Late January Dinner

In the past several months, we've pretty much stopped going out to eat at restaurants around Bend. The lousy food we have had in the past couple of years has made us really tired of spending a lot of money with almost no return. For myriad reasons, quality and consistency of restaurant food is lacking and so for our special meals lately, Ann and I have been cooking at home and inviting friends over to dinner.

This past weekend, I really had no overarching theme for the menu; I simply wanted to use (and use up) items that we had on hand already. In addition to a bunch of stuff to use up in the refrigerator, we have a pretty robust pantry that includes a great many items that we can use to cook whatever it is that we want.

Ann was in charge of cocktails and dessert. For cocktails, she made us one of her favorites, dirty martinis with blue cheese-stuffed olives. I am sorry to say that white liquor isn't my jam and although the cocktails were well made, I just couldn't drink mine and opened a bottle of Crémant d'Alsace to go with my appetizer. As much as I would like to be a martini guy, I am resigned to never being one.

Lovely Dirty Martini

Blue-Cheese Stuffed Olives

For appetizers, I had more Scottish cold-smoked salmon and sea trout caviar leftover from our aborted New Year's Eve celebration that I wanted to clear out of the refrigerator. So I envisioned an appetizer of smoked salmon, smoked salmon mouse, and sea trout caviar that is similar in many ways to the smoked salmon smørrebrød that I made a couple of weeks back when we got pounded by snow. Because this appetizer needed to be gluten-free, I cut cucumbers on the bias to mimic crostini. 

Smoked Salmon, Smoked Salmon Mousse, and Sea Trout Caviar

For the main part of our meal, it was pretty much a no-brainer that we were going to have pork tenderloin. A recent foray to Costco saw a package of four tenderloins come home, two of which were salted away in the freezer, leaving two more in the fridge that needed to be cooked. I decide to stuff a tenderloin with goat cheese and spinach and wrap it in prosciutto, a technique that I developed for the restaurant and which is documented in a separate post for anyone curious about how to do it.

The beauty of this dish is three-fold: it looks a lot more complicated to pull off than it is, it looks beautiful, and you can prep it well in advance, leaving only the final roasting to be done and freeing up your time to visit with your guests.

Searing the Prosciutto-Wrapped Stuffed Pork Tender
(cut in half so it would fit into the pan)

Seared Pork Tenderloin Rolls, Prepped in Advance, Ready to Roast

To accompany the pork, I turned to our pantry where I found the tail end of three separate bags of Arborio rice that I wanted to use or consolidate. Moreover, we just ran out of dried porcini and ordered a new bag which is more than will fit into the canister. I wanted to use the overflow that would not fit in the canister and so it seemed pretty natural to make an earthy risotto to go with the pork.

One of the neat things about risotto is that you can par-cook the base about ten minutes and let it cool. This then means that it will only take 8-10 minutes to have the risotto ready. In other words, all I had to do when guests were over was spend ten minutes at the range finishing the risotto while the pork roast cooled and rested. I spent the rest of my time socializing and enjoying the evening.

I get really tired of chefs making out like risotto needs some kind of crazy voodoo to pull off correctly and that it takes far too long to prepare to put it on the menu. In fact, I have good friends who run a restaurant whose menu claims that a simple plate of risotto will take the kitchen 45 minutes to make, and oh by the way, that will be $45 for the plate. Ridiculous. I love you guys, but that's ridiculous.

Spinach and Goat Cheese Stuffed Pork Tenderloin on Porcini Risotto

Ann asked also that I reprise the salad that I made last weekend and I obliged her. She just really loved the combination of ingredients: greens, spiced pecans, pomegranate seeds, and pickled shallots all combined with a pomegranate-pickled shallot vinaigrette. You can find all the salad magic covered in prior posts: spicing pecans, pickling shallots, and making the vinaigrette. 

Greens with Pickled Shallot and Pomegranate Vinaigrette

In keeping with the theme of using up, I remembered that for the holidays, Ann had prepped a batch of her delicious shortbread made with orange zest, rosemary, olive oil, sea salt, and very little sugar. Unfortunately, she became sick before she could do all the baking that she wanted to do. I suggested that we take the remaining log of dough from the freezer, cut it into discs, bake them, and then dip the shortbread cookies in melted chocolate for an easy finish to dinner. I sliced; Ann baked; I melted the chocolate and dipped the cookies; and Ann applied sea salt to the chocolate. Tag team and done!

