rubbed, you know what I mean.

Basil is a member of the mint family, and the origin of its name is the same as "prince" in many languages (think of the "basilica" of St Peter. It's the same root). And indeed, it may be the strongest of mints, if you can even think of it that way.

For me, this is one of the ingredients that says "summer." I will not work with it outside of the warm months, and I think of the d ried stuff as just a cadaver. It's worthless. But when it's around, oh yes, bring it on.

From the title, you may have assumed, correctly, that we are getting to pesto. We've all had it. Most of us have had a bad version, with too much salt, or too much cheese, or not enough basil, or too much parsely (yes, parsley), and we use too much of it because the flavor of the bad stuff just isn't good. I'm going to tell you how I make mine, and make some suggestions on using it. And here's one of the ones I most enjoy making.

Use it in the winter. Seriously. Pesto freezes beautifully, and if you feel about its scent and power the way I do, you will appreciate the impact it can have if you float some pesto on a bowl of winter minestrone in February. Ray Bradbury had his dandelion wine, Annalena has her pesto. After you make it, you can load it into ice cube trays, freeze it, and then store the cubes in a plastic bag, and take them out as you need them. Trust me on this one, sometimes it is just what you need to bring a winter meal up to speed, and you can recall those summer days, the way those lovely young children recalled summer whenever they opened a bottle of dandelion wine.

So, here's how I make mine. I take four cups of basil leaves. It can be very tedious to pull the leaves off of the stems of the plants, but you really do need to do this, leaving behind as much of the stem as possible (there IS a good use for the stem though, as I'll talk about below). The stem can give a very woody taste to your pesto when you process it. Pack the leaves loosely into a measuring cup and put them to the side, while you get a pot of water , without salt, to a boil.

Wait... boiling water for pesto. Yes. It's a trick I learned from a recipe I read years ago, and I had my doubts. But it works. Sometimes, when I made pesto from the raw leaves, there would be a bitter edge to it that is as unpleasant as some of the tannic, big Tuscan olive oils where the pepper is all you taste. But putting the basil leaves in boiling water for ten seconds (yup, ten seconds), seems to take care of that. So you put em in and pull em out, and drain them on some paper towels while you get the other ingredients ready.

Now, this is MY recipe, and other people will have other variations. You should play within the constraints of using the ingredients listed. Olive oil is a must. For four cups of leaves, one cup of olive oil. Extra virgin. The best you can find. Pine nuts. Two tablespoons. I don't toast them, toast them if you like the darker flavor. Garlic. Two cloves for a batch. Less if your garlic is very strong. Salt. Half a teaspoon. And, optionally, although for me, an essential part of this, is a quarter cup of water. You shouldn't use what's in the pot from the quick cook of the leaves though. Remember, you left the bitter flavor there.

I put the oil in a blender, first, and then the garlic and the pine nuts, whirring this to a puree. Then I add the basil leaves, and the water. The water , to me, gives a creamier emulsion and makes a smoother sauce. Leave it out if it bothers you, but try it once. Then the salt. Taste. If it needs more, add more.

This is a very loose sauce, and "pesto" means "paste," of course. The pasty texture comes from grating cheese into it. When I was younger, I used TONS of cheese in my pesto. But now, I almost never use it. Maybe there has been a change in my palette, but I more enjoy that fresh, strong jolt of basil, without the cheese, than the combination. Sometimes I'll sprinkle cheese over a dish that I use pesto on, but not always. And having pesto without cheese allows me to use it on things like fish.

When I use it during the summer, I almost always make trenette. I am not certain how this dish developed, because it seems anathemic to everything Italian, but it sure is good. Trenette uses a special pasta - also called trenette - that resembles linguine very closely. So use linguine if you don't have trenette pasta. Use the dried stuff , it's fine. While the water is coming to a boil, trim and break up about half a cup of green beans. They should be broken into bite sized pieces. And also peel and dice one small boiling potato (the red skinned ones), for every two persons you're serving. Then, when the water comes to a boil, add the salt you would normally use, and add your pasta, green beans, and potatoes, all at once. They will cook together. The green beans may be softer than you would likethem as a side vegetable, but they're right for this dish. When the pasta is ready, drain everything, and get your pesto ready. Stir in a good tablespoon per portion (that's the standard amount: use more if you like, but try it with just one). I can't say this enough: as the pesto hits the hot pasta, the smell will come up and WHAM, you get it again. Then stir everything together, add grated cheese if you like, and serve this interesting , wonderful amalgalm of starch and fat to your guests. They'll love it.

Oh, back to the stems. Well.... that's to be continued when corn comes into season. To tease, it's a stock made of corn cobs, and pesto stems. Yup, you read right.

Hey, remember, I told you about pea pod stock. Would I lie to you about this?

Pushing limits or, I make pie

"We can't all be good at everything," right? You've heard that line, I've heard the line, you've used it, I've used it, we all know it and we all somehow, sometimes, feel "deficient" or "inadequate" for lack of a better word. And when we're good at something that is a big category, there are always things within it that fall on a "bell curve" of competence. If you play tennis, for example, (and you've heard this on tv), you may have an excellent serve, and a weak return. Or, if you're a gym rat, you may be good at lifting, and stink at the bike (I'm guessing at that last one. I know way more about TV sports than the real stuff).

In my own area of cooking, I stay away from pie. I just don't feel all that comfortable at it, and I don't think I'm very good at it. A cake? Hell, put me in a kitchen, give me some flour, butter and sugar, and you'll have cake in 30 minutes. Ask me for a pie? Well.. we're kinda pushing the line here. You gotta be a DAMN good friend to get me to make a pie.

Enter Keith. Keith's name has come up in these entries before, not as often as some others, but he's here. Well, in one of the fortuitous coincidences of the calendar, Keith's birthday is tomorrow, while we're still in the throes of gay pride, which is today.

Every year, when pride comes around, I find myself thinking about my gay blessings. Those are different, you see, from the general blessings of good health, or financial security. See, when you enter this "club," you find out that it's a tough one. A REAL tough one. Many pundits have written about it far better than I can. Let me just say that on the list of my blessings, Keith is up there at the top of the list.

One of the reasons for it is, he'd never ask me to make a pie. NEVER. In fact, he'd never ask for anything. I offered to give him a birthday party, and he accepted, with tremendous, heartfelt, almost tearful gratitude. So, what do you make for dessert for a friend that dear to your heart? For me, it means tapping into what I remember as favorites. Keith loves cherries. And there is no dessert that shows off cherries better than cherry pie.

Oh dear. Somewhat worse than being torn between two lovers: my desire to really do something special for a very special friend, and my fear of turning out something awful. So, what do you do in that situation? You swallow , take a deep breath and say "I can do it." And I did. Here's the story.

I have a wonderful cookbook called "The Pie and Pastry Bible," by Rose Levy Beranbaum. I don't consult this book very often, because I don't make pie very often. After today, perhaps I shall use it more often. This is a book that can very easily intimidate people. Ms. Beranbaum is EXTREMELY detailed in her recipes, and her measurements. But that is something I LOVE. And there is extreme good sense in the book. For example, for this pie, which has a lattice top, she recommends rolling the dough to a rectangle, since you're going to be making long slices.

Isn't that sensible? Well, it's the first time I've seen someone recommend that. And it's the first time my lattice has not made me want to scream. Pie crust is supposed to be made with cold ingredients. New York apartments are warm. So, what does she suggest you do? She suggests you get the ingredients ready and put them in the freezer for a short period of time before you make the crust. Brilliant, common sense. And something I've never seen before. So if she needs a paragraph or two to explain this, I'm all for it. "GO GIRL" is all I can say. Ms. Beranbaum has a blog of her own, and I shall be thanking her for this later today.

So, here's the pie. Starting with the crust. This is a crust that has some cream cheese in it. Again, this is quite brilliant. When I was rolling it out (one of the things that gives me fits), it was so smooth, and so easy, that I felt like I could make another one. What you do is measure about 1 1/3 cups of flour (Ms. Beranbaum says bleached. I don't have bleached flour in the house, so I used all purpose. I p robably lost some tenderness here, but I can't in good conscience use a bleached flour), together with 1/8 teaspoon of salt (see what I mean about the measurements) and 1/8 teaspoon of baking powder. You put t his in a plastic bag and put it in the freezer, for 30 minutes. You do the same thing with a stick of unsalted butter, that you've cut into cubes.

After the thirty minutes, get 1.5 tablespoons of ice water ready, and 1.5 teaspoons of cider vinegar. Also get a 3 ounce package of cream cheese, and cut it into four pieces. Put the flour into the food processor and pulse it a few times. Add the cream cheese with the motor running, and then add the butter, and pulse, pulse, pulse, until you've got a consistency of small peas. Then add the water, and the vinegar and pulse a few more times.

You will get something that looks decidedly unpromising. But this is what you want. I learned, a while ago, that if your piecrust "feels" like piecrust when it comes out of the processor, it's too tough. Then you put all of this into a plastic bag (I used the former flour bag), and press it into a solid mass with your fingers. Trust me, it works. Then, for the lattice crust, divide that into one piece that is half the size of the other (I have a metric scale and I weighed it). Wrap them separately, and refrigerate. I let them refrigerate overnight.

Next day, I took out the dough to let it rest, and I made the filling. Here, I was more generous than Ms. Beranbaum. She calls for 1.5 pounds of sour cherries. I had nearly 2 3/4, and I took a chance, which worked. I pitted them with my fingers, and it didn't take long: maybe twenty minutes. Since I had increased the amount of fruit, I increased her sugar from 3/4 cup to one full cup and the cornstarch from 2.5 teaspoons to a heaping tablespoon. Some may argue about the amount of sugar, but Keith doesn't like things that are too sweet, and it's his pie. I agreed fully with her suggestion to add some almond extract. Had I a few noyaux around (the kernels of apricots and peaches), I would have crushed them, and used that instead. I let the filling sit.

