Thanksgiving 2025

Yet another Thanksgiving is in the books, a quiet one involving just us and Rob and Dyce, an affair that ran from just after noon until well after dark, not that dark comes particularly late at this time of year. We had thought that we would celebrate at our house this year, but the guys just finished renovating the kitchen in their new house. They wanted us to come over for Thanksgiving to christen the kitchen, and so we did.

Post-Thanksgiving Scrabble with Willamette Pinot
Ed and Dyce Getting Killed by the Pros

I had already made plans to make my Thanksgiving Lasagne yet again this year (for details and recipes, click through the link). By this, I mean that Ann asked me to make it again as Thanksgiving is her show. As a perfectly portable dish, the pan of lasagne was easy to assemble in our kitchen (over 5 days) and bake in their kitchen. Turkey neck rillettes are always a happy by-product of making the lasagne, so we brought those along too as well as a container of cranberry-orange relish.

Rob and Dyce contributed a green bean casserole, deviled eggs, a warm artichoke dip, and a delightful charcuterie board. It seems hard to believe that Ann made it this far in life without ever having green bean casserole, de rigueur at every potluck! I also have to mention that they opened their final bottle of 2015 Cristom Pinot Noir Hirschy Vineyard, a spectacular wine that is drinking so phenomenally right now.

Way Too Many Appetizers

Rob's Spinach-Artichoke Dip

Turkey Rillettes with Cranberry Relish

You Had Me at Speck!

Dyce's Deviled Eggs

Tukey Lasagna and Green Bean Casserole Finished Baking

Tukey Lasagna, Cranberry Relish, Green Bean Casserole

One Food Porn Shot: Roasted Turkey Thighs for the Lasagna

Brined Roasted Steelhead with Fennel-Orange Slaw

We end up eating a fair amount of steelhead trout and salmon, to the point where I am looking for ways to cook it other than on the grill or in a steel pan. I remember years ago at the restaurant, sometimes I would brine and roast fish and that's what I decided to do in this case. Brining gives fish a silky, sexy texture and this piece of steelhead was amazingly moist and delicious.

Brined Roasted Steelhead with Fennel-Orange Slaw

It's hard to come up with garnishes for dishes in the middle of winter because so few things are in season. Fortunately, winter is a great time for both citrus and fennel. On spying a nice fennel bulb at the market, I brought it home to make into slaw for the steelhead. Haricots verts have very good shelf life and are not too bad during winter, so I brought some of those home to roast as well.

Brining Steelhead

A decent brine is a tablespoon of Kosher salt per cup of water. For this brine, I put two tablespoons of salt and a tablespoon of sugar in a pint of water. The steelhead was in the brine for about two hours. Even ten minutes in the brine improves both texture and flavor. I did not salt the fish otherwise.

Fennel-Orange Slaw

This fennel-orange slaw could not be any simpler to make. It contains one fennel bulb, core removed and shaved, the segments of two large navel oranges, and a bit of shaved red onion. It is seasoned with salt, sugar, red wine vinegar, and the orange juice that I squeezed from the oranges after removing the segments.

Steelhead Trout with Piquillo White Beans and Haricots Verts

A Quick Dinner from Leftovers

I know I have touched on this a bunch of times before, but it bears repeating: having leftovers in the refrigerator really helps put dinners on the table quickly. A case in point: I had a couple pieces of Steelhead Trout to cook for dinner and on rummaging the fridge, I found some roasted haricots verts, a little black olive tapenade, and a half a jar of piquillo peppers from various recent dinners.

Steelhead Trout with Piquillo White Beans and Haricots Verts

While the fish was cooking, I reheated the green beans and blitzed a can of cannellini in the food processor with the four or five leftover piquillos. By the time the fish was done, the plate was ready to assemble, a really tasty and nice looking dinner in under seven minutes.

Pan-Seared Halibut with Black Olive Tapenade

Each time we go to or through Newberg, a town about 20 minutes from the house, we make a point to go to the fish market there. Although the prices are spendy, the quality is extremely good. On this trip, I bought a small piece of halibut for our dinner. 

With a mild white fish such as halibut, I love a salty element to complement it and tapenade is high on my list of salty condiments, being a mixture of olives, capers, and anchovies.

