Going with the grain

I had the intention of boring you all with the saga of my ambitious dinner party from Saturday night. However, time got away and I never was able to seize the camera for documentation. Yesterday I snagged bits and pieces of things from the fridge along with about 1 1/2 cups of dried wheat berries from Whole Foods. I made a salad of it all: the berries, carrot, scallion, heart of palm, marinated artichoke hearts, mushrooms, and celery. It was (and will be again tonight) oh so healthy and delicious. The pic is purloined, but my heart is pure. Oh, and the dressing was left from Saturday when it was used on a faux Thai green papaya salad. Ingredients? Stuff. I don't know. I was busy.

Wild rice and Israeli couscous salad

This is a concoction that will get you will points with the 'rents, or, if it's too late for that, an invitation to come back to the family reunion next year (in spite of what you said while in your cups this time around).

There will be no recipe, only a list of ingredients. Why, picnic breath, you ask? 'Cause I measured only the rice and couscous and nothing else. When you make your dressing, keep tasting it. When it tastes right to you, it IS right. Add more or less of the ancillary (aka canned) ingredients. It won't matter except to you and those you are feeding. Knock yourself out.

One last word: this batch, which I catered for a dinner for 20, got me re-engaged the same night for a picnic for over 30 two weeks later. So no sneezing at this. I sneezed all the way to the bank.

Wild rice and Israeli couscous salad
3 cups chicken broth
a 4 oz box of wild rice (don't get that wild and long grain rice mix - just don't do it)
1 cup Israeli couscous
scallions, chopped
garlic, chopped
hearts of palm
bamboo shoots
water chestnuts
small jar of marinated artichoke hearts, chopped
some of the liquid from the artichokes
salt and pepper to taste

Bring the broth to a boil. Add wild rice and simmer 50-55 min. Drain, reserving liquid. Cook the couscous in the same liquid for 10 min., drain and rinse with cool water to stop cooking.

Add the other ingredients more or less to your taste.

Here's my approximate dressing:
olive oil
lemon zest
rice wine vinegar
sesame oil
garlic
red pepper flakes
SunnyD
fish sauce
salt and pepper

Put these together and taste, taste, taste until you like it. Pour it over the salad when it's time to serve.

Bean and potato salad for summertime at your house

In my never-ending quest for dishes to serve in hot weather, this one just shouted out of my imagination the other day. It has one kinky ingredient: canned potatoes. If you've never tried them, it's worth the effort. They are quite inexpensive and have a unique flavor and texture. Of course if the idea of potatoes from a can rubs you the wrong way, buy regular taters (then you need to cook them). As for the beans, I gave up starting with dried beans quite a while ago. The bean snobs of the world (yes, Alton, that's you) will put up their noses at this, but I had other designs on my day than soaking and simmering for ages.

Bean and potato salad
1 15 oz can canneloni beans (or other beans you prefer)
1 15 oz can whole potatoes, cut into 1/2 inch pieces
1 Tbs butter
1 Tbs vegetable oil
1 large stalk celery, diced
12 black olives, pitted and chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 jalapeno, seeded and minced
salt and pepper to taste
juice of 1/4 lemon
2 Tbs coconut milk
2 Tbs mascarpone cheese

Rinse and drain the beans and the potatoes. Melt the butter in the oil in a saute pan. Saute the potatoes until they brown somewhat. This will take at least 10 minutes over medium high heat.
While the potatoes are cooking: In a large salad bowl, combine the celery, beans, olives, garlic and jalapeno. Sprinkle with a pinch of kosher salt and coarse ground black pepper and squeeze the lemon over the salad.
Drain the potatoes on paper toweling and allow to cool. Then toss in with the rest of the salad.
Whisk together the coconut milk, mascarpone, and another pinch of salt and pepper. Just before serving, pour the dressing over the salad and toss to coat everything.

Sweet corn and black bean salad

We got our first Colorado sweet corn a couple of days ago. I bought enough for us to steam for dinner and also to make this salad. It’s loosely based on Rachel Ray, but only loosely. Light and nutritious, it’s a quintessential summertime dish.