I rolled out the dough on a well floured, DRY board (part of my problem with pastry is that I don't keep a neat kitchen, and things are always wet. So I did this before I did anything else). After I had rolled out the dough, I pressed it into a pretty pie dish and refrigerated, like Ms. Beranbaum suggested, while I preheated the oven to 425. I also rolled that second piece of dough to a rectangle so I could make my slices, and refrigerated that.

After an hour, with renewed confidence, I took out the pieplate, filled it with the cherries, and dutifully made my lattice. I will not try to explain lattice. I suggest you get the book and look at the illustrations. NOW, I know how to do it. The pie went into the oven, looking stunning and baked for 45 minutes. I DO have a baking stone, but my oven runs hot, so instead of baking it on the stone, I put the pieplate on a baking sheet, for spills, of which there were some, because sour cherries are juicy.

Out of the oven came a beautifully brown, bubbling, wonderful smelling pie. It LOOKS homemade. This is not a perfect pie. There is some patching of the lattice, there are some uneven edges, but when you get right down to it, isn't that what homemade is about? And I have never pretended to be without my own patches or uneven edges (and for that matter, neither has Keith).

And it's done. It's cooling now, waiting for our party, where I hope to put a great big candle in the center of it, put a knife in Keith's hands, and hopefully see a big smile on his face when he tastes it.

Keith, I love you to pieces. There aren't many people who could get this kinda pie out of me, but you can have one anytime you want. All you have to do is ask. Even though you never will.

Happy birthday bright eyes, and happy pride.

How can something so sour be so sweet?

Any idea what I'm talking about, besides love? I'm speaking of cherries.
As a person who loves to cook, and loves to eat, I have an ambivalent relationship with cherries. At this time of year, just about any restaurant you go into has a cherry dessert on the menu. And I've had all of them. And I've been disappointed with each and every one of them. See, I'm not ambivalent about the TASTE of cherries: I love them. But when cherries are cooked, to my taste, they wind up tasting just like prunes, or raisins. All of the "cherrieness" is gone from them.

But I speak of SWEET cherries. And those, I reserve for eating fresh, or now, my new discovery, (thanks to Zuni), roasted. There is a second variety of cherries, that many of us just don't know about, and those are SOUR cherries. Why don't we k now about them? Well, while cherries are fragile, in general, sour cherries are extremely fragile. They are extremely soft, and extremely juicy, and under the usual conditions of handling of fruit, they're destroyed. And, when a sour cherry crop comes in, it all comes in at the same time. So, many of them , in fact most of them, are frozen, or canned, or used in the food business for the flavor or color they impart to other things. So, when you see sour cherries, or "pie cherries," as they are sometimes called, it is unusual to see them fresh. This is their season, though, the Farmers Markets are full of them, and away I go.

One of the interesting things I learned about sour cherries, many years ago, is that sour cherry trees are not self pollinating. In other words, if you have a sour cherry tree, and there isn't another one around, you will get flowers, but no fruit. Sweet cherry trees DO self pollinate, so you'll get fruit if you beat the birds to them. Cherries, be they sweet or sour , are extremely good for you, and birds know that. Farmers I have spoken to tell me that the race to get to the cherries before the birds do is a tight one. There are all kinds of techniques employed, including netting the trees as the fruit ripens, but there is always a loss to the deserving, hard working birds.

But to the fruits themselves. I LOVE making sour cherry sorbet. I will post it here in due course, but in short, all it has in it are cherries, sugar and water. And if it works, I will post a sour cherry pie recipe in a day or so. Today, however, I am posting my latest discovery for cherries: pickled sour cherries.

Yes, I have an obsessive personality, and now that I've made pickles, I'm looking at all kinds of pickling recipes. With the sour cherries in, I happened upon a recipe, by following a link in David Lebovitz's wonderful blog. Since my dear friend Keith has a birthday in a matter of days, and he has told me that cherries are his favorite fruit, I wanted to try to provide him something that he's never had before - plus a cherry pie. And, of course, since I'm now fascinated by the concept of pickling, I got to have fun, too.

This was a very easy recipe. I WILL tell you that amongst Guy and I, as of now, the jury is still out on these. True, they have been picling for all of four or five hours, and the recipe very explicitly says to wait a few days before eating them, but we tried them anyway. They have a very unique flavor, and perhaps not at all like cherries. The other thing you need to know is that the process of pickling them does leach the red color out of them, so you get a yellow looking fruit, and a dark liquid.

For a quart jar of cherries, you need a full pound of sour cherries. Don't pit them. DO cut the stems back, almost to the base of the cherry. The reason for this is simple: the stem of fruit is wood: that's tannin. Tannin extracts into alcohol, and unless you control it, like in a good wine, it is really, REALLY nasty. But you want the softer, little bit in order to give you a "handle" for getting the cherries out of the jar. Then - and I think this is the fun part, although it is a bit tedious, take a toothpick and prick each cherry two or three times, before putting it in your quart jar. You can make the brine while you're doing this. The brine is a cup of white wine vinegar (I had some chardonnay vinegar), a cup of white sugar, 2/3 cup of water, a half tablespoon of black peppercorns, and two bay leaves. Bring the sugar and the water and the vinegar to a boil, and then take it off the heat. Crush the peppercorns with the back of a knife, just a bit, and put them into the jar with the cherries, and the bay leaves. Pour the liquid over all of it, and close the jar.

The change of color is very dramatic, and you can watch it unfold over several hours. The cherries also float in the liquid. You don't want to fill the jar too full of the cherries, because if you do, you'll crush them.

From the taste I had, I could see serving these with a rich meat, like duck, or pork, or some kind of barbecue. And I think the brine is going to be wonderful in a sparkler, something like a balsamic vinegar soda.

I will report back to you on what we do with these and how they work out. This may be something we do for fun, once in a while. Try it. It sure was easy to do.

Remembering Nana again

I've been spending a fair amount of time as of late, OUT of the kitchen. Yes, Guy and I have been doing more than our share of getting out and partying, so I really don't have much to tell you about what's going on in the kitchen. So, when in doubt, a story from my cooking past.

I had actually forgotten this story. I was reminded of it when Chris recalled a story that I had told him which involved a large carp (you'll get that one, eventually), but remembered it as involving eel. Well, I DO have an eel story. A recurring one.

Everyone associates Easter with lamb. There's always something associated with lamb around the pascal feast. Especially amongst Italians, who can argue endlessly about the appropriate age of the lamb roast, all the way up to mutton.

Well, not everyone eats lamb. Or at least, when I was a kid, that was true. Lamb was expensive. VERY expensive, compared to other things. And there were many times when the money just did not stretch far enough to provide lamb, for what was, at times, a very bustling, large family. And when that happened, it fell to Nana to come up with something else. And it was always eel. Not the little, tiny eels that you find in Spanish restaurants at about 100.00 an ounce, or the medium sized ones you will see in Japanese restaurants on the sushi plate. Oh, no, these were BIG eels. Big enough to feed ten people. But I should explain: eel is very strong tasting, and very rich. I haven't seen anyone selling eels that size anymore, and I suspect that they've either been fished out, or they all go to Asia or to Europe. But back then, I would go with Nana, on Good Friday, to our local fisherman. He had a tank of live eels. Nana would study them carefully, and then settle on one. The fish monger would take it off and dispatch it (unlike chickens, Nana never killed her own fish). And we'd bring it home, and prep it on Holy Saturday.

In some older books, you see references to women filling gowns "like eels." Eelskin is very tight on the animal. But you have to skin it to cook it Italian style, or at least the way Nana did. And that's where the teamwork would come in. Ok, ready for this? What she would do is hold the eel up against a wall, and then she'd take a large nail out of her mouth, and BANG a hammer on it, right through the head of the eel. That way, it was fixed to the wall for what we did next.

Then, she would take her sharpest knife (a little tiny thing she called "her secret sister"), and run a horizontal cut at the base where the head met the neck, in a circle. My turn was next. The two of us would each grab a plier and stand at the side, and pull, pull, PULL..... You have to have the image of a slightly overweight - ok, MORE than slightly overweight kid, and a woman in her late 50s, standing there, with a snake between them, pulling the skin off.

It would take a while, but we did it. The skinned eel did not look very appetizing, and it still needed to be cleaned. Nana would excuse me for that, so I can honestly say that eviscerating an eel is not something I know how to do. She did it herself. Then she'd stuff it with a combination of various tasty things: I remember bread crumbs, garlic, olive oil, dried spices, raisins, and maybe some other things. If we had them, there would be pignoli nuts, but that was rare.

She'd bake it for a long time, and then serve big slices of it with whatever vegetables we were having. My sisters were grossed out by it, but I have to say, I LOVED that dish. Maybe even more than lamb. And we only had it once a year.

Times changed, and we began to have more money. And lamb every Easter. One year, I went into the kitchen and asked Nana if we were ever going to have eel again. I remember that she was working, and she smiled and said "No, dear. We're having lamb. Like fancy people." And I answered her by asking if fancy people ever ate things that they liked. What I remember next is that she stopped what she was doing, looked at me, and smiled even bigger. "You have a poor person's taste. That's good. You'll always have enough money for food. Most people aren't that lucky." And I remember she did something Nana almost never did. She kissed me three times: once on the top of my head, once on my cheek, and once on my lips (Nana took great faith in things that came in threes).

And as years went by, she and I ate "poor food" together: tripe. Fava beans. Breast of veal. Spaghetti with bread crumbs. But we never sat down to eel again. I guess I always have had money for food, and I'm not sure if I have "poor person's taste," but what I do know is that I sure miss that stuffed eel.

Surely , reader, you have some reminiscence of a dish that you grew up on that brngs up strong memories, be they good or bad. Isn't it time to share? Sharing is one of the big themes of Annlena's kitchen, so how about your own story ? I would love to read them.

Special friends, special meals, special treats

"When I was a kid." You know that line, don't you? We all use it. And here I go. It's a line that most of us have used : "when I was a kid, either you ate what was put on the table or you went hungry." You've heard and used some variation on that, haven't you?