Chocolate-Dipped Orange-Rosemary-Olive Oil Shortbreads

As a final thought, I love having leftovers in the refrigerator that can be repurposed into another meal. The following evening, I formed some of the leftover risotto into cakes that I crusted in a pan while gently rewarming the two remaining slices of stuffed pork tenderloin. While I poached four eggs, I whipped up a little of my pimentón sauce with which to finish our dinners of leftovers.

Leftovers: Stuffed Pork Tenderloin and Risotto Cake
Topped with Poached Eggs and Pimentón Sauce 

Seared Ahi on Mediterranean Salad

Seared Ahi on Mediterranean Salad

Tuna may be the ultimate fish (though in my book, a big slab of Striped Bass is right up there). And it would be a terrible understatement to say that I am picky about my tuna. At the restaurant, I handled a very great deal of very high quality tuna and so most of what I see at the store is several notches below what I used to serve to my customers. Every now and again, which is to say quite rarely, I see a piece of tuna at the store that looks good enough to bring home. As it did back at the end of March.

How to cook tuna is never in question for me. Like scallops, the less cooked it is, the better. If I am going to cook it at all, I will either briefly sear it or lightly grill it, just trying to cook the outer surface. Given that our weather was really cold, I decided to pan-sear this piece rather than to unbury the grill from its mantle of snow.

Here in lovely Bend, Oregon, spring is still a long ways off (with a bunch of snow in our long-range forecast) and yet I yearn for the warmer days. To help put myself in that frame of mind, I thought a really simple chopped salad might just be the ticket.

My so-called Mediterranean salad is grape tomatoes, cucumbers, thinly-sliced red onions, a touch of minced garlic, Italian parsley, and toasted pine nuts. The "dressing" is a simple squeeze of fresh lemon juice, a drizzle of olive oil, and a pinch of Kosher salt.

It's hard to imagine a better warm weather light dinner, even if it is served with snow on the ground!

Pan-Seared Barramundi with "Sauce Vièrge"

I'm a huge proponent of wild-caught local fish from well-managed fisheries, but out here in Oregon, our selection is quite limited in comparison to what I am used to on the East Coast, where we served many dozens of species at the restaurant. Out here, we have access to salmon, steelhead, rockfish, Pacific cod, albacore, sturgeon, sablefish, halibut, and not a whole lot else. Often I wish for a bit more diversity in the fish that we eat, so when I ran across some beautiful farmed barramundi, I snapped it up.

Every now and again at the restaurant, we could not get much in the way of local wild-caught fish because of a hurricane or nor'easter keeping the fleet in port. At such times, I had no choice but to buy farmed fish and farmed barramundi from Massachusetts was a great choice. It cooks (and has crowd appeal) just like any of the eastern firm white fish: striped bass, grouper, wreckfish, drum, corvina, or snapper.

Ann, who I do not believe had ever eaten barramundi, asked me to grill it, but I knew from working with the fish for many years that one of the best things about it is the crispy skin that you can get from cooking it in a steel or cast iron pan. And so I crisped the portions and served them with a sauce that I call sauce vièrge.

Pan-Seared Barramundi with "Sauce Vièrge"

"Sauce Vièrge"

When I was learning my chops in the 1980s, one of the most influential chefs was Michel Guérard, who was arguably the father of nouvelle cuisine, the more modern take-off of haute cuisine with an emphasis on lighter saucing, brighter flavors, and beautiful presentations. Chef Guérard recorded a lot of his dishes in a book called Cuisine Minceur, so-called slimming cuisine. While some of the dishes seemed to me to be a bit too austere in pursuit of diet consciousness, I did read and learn.

One of preparations for which he became well known among chefs was a sauce that he called virgin sauce, sauce vièrge, virgin in the sense of uncooked and raw. It is essentially finely chopped tomatoes in a vinaigrette. I took the sauce and adopted it to my kitchen and served it with seafood during late summer when the necessary ingredients were in the market.

My version is more or less a chopped salad meets vinaigrette. Last night's version included red pepper, yellow pepper, cucumber, tomato, minced shallot, capers, olive oil, and lemon juice. I generally include either basil or parsley, but the winter has not been kind to my parsley and of course, the basil is long dead.