Pan-Seared Halibut with Black Olive Tapenade
and Roasted Haricots Filets

Tapenade Ingredients: Capers, Kalamata Olives, Garlic, Thyme

While we used to buy salted anchovies by the kilo at the restaurant, I have no access to them here in the Willamette Valley. To compensate, I will often add a splash of fish sauce to those dishes that require anchovies. In this case, I had plenty of fish flavor from the halibut, so I went ahead without anchovies. For this quantity of olives and depending on the size of the anchovies, I would probably peel one filet off the backbone for this tapenade. If the anchovy were tiny as sometimes happens, I would use perhaps both filets.

Finished Tapenade

To make the tapendade, I just chopped all the ingredients and mixed them right on the cutting board. Tapenade really is that simple. I don't like to put small quantities in the food processor: the texture is better when cut by hand.

Green Beans Tossed in Olive Oil, Ready to Roast

French Black Steel Puts a Beautiful Crust on Fish

My Secret Fish Spatula

Years ago, I had a couple nice French fish spatulas, which seem to be all the rage among chefs, but they just never suited me. In the professional kitchen, you have a personal relationship with your tools and if something doesn't work, it is time to move on. I ended up giving my fish spatulas to two of my junior cooks.

My preference is a big perforated pancake spatula that I have cooked with for 30-plus years that suits my hand and has turned tens of thousands of pieces of fish and scallops. There are a couple of times when the big spatula is not the best tool for the job: in a pan that is loaded with closely spaced scallops and when cooking long, slender pieces of fish such as the halibut in the photo above.

In cases like this, I go into my pastry toolbox and get out a Matfer offset icing spatula which is a perfect tool, even if designed for another use. Being a sauté guy, I have turned way more fish with this spatula than I have iced cakes!

Halibut Deserves a Great Pinot Noir

Please don't tell me that red wine and fish don't go together. Please. Besides being utter nonsense, it is also utter nonsense. In America, we really focus on what wine goes with which food. Is it any wonder that a great many people are put off of wine because all these "rules?" Granted that some fish and red wine is a train wreck and some wine and food pairings are astoundingly more than the sum of their parts, but I had a real eye opening in France many decades ago. The French do things differently: except in the non-wine producing areas, everyone drinks the local wine with whatever they're eating, pairing be damned.

A case in point: on one trip to wine country, we ended up in a small restaurant in the town of Romanèche-Thorins, home to Georges Duboeuf, in the Beaujolais. For the table, we ordered a simply roasted Bresse chicken. And what did we drink? The same thing that all the other tables were drinking: Cru Beaujolais, red wine with roast chicken, something that breaks all the so-called "rules" in the US.

In any case, halibut is a mild meaty fish that loves to be paired with a lighter red wine. The earthy and salty flavors in the tapenade really help marry the wine and the fish. And of course, we're drinking local because we live (intentionally) in one of the very best wine growing areas of the world. For our halibut, we chose a wine from a small producer made from Coury clone Pinot Noir from one of the great vineyards in Oregon, planted in 1971. It was a great pairing.

Chipotle Chicken with Grilled Vegetable Salad

We had a bunch of things in the refrigerator that needed to be eaten and so I set about turning them into a delicious meal. I really succeeded with this grilled dinner of chicken and vegetables. The aim was to keep the fat to a minimum, so I deboned and skinned the chicken thighs. And the grilled vegetables were so tasty on their own that they needed no dressing. The only fat was a touch of pan spray on the vegetables to promote their charring.

Chipotle Chicken with Grilled Vegetable Salad

Chicken Thighs in Chipotle-Lime-Agave Marinade

When I buy chicken thighs, I buy an entire tray of 8 of them. After boning them out, I use the bones and skin to make chicken stock for the refrigerator. I'm always using chicken stock for all kinds of things, at least a quart a week.

These thighs went into a seal-top bag with a chipotle marinade and into the refrigerator for a few hours before grilling. To make the marinade, I blended three chipotles, a tablespoon of chipotle adobo, the juice of one lime, and three tablespoons of agave syrup.

Salad Vegetables, Ready to Cook

For vegetables for the salad, I scavenged the refrigerator and came up with a zucchini, two ears of corn, a big handful of green beans, and five nice Padrón peppers. Add to this a big onion from the pantry. My intent was to grill everything, chop it, and mix it with chipotle-roasted garlic salsa.