Well, things change. For our last two dinner parties, we had guests who expressed openly that they did not eat/did not care for certain things that were on the menu. In fairness, I always try to give people an opportunity to express just that. Hospitality, in my view, means that you open yourself up to making changes for people. In return, you expect that someone is not going to say "I don't eat...." simply because she doesn't like the way it looks.

It does mean more work. For example, at our last dinner party, we served duck as the main course. One guest was vegetarian, which was new to me. Another eats chicken and turkey, but that's all. Now, both guests were very explicit: "don't worry about making something special, I'll be fine with what other things you're cooking."

Yes, but I wouldn't be. And a hospitable cook does try to honor this kind of request. It's a challenge, and what it can also lead to is having enough food left over so that you don't have to cook a few meals for the rest of the week, or you just have to make a few modifications and you have a really good dinner.

Even though our chicken eating guest had said he'd be fine, modifying my duck dish to chicken was actually so easy that it begged to be done. In fact, the chicken may very well have been better. It was sort of a "poor man's coq au vin," or "summer coq au vin," which I will explain below. And then I'm going to explain what I did to make a second meal.

I only needed one chicken leg for the portion of protein for our friend, but let's face it: is there anything more depressing than cooking ONE chicken leg? Well, yes , there are more depressing things (like our presidency), but in the kitchen, few things are. So I bought four of them. And then I took a recipe that I have from one of the Chez Panisse cookbooks, and modified it just a bit. I will tell you how I did too.

You will need four chicken legs - whole legs, drumstick and thigh. You will also need two carrots, sliced into coins, a large onion or two small ones, diced, a couple of bay leaves, a sprig or two of thyme, the rind of half of a lemon , in large pieces, salt, and pepper, and chicken stock and white wine. Also, some olive oil. While you're prepping all of your ingredients, preheat your oven to 450. If you have remembered to do so, salt the chicken the night before, with about a teaspoon of salt, and if you h aven't, do it before you start cooking.

I vary from the recipe that I learned, by heating up the olive oil and browning the chicken legs quickly. All in all, it takes about 8 minutes: 5 for the first side, and three for the other when you turn them. Don't move the legs around when you're browning them. When they're browned, move them to the side, and keep them warm. Now, eyeball the oil, and keep in mind you're going to cook vegetables. Do you have enough? Do you have too much? If your chicken was particularly fatty, you will probably have too much. If you buy an organic, pasture fed chicken, it may be just enough, or even too little, because the bird is lean. You have to make a judgement call here. In any event, what you've done is flavored your oil by cooking the chicken first. Now add your onions, and cook them for about three minutes, and then add the carrots, the bay leaf and the thyme, and cook for another three minutes.

Lay those vegetables down on a baking casserole, and put the chicken on top of it. Then add 2 parts of stock and one part white wine, to just come to the top of the chicken legs. Add the lemon peel at this time. Cover the pan with foil and put it in the oven. After fifteen minutes, lower the heat to 350 and cook for another 45 minutes. Finally, take the foil off, turn the chicken legs and cook for another fifteen minutes.

This last step is supposed to brown the chicken. When I did it without prebrowning the chicken, it never happened. That's why I brown them ahead of time. And it also allows me to add more flavor to the vegetables. The liquid will also evaporate during the cooking, and the vegetables will soften markedly. You can crush them into what little liquid is left and have a nice sauce for the chicken, for the first day. And that is exactly what we did.

Now, if you have left overs, you can do something like this. Let them cool. In fact, you can let the chicken cool and then refrigerate it, and work with it right out of the fridge, which may be easier. I say easier because the chicken will have fat on it from the cooking, and as the fat melts, it will get more and more slippery. Think in these terms: is it easier to handle a pat of butter, or a spoon of olive oil? So, however the temperature, tear, or cut the meat from the chicken in rough pieces. Don't toss the skin unless you're really feeling virtuous, and if you are, well, you're reading MY blog?

Then, take a look at the chicken you have there, and dice up an equal amount of summer squashes, in pieces about the same size. Pour a little olive oil into a big pan, and add the squash (it's high season now: buy different shapes and sizes and colors). Cook that squash for about five minutes, and don't stir it too much. Then, add the chicken. It's cooked already, and all you really need to do is warm it. If you happen to have some left over sauce from the first cooking, add that , too. If you don't, and you want a moister dish, add some chicken stock, or even water. I think you'll like it drier though. When the chicken has warmed through, you're done.

What you have now, is another, wonderful dish. You can serve this as is, or you can put it over chunky pasta, or on polenta, or rice or again, make a great sandwich. And you've accomplished two things. First, you've made a friend happy with a dish that was not that hard to do, and is quite tasty. Second, you've made a second delicious meal with what was left over, used seasonal ingredients, and that didn't take too much trouble at all, did it?

It IS the end of June, it can be very warm, and Annalena's kitchen is all about not too much trouble if it can be avoided.

If you don't have squash, use something else. I came very close to buying beautiful wild porcinis today, and simply forgot. At 40 bucks a pound ( a bargain, to be honest), it was probably good that I didn't. But had I done so, they would have worked with the chicken. Indeed, if we didn't have chicken, the sausage from yesterday would have worked with the squash as well.

Cooking is, very much an act of improvisation. Use what you have, and do the best with it. You can do it.

Not just for sandwiches: fresh tuna

One of the standards that anyone my age, or thereabouts, remembers from childhood, is tuna fish sandwiches. Soft, messy sandwiches with canned tuna, mayonnaise, usually celery, and maybe other stuff. On soft white sandwich bread, or if you were fancy, rye bread.

Admit it: you loved them. And you miss them. I do. One of the things that the "food revolutions" of the last thirty years have succeeded in just about eliminating are those wonderful, messy sandwiches. They were also cheap. I remember being able to get a sandwich, chips and a soda and spending a dollar or so. I was in my local deli this morning and saw that the tuna sandwich was 8 dollars. But it was on ciabatta. And it was "gourment, mayonnaise free" tuna salad. "

No thanks.

I don't want to blame any of us who grew up on those sandwiches with the plight of bluefin tuna today - we weren't using bluefin in those sandwiches, rest assured- but tuna is a fish that has been overhunted, and some species are in fact at the verge of crashing to the point of extinction. Bluefin is one of those. The numbers are scary, and depressing. So when you eat tuna out, please, to make Annalena a slightly happier woman, ask what kind of tuna you're getting. Most NY restaurants are respecting the "ban" or "boycot" and don't serve it, but it doesn't hurt to ask.

Other species are more plentiful, and the one that is showing up in NY waters right now, is yellowfin. It has to be distinguished from "yellowtail," and I'm sure that if I had to, I could tell them apart, but I can't explain how. I DO ask the "not so ancient mariner" Phil or his crew what type they brought in when they have it, and they always look at me like "Oh, are we going over this AGAIN?" Well, Annalena's mind is not as flexible as it used to be. So yes, we are. Remember, Annalena is bringing you lunch later that day. Be nice to her.

So, the water has gotten warmer, and tuna are in local waters. And that means we're eating it. Not often, perhaps once every two or three weeks, but we are eating it. And I want to talk about cooking it, because I fear that many people don't eat fresh tuna because it scares them.

When you see a good, really fresh piece of tuna, it's dark pink or red. This is a result of the musculature of the fish. These are fast moving, deep water fish. They need strong muscles for swimming, and deep water diving requires blood that holds a lot of oxygen. That's where the red comes from. The older a slice of tuna is, the drier it is (a sign you shouldn't buy it is curling at the edges), and the red begins to change to an ugly dark purple (another sign you shouldn't buy it. The third, and final sign is: does it smell bad?).

The dark red color , and the dense texture of the fish should give you a hint as to how to cook it: I tell people to think of tuna as "swimming steak." Yes, it's kind of gross, but it tells you how you should cook it.

Annalena likes her meat and tuna close to raw (let's be careful here, boys). In a restaurant, if she's eating tuna, and they ask "how would you like it?" Annalena will frequently say something like "hold a match to it and put it on the plate." After the server gives her a look like she's crazy, Guy will step in and say "she means cook it blue." Blue is cold at the center, charred on the outside. I usually can't get it that way, but anything beyond rare is too cooked for me. Other people prefer it more cooked. Then there are people like my friend Par, from Sweden, who eat it well done.

There are many theories as to why people eat fish like tuna well done. The most convincing one to me is that it's a way of making sure that anything that might be questionable about the fish is cooked to the point where you can't smell it, and it's not a problem anymore. But it may also, simply be a question of taste. Italians, for example, and meditteranean French, prepare tuna in a way that I find interesting and tasty, but extravagant. The tuna is poached, at a low, warm temperature, for a long time, in olive oil. This cooks the fish nearly all the way through. The olive oil keeps it moist, but you lose that redness that many of us like. I DO like this preparation in salads, or in combination with vegetables, but as a plain piece of fish, rare for me , please.

So, this is how I cook my tuna, with some variations. And it's easy. I like to get slices of tuna ('steaks' if you will), that are about half an inch to 3/4 inch thick. This is about half a pound. I can easily eat the whole piece, and usually do, but this is big enough to slice nicely, if you're going to use the tuna for some of the things I talk about below. I heat up a grill pan (you can use a frying pan), and what I do is brush olive oil on both the g rill pan AND the fish itself. I also salt the fish, but at the last minute. And I salt it heavily, because most of the salt is going to fall off.

I test the grill pan to see if a drop of water skittles off of it quickly. If it does, it's hot enough to cook the fish. And it HAS to be hot enough to keep the integrity of the slice. If it is not, the fish will stick, and break apart. It usually doesn't take more than two minutes for the tuna to cook enough on a side for me, and then I turn it, for another two minutes. You can watch the cooking process by looking at the slice from the side, as it cooks. It moves through the fish, sort of the way water moves up fabric, as the color goes from red, to pink, to brown. You have to be the judge here. DO keep in mind that as the color changes, the fish is also cooking on the inside, so you're getting some slow cooking there, too.