So, while the execution of the sauce is all mine, I freely admit that I stole the base idea from Michel Guérard. That theft is in the chef world one of the highest forms of flattery: something that one chef does is so good that other chefs take that idea and adapt it to their kitchens. I'd like to think that one of more of my sous chefs and other cooks might have taken some of my ideas into their own kitchens.

"Warm" Greek Salad: White Beans with Horiatiki

I'm a big fan of mixing textures of foods in the same dish, witness my vegetable tacos in which I mix cooked vegetables with raw ones to achieve the final product. In the same vein and in response to wanting something warm for dinner in this cold season, but also wanting something fresh, bright, and cheerful, I started thinking about combining two dishes: a humble pan of white beans and horiatiki, the classic chopped Greek salad.

"Warm" Greek Salad: White Beans with Horiatiki

White Beans with Red Onion, Spinach, and Garlic

Horiatiki Without Feta

It's quite simple really: cook some onion and garlic in olive oil, add spinach and white beans to warm through and wilt the spinach. Assemble a chopped salad of tomatoes, cucumbers, olives, red onions, and peppers and dress them with olive oil, lemon juice, oregano, and salt. Lay the beans in a bowl and top with the horiatiki.

Feta would be great in this salad or crumbled into the beans or over the top of the plate but we are watching our fat intake and my gut has issues processing a lot of cheese. It's a shame because a great sheep's milk feta is one of the world's great cheeses.

Ann asked me to make this dish again. It really is tasty and it's a great vegetarian dish that can be on the table in under ten minutes start to finish.

Temaki: Spicy Tuna Hand Rolls

As I have lamented elsewhere, there is no place we trust in our town for sushi and so I have been doing my own raw fish dishes to scratch that particular itch. The spicy salmon tartare that we had recently got our sushi urges raging and Ann was really longing for hand rolls, so I made some spicy tuna temaki for us.

Ann Models a Spicy Tuna Hand Roll

Check out Ann's new Christmas nail job! We ended up eating the hand rolls standing at the counter. I would roll a couple, we would eat a couple, and so forth. All great fun.

Hand Roll Mise en Place

For the tuna, I minced some seedless cucumber and sliced some green onions and then made a spicy sauce of equal parts sriracha and soy sauce with a little sesame oil for flavor. I combined these two with the minced tuna and toasted sesame seeds.

Earlier in the afternoon, I had cooked a bit of good sushi rice. Fortunately, we grow excellent sushi rice in California and it is readily available in grocery stores. Although I love imported brands from Japan, my tried and true California brand is Nishiki, but my store doesn't carry it. What I have found is that most sushi rice brands can be very good, but what is really messed up are the cooking instructions.

Most brands call for too much water, resulting in an overcooked mushy mess, especially after you add the seasoned rice vinegar to the rice. In general, I have found that 1 portion of rice to a scant 1 and an eighth portion of water is a very good ratio, depending on how fresh the rice is. For reference, a cup of uncooked sushi rice will make a good dozen temaki.

As for seasoned vinegar, I don't mess with it. I use plain rice vinegar into which I stir a little sugar or agave nectar for sweetness. I use about an eighth cup per cup of rice and sprinkle it over the hot rice, gently turning the rice while it cools to room temperature.

Lay Rice on One End of the Nori

Making temaki, hand rolls, is child's play. It's fun to let everyone, kids included, roll their own. Mistakes are still edible! Start by slicing a sheet of nori down the center longways. Place it shiny side down on your board and with moistened fingers, spread a little rice on one end.

Lay the Filling on the Rice

Lay the filling or fillings on the rice on the diagonal. Start rolling by grasping the lower corner, the lower left corner in this case, and bringing it across the filling until the lower corner meets the top edge. I like to roll left to right. They roll right to left equally easily.

Roll the Resulting Cone Over Itself

Continue to roll the resulting cone over itself until you have but a small flap remaining. Put a few grains of rice on the flap to act as glue, then press the flap down onto the body of the cone.

Spicy Tuna Hand Rolls

Annie Demonstrating Temaki-Eating Skills

Hearts of Palm Seviche

I don't regularly surf for recipe ideas. Between my brain that thinks in flavors and Ann's wonderful incessant stream of "make this" and "make that," I never want for ideas. But still ideas do come at me from various places, such as when I am wandering through the produce section of the grocery store and the sight of some piece of produce gets my mind riffing. Recently, in something of a surprise, at least to me, one came from an advertisement.