Sweet corn and black bean salad
3 ears corn, steamed and cooled
1 14.5 oz. can black beans, drained and rinsed
¼ medium red onion, finely diced
½ green (or other color) bell pepper, diced
2 tbsp chopped parsley or cilantro (or both)
1 tsp ground cumin
juice of ½ lime
splash of tabasco or sriracha (to taste)
salt and pepper to taste
1 tbsp olive oil

Cut kernels from ears of corn. Put into a bowl with beans and onion.

Microwave the bell pepper for 30 seconds with just a splash of water. This is an optional step. We prefer the pepper not to be totally raw.

Add remaining ingredients and stir to combine. Serve at room temperature.

Salmon with orzo

It’s hard to imagine anything easier or more delicious than this quick dish. Accompany it with a green salad and you’ve got a perfect summer supper.

At our house we have certain things categorized by season. For example, we’d never make lasagna during July and August, and we wouldn’t make gazpacho in January.

A word about doneness for the salmon: We like ours medium rare in the center. If you want it more cooked-thru, leave it in the hot liquid for an extra 4-5 minutes. Since it gets shredded anyways, just separate the thickest part with a fork to check for doneness.

A word about the cooking liquid: I use broth or a stock made from shrimp shells or lobster shells. You certainly can just use plain water, though the salmon will be a little less flavorful, but perfectly fine.

Salmon with orzo
14 oz. salmon, pin bones removed, skin on
broth or water to cover
1 cup orzo, prepared according to package directions
¼ cup canned black olives, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
2 scallions, white and green parts, chopped fine
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp Dijon mustard
salt and black or white pepper to taste
juice of ½ small lemon
1 tbsp parsley, chopped

Bring your cooking liquid to a boil. Carefully slip in the salmon. Cover the pan and remove from the heat. Let stand 10-15 minutes until desired doneness is achieved. When you reach that point, remove the salmon from the liquid and allow to cool completely.

As soon as the orzo is done, drain it in a colander and rinse with cool water to stop the cooking. Drain well.

In a large bowl, combine the orzo, olives, scallion and toss. Whisk the mustard into the olive oil and toss into the orzo mix. Season with salt and pepper and taste. Adjust seasonings to your taste, then shred the salmon into the bowl, garnish with lemon juice and parsley, and toss one final time.

Orzo salad with tuna and fresh tomato

Disclaimer: I didn't get a nice sharp picture of my own dish. However, this one looks a lot like it...thanks to FoodNetwork.



The inspiration for this came from a trip to Denver's excellent farmer's market, Heinie's, where we found fresh Colorado tomatoes (ours in the garden aren't ready yet). The herbs are ours, though. I wouldn't make this with a store-bought tomato - the fresh taste of what I used is incomparable.

Orzo with tuna and fresh tomato
Orzo pasta
6 oz. pouch tuna in water
1 large fresh tomato
1 tsp fresh thyme, chopped
1 tbsp fresh basil leaves, julienned
1 tbsp chives, chopped fine
1 jalapeno pepper, ¾ deveined and seeded, diced fine
salt and pepper to taste
1 tbsp olive oil
juice of ¼ lemon

Cook the orzo in well-salted water according to package directions. Drain and rinse under cold water. Set aside.

Cut the tomato into a fine dice. Combine the tomato, orzo, tuna, thyme, basil, chives and jalaeno in a large bowl. Season with salt and pepper and drizzle with olive oil and the lemon juice. Toss thoroughly to combine. Let stand one hour at room temperature before serving.

Quinoa salad with toasted garbanzos and black olives

I invented this concoction a couple of months ago but only got around to making it 2 days ago. Of course it evolved between conception and execution. This end result is a truly lovely dish to accompany the protein of your choice or just to be a stand-alone lunch (maybe with some crusty bread).