Vegetables on the Grill

Once the grill got blazing hot, I started by grilling the vegetables and getting them really charred. Charring gives them great flavor. After the vegetables came off, I put on the chicken. While the chicken was cooking, I assembled the grilled vegetable salad by chopping all the vegetables and slicing the charred corn kernels off the cobs. I mixed the grilled vegetables with a diced tomato and that was it.

With just a touch of salt, the mixed vegetables were so tasty on their own that I scrapped the idea of dressing them with anything. The salad was as delicious as it was beautiful.

Chipotle-Lime-Agave Chicken Grilling

For twenty minutes of prep time, we thoroughly enjoyed a delicious summer dinner that did not heat up the kitchen at all, a great return on my minimal investment of time. This was the first time that I have ever grilled green beans, believe it or not. We love to roast pans of haricots filets; they're a favorite snack, so I knew that grilling green beans would be delicious. Top top it off, a quart and a half of fresh chicken stock in the refrigerator was bonus!

Quick Summer Lunches

I'm in uncharted territory these days: lunch at home is not a meal that I am really familiar with. Back in the restaurant days, I had one day a week off and lunch was more likely than not something leftover from dinner service the night before, a meal out at a restaurant, or when we were hiking, quick trail food taken sitting on a rock or log somewhere. Lunch at home has been a meal that I have never cooked or put any thought whatsoever into.

Post-restaurant, it has been pretty much the same story. Even though my weekends doubled to two days a week off, it was rare that we would eat lunch at home. We would invariably get something while we were out and about.

Now in the middle of this pandemic, we're pretty well confined to the house, except for critical outings (to the store, doctor). Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I'm having to put some effort and thought into lunches. There are days when I don't make lunch and each of us fends for ourselves, but more often than not, I throw something together early afternoon for the two of us. This has required a total change of mindset on my part.

While I was working, I would make a cold cut sandwich to take to work to eat at my desk and in the first weeks after I lost my job, our home lunches were a continuation of work: cold cut sandwiches. Not only are cold cuts highly processed foods (something new to my diet since going to work at the winery), but they are wicked expensive, and having sandwich bread in the house has not helped with our quarantine-aided waistline expansions.

The instant reduction in our cashflow was the impetus to stop buying all that expensive and highly processed deli meat, while the pounds adding up from the boredom and depression of quarantine were the impetus to move back to more complex carbs.

These days, with forays to the grocery store every other week or so, we tend to plan our dinners in advance. Before I head out to the store, Ann and I make a list of dinners that we'd like to have in the next couple of weeks, and I make sure that we have all the necessary ingredients on hand for those meals. The meals aren't fixed and we deviate from the "plan" at will, but at least some thought has gone into dinner in advance.

Lunches do not get any significant amount of forethought. Sometimes when I am planning a dinner, I will plan for leftovers that may become lunch the following day. But more likely than not, I don't have a plan for lunch and that has led to some "What are we going to eat?" questions. 

I am evolving a strategy for lunch: keep plenty of dry goods in the pantry as well as a ready supply of vegetables in the fridge, items that can go into a quick lunch. My aim is to not spend time in the middle of the day cooking and to put tasty lunches on the table in under 10 minutes. 

While we have been eating a lot of eggs for lunches (frittatas, scrambles, huevos con chorizo, poached, etc.), during these summer weeks, I am focusing on fresh and quick vegetable dishes that come together with no forethought and little effort, one bowl vegetable salads essentially. For example, a couple weeks ago, I diced some leftover grilled vegetables and reheated them with a couple of cans of cannellini beans, a bit of fresh oregano, and a couple hands full of baby spinach leaves. A dollop of tzatziki on top gave us a delicious warm white bean salad.

Below are four recent cold vegetable dishes in the same mold:

Black Bean, Avocado, Corn, Tomato, and Lime Juice

Guacamole: Avocado, Tomato, Red Onion, Cilantro, Chile, Lime

Corn, Black Bean, Orange Pepper, Tomato, Cilantro, Lime

Roasted Filet Bean, Tomato, Corn, Cucumber, Pesto

So while I am still new to doing lunch at home, I think I am evolving a strategy for quick, delicious, healthy, and satisfying summer lunches. How that will evolve in the fall when fresh vegetables from the farmers market are scarce, I don't have a clue. I like to think that we'll be able to run out to a bar for a beer and a burger every now and again, but that doesn't seem very realistic, does it?