Like a lot of folks, we cut the cord a long time ago and don't watch regular broadcast or cable TV, but we have a couple of streaming channels. We were watching a show the other night when some kind of pre-roll ad starting talking about Hearts of Palm Seviche. And that's all it took to spark an idea.

We both looked at each other and said, "Hearts of palm seviche sounds great."

Hearts of Palm Seviche

It probably sounded great because we have been eating fall vegetables for a couple of months now and are looking for a summery change-up for our vegetarian dinner entrées. Next trip to the store, I bought a couple cans of hearts of palm and all the vegetables that I wanted for the seviche.

It turned out so well that I made it again the week following and it is certain to go on our wintertime dinner menu. 

Hearts of Palm Seviche

You can add whatever you like to your seviche. I thought my first impromptu version was outstanding, so I wrote it down and haven't changed a thing in subsequent versions. This recipe makes two healthy portions or 4-6 appetizer portions.

1 cup grape tomatoes, diced

1/2 seedless cucumber, diced

1 yellow pepper, diced

1 red pepper, diced

1 orange pepper, diced

1/2 red onion, in fine dice

1 avocado, diced

2 15-ounce cans of hearts of palm, sliced into coins

1 bunch cilantro, destemmed and chopped

1 teaspoon Kosher salt, to taste

juice of two limes

Chop and mix. Season to taste. Serve immediately.

Sablefish with Balsamic-Roasted Onions and Quick Pickles

One of the best, most luxurious fishes on the planet is the sablefish, locally known as black cod, though it is not a cod at all. It is a fish that I have worked with sporadically over my career. We would get some flown in to the restaurant in Virginia from our purveyor in Alaska, but it would come in only infrequently along with our salmon and halibut, most of my fisherman's catch being sold to Japan.

Because it is so good, it wants to be treated simply so that it can be the star of the show. Moreover, because it is so high in fat (good fish fats), it wants something acidic to help balance it. In this case, I decided to use two different vinegars to help balance the dish: balsamic and rice.

Sablefish with Balsamic-Roasted Onions and Quick Pickles

I decided to plate the sablefish on a bed of onion slabs first marinated in and then roasted in balsamic vinegar. Then I decided to quick pickle some cucumber slices to garnish the top of the fish. The two sources of acid complemented the unctuous fish.

Onions with Balsamic Vinegar, Prior to Roasting

I slabbed a big onion and poured on a bit of balsamic vinegar and let the slabs stand for twenty minutes, turning the slices once, to marinate. After I sprinkled them with salt and pepper, I put them in a moderate oven until the onions were soft, but still holding together, and the balsamic vinegar reduced to a syrupy glaze.

Cucumber Slices in the Pickle Brine

Quick pickles are just that: pickles that take no time. They pick up a bit of the pickle brine, yet they retain the fresh snap and crunch of the raw cucumber. I make my brine by taste. I start with a bit of rice vinegar and then dilute it with water until I am happy with it. Then I stir in salt and sugar, tasting as I go, until I am happy with the flavor of the brine. In go the cucumbers for a short stay, an hour or less. These were in the brine just about an hour.

Searing the Skin Side of the Sablefish

Sablefish is among the easiest fish to cook for two reasons. First, because of the fat content, it is very hard to overcook it to the point where it is inedible. And second, because it has a built-in timer. When the flesh starts to flake apart, it is ready to serve. You can see the very visible flakes in the top photo.

I always serve sablefish with the crispy skin attached. It is a treat on par with and perhaps surpassing salmon skin. One day, perhaps I will make sablefish skin hand rolls as a special treat for Ann and me; I suspect it will be far better than the same sushi made with salmon skin.

As always, hats off to Northwest Fresh Seafood for impeccable fish.

Summer Vegetable Dinner

Since retiring from the restaurant, I have cooked a handful of real meals, meals into which I put any effort at all. After coming home from the winery, I am mainly about getting something on the table rather than being creative. I need a reason to cook now, it seems. And that reason would be our good friends Pat and Mary Jo just two houses down.

We invited them over for dinner and since they are vegetarians, I cooked vegetarian. Because my diet is mainly vegetarian, this is a non-issue and truth be told, I've never needed meat to make my life complete. Well, there is pork belly. If I have any weakness at all, it would be for pork belly.