Just like a steak, when you take the tuna off of the grill, be it after four minutes, or ten minutes, etc, let it rest a few minutes to recover its juices. Now is the time to add ground pepper if you like (I do). If you're going to slice it, slice it across the grain. What do I mean by this? You'll see the tuna have "lines" that run from one end to the other. What you want to do is make your slices run perpendicular to those lines. You're doing this to sever muscle. Muscle is tough and chewy, and if you try to chew on a long slice, you'll be getting tuna chewing gum. By cutting against the grain, you sever the muscle and make it easier to chew and enjoy.

For me, a spritz of lemon, is all that I want on this. Sometimes, I will make a quick sauce of green, fresh herbs: cilantro, parsley, lemon balm, herbs that are fresh and bright go well with tuna. You can also put the slices on top of a green salad, for a lovely dish, or combine it with the classic ingredients of a salade nicoise (I believe they are cooked green beans, olives, and hard boiled eggs, but this is one of those classics that has been reinvented so many times, Annalena cannot keep her head from spinning). You could, if you felt like you wanted a heavier sauce, make a homemade mayonnaise or an aioli, and put that down with the tuna as well. I find that especially delicious if the tuna is being served cold.

You could also - sigh - take the rare slices of tuna, and put them on some good bread, and make yourself a sandwich with the fixings. Annalena admits to a weakness for having this with bacon and avocado slices. Certainly not your low calorie lunch, especially when she slathers home made mayonnaise on it. But oh, hell, is that a sandwich that makes you think "you know, if sex were this good, I would NEVER get out of bed."

Did I just write that? Oh, dear. Someone has got the SPH's today (screaming purple hornies). Seriously, it is a wonderful sandwich if you are feeling ambitious enough to make it. And if it manages to get you horizontal, from vertical, well, one of Annalena's tasks has been accomplished.

So, find out what kind of tuna you're getting. Skip the bluefin, go for yellow, and cook it simple. Whether you want it rare, or well done, it's very easy to do. Have it once in a while, but do have it. And if you have an interesting, delicious way you prepare it, let Annalena know.

Nothing wrong with hearty food in summer: sausage and peppers

We get into this mindset as the weather gets warmer that we eat "lighter food." You know, things like, oh, ice cream, and cold pesto pasta salads, and potato salad with mayonnaise and so on and so forth.

I don't mean to be sarcastic there. I'm just trying to make the point that if you look underneath the "hype" we DO in fact eat a fair amount of food that is hardly light and airy during the warm months. There isn't anything light about a barbecued steak, or a boiled lobster. But you know - there's no need to apologize for eating this kind of food. It's about balance. And ultimately, it's a question of "how much" did you eat, "what " went on it, and so forth.

So with this in mind, I put forth, unapologetically, a recipe for sausage and peppers, one of my favorite dishes, and one which I make rather infrequently. The reason I make it infrequently is the peppers: peppers in season cannot be beat. Peppers out of season, from Holland, or South America, or wherever those garish neony lanterns come from, are a disaster waiting to happen. The only thing I can say good about them is they are refreshing.

Goddess of vegetables Nevia is putting forward some early sweet peppers these recent weeks, and our friend James is coming to dinner tonight. To serve James sausage is somehow right, and somehow redundant. If you knew him, you'd understand. In any event, with the craving for sausage in my mind, and probably his, and probably G uy's, I put this forward.

When I make this dish, I plan on one small spring onion, or half of a storage onion per person. I also use one pepper per person, and two sausages. That's a pretty nice sized portion, so we'll have something simple with it, like polenta and steamed green beans (I will be coming back to "green beans" in the future. We don't call them "string beans" anymore, because they don't have strings.).

When cooking something like pork sausage, or any kind of pork product, people make a common mistake. Since this is "pork," that means it's fatty, and you don't need any fat to cook it. Proceeding in that way is a pathway to burned meat, and an unpleasant dish, and perhaps ruining a pan forever. No, just because something is fatty doesn't mean that it needs no fat for cooking. With the exception of something REALLY rich and fatty, like foie gras (which is essentially duck butter in my book, and worth every calorie), anything needs some fat to get it started. And, keep in mind that "modern" pork is not as fatty as we've been led to believe.

So, first I chop the onions, and then I slice the peppers into fairly thick slices. I put this aside as I address the sausage. I slick my pan with olive oil, and heat it up. When it's hot , but not smoking hot, in go the sausages. I like to use a mix of sweet and hot sausage, but you choose this.

I brown the sausage slowly. Take your time to develop the flavor. In this first step, all you want to do is give them color, and also give your fat some flavor. This, to me, is the secret of making this a truly great dish.

When you've browned the sausage on all sides, remove it to a plate and k eep it warm. Take a look at the fat in the pan. If it looks excessive, toss some. If it looks like you need more, add more. But take a minute and notice that wonderful brown stuff, the "fond" in your pan. Think of the flavor there, and what it's going to do to your vegetables, which you're going to add now. Onions first, with a sprinkle of salt, for about two minutes, and then the peppers, for another two minutes or so. Stir them all together. Then, make a decision about yours sausages: you can cut them into smaller pieces, which will make them cook faster, or keep them whole. Put them right on top of the vegetables, lower the heat, and cover the pan. Check after about five minutes. What you're looking for is the point where the peppers get soft, but not too soft. It may take five minutes, or ten minutes. The sausages won't overcook and the vegetables will pick up the wonderful flavor of your sausages.

You DO need a big pan for this. You can use a big dutch oven too. What you want is enough surface area for everything.

This is a wonderful , satisfying meal on many levels. If you have a non-carb eater, like my friend Chris, you can put it in front of him without a qualm . And if you're serving it to my crowd, you'll put it on something like pasta or polenta, or just layer it on a big piece of bread, lean foward, and have one of the best sandwiches ever.

I must admit that, normally when I write these things, I can do it dispassionately. But this one has left me very hungry

Summer's here, and the time is right

Now if you can fill in that line, based on a great song, I am in love with you, because it means you're just about the same age as me. Bonus points if you can give the original source of the song - NOT the David Bowie/Mick Jagger duet (which, I must admit does have its redeeming values).

And yes, it may indeed be time for dancing in the streets, but it's time for the seasonal cook to "get a grip." Every single day, the market is changing as new fruits and vegetables come in. And what that means for us is that planning a menu is really an exercise in delightful frustration. For example, I had planned to serve a rhubarb galette for dessert at a dinner party last night. That went by the boards, when the first peaches of the season came in. I will be writing about peaches a lot over the summer. This first batch were the "cling" peaches. Not as juicy and sweet as the later, freestones will be, but still.... This is really like getting reacquainted with an old friend you haven't seen for a while. The cherries are in, and their season is always too s hort, so we're putting them down as fast as we can (I mean our gullets. I WILL be looking at sour cherry pickle, though). So a peach and cherry cobbler replaced the galette. No one minded. And I think there were probably somewhere between seven and ten vegetables on the plates.

But this also means that you have to get ready to say goodbye to some earlybirds. The peas will be gone soon, as will the asparagus. Nettles are gone, so are dandelion greens. Ramps and fiddleheads are away until next spring, and you just wave and say "see you next year." And that's how it goes.

One of the delights of the warmer weather are fried squash blossoms. This deceptively easy treat says "summer" more than just about anything else you can buy, because these are fragile, perishable delights, that just aren't around when it's cool or cold.

A bit of background. If you have every grown squash, melons, or cucumbers, you will be acquainted with the enormous number of yellow flowers that the plant produces. And you may very well be thinking "WOW. Look at all the cucumbers/squash/melons I'm gonna get."

Uh uh. Half of those flowers are male flowers, and they will never produce fruit. They are there simply to pollinate the female flowers (this is done, by the way, almost always by a beetle. Show some respect the next time you want to crush one of these guys). And if all of the female flowers "set" fruit, then the plant would die. It would become too heavy from the weight of the fruit. So again, some of those flowers have to come off. Farmers I have spoken to say that four out of every five flowers on a squash plant come off.

So, what do you do with them? Well, in the United States, until farmers caught on, these flowers were used as animal food, for pigs, or other scavenging animals. Europeans, and Mexicans, however, saw a good thing for what it was, and use them as a comestible for people. Mexican cooking has recipes for their use in soups, in fillings for tortillas, and other uses that I can't even think of (you can buy canned Mexican squash flowers, but to me, this is a waste of money). In Europe, especially in Italy, they are used in risotto (where they give a beautiful color and an interesting texture), stuffed and baked, or, as I will talk about here, deep fried.

Eating a deep fried squash blossom is, to me, participating in summer at the highest level. They taste to me a bit like a squash potato chip. And knowing that they will be here only for a few months is a tease. The fact that frying them makes them taste very rich, and that you can really only eat another few, is another tease. It's like reaching for that chip you really can't or shouldn't eat: how far can you go, before you feel so stuffed you can't move? I sometimes think that we have people over during the summer just so I can make and eat these guys. Making them for one or two people is silly, because at most, with a completely empty stomach, I think I can eat six of them. As I never have an empty stomach, well... My normal rule is three per person, as an antipasto. I make them as often as I can during the summer. The recipe is simple. Read below, and make them. You'll be glad you did.

What you will need are squash blossoms, flour of some kind (see below), water, and oil. Vegetable oil, for its inert flavor. Your blossoms should look the way fresh, ornamental flowers do. They should be crisp, and bright, and not look soggy or wilted. DONT wash them. Look at them carefully, if there is anything "foreign" in them, including beetles , just brush them off.

Fill a pot or pan with about two inches of vegetable oil, and heat it to 325/350. How do you know it's there? We'll come to that....

Now, make your batter. Giving exact proportions here is difficult, because the humidity in the air impacts this, as does how thick a coating you want. I prefer a thin one, that is almost invisible, but there are others who prefer a puffier consistency. What I start with is 1.5 cups of flour, in a bowl, and then I add water until I have something that is the consistency of , say, buttermilk. Then I test the oil. I test it by dropping a spoon of the batter into the oil. Does it sizzle and fry up? If it does, you're ready. If not, keep heating.