I chose the small olives so that I didn’t feel I had to cut them up – thus saving a little time. It is not essential to toast the garbanzos, but they do take on a nutty tastiness if you do toast them. I love cumin. However, maybe you don’t. Try adding a bit of fresh oregano or thyme or basil or all three.

Quinoa is very low in Cholesterol and Sodium. It is also a good source of Magnesium and Phosphorus, and a very good source of Manganese.

Quinoa salad w/black olives and garbanzos
1 14.5 oz. can garbanzo beans, drained, rinsed, and dried
1 tbsp olive oil
1 medium shallot, minced
1 serrano pepper, ½ seeded, ½ not seeded
2 medium cloves garlic, chopped
1 cup quinoa
1 ¾ cup chicken broth
1 14.5 oz. can small black olives, drained, rinsed, and dried
2 tbsp parsley, chopped
juice of ½ lemon
1 tsp cumin
salt and pepper to taste
1 tbsp fresh mint, chopped (optional)

Place the garbanzos in a non-stick pan large enough to hold them in one layer. Toast over medium heat until lightly browned, 10-15 minutes. Set aside to cool.

Heat the olive oil in a sauce pan. Add the shallot, Serrano pepper and garlic and cook over medium heat, stirring often, for 3-5 minutes or until softened.

Add the quinoa and stir to coat. Add the broth and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and simmer slowly about 15 minutes, or until all the liquid has been absorbed. Remove the quinoa to a large bowl and allow to cool to room temperature.

To the bowl add olives, parsley, lemon juice, cumin, salt and pepper to taste, and mint (if using). Toss to combine. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 2 hours or overnight. Allow to come to room temperature. Taste and adjust seasonings before serving.

Composed salad with steak

I’ve been lazy about posting lately. I’m going to make up for it over the next couple of days. Last night Peter and I made a constructed salad which we served with thin slices of rib eye steak. We had cooked a “cowboy” rib eye the night before. It was a whopping 2 pounds of meat with a single rib bone and a slightly regrettable amount of fat, much of which I trimmed away.

I didn’t (again the word regrettably) take a picture of it so I poached one from the internet. Here it is:


Is that magnificent or what? I had two meat rubs on hand, both left over from other recipes. One was by Anne Burrell, whose show, “Secrets of a Restaurant Chef,” I watch religiously. Unfortunately it was way too salty when I used it the first time. However, by mixing it with another rub which included ground coffee, it was transformed into a great concoction.

The one thing I will do differently when I cook a cowboy steak the next time is set a slightly lower target temperature. After browning one side thoroughly (4 minutes), I finished it in a 350° oven (which took about 20 more minutes), letting the internal temp rise to 135°. This gave us somewhat more of a medium steak instead of my preferred medium rare. I think 130° is a better temp, especially because you let it rest for 10 minutes before slicing. It tasted wonderful nonetheless.

We came up with the idea for these composed salads as we scoured our brains for inventive ways to use lettuce and endive from our garden. The picture below is a combination of those two greens with some toasted garbanzos, sliced radishes, croutons, and sugar snap peas which were blanched for a couple of minutes and then shocked with ice water. You’d think we were having sex if you heard the sounds we made while consuming this consummate creation.



We have a great time pottering about in the kitchen together. Here’s a pic of our culinary work area:


It’s a little tricky jockeying around one another, but we’ve got it down pretty good.

Thai beef and wild rice salad

I forgot to take a photo of today's recipe. Sorry.

Yesterday I posted my harangue about making soup from bits and pieces of stuff you find on hand. Today I will compose a salad, again using small amounts of miscellanea sitting in the fridge, the pantry, the crisper drawer (another excellent hideout for stuff).

The problem with the crisper drawer is that everything in there is in a plastic bag. So it can take a bit of doing to get a clear picture of what you’ve got. This is where the inventory system I talked about yesterday re-emerges today.

Ironically enough, Mark Bittman (the “minimalist”) in today’s NY Times food section goes on at some length about lists so that things don’t get lost. I’d almost think he read my blog.