This meal was guided by the time of the year and what was in season, the very same ethos that drove the menus at OBW. For a first course, seeing some beautiful Kuta squash in the market made me think back to a dish I did for a vegetarian summer squash-themed dinner more than a decade ago. I made a classic vichyssoise substituting squash for potatoes and calling it rather tongue-in-cheek squashyssoise.

Only one problem. I have real problems with lactose and a bowl of the original chilled soup would certainly be painful. No worries: coconut milk to the rescue for that same unctuousness that heavy cream provides. The soup involved sweating squash and leek with a bouquet of Thai basil from the garden (because is not the combination of coconut milk and Thai basil one of the most glorious flavor combinations ever?) and then into the blender.

After the soup chilled overnight, I pulled it out of the fridge 90 minutes before I wanted to serve it to let it warm to the point where the fat in the coconut milk would be liquid, cooler than room temperature. Only one problem: the soup was so desperately flat that I thought of pitching it out rather than serving it.

I don't know if I am out of practice or if my chef mind failed me, but it actually took me what seemed like several minutes to figure out how to rescue the soup. A sprinkle of salt and a squeeze of agave syrup took the soup to a new plane: one of the three best soups I have ever made and I have made thousands. The garnish is a simple relish of raw corn, raw tomato, Thai basil, salt, and agave nectar.

Lacto-Friendly Squashyssoise

Squash cakes. A year ago, I would have screamed "f*cking squash cakes!" at the thought of making another after a decade and a half of having them on summer menus and the incessant requests from customers as soon as spring arrived, "When are you going to put squash cakes back on the menu?" Squash cakes sound pretty bland, boring, and healthy, but these are none of those things and once someone tries them, she is pretty well hooked for life.

A quick fresh salad of black-eyed peas and vegetables dressed in red wine vinegar and olive oil sits under the cake and a quick pickle of cucumber brings a little more acid to the party to complement the incredibly rich squash.

Squash Cake, Black-Eyed Pea Salad, Quick Pickled Cukes

And for dessert, I had to do a sorbet. Why? My wife made me schlep my huge commercial sorbet machine 3500 miles across this country and it had been sitting in the garage, unpacked and unloved. I made a simple syrup of Pinot Noir with a hint of cinnamon and blended it with watermelon to yield a fun summer sorbet.

Watermelon-Pinot Noir Sorbet

Pat and Mary Jo, thanks for all you do for us. We'll do it again. When I get the itch to cook again.

July 4th

Monday July 4th was a great day because I got to spend it with my wife. We (read I) wanted to go hiking, but for a lot of reasons, that just didn't work out. But we got a lot of other things accomplished instead.

The morning started early as do all Mondays at our house with me taking the dogs out. As I walked to the back door, I could see a red fox in the backyard, staking out the rabbit burrow under the back stairs. This is the first time that I have actually laid eyes on said fox, but I have known of it for a couple years from plentiful scat and from tracks in the snow. About this time, Charlie spotted it and commenced to barking and carrying on. The fox cocked its head and looked at the dog going crazy, then trotted off in the direction of the hedgerow behind the house, where it sat for a while before heading out of sight. I would see it a few more times throughout the morning as it was scoping out the rabbits. Persistent bugger.

Coffee with Grace the Lap Cat

The weather was a bit misty/chilly so we took our coffee in the sunroom before Ann headed off to yoga. While she was away, I planted and transplanted several plants in the garden, created a new bed for our cucumelons and another for some iris that we would get later in the day, and dug a hole for a newly acquired prickly pear.

When she returned, we went to the annual July 4th plant sale at the local nursery. We save our pennies all year and give ourselves a $100 budget. This year, though we only found one thing out of four on our wish list (irises), we managed to score 22 pots for $96. Our meager funds go a long way though. For example, two pots of irises I divided into 12 plants, but your guess is as good as mine about what colors they will be. That's the downside of the big sale; very little is marked and often it's a crapshoot. Our other crapshoots in years past, Rose of Sharon and wisteria, turned out great and no doubt these irises will too.

A bonus was the overcast, chilly, and slightly rainy weather that kept a lot of people away from what is usually one of the biggest circuses of the year. It was raining lightly by the time we were checking out.