Have a tray with brown paper, or paper towel, or the section of the newspaper you don't read, ready. Dip the blossoms into the batter, and let the excess drip off. Then drop them into the oil. Don't do too many at a time. If I'm using a ten inch pan, I try to do six at a time, at most.

They need about t wo minutes per side to cook.Flip them, and as I always say, LISTEN to the cooking. When the heavy duty sizzling stops, and you have the low sizzle, it's time to take them out and drain them.

You can salt these in the kitchen, before you serve them to guests, but I like to put out a bowl of salt for people to take their own.

I love these with plain, white flour based batter. But I'm intrigued by cooks who use chickpea flour. I've eaten these that way in restaurants, and loved them. Sometimes I also add panko breadcrumbs to the batter and get a textured, crispy flavor. I have also had them with curry powder mixed in.

The one thing you must NEVER put in the batter, is salt. The salt will draw all of the water out of the flowers and you'll get what my friend Matt calls a "hot mess." Wait until the guys are fried and then salt them.

Within a half hour of doing these, they will begin to get soggy, so have your guests ready. It's a special summer treat that you really shouldn't miss. Everyone thinks of summer fruit and summer ice cream and summer drinks, but here's a summer fry for you. Try it. I think you'll get acquainted with something you'll love.

And of course, if I have an excuse to fry up a batch... so just come on over.

Fruit for dessert

Let's be honest. All of us know "we should." If we're going to have dessert, we SHOULD have fruit. And how many of us play the game of "hey, it's apple pie. That's fruit," or "well, I'm having strawberry ice cream." I will admit to having done this myself. It's a neat sort of way of trying to ameliorate (dontcha love that word), a situation that we "know" is bad for us. I have "know" in quotes, because it ain't always so. Can you say it's a "binge" or an "indulgence," for example, if you've had a chicken ceasar salad, with very little dressing, and follow it with a scoop of ice cream? Is the "crime" the same size, if your dinner was broiled fish, steamed rice and asparagus, as it is if you have a rib eye steak, a baked potato with butter, and hollandaise at the asparagus, if you follow it with a piece of fruit pie?

To my cook and eater's mind, the only time that there is a "crime" committed around dessert is if you're eating it because you feel you "have to." In other words, if you have a sense that a meal is not a meal without dessert, then there's a problem. I do see it a lot, and I was guilty of it for years. "Oh here's the dessert menu, what will I have," rather than "oh here's the dessert menu, do I want one?" If we shift our way of thinking about dessert, I think we would all be happier.

I don't know if it's still true, so many things change, but I was taught that, in Italy, if you have "dessert" at the end of a meal, it's fruit. Period. If you want something more complex, then you go out. I think that perhaps one of the reasons why we here in the United States don't do the fruit for dessert thing more often, is because we frequently settle for fruit that is just plain tasteless. If you've got your mouth set for something sweet and juicy, and you bite into a peach that will crack your tooth, and taste like cotton, well, no wonder you're rooting around in the freezer for that container of ice cream you KNOW is there.

It takes work. Believe me, I know. But when you succeed, there are few things that are better than a simple fruit dessert.

Last night, when we had two people over for a cooking lesson and a dinner, we put together a simple dessert. I want to encourage everyone to do desserts like this, instead of buying ice cream, with a zillion preservatives in it, or a cake that really has no taste, or cookies that taste of sugar only. It is the season when fresh fruit is abundant. And enjoy it, as much as you can.

Here's what we did. I had picked up the first blueberries of the year, and we used about two times as many blueberries as we did strawberries. The strawberries were small, and dead ripe (perhaps even a bit OVER ripe. And a fruit dessert like this is a perfect place to use them). All we did was combine two pints of blueberries, with a pint of hulled strawberries, left whole, and about a third of a cup of sugar. We let that sit for half an hour or so. We took some rose geranium leaves off of my plant, tore them up, and stirred them into the fruit. Then, just before serving, a nice scoop of creme fraiche went on the fruit.

Now, think about those components for a minute. Blueberries by themselves would have been fine. So would have strawberries. Or raspberries, or blackberries, or any other small, berry fruit. We could have used cherries if we wanted to, but there, to get the effect of the sugar (called "maceration"), we probably would have needed to pit them, and cut them in half. Your choice.

Sugar is a must here, but you could use brown sugar, or even honey. The rose geranium leaves were a conceit, I must admit. They are a bit "fey" as it were. But an herb, like a mild mint, or even a stronger one, like rosemary, is nice with fruit. If you don't have them, try a bit of vanilla, or a sweet vinegar (balsamic or apple cider). The key thing is to let everything sit for a little while to release the juices and soften.

Creme fraiche? Yes, it does put it over the top. You don't have to use it, and perhaps we shouldn't have. But we ate relatively normal sized portions of everything, so it wasn't that big an indulgence. We could have used yogurt, or sour cream, or - DUH- a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

I will say that this was one of the best desserts I have had in a long, long time. Yes, the fruit was excellent quality, but the most important thing in eating is to be enjoying yourself thoroughly. If you're eating with good friends, everything is going to taste better.

So, if you're wary of serving dessert to your friends, just try this one. Improvise on the ingredients, but not on your friends. Gather the best quality you can find: both ingredients, and friends. They'll improve each other. Trust me on this one.

Foolin around and having fun

Ah, if you don't know by now that my titles frequently tease... well. Today, I'm writing about something that does confront the seasonal cook. A vegetable comes into season, and you know it won't be there forever. So, while it's in season, you do wonderful things to it. At first, you do it very very simply, but after a while, perhaps you think "how many times can I serve that, that way?' And then, you start "foolin around and having fun."

Last night, I found myself with a big bunch of asparagus. I haven't written much about asparagus since they came into season, because the recipes I wrote about them, are really the way we've been eating them. There truly isn't much better than quickly cooked asparagus, perhaps with a dash of lemon juice and/or butter. But... sometimes, the urge strikes for something a bit more. Or, the pan you normally use for doing the regular preparation is being used for something else. Last night, both factors were in play, so I did something else. I pan fried them.

I have seen, and eaten, deep fried asparagus. Ok, but not great, to my taste. I have also eaten batter dipped asparagus that were fried quickly. Those I liked much more. And I love asparagus that are dipped into a bread crumb batter and fried. But years ago, I watched the wonderful Molly Katzen do something on television that was an eye opener. She pan fried asparagus, in vegetable oil, and added toasted pecans to them. It was such an easy recipe that I made it, and made it again, and made it again. SO GOOD. And if you're cooking for vegans, this is a great dish, because the nuts have protein and "heft" to them, and they're richness compliments the grassiness of the asparagus.

Well, last night we were having a roasted chicken, and I was also making couscous. If you look up the roasted chicken recipe I posted, thanks to Zuni Cafe, you'll see I add no fat to it. But one of the things this recipe brings to your attention is the fact that a chicken has a LOT of fat in it. When it's all done, there is liquid all over the pan. So, the chicken IS rich . The couscous was going to be plain, but the salad had an oil based dressing on it. Both Guy and I are succeeding at cutting back on what we eat and losing weight, so I didn't want to put too much into the "Jersey grass," but I didn't want to just steam it. So, I stir fried it with garlic scapes: you will find those at the farmers' market, it's the big green "thing" that comes out of garlic and has a milder flavor than the dried clove. It's really good.

What I did was, I took a bunch of the asparagus, and since they were thin ones, I just b roke off the tough tips. Then I cut them, into about two inch slices, on the bias. I took four scapes, and cut them into fine dice, as if they were chives. I put in half of them to stir fry with the asparagus, and kept the rest, as a fine dice to add at the end. It took no more than four minutes to do it, and they were wonderful.

So, if you are looking at a vegetable and thinking "perhaps I've gotten too familiar with you," well, improvise. There are a skazillion ways to cook everything. Use your senses, use your imagination, and get in there and cook away. I think you will find a whole lot of fun waiting for you.

BREAKING NEWS: Berry season has started! The first blueberries were in, and so were raspberries, but they are rarer, and Annalena missed them today. But blueberries are on the menu for tonight. YAY!!!!!

Arancini

I have always been enamored of these little "snacks" that are part of the Southern Italian cooking repertory. Crisp, hot, and filled with softly melting cheese, or meat, or green peas or some combination of these things, when they're good, they're REALLY good. But when they're bad, they are TERRIBLE. I have eaten some terrible ones. Including my own. There is no question about it, mine were awful. I could never get the things right. They'd fall apart in the oil, leaving disgusting, fried cheese mixed in with the fat, the rice would not cook, and it was just a total, total mess.

Well, I may have the problem "licked" so to speak. This weekend, thinking about the friend I wrote about in the last blog, I decided to give them another try. Heck, I knew my chicken meatballs would work, and so I had SOMETHING to bring even if the arancini didn't work out.

These weren't perfect. But they sure were good. Two of them didn't cohere very well, and Guy and I ate them right out of the pot. I'd do this recipe again, with some changes, like I outline in the recipe. So, perhaps you'd like to give this a try. And if yours are good, tell me. PLEASE.

I started by cooking 1 heaping cup of carnaroli rice, in 2.5 cups of chicken stock. I think that the recipe might work better next time if I add more liquid. One of the issues with these guys is that the rice has to stick together. The rice I had did in fact stick, but not as well as it might have. Softer rice might have solved that. Anyway, I cooked this, until the liquid had all been absorbed by the rice, and it was making little "craters" in the pot. That's my sign that rice is cooked. I then poured it out onto a cooking sheet lined with parchment, to cool off. I think this is a really critical part of this: your rice must be at room temperature. While it was cooling, I cut a half pound of mozzarella into what I THOUGHT were small pieces. It turned out that really, they were too big for my arancini. I think the answer is not to make the cheese pieces smaller, but to make the balls bigger than I did. I also cooked up half a cup of green peas that I had just shelled, and let them cool.