Salade Niçoise

Salade Niçoise?

The make-up of many famous dishes is a highly personal thing, often rooted in childhood. The dishes that we grew up with are the canonical versions of those dishes and any deviation from those dishes can inspire legions to argue, sometimes vociferously and vehemently. This is especially true for a dish also tied to the region of our birth. Those who would trample our heritage are our enemies.

I've often blogged about how small land wars have been fought over whose grandmother's recipe for various dishes is the One True Version. You can hear the childish taunts. "My Nonna's ragù is better than yours." "My Oma's paprikash is the best."

In France, one of these contentious dishes is the humble Salade Niçoise, which you may or may not see in the photo above depending on your idea of what constitutes such a salad. The minority position in this squabble is held by the "Cercle de la Capelina d’Or," a tiny but vociferous Niçois preservationist group. The majority position belongs to the rest of us who enjoy and make the salad.

Members of the Cercle, who certify restaurants in Nice as authentically Niçois, argue quixotically that a true version of this world famous salad may not contain cooked vegetables (especially green beans and potatoes) and must not contain vinegar. This stance likely is rooted in cuisine pauvre, peasant cooking, in which the dish probably derived from a plate of ripe tomatoes and anchovies, doused in olive oil.

For the rest of us, a Salade Niçoise contains blanched green beans, boiled potatoes, and the whole is dressed with a classic vinaigrette.

How did we arrive at this divide over beans and potatoes?

Blame the schism on Auguste Escoffier, the so-called king of chefs and the chef of kings. Escoffier codified modern French cooking in writing the primary and seminal textbook on professional cooking, Le Guide Culinaire, in 1903. A measure of this book's importance: it is still in print and still in use today as a culinary textbook and kitchen reference.

1903 also saw publication of another cookbook called La Cuisine à Nice by Henri Heyraud, whose recipes in part influence the Cercle. While the Escoffier book is still in print and in use, Heyraud's oeuvre is extremely rare and will cost several hundred dollars to purchase.

Escoffier included both cooked green beans and potatoes in his salad, the whole dressed with oil and vinegar. Heyraud did not include the beans or potatoes, opting only for raw vegetables (red peppers and artichokes) but his salad was dressed with vinaigrette, something that the Cercle seems to have conveniently overlooked in its ban on vinegar.

Back then in the early part of the 20th century, just as it is now in the social media era of the 21st, influencers and their followers mattered. While Heyraud is largely forgotten, thanks to Le Guide Culinaire, Escoffier's influence extends to many generations of chefs, both directly and indirectly.

Directly, Escoffier trained hundreds of chefs and cooks in his days at the Savoy, Ritz, and Carlton hotels, bastions of fine dining. Indirectly, Escoffier's recipe has been passed down to later authors who works were also influential.

For example, at least two generations of American chefs, primarily those who are teaching now, took their cues from the 1961 groundbreaking English-language treatise on French cooking Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle, and Julia Child. The salad in Mastering derived from Escoffier and I count myself among those who learned it in those pages. In turn, I passed my salad along to many of my chefs and cooks before I retired. Escoffier's influence continues, generation over generation, sad to say for the preservationists.

While the Cercle's promotion and preservation of la vraie cuisine niçoise is admirable and even laudable, the rest of the world has voted against them in the matter of this particular salad. But no matter which camp you fall into, you must admit that a well made Salade Niçoise is one of the gems of summer and the south of France, potatoes and beans or no.

My version varies with the ingredients on hand, but must include tomatoes, green beans (preferably the tiny haricots filets), potatoes, olives, hard boiled eggs, and either tuna or anchovies, with my preference going to anchovies when I can get them. Lettuce never appears in my version. I would add baby artichokes if I could find them.

I dress the fish, green beans, potatoes, and artichokes in a classic shallot vinaigrette made with white wine vinegar, extra virgin olive oil, minced shallots, and a touch each of mustard and salt. 