Quick Lunch Out at Thai Winchester

From the nursery, we headed downtown to the restaurant to get a bottle of wine for dinner and my heavy workgloves so that I could plant the prickly pear. Ask Ann about those spines! It was midafternoon and we were starving, not having had any breakfast, so we popped across the street to Thai Winchester for a quick lunch. Look how fabulously skinny Ann looks in the photo above tackling her Singha.

Siu Mai at a Thai Restaurant???

By the time we walked to Thai Winchester, it was raining solidly and we were pretty wet and chilled. There was never any doubt that we were going to order bowls of roasted duck noodle soup. Ann surprised me by ordering "steam dumplings" for an appetizer. They turned out to be pork siu mai, not something that I would ever expect or order in a Thai restaurant. They were fine but I've had and made a lot better. The soup was fabulous as ever.

Roasted Duck Noodle Soup

Back home, we spent a couple hours out in the rain putting in all the plants that we bought in the morning and were thoroughly wet and miserable by the time we were done. After hot showers and a bit of rest in front of the TV, I made us lamb burgers with cucumber-yogurt salad. Dolmades were on the menu too, but Ann pulled them out for late afternoon snack while we were watching TV.

Lamb Burger, Cucumber-Yogurt Salad, Dolmades Absent

We had planned all week to have lamb burgers for the Fourth and so I made them at work on Saturday morning, starting by grinding a leg of lamb. The mix contains EVOO, cream, salt, pepper, pimentón, oregano, garlic, and feta cheese. I would have grilled them except the weather sucked and we ran out of gas last week and forget to get a new tank. The cucumber salad is cucumbers, Greek yogurt, salt, sugar, and rice vinegar. We had a Barolo with our lamb.

It was a really good day, just Ann and me. I would pay for the day off later in the week, but it was still worth it.

Salmon Cakes

I'm starting to get back in the habit of taking Tuesday and Wednesday evenings off to spend with Ann if business is slow enough and slow enough early week it has been. After some back and forth about eating in or eating out, we decided on eating in.

In trying to find something healthy to eat for dinner, I remembered that I had a couple sides of small Steelhead Trout in the refrigerator and had just scored some amazing small cucumbers at the farmers market. Pretty quickly I arrived at salmon cakes with cucumber salad.

Salmon Cakes in the Pan

Salmon cakes really could not be any easier to make. The exact flavorings are different each time that I make them. I skinned the fish, cubed it, and tossed it in the food processor with some whole grain mustard, two minced shallots, a big bunch of chopped dill from the garden, and a big handful of capers. I processed it to the consistency you see in the pan above and then formed it into four-ounce cakes, which I cooked to crispy on the outside and medium rare in the middle. I see all kinds of recipes that include egg and breading to help hold the cakes together. This is about as necessary as egg and bread in hamburgers to help them hold together.

Salmon and Cucumbers, a Classic Combination

The cucumber salad is equally trivial to make. After slicing the cucumbers thinly, I added just a little Greek yogurt, a little sugar, a little rice vinegar, and a little salt. End of story. Delicious!

Dinner al Fresco

Now that the restaurant kitchen is starting to operate more smoothly post transition to a new kitchen crew, I felt like I could take off last evening to spend some time with Ann. In fact, I decided early enough in the day that Ann and I discussed options for dinner and decided that we needed to eat some of the asparagus and eggplant from the refrigerator.

I got home around 4:30 and began prepping and Ann arrived home at 5:30 just as I was finishing cleaning up the kitchen. In an hour, I sliced and blanched all the vegetables for dinner, made a pot of chicken paprikash for Ann to eat later in the week, blitzed a pint of tomato goat cheese (fresh tomatoes, salt, and goat cheese) in the food processor, and made three cups of white bean hummus.

After Ann took a shower, we went out on the patio with this bottle of Ramey Syrah and enjoyed what proved to be an exquisitely beautiful evening. I couldn't have randomly picked any better evening to be off. Or a better random bottle of wine. This Syrah is more French than Californian with an earthy nose riding on top of plum fruit with hints of black pepper. Understated and delicious and decidedly contrarian for California.

Ramey Syrah: More France Than California

At some point later in the evening (gotta love these long days!), I fired up the grill and grilled the eggplant along with the asparagus and broccoli that I had blanched earlier. I went by the farmers market in the morning and found a few things we could use for dinner: two small cucumbers, the first of the year; a small basket of greenhouse cherry tomatoes, also the first of the year; a couple handfuls of broccoli side shoots, again first of the year; and a lone bunch of radishes, about the last of the spring. These are the first new vegetables at the market in weeks!