But seriously, folks, in our house Peter and I have finally begun to exhibit some discipline and keep frequently updated lists on hand for the contents of the fridge and freezer. I simply stick a piece of paper (actually from a notepad) on the door of the fridge and write and cross off whatever goes in or comes out. You can do it. Once you get a sense of how much more efficiently you use the food you’ve paid good money for, you’ll be patting yourself on the back (as we are now doing frequently).

Today’s recipe used only items I had on hand and fell into the category “use it, or lose it.” Here’s what the inventory led to:

Thai beef and wild rice salad
Juice of ½ lemon
¼ cup finely diced celery (with leafy parts if possible)
2 scallions, green and white parts diced fine
3 tbsp fish sauce, or to taste
2 tbsp chili/garlic paste
¼ cup Italian parsley, chopped
2 cups cooked wild rice
6 oz. cooked steak

Put the first 6 items in a medium bowl and stir to combine. Stir in the rice, mixing everything thoroughly. Give it a taste and add more of anything you think it needs (for me it was a bit more fish sauce).

Cut the steak into thin slices across the grain. Over medium-low heat, warm the steak in a non-stick skillet for a few minutes. Sprinkle with a bit of soy sauce. Serve the rice in bowls topped with steak slices.

Oil-poached shrimp, potato, green bean salad

For many years we’ve had a recipe for tuna poached in olive oil (tonno ventresca). Peter prepared it once, so long ago we have no idea when it was. You can buy ventresca tuna in cans at specialty shops. It’s an excellent product. I thought it might be interesting to do it from scratch.

Marcella Hazan, perhaps the doyen of Italian cooking, is so fussy about everything being from scratch that I used to say her ventresca tuna recipe should begin, “First, rent a fishing boat.” I took the easier path of getting ¾ lb. of nice fresh tuna from my local monger. It had some of what I think is called the bloodline, that dark stuff, on the side of it. Monger Bruce told me it was edible although somewhat strong tasting. I chose to cut it off.

Our recipe gave very explicit instructions for how to do this: put the tuna in a pan, cover it with oil, add a garlic clove or two, and bring the oil up to a temperature where it bubbles ever so slightly. After ten minutes remove the pan from the heat and add a couple more things. Then marinate the tuna overnight before constructing the tuna salad.

I didn’t want to have leftovers, and made basically a half recipe. It was the perfect amount for our lunch on Sunday. In order to reuse the oil, I prepared enough potatoes and green beans to make up another lunch, this time using shrimp.

I couldn’t find very good directions for poaching shrimp in oil, so I had to kind of make this up. To be honest, I liked the shrimp salad result better than the tuna. For the tuna, a red wine and oil dressing was called for. It tasted very good, but I replaced the vinegar with lemon juice for the shrimp.

The basics of the recipe are from that one we found in one of our recipe binders (we have more than 650 pages of them). I did some tweaking and consider this to fit in with the intention of my postings: invention. This is well worth trying.

This picture "resembles" my shrimp salad, but I confess to having borrowed it from FoodNetwork. It's fun to have a picture.

Oil-poached shrimp salad
12 oz. shrimp, peeled and deveined
8 oz. green beans
8 small potatoes (1-2” diameter)
olive oil
dried thyme
2 garlic cloves, cut in half
1 garlic clove, minced or pressed
1 bay leaf
zest of 1 lemon
¼ cup chopped parsley
juice of 1 lemon
salt and pepper

Put the shrimp in a saucepan and just barely cover with oil. Add the garlic. Bring the oil’s temperature up over medium-low heat. If it starts to bubble, turn the heat down. Carefully watch the progress of the shrimp turning pink, tossing them frequently with a fork. At the first sign they are close to being cooked through (about 5-6 minutes), remove the pan from the heat.

Add the lemon zest, thyme and bay leaf to the oil. After 5 minutes remove the shrimp, let cool completely, and refrigerate overnight.

Allow the oil to cool completely, then refrigerate it overnight also.