I leave you with some thoughts on a key component of the salad, hard boiled eggs, of which I have had a great many terrible versions in my career versus far fewer brilliant ones. They are so easy to do that they should be spot on every time, no matter the cook.

Hard Boiled Eggs

I'm not a huge fan of boiled eggs. I ate way too many hard cooked eggs as a child—thanks Mom!—and to this day can get queasy in their presence. As a result I am overly picky about hard boiled eggs.

If you like rock hard yolks with a green ring around them, you can stop reading here. If you like eggs that are set but slightly creamy in the middle, like those in the photo above, read on.

At the restaurant, we used massive Rhode Island Red eggs that are even bigger than commercially available jumbo graded eggs. Post-restaurant, I have since adapted my timing for jumbo eggs. If you are using large eggs or smaller, you'll need to reduce the cook time.

In a sauce pan, cover the eggs with a good inch of cold water. Place on a high flame. As soon as the water comes to a rapid, rolling boil, turn off the flame. Cover the pot. Set the timer for 8 minutes. When the timer goes off, immediately chill the eggs in cold water until they are cold to touch. Done.

You can adjust the timing for more or less done eggs as you prefer.

Seven-Layer Dip Bowl

Delicious and Healthy, Too!

This cold wet weather is not helping the restaurant business one bit, but it is giving me more time at home with Ann, so that's something of a win, no? Last night was another in a long series of slow week nights and so I decided to go home and make dinner for us. It's no secret that Ann and I are slowly trying to work off all that winter weight we put on and so we are being a bit more selective in what we eat.

We haggled a bit on the phone over dinner, throwing out one idea after another. It all kept coming back to the thawed ground turkey in the fridge. It finally dawned on me that we could do a really healthy version of the horribly unhealthy seven-layer dip, yet put it in a bowl so that we could eat it without the usual tortilla chips.

The layers are up to you, but I avoided the cheese and sour cream in my bowl because of my lactose intolerance. Ann went for both from her stash in the fridge. This is not a quick or haphazard meal. Between vegetable prep and milling spices and adding cook time for the beans and the turkey, this was a solid 30 minutes of work, even for a very quick professional chef.

The bottom layer for both of us was ground turkey which I added to a sauté of onions, poblanos, and garlic and cooked until just done through. Then I seasoned with salt, cumin, ancho powder, oregano, and the barest hint of cinnamon. A spice mill really helps. Get one. Keep your spices and chile peppers fresh and rotated and mill them to order. It does make a difference.

For the beans, the second layer, I opted for something texturally between soup beans (frijoles de la olla) and refried beans (frijoles refritos). I started by draining a large can of cooked pintos: I love to rehydrate dry beans overnight, but that's not a possibility much of the time, especially on a day when I didn't anticipate being home for dinner. Canned beans aren't as economical or even as tasty as dried beans, but they sure are one of life's great convenience foods and there's no shame at all in using them.

In the bean pot, I started  a sauté of diced onion, diced poblano, minced garlic, and minced cilantro stems. Once this cooked down for a bit, in went the beans, about two ounces of the adobo off a can of chipotles, salt, and water to cover. I cooked the beans in parallel with the turkey. Once the turkey was done, I moved the beans to the high burner and brought them down rapidly. Towards the end, I smashed some beans against the side of the pot with my spoon and this thickened the sauce quite quickly. I finished them like refried beans, cooking them while stirring often, until the beans started to pull away from the side of the pot.

On top of the turkey and beans, I layered chipotle salsa, halved grape tomatoes, nopalitos, green onions, and topped the whole thing with cilantro. Cubes of avocado and fresh, raw sweet corn would be great in this, in season.

This dish has it all: extremely tasty, high protein, low fat, high fiber, and has only complex carbs in the beans. It's a winner even if you doctor it with a bit of cheese, sour cream, or both.

Thanksgiving 2015

The Big Meal: Roast Turkey Thigh, Haricots Verts, Dressing, Gravy

Yesterday marked the seventh Thanksgiving that Ann and I have celebrated together. And it marked the quietest and most relaxed Thanksgiving that we have celebrated. Most of our circle of friends who celebrated with us in the past have moved away, my daughters are off and gone, and Ann's parents are getting to the point where they just don't want to make the drive from McLean, and who can fault them for that?