When the rice was ready, I put it in a bowl with one egg and mixed this together. I was able to shape balls, about the size of a golfball and a half, and then I pushed a hole into each one, inserting a small piece of cheese and some peas. My biggest problem came with trying to incorporate the filling into the rice. Riceballs are very dense, and there isn't much room for this kind of thing, at least if you want the balls to "recohere" when you reshape them. Probably, they should have been the size of a tangerine or a small orange (like the name implies). I then dipped them in unflavored breadcrumbs, and fried them in about an inch of hot oil.

Turning these guys over, to cook them on all sides, was not easy. They are very delicate, and handling them too much, did break them up. I was fairly successful with a slotted spoon, turning them after two minutes, and cooking them on each side, before I drained them on paper towels.

The two that Guy and I ate were really tasty. How could they not be? Fried rice, bread crumbs, cheese, peas? But they were very, very soft. I thought about combining breadcrumbs into the rice, and discarded that idea. I also thought that they needed more filling, even though I had all that trouble forming the balls around the filling. A larger ball would do.

I got 16 of them out of this recipe. T ime to start doing some research. I think next time, I'll double the size, and see what happens.

So, this is one where I could really use your comments. Write in, folks. Help Annalena perfect her recipe. I guarantee I'll credit you.

POST NUMBER 200!!!!

Yup, got here. The "goal" so to speak, is 300, and we're almost there. And the subject of this blog is really appropriate, as we get to this symbolic number, because the topic today is one of the symbols and themes of this whole project: feeding friends.

I have posted entries on my meat balls, and my turkey meatballs, But here comes another one, and this is why. Last week, I learned that a friend was very ill. One of his symptoms is a loss of appetite. To think of this friend as having a poor appetite - and actually seeing it, was a real shocker to me. And it's something we all have to think about: how quickly things can change for us, in an instance. I am not living with my friend, of course, and I am not living with what he and his partner go through, every single minute of the day, so I cannot imagine what this is like. What I CAN say is that it's a challenge to push aside the sense of "OH MY GOD" and be cheerful, and try to make everything as even and positive as possible.

In chatting with my friend, I learned that one thing that his partner is eating, is chicken. And the other thing I gathered from what he told me that his partner was eating, was that smaller items were more appealing than, say, a big steak.

Meatballs. That's what I thought of immediately. And given the other things I was told about my friend's bad appetite, I thought of making a lighter tasting item. So it was chicken, in a Greek style, with dill and lemon. I tasted them, and they were really good. They were delicious in a chicken soup, by themselves, and also good with some meat sauce, just in case the appetite got a bit stronger. Here's what I did.

I took two pounds of ground organic chicken, and added a diced spring onion. Just one. If there weren't any spring onions, I would have added a shallot. A larger onion might have been too strong and too sulfuric. I also grated in the peel of one whole lemon, and chopped up half of a bunch of fresh dill. I mixed all of this up with one egg, and about a half cup of breadcrumbs. My "rule" for breadcrumbs in meatballs, by the way is this: add one egg to two pounds of meat. This makes the meat slippery and wet. Then add bread crumbs, until the stickiness is just about gone. That's how I determine how much is needed. Finally, I added just a bit of dried oregano (just about the only herb that I like better dried than fresh). I formed walnut sized balls, and dropped them into hot stock, and cooked them for about fifteen minutes.

I got about 30 meatballs this way, so I guess they were about an ounce each. They kept the lemon flavor nicely, the dill, less so. And the stock took on a bit of the dill flavor.

Of course, the test of any recipe is: does the person served eat it? That remains to be seen. But I hope so. There is really very little anyone can do for someone who is ill other than hope, and do what they think will make him or her feel better, and not get hurt feelings if it doesn't work. In cases like this, I truly feel that it IS the thought that counts.

GET BETTER BIG GUY.

Revisiting squash, and stuffing

For a committed farmers market geek, like me, the appearance of a new vegetable is a cause for excitement (I SAID I was a geek). Yesterday, there were a couple of new varities: broccoli, and the first field zucchini. Broccoli is next on my list, but I went for the squash. Green and yellow.

There are a lot of people who just do not care for squash. They find it watery, bland, tasteless, with bad texture. And if it's cooked badly, it is all of these things. I'm going to be posting many recipes involving squash during this summer, and here's the first one, combining several ideas that have showed up on this blog: how to buy squash, and how to stuff vegetables. This is really a neat recipe to have in your back pocket. You can do it with just about any stuffing you like, but I'm going to give you my favorite one.

To make this for six people, I bought six squash. Three yellow ones, and three green ones. Now, something you have to keep in mind: squash are not all the same. The yellow squash varities, in my experience, tend to be bigger, with an almost "pear shaped" end, while the green ones are straighter and more even. The yellow ones seem to hold more water too, although any summer squash (with the possible exception of avocado squash), will be very full of water. I was making stuffed squash for six, and I thought half yellow half green would make a nice presentation. Had I more time, I would have made two stuffings. (DONT TELL MY GUESTS).

When I have had stuffed vegetables in many restaurants, I find that the "boat," i.e, the squash half, is either raw or overcooked. When it's raw, you can't really do much other than to eat the stuffing, and then treat the "boat" as a salad. When it's overcooked, you just have a mess, and all of those nasty qualities that I described above. Well, I like the way I do mine, so give it a try.

It's difficult, if not impossible, to clean out a raw squash so that it's a receptacle for stuffing. So what I do is slice them, lengthwise, as evenly as possible. I did this late last night, so it wasn't as pure as it could be. I didn't measure the squash, but I'd say that they were about 8-9 inches long (keep in mind that a man is writing this), and then I put them in a pot of boiling, salted water.

Here's an important tip: squash are very light. If you are trying to boil them, you'll need to weigh them down. I took the cover of a smaller pot, and used that. I let them cook for six minutes and then fished them out.

Hot squash burns. Badly. So I let it cool until it was at room temperature. Then, I took a SMALL spoon (VERY IMPORTANT: make sure the spoon is no wider than the center of your squash), and gently scooped out the centers. This is mostly soft flesh, and seeds. And with help, it's delicious. I chopped it coarsely. Then I added it to a frying pan, slicked with olive oil, a chopped head of new garlic, and two chopped, purple, spring onions. I added about a teaspoon and a half of chopped fresh time, and a good pinch of salt. The garlic and onions cooked slowly as the water from the squash came off and evaporated, and the water kept things from burning. You wind up with a thick mass of aromatics and squash. To that, I added about half a cup of dry bread crumbs, and stirred this up, just to toast the crumbs a bit.

This whole mix looked a little dry to me, so I added a dollop of olive oil.

This gave me enough filling to sparsely fill all of my twelve half squash. And here we come to another very important point. The cooking of the squash filling will reduce the volume of your materials drastically. If you want to really "Heap" the squash halves with filling, you should chop up a few more squash and add them to the filling. What I had was enough to make a "boat" that was not filled, but that was okay, because I have other things on the plate. If this were "DINNER" I would have needed more. Anyway, I scooped it into the shells, and then put them in a big (9x13) inch glass baking dish that I had coated with olive oil and baked them for twenty minutes.

The smell of the thyme and the toast was intoxicating. The whole apartment smelled gorgeous this morning from this.

If you want the crumbs toasty - REALLY toasty - run this under the broiler for a minute or two. And if you like, you can sprinkle this with grated cheese, either before or after broiling. Of course, you can leave it out, as I did.

Other fillings? Well, add some meat to what I just described. For example, if you have a few leftover meatballs, break them up and add a bit of tomato sauce. Rice and peas, if you have leftover risibisi (which we never do). Some sausage perhaps, or mushrooms. Cubed bread. Just about anything.

It's a good dish. And when the monster squash - the ones the Brits call "marrows" manifest themselves later in the summer, you can use this preparation to cook them as well, and serve slices of it to people, instead of the whole thing.

It didn't sound too hard to do, did it? Try it. Squash is available just about the whole summer and fall, so it's good to have something in your repertoire to use it.

I can't wait to try it tonight

Not ragu but ragout

I can never tell how to pronounce "ragout." Somehow or another, I always say it as something like "rag doll," because I'm trying to make sure that it doesn't get confused with "ragu," which to me is always a slowly cooked, hearty stew. And that's not what I'm thinking of here. I see it show up on menus, frequently in combinations involving different parts of an animal, like a "rabbit ragout" (does John Updike know? Who cares? I don't get him, but that's me).

When I speak of ragouts, I almost always mean what sometimes is referred to as a "vegetable medley." And I won't use that phrase because - and those of you of a certain age are smiling and shaking your head - those big bags of frozen, mixed vegetables that our mothers bought and served as "something different and interesting." The "thought" behind those "vegetable medleys" always alluded me, even when I was only about 9 years old. What thought unites lima beans, corn, carrots and green beans, other than you can cook them all horribly and then get defensive when your children don't eat them? So, no, medley was not going to work.

And, truth to be told, even when done fresh, I am not much of a fan of mixed vegetable combinations. It may be (in fact it probably is), idiosyncratic (who? ME? Idiosyncratic???), but I think that vegetables "sing" best, when they "sing" alone. I really don't want to taste the "interesting interplay of swiss chard and corn" or "note how the bitterness of the kale plays off against the sweetness of the beets." Sorry, don't get it. I wanna taste chard, I wanna taste corn, I wanna taste beets, I wanna taste kale. And when these veggies are mixed, all I taste is muddle.

I WILL say, however, that in addition to what I'm putting forth here, I DO like combinations of dark leafy greens. Somehow, those mixes always taste really good to me. A saute of chard, kale, spinach and broccoli rabb, for example? Hell yeah. Or other combinations. Put them on the plate, and then give me the extras. I'm d elighted with that. And then I'll drink down the pot liquor too. (Of course, then Guy has to be ready for the inevitable consequences of these leafy green feasts on my digestive system, but hey, for better or for worse, right?).