Vegetable Platter with Two Dips

While we were waiting for the grill to heat, I heard a big crash from inside and knew instinctively what had happened. I arrived in the kitchen about two seconds later to find a shattered platter in the floor; tomato-goat cheese spread plastered all over the dishwasher, cabinets, and walls; and the brown dog happily licking up the mess from the floor. Carter and I cleaned up the mess in the kitchen while Ann hauled Grace outside for a hose bath. Dogs!

Quick Shrimp Salad

Last post, I wrote about Ann pulling odds and ends out of the freezer. She also pulled out a bag of cooked salad shrimp, which are always useful to have in the freezer for an emergency. A quick rinse under cold water and they are ready to eat.

Shrimp and Vegetable Salad

In the midst of a cold and barren winter, I wanted something fresh, crunchy, and a little exotic to take me away from here, at least for ten minutes or so. So I endeavored to make a quick salad of the shrimp with lots of crunchy vegetables, Thai basil, and a quick Thai-inspired dressing. The salad ingredients aside from the shrimp are grape tomatoes, cucumbers, orange peppers, canned baby corn, sugar snaps, and Thai basil. The dressing is fish sauce, brown sugar, crushed chile peppers, and garlic. None of this is in season now and that vexes the seasonalist in me, but filled my need for a little temporary escapism from the doldrums of winter.

Bonus Dinner: Cellophane Noodle Salad

Tuesday was about as odd a day in the restaurant business as one could imagine. School just started so we had no reservations and not much hope of any dinner business either. Worse still, our disgruntled dishwasher called out sick after posting on Facebook on the weekend that he hates his job and never wants to wash dishes again, so we were stuck with no dishwasher.

However, one of our line cooks volunteered to come in and wash dishes for the extra hours on his paycheck. And with the extra line cook in the kitchen, there was really no need for me to be there, so I took the night off and stopped by the grocery store to pick up some items to make that cellophane noodle salad that Ann and I had discussed as a possibility for Sunday's dinner.

Cellophane Noodle Salad with Shrimp

This light, refreshing salad was just what the doctor ordered. Ann and I ate it while catching up on some TV.

Salad Ingredients Save for Shrimp and Noodles

This is a freeform salad that takes little time to prep, cook, and devour and should be in everyone's culinary arsenal. Five minutes of prep included cutting up two bunches of cellophane noodles with kitchen scissors and covering them in warm water, defrosting eight big shrimp, slicing a quarter of a small red onion, cutting half a bunch of green onions into batons, likewise for a small pickling cucumber and a small orange pepper, picking some cilantro leaves, harvesting some Thai basil leaves from the garden, and making a batch of nước chấm from lime juice, fish sauce, garlic, sambal oelek, and agave nectar.

When we were ready to eat, I quickly cooked the shrimp, drained the noodles, and mixed everything together. A quick scattering of crispy fried shallots on top finished the dish.

Ann said to me during dinner, "It's almost like we're normal." Almost, girlfriend, almost.

Easy. Fresh. Delicious. Quick. Try it.

Lemongrass Pork

Monday was a gorgeous day, prompting Ann to suggest something on the grill for dinner. I was in the mood for some bright flavorful Vietnamese food. And so I combined the two wants to make grilled lemongrass pork with a fish sauce caramel and a bright table salad.

Lemongrass Pork with Table Salad

The dish has four components: the marinade for the pork, the fish sauce caramel, the table salad, and the nước chấm dipping sauce that I dressed the salad with. For pork, I used thick-cut strips of shoulder that I picked up in bulk at Costco. I planned to really sear the pork over a blasting flame to get an awesome crust, so I wanted a cut with some fat in it to protect it from that intense heat. Shoulder is the way to go. Most people don't think of shoulder as a grilling cut, but it is infinitely better than loin which has almost zero margin for error: it goes from just right to dry in moments.

Look at the Crust on this Pork!

The crust was accomplished with a blender marinade. I thinly sliced four or five stalks of lemongrass, the stems off a bunch of cilantro, and a couple cloves of garlic. This went into the blender with a few glugs of oil, a couple splashes of fish sauce, and a healthy portion of ground black pepper. The smooth green marinade went over the pork and it sat on the counter for a good hour, coming up to room temperature.