Table for Three, Please

That left just Ann and me and Carter, who was more focused on having to work Black Friday sales at his job at the mall that evening than he was on celebrating with us. Progress though this year: he left his cell phone in the kitchen when he joined us at the table for dinner.

Herbs from our Garden

Unlike years gone by, I did very little in the way of advance prep and that was limited to a quart of turkey stock that I made from a half dozen turkey necks on Wednesday and a pint of the meat that I pulled off the necks. Just cooking for three, we scaled the menu and the portions way back and that really reduced the prep load, so I just prepped everything Thanksgiving morning in a slow, leisurely manner.

Ann and I started the morning after our obligatory coffee in the sun room by walking about the back yard collecting herbs from the various beds: chives, sage, rosemary, and thyme. For the second year running, the parsley plants that I bought at the farmers market immediately bloomed and went to seed upon planting them. Though they were tiny, they acted like second year plants. Note to self, no more parsley from the market. I brought home a bunch of parsley from the restaurant. At least until it snows, it looks like Beth will have plenty of parsley, but damned if I don't miss being able to go out the back door and cut some at will.

Thanksgiving Mise en Place

Once a chef, always a chef. The reason we are so efficient in the kitchen is that we have everything in its place and ready to go before the flame goes on. In the restaurant kitchen, we spend all day getting ready for four hours of dinner service. At home, I spent 20 minutes getting ready for an hour of cooking: mirepoix for the dressing (leeks, onions, celery), ingredients for the pancetta-pecorino butter for the turkey (sage, rosemary, shallots, garlic, pancetta), chives for the mashed potatoes, and herbs for the dressing (sage, thyme, and parsley).

Ann put on some oldies from the 1960s on Pandora and we worked away in the kitchen, in no sort of rush. We had no agenda really, but by 1pm, it became clear that we were getting really hungry and so we put a move on things and ate at 2:45.

Roast Turkey Thighs with Pancetta-Pecorino Butter

Some years ago, Ann found a recipe for a pancetta-pecorino compound butter that we used under the breast skin of the turkey and it turned out so good that we have made it every year since. This year, it went under the skin of the turkey thighs and then all over the thighs, into the mirepoix for the dressing, and as the base fat for the gravy. It's really good stuff: butter, finely minced pancetta, shallots, garlic, salt, pepper, pecorino, olive oil, rosemary, and sage, all tossed into the food processor. Can be made a long time in advance and would be something awesome to keep in the fridge most of the time.

Gravy is Awesome

Once the turkey had cooked, I put the dressing in the oven. Ann makes the same dressing every year because it is wonderful: toasted cubes of bread, saltines, mirepoix (onion, leek, celery), herbs, stock, and milk. This year, I might have deglazed the mirepoix pan with a glass of Chablis while Ann wasn't looking (because we can NEVER change a recipe: we have to follow it to the T) and some turkey stock to get up all those browned bits of pancetta-pecorino butter that also wasn't in the recipe.

While the dressing cooked, the turkey rested and once it had cooled, I started making the gravy by taking the fat off the roasting pan and adding it to some of the compound butter. A little flour went into the pan until I had a nice light brown roux, then in went the drippings from the roasting pan, the pint of turkey neck meat, and the turkey stock. A few more minutes on a low flame, a touch of salt, and done. Ann: "I could eat a bowl of just this!"

While I was making gravy, Ann made a batch of mashed potatoes. We have a running mock argument about them each year as I really don't see the need for mashed potatoes and dressing in the same meal. She disagrees. I need some cranberry sauce with my meal or it isn't Thanksgiving and she does not. We enjoy our little verbal sparring. ;)

Ann put a bunch of green beans tossed in olive oil, salt, pepper, and pecorino on a sheet tray and once the dressing came out of the oven, I put the beans under the broiler for about five minutes just before we ate.

It was a quiet Thanksgiving dinner, just the three of us at the table with the dogs curled up below, low stress and calm with few dishes to clean up. But I won't lie: we missed our friends and our family. It wasn't the same without them.

Summertime and the Eating is Good

I Love Summer Vegetables

The next 8 weeks are the best of the entire year for eating in our part of the world. Squash, eggplants, beans, early peppers, corn, potatoes, and tomatoes, glorious tomatoes, are all now available in great quantities. And so I took advantage of the farmers market bounty this weekend to load up the refrigerator with good stuff for Ann to eat during the week while I am at work.