Well, in spring, I do make an occasional vegetable ragout, along the lines of this one. It was inspired, by "deconstructing" (remember: I went to college in the late 70s), the Roman soup classic, "vignarola," and also by learning that Romans do a spring time ragout of artichokes, peas, and fava beans. When I've eaten that mixture, I haven't been too thrilled. The vegetables are cooked for a long time, which is fine, in and of itself. But to me, these vegetables suffer from long cooking. So I make a fresher, simpler one. It may not be to your taste, and it may not be something you want to spend the time doing. But here it is.

Mine uses fava beans, asparagus, and sugar snap peas as the component vegetables. The first thing I do is prep the favas, because this takes some advanced planning. I shell the fava beans, freeze them, and thaw them, and then pop em right out of their skins. I use about half as many of them as I do the asparagus and the snap peas. I get a big pot of water to the boiling point, and put in a good portion of salt. The favas go in first, and I let them cook for about ten minutes. While they're cooking, I take the strings out of the snap peas, and also break up the asparagus into pieces. Here, I don't use the tougher bottom pots. They go into a liquid for stock or something else. After ten minutes, the favas get scooped out and put in a bowl, and the asparagus go in, for two minutes. Out they come, and then the snap peas, for a minute. I don't chill them on ice, any of them, but I do add them all to the same bowl.

Now, this water where the vegetables have cooked will make an excellent vegetarian soup stock, it will also make great rice. If you feel strongly enough about saving it, do it and use it again. I do. In fact, remember those asparagus pieces above, that I didn't use? Well, I put them into the stock and "reinforce" the flavor.

Now I have my vegetables ready for a very quick turn, in a hot pan, in which I've melted a little butter (maybe two tablespoons), and chopped up a head of green garlic (use a few cloves of regular garlic if the green stuff isn't around). I mean it when I say "very quick turn." If it's more than a minute, it's a lot. I just want the vegetables to glisten with the butter. Turn them out into a bowl, and if you happen to have some fresh mint, or parsley, or some other herb you really like, chop some of that up, turn it into the vegetables, and you are done.

This COULD make a wonderful pasta sauce, and as I think about it, why not use it as an omelet filling, either alone, or with some cheese? But ultimately, I like this alongside of a roasted or grilled meat. I'm making it for friends this week, for a dinner that is more sweet than bitter, but does partake of both. Annalena HATES goodbyes even more than she hates canned vegetables. But they are inevitable, and Annalena has a LOT of them to deal with in the next few months. But you know, when you "signed up," no one ever said life was going to be fair.

Making your meal

Last night, I had occasion to cook with two good friends, who profess an inability to cook. Well, you could have fooled me. They did really, really well in the kitchen. And in musing about it this morning (we were up way late, laughing and being silly, like we all need to be sometimes), I realized that, ultimately, putting together a meal is a question of wanting to, and not being intimidated. That's why I think that anyone who DOES cook regularly has more than a bit of an obligation to help people who want to, but feel that they're just not"there." So, I'm going to tell you how this meal developed, and give recipes along the way.

When I went to the farmers' market on Saturday, our fishmonger had some lovely stuff, including something that he doesn't have often: shark. Now, I will not buy mako shark, or any of the bigger sharks, which are being hunted to extinction, but this was sand shark. There's plenty of that around. It's small, and the piece of fish that he had was, essentially, a whole shark that had been skinned, and cleaned, leaving about two pounds of filet. That's plenty for four portions.

Shark is a nice, firm fleshed fish that can be cooked just about any way you would cook cod, or even tuna. I had a plan for it already, however, and that was to cook it in foil, like I've written about before. The only question was: what was going into the foil with the fish? That came later in the process of thinking about the meal.

That same day, I bought some greenhouse tomatoes which had flavor. That's unusual, but as Mary, the tomato goddess said "if you know how to do it properly, they taste good." And they did: bigger than cherry tomatoes, smaller than plum, they were sitting on the counter (I never refrigerate tomatoes), waiting to be used for lunch.

One of my two friends loves asparagus, and since we're into "high Jersey grass" season, that was an easy one. Asparagus would be our vegetable. And we would have a salad.

You can see how the meal is shaping up, but it didn't finalize, until Monday morning. I had been planning to make rice, perhaps with some pan cooked onions stirred in, as our starch. But when I got to the market on Monday, the first new potatoes of the season were there. DONE. There's the starch. The rice will wait, the potatoes came home with me. They would get cooked with the onions.

Onto the fish: I really hadn't made up my mind, and then it struck me: a sort of "provencal" style of dish, with tomatoes, fresh thyme, and lemon slices.

SO, this is how we did it, in the order we did it, for teaching purposes. First, we cut the potatoes in half, and put them in salted water to cook until they were just tender. While that was happening, we prepped the asparagus. We counted on six stalks each, and my two friends did the prep work of peeling back the stems. Put those aside, and get the fish ready. Olive oil on some foil, and then two slices of lemon, with the fish right on top of that. Then a handful of salted halved tomatoes with some thyme leaves, wrapped tightly in foil, waiting to cook. By this point, the potatoes were done, and we drained them, while four red spring onions cooked away in a pan with salt and olive oil. Then the potatoes, drained and dried, went cut side down in a pan with some oil, and sizzled to brown. The fish went into a 400 degree oven, to cook for fifteen minutes. A large pan came out, got filled with boiling water, and salt, and in went the asparagus, for less than five minutes. We tested the asparagus along the way, and when they were just a tad underdone, out they came. I don't usually "shock" vegetables, so they did continue to cook for a bit.

By this point, the asparagus were ready, and the potatoes had browned. The fish was not quite ready, so we turned to salad. The greens were that wonderful vegetable, "mache," which always reminds me of rabbit ears, and a head of green radicchio that I had picked up at the market that morning. That radicchio was very bitter, so we knew we needed a "sweeter" kind of dressing. A white wine (actually champagne) vinaigrette got put together, with some vinegar, salt, and about four times as much olive oil. The greens went in, and then the "kicker." Kim, the miracle citrus queen, had sent a huge box of the sweetest oro blancos that you could imagine (think HUGE grapefruit). While I sing the Supremes, I don't supreme fruit, so I just peeled and cut this into chunks and put it on top of the greens.

Plating? Ok, first the asparagus, and then the potatoes. The fish, very moist and very wet was ready. Here, I didn't do something that you CAN do if you want. There is a lot of liquid in the foil, and if you don't want to muss up your plate, you can just slide the fish and the other solids off of the foil, and discard that liquid. I didn't mind if it wet the veggies, so I just pushed everything off of the foil and onto the plate.

Because we had olive oil in the fish, and in the potatoes, and we were going to have a dessert, the asparagus were just, simply steamed. No one seemed to miss the butter or olive oil.

VOILA. This was a meal that we prepped in less than an hour, having fun every inch of the way. (At least I did).

If you're cooking it yourself, you can probably do it in less time, but then you'll miss the joy of sharing the act.

Cook together with your friends. Get together, work in the kitchen, and the food will taste that much better when it's done. I guarantee it.

I make pickles

Some time ago, I was writing a bit about how food gives you a "sense of place. " Sourdough bread in San Francisco doesn't seem right anywhere else (I've tried). The folded piece of pizza? Only in NY (I've tried that one, too). Sweetened iced tea? Washington DC, Virginia, and further south. Blueberry pie? New England. You can eat all of these things anywhere, and they taste good, but somehow, there is "something in the air," that makes them taste better in different places.

I feel that way about pickles. Not "pickled vegetables," which change from place to place, but PICKLES. Big, wonderful, sour dills, or other pickled cucumbers. Eating pickles anywhere other than in NY does in fact seem to me to be a waste of time, because to me, they won't taste as good.

Now, I will also say that I have despaired of finding pickles I truly love. There used to be a guy who sold them at street fairs, and street fairs only. Even if I bought nothing else, I would always come home with 2 or 3 quarts of his most sour cukes, and just eat them until the next street fair. He opened a store, and I believe went out of business in about six months. Now I can't find him. There's "Rick's picks," and I love their beans, their beets, their red peppers, but the dill pickles just leave me feeling "something's missing." But now.....

Arthur Schwartz recently published a book on Jewish cooking. I didn't really know about it, because while everyone in NY knows Arthur's work (and I've met Arthur), this is an area of cooking I just don't do. But one of my favorite bloggers, David Lebovitz, has been , shall we say "mildly obsessed " about pickles for a while, and he published Mr. Schwartz' recipe, with approval.

These are two people I respect, so I took this as a sign. That and the fact that I had some empty Mason quart jars. Looking at the ingredients I figured "what the hell? Not that expensive, and if it doesn't work, oh well."

And I have to be honest. At first, I thought it wasn't going to work. I did what you're not ever supposed to do and tasted them halfway through the pickling process. YUCH! But since I still had some patience left (vacation after glow), I waited. It was worth it.

So I'm gonna put the recipe here, since this is what I've made recently. And I'm making a bigger batch . And I want you to make them, especially if you like pickles.

You'll need four quarts of water, a half cup of kosher salt, kirby cucumbers, peeled garlic cloves, a big bunch of dill, bay leaves, pickling spiceand a bunch of fresh dill. The original recipe calls for certain quantities, and says the dill is preferably going to seed. Yes, I can see that, but dill is not going to seed in these parts yet. Too early. Make them again later in the season when it does.
Pickling spice was the hardest thing for me to find. I actually had to go to the grocery store to get it.

In terms of quantity, you're going to want two cloves of garlic, two bay leaves, and about a half tablespoon of pickling spice (and a bit more), per quart of pickles. What you need to do is fill your jars with the pickles. With kirbys, you can put them in whole. I get about four, big ones, into a quart jar, more with smaller ones. You can also cut spears f rom larger cucumbers. You should put these into jars that you have cleaned by either running them through your dishwasher, or by filling them with boiling water, and then dumping it out. After you do that, put in the cucumbers, so you'll see how much of everything you need.