For the table salad, I thinly sliced cucumber and red onion and put that in a bowl with plucked cilantro, Thai basil leaves, and a handful of bean sprouts. Easy, simple, crunchy, and flavorful. The contents of this salad vary each time I make it depending on what I have on hand. I might have thrown some mint into this too, but honestly, I already had enough herbs in the salad by the time I thought of it.

To dress the salad, I made a small amount of nước chấm from lime juice, agave nectar, fish sauce, garlic, and sambal oelek. Always simple, always delicious, nước chấm is one of the great sauces of the world and every cook should have it in his or her repertoire.

Finally, I made another classic Vietnamese sauce, nước màu, a fish sauce caramel to dress the pork with. I have made this sauce my own with the addition of both shallots and black pepper. I make a caramel by melting sugar until golden brown, add minced shallots and ground black pepper, and once the shallots have caramelized (pun intended), I add fish sauce to taste to balance out the sweet bitterness of the caramel. I add water if necessary to thin the sauce to the consistency I want.

I hit a home run last night, no doubt. Ann and Carter wiped the pork out; Carter had thirds. This from the teenager who doesn't normally eat with us because we eat weird food.

Thai Chicken Salad

On Monday, Ann and I were both running different directions and we missed the opportunity to discuss what was for dinner, so I ended up making an executive decision. Given that it was a warm day, I wanted something cool, light, and highly flavorful.

Thai Chicken Salad

And so I decided to grab a pre-roasted chicken, some herbs, some lettuce, some vegetables, and throw together a salad. I'm calling this Thai Chicken Salad, but I doubt seriously that it has a counterpart in Thailand, though Thai cooks would recognize the spirit of the dish.

Salad Fixings

The first thing I did was to throw together a quick dressing, which you see in the bowl at the top of the photo, of freshly squeezed lime juice, fish sauce, sambal oelek, and agave nectar. Agave isn't used in Thailand but it has the benefit of dissolving readily in a cold dressing. It works better than sugar and I am all about works better.

Then I diced some of the chicken breast and gave it a quick marinade in the dressing while I tossed cilantro and Thai basil leaves with some lettuce leaves. I put the undressed leaves on a platter and then put tomatoes, sweet orange peppers, cucumber, and red onion rings over that. Then I spooned on a good bit of dressing and tossed the chicken on top.

I love crunchy bits in a salad, so on top of everything, I scattered some roasted peanuts and crispy fried shallots.

This was a delightful salad that we gorged ourselves on while sitting in a chair and eating right out of the platter with two forks!

Chipotle-Marinated Grilled Pork and Pineapple Salad

Shockingly yellow daffodils in full glory on Monday at dawn heralded a beautiful spring day, signaling from the moment that the dogs and I stepped outside that morning that we were going to eat dinner outside on the patio for the first time this year, as long as the weather gods did not send us a late afternoon thunderstorm. And I knew then that I was going to grill something for dinner. I am not immune to that same urge to put meat to fire that infects everyone else this time of year. It has been how many cold, dreary, months of leaden skies since I have fired the grill?

And then just after noon while I was at work, the text arrived, "some kind of huge salad for dinner?" Hmm, well, that did kind of put a kink in my plans for something grilled, and by something grilled, I meant a burger, a big, fat, voluptuously delicious, grease dripping down the chin, burger.

Chipotle-Marinated Grilled Pork and Pineapple Salad

My burger-lust unsated and shelved, I started working plan B. Plan B was some means of combining grilled meat with a salad. And Plan B happened to be formulating just as I walked by a huge pile of pineapples at the market. Grilled pineapple? Yeah, I'm a fan. Now what? Heat and sweet? Yes sir! Chipotle and pineapple. It just has to be pork. I'll get some thinly sliced pork shoulder, marinate it in chipotle, grill it, some pineapple, and a sweet pepper, and then build a salad on that. Perfect!

Grilled Pork, Pineapple, Peppers and a Salad on Top

Feeling these same spring urges that I felt, Ann put a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc in the fridge so that it would be cold by the time we both got home. We sat out on the patio and drank our first bottle of white wine of the year. There is something special about that first bottle of white out on the patio, the same patio that had been covered in snow for so many months. Spring, it seems, is finally here!

This dish was beautiful and a good choice for outdoor dining, but damn it, I want a burger!