I tapped into that bounty for dinner last night: sliced tomatoes including a Green Zebra from our garden, Romano beans boiled until tender (25 minutes) and dressed in olive oil, and the tiniest baby redskin new potatoes boiled until tender (12 minutes) and dressed with butter and parsley from the garden.

I just love these vegetables. New potatoes cannot be beat. And for meaty goodness, Romano beans are outstanding. I could wax poetic about tomatoes, but instead, I will just eat some every day until we run out in October.

Broiled Rainbow Trout

Monday night, we were going to have rainbow trout for dinner, but we ended up going to the movies and eating cheese steaks there. Ann wondered because of the snow if I might be able to get home early enough on Tuesday to have the trout. I was able: it was a painfully early night at the restaurant.

Rainbow Trout with Roasted Haricots Verts and Lentils

I love trout, always have. As a child, I remember that my father would take the whole family to Graves Mountain Lodge down in Syria, VA in Madison County each spring for the opening of trout season. My brother and I would fish ineffectually with the wrong gear in the Rose River until dinner time, at which point, we would consume massive amounts of fried trout. Bones be damned, I love me some trout.

For restaurant service, I take the head off the trout and butterfly them, removing the spine and then I surgically remove all the tiny and hugely annoying pin bones. This three minutes of labor per fish yields the perfectly deboned butterflied trout that you see above. Now multiply this labor by the 64 fish that I prepped last week and you could understand why I might not want to see another trout again for a very long time. But so delicious is trout that I would willingly go through a lot of labor to put it on the table.

This trout I rubbed with olive oil, salt, and pepper and put under the broiler for about 3 minutes while I reheated the lentils in the microwave. Ann roasted the haricots verts before I got home. Dinner took five minutes to put on the table, which is good, because we were both voraciously hungry. This is about as simple, easy, and delicious as dinner gets.

Pad Woon Sen: Thai Mash Up

Pad Woon Sen

Ann left dinner up to me yesterday. I knew immediately that we needed to do a krapow dish because the Thai basil in the garden is coming in fast and furious now. So I texted her: shrimp and Thai basil or squid and Thai basil. Squid was her choice (and I knew it would be, but I wanted to ask). That girl loves squid; so do I. And that settled it: Squid Krapow for dinner.

Because I am trying to watch my carbs, I decided to forgo the rice with the squid. To complement the spicy squid, I wanted to do Som Tum, green papaya slaw. And so at the market, I grabbed everything I would need that I don't have at home: squid, green papaya, bird chiles, and green beans. I bought green beans because they are fresh and seasonal. I could have bought the traditional long beans, but they looked like hell. Always choose quality over authenticity.

In the afternoon, I prepped both dishes but assembled neither and then went to watch a movie with Ann. After the movie, she insisted that she wanted Pad Thai. I don't keep rice noodles at home because I can buy them fresh at the market when I need them. And I wasn't in the mood for Pad Thai, having just prepped Som Tum and Squid Krapow. But I find it very hard to not please her, so I found a couple bundles of woon sen, cellophane noodles, in the pantry.

From there, I made Pad Woon Sen with the traditional Krapow sauce of oyster sauce, soy sauce, and lots of fish sauce and tossed in all the ingredients for Som Tum: grated papaya, peanuts, green beans, tomatoes, lime juice, and brown sugar. I made this dish grudgingly and probably with a few grumbles, but do you know what? It turned out to be a fantastic dish!

What to Drink with Thai Food? Yep, a Big Bordeaux Blend

I think my restaurant customers might freak out if they saw what I drank with my spicy Thai food, a big Bordeaux blend from nearby Delaplane Cellars. People put way too much emphasis on what goes with what. I always tell people to drink what they like and don't worry about it. At least I practice what I preach.

Steelhead Trout with Orange-Bean Sauce

After pigging out for the holidays, we're both feeling the need to eat lighter and so I brought home some salad fixings and a side of Steelhead Trout.



I Love Salad

I don't fix that many salads, which is a bit odd, because I love them a lot. This one is very simple: torn butter lettuces, grape tomatoes, blanched