Bring four quarts of water to a boil and addhalf a cup of kosher salt. The two recipes said to let this cool, but I didn't do that. I ladled the liquid over the pickles, and added the spice mixture, putting a few sprigs of fresh dill in, whereever there was room.

You then cover the jars, but don't seal them. Leave them someplace cool (or not. I actually put mine in a sunny window, and I don't regret it).

It's interesting to watch the fermentation happen. You will start with a clear liquid, and bright green cucumbers. This will, over 3 days, begin to cloud up, and the pickles will lose their bright green color.

At three days, you may want to taste, but if you know you prefer more sour pickles, leave them for up to six days. Then you refrigerate them, but keep in mind they will continue to "sour" in teh fridge. These are not storage pickles, so make what you can use and give away in a week.

I really liked these, and I really like pickles. I was so pleased that, of the four jars I made, I've already eaten two of them. Not good for my stomach, but good for my smile.

Yes, it's odd talking about pickles as the market continues to fill. More on that to come. I just loved this recipe so much, I needed to share it. Thank you Arthur, thank you David

Saving the sauce

It DOES seem like quite a while since we've been together, doesn't it? Annalena feels like she's been away for weeks. It has been a hectic period, with Guy's concert (which was a SMASH. Anyone who missed the concert missed a thing of beauty and a thing of fun), parties afterward, and a big fundraiser for his chorus, in which Annalena participated, and will write about below. Guy mentioned at one point, correctly, that over the past week, it seemed we had not gone to bed before midnight more than once. Indeed. And as Annalena is more stewing fowl than spring chicken, it has been difficult to write, let alone sit up without falling asleep. So there it is.

Now, to the point, sort of. You can all gather from these blogs that I am most comfortable in the kitchen. In fact, in many situations where I find myself totally lost, socially, I gravitate to the kitchen. There is always a need for someone to help, and then the chatting starts, and at least for a little while, I'm harbored, feeling safe, and not feeling as insecure as I do in a roomful of people who are small talking.

Last year, I went to this fundraiser and was banned from the kitchen. I was told to "go outside and have fun," sort of like my Nana and mother used to tell me. It is all meant well: getting food together for a hundred plus people is WORK. And everyone wanted to show me how much they appreciated me by not letting me work. Well, it took some doing before people accepted the fact that if you want to make me happy, put me to work. Sort of like a border terrier, but without the cute tail. And this year, I was in charge of pasta.

Shortly before the event, I was told that they would need twelve quarts of sauce to make everything come together. Well, making twelve quarts of sauce in a short span of time is a difficult task, even for Annalena, but I was ready to try. But then they told me that they had already bought jars and jars and jars of bottled sauces.

Yes, I know. Annalena wretches at the thought of using a jar, because she likes making the sauce herself. Truth to be told though, many jarred sauces are not awful. You DO get what you pay for. If you buy the cheap, store label brand, you will be disappointed. And the bottom line is, no jarred sauce is going to be as good as your own; however, when faced with the issue of not having time to make sauce , or not having canned tomatoes on hand (and why don't you have canned tomatoes on hand? GO GET SOME NOW), you can remedy many sauces to make them very good.

You will need things like onions, garlic, olive oil, and fresh herbs. Use the herbs that can cook longer: savory, rosemary, oregano, thyme, or any combination of them. You might also add a jar or two of fresh tomatoes to the mix.

BUT... the most important thing to do is to TASTE the sauce first. That will be your key as to what needs to be done. The sauces I had to work with were not bad at all. I would say the major issue was that they were one dimensional, i.e, the flavor did not "resonate." You get that kind of resonance, from aromatics. The next time you put a spoon of tomato sauce in your mouth, think about it as you taste it. First, you get a sharp flavor of tomato acidity. Then, a second layer, of cooked tomato, almost a sweetness if the sauce is well done, a bitterness if not. In a good homemade sauce, then you get the layers of spice, garlic, and other goodies that the cook put into his or her sauce. It's this third layer that you frequently do not get in a jarred sauce, and the reason is because everyone like sauce differently. I like LOTS of garlic in mine, and LOTS of herbs. Too strong for many people. Others are stunned when I do not include pepperoncini in my sauce. Or basil (I put basil in just before I am going to serve it. Long cooked basil is dead basil to me). So this is how I worked the sauce. "Saving" it is perhaps too strong a word. Improving it is, I guess better. The hosts said it was better. I am truly glad that they, and everyone else enjoyed it.

Essentially, you treat the jarred sauce as a can of tomatoes. So, for every quart, or quart and a half, chop half of an onion. And have two cloves of garlic, whole, ready. Also your fresh herbs. Take the leaves off of the stems as best as you can. In the case of thyme, this will make you crazy, so simply pull off the tender stems at the top of the plant and use those.

Saute your onion in olive oil, with a pinch of salt. then dump in your prepared sauce, your herbs (I'm not giving you quantities. It's up to you. Taste your herbs. Some are stronger than others. Thyme, for example, can be used with abandon. Marjoram and oregano cannot . Sage must be used with caution. Taste and see what's strong. I like to use about two or three tablepoons of herbs to every quart and a half of sauce.

When the onions have gone translucent, add everything else. Taste it, and correct the sauce. Then, let it cook, slowly, covered, for about twenty minutes. Taste again. This time, you're looking for herbal notes. Do you get the resonance? If you do, stop cooking. If you don't, cook some more. Up to 45 minutes if you have to.

This will serve you, and will serve you very well, especially if you're intimidated about making the sauce from scratch. Nana did not do this, but I'm told that it was fairly common in Italian homes when I was growing up. And I never met a tomato sauce that I did not like. So.... doll up your sauce, and tell me what you did and how it turned out.

Faster! Faster! Faster!

One of the comments that people make to me, about this blog, and about cooking generally, is that they don't have time. They would love to make good food every day, but it just doesn't fit into their schedule.

Believe it or not, I get it. I happen to love the joy of cooking a meal every night, but I love it MOST of the time, not all of the time. There are nights when the thought of greasy eggrolls and bad hot and sour soup are overwhelmingly inviting. And then there are nights when lifting a saute pan seems like too much work. They don't last, but they're there. And then there are the nights when you're so busy, or so overtired, that even mixing greens for salad is too much to consider. Indeed, last night, coming home from Guy's concert, that is exactly what happened. So when that happens, go with it, and take a break.

But I want to address the point raised by people who "just don't have time to cook, period." Nope, not accepting that. One of the things I enjoy doing when I cook with friends, is show them how to make a week's worth of really tasty, decent meals in about an hour and a half worth of time. I'm going to run down one such list, and tell you how I do it.

Tomato sauce
Grass fed london broil
Stuffed chicken breasts
pork or veal tenderloin
Fish in "papillote"

Tomato sauce is, of course, not a dinner in and of itself, but surely there will be one night when you can find the time to boil some pasta? All of the items, with the exception of the fish, can be made and cooled and then eaten later in the week. And all of the recipes are posted on this blog. All you have to do is find them.

What you need to do is a little planning. Of course, you need the food in the house, and you need to have sufficient pots and pans. Here's how I would do it.

First, I know that the dish that requires the hottest oven is the London broil, and the one which takes the lowest temperature, is the chicken breasts. Tomato sauce doesn't go into the oven at all. So, start by cranking up your oven to broil, and then get all your ingredients out, so they can come to a room temperature, or as close to it as possible. While that's happening, make a pot of tomato sauce. You'll find my recipe all the way back in the very first set of recipes that are in this blog. You can put that aside on a burner, and let it cook away for forty five minutes or an hour, while you do the rest.

To the london broil. Again, you have that recipe on this blog, but to go over it again, since it's so easy. I use a ribbed grill pan, but you can use a simple frying pan. I oil down the meat and the pan, and then, when it's hot, over medium heat, I cook the meat until I get a nice, dark sear on a side. I can usually tell this is happening by listening to it, and hearing the end of heavy duty bubbling. If I'm wrong - and sometimes I am, I let it cook some more. It never takes more than about five minutes. Then I do it on the other side, and when that happens, it goes under the broiler, for about ten minutes.

If you're trying to cook a lot in a hurry, you can't take a break. Let's move onto the tenderloin. Again, the recipes are here, but get out a frying pan that is big enough to hold the whole thing, and coat it with oil. If you've salted your meat, the night before, wonderful. If not, sprinkle it with salt, and pepper if you like, and when the oil is hot, again, sear it. You want to sear it on all sides, and tenderloins are somewhat oval or round, so you'll be doing some flipping and moving. Remember that while that's happening, your london broil is cooking. After ten minutes, protect your hand, and take it out of the oven. It may be undercooked, but that's ok. Remember, you're going to cook it again during the week.

Lower the oven to 400 or so, and slip in the tenderloin. That's going to take about fifteen minutes to cook, and it allows you time to adress the stuffed chicken breasts. Again, this is on the blog, but to reiterate: you make a narrow cut in chicken breasts, still on the bone, and stuff them with a small amount of whatever you like. For example, fontina cheese wrapped in prosciutto. Just slide it into the chicken breast and push it closed. Get yet another pan and slick it with oil. Try to get one that will hold four breasts, because these are wonderful. Sear them without moving them for about five minutes, flip them over and now, you're putting these into the oven, keeping it at 400, and letting them cook away for fifteen or even twenty mintues (you DO want the chicken to cook all the way through).

While they're cooking, yet another recipe from the blog! The fish in foil. You can look that one up too. You'll probably need about ten minutes to get them ready, and then they can go onto the empty rack in the oven, and cook away for ten minutes. Those, you're going to eat that night.

There are entries here on how to make a green veggie like asparagus, or snap peas, or peas, and you should make yourself a vegetable while the fish and chicken are finishing up.

Now, no starches or veggies other than the one with the fish are discussed here, because if you've looked at some of the entries, you'll "get" how easy these veggies are to cook. And by this time, your sauce is done, and you have what you need for a nice pasta dinner one night.

I would like someone to try to do this. See if it works. Tell me if you got it all done, how long it took, and if you were happy with the results. I bet you will be.