Place the potatoes in another pot and cover with cold water. Bring the water to a boil, add a generous amount of salt, and simmer them until fork tender, 20 minutes or so. It will help to cut in half any disproportionately large ones.

While the potatoes cook, trim and wash the green beans. When the potatoes are cooked, remove them to a colander and bring the water back to a full boil. Add a bit more salt and blanch the beans to your preferred crunchiness. For me it was about 9 minutes as the beans were fairly mature.

Drain the beans and rinse them for a minute with cold water, using your sink sprayer attachment. When the beans and potatoes are cool, refrigerate them along with the shrimp and the oil.

Now you could construct and eat this salad the same day you poach the shrimp. It probably would be pretty much as good. But I had the time and did it a day ahead.

To construct the salad:*
Cut the potatoes into ½” pieces. Cut the green beans into ½” pieces. Put them both in a large bowl. Cut the shrimp into similar sized pieces and add to the bowl. Add the parsley and toss to mix.

For the dressing:
Put the lemon juice into a bowl in which you can whisk the ingredients. Add salt and pepper and more dried thyme. If the poaching oil has solidified (as it almost certainly will have), warm it over low heat. Add some of the oil to the dressing bowl. How much? No more than an amount equel in volume to the lemon juice. Whisk the mix together until the oil emulifies, ½ - 1 minute. Taste. If it is too lemony, add a bit more oil. At this point your taste buds must be your guide. Add salt and pepper as necessary.

Pour the dressing over the shrimp, potato, green bean mix and toss to coat. Sprinkle with a little more salt and pepper. Serve and enjoy.

*We were eating our salad on a very chilly day and wanted it to be at least warm. That was accomplished easily by combining the beans and potatoes and microwaving them for 90 seconds. Then, when tossed with the shrimp and dressed the salad was nice and warm.



For a free excerpt of my book, “A Year of Food,” in which I opine, report, cook, muse and philosophize about everything that passed my lips for an entire year, write to me at: scrout1944@msn.com.

Caesar-style salad

I call this “Caesar-style” because it’s not a real Caesar salad. It does not have egg in it and includes lemon juice instead of vinegar. However, it is reminiscent of the real thing and quite tasty.

As with many of the things I prepare, I made this up. The hearts of palm are optional, but are a wonderful addition. The olives are also optional.

One of the best Caesar salads I ever had was at a Denver restaurant, Prima, where Peter and I had lunch, paid for with a gift certificate he had received as a Christmas gift. I recall my entrée was cioppino, made by a new cook at the restaurant. Our waitress was eager to know what I thought of it. After a couple of years I don’t really remember much except that, in general, I liked it.

We started lunch with a shared Caesar salad. It was a copious quantity of hearts of romaine lettuce with a delicious dressing and shaved parmesan. Indeed the salad was over-dressed, at least in terms of how we eat at home.

As it happened we had Castelvetrano olives, a very mild green variety, and romano cheese on hand. I guess the only kind of olives I would not use would be standard green ones in a jar – the kind that might be stuffed with pimento.

Caesar-style salad
1 head heart of romaine
juice of 1/2 lemon, about 2 tbsp
1 medium garlic clove, minced or pressed
extra virgin olive oil
parmesan or romano cheese
salt and pepper2 pieces hearts of palm4-6 olives, any kind you like

Slice the lettuce in half lengthwise and trim the bottom end. Keep the halves intact and place each on a salad plate cut side up. Alongside the lettuce place a piece of heart of palm, sliced or not, and a few olives.

For the dressing: put the lemon juice in a bowl. Add garlic and salt and pepper and whisk in olive oil, tasting frequently, until an emulsion is formed and there is a good balance of the flavors (your judgment counts for everything here).

Stir in finely grated cheese, again to taste. Spoon dressing over the lettuce, palm and olives, and top with a bit more grated cheese if you wish.

For a free excerpt of my book, “A Year of Food,” in which I opine, report, cook, muse and philosophize about everything that passed my lips for an entire year, write to me at: scrout1944@msn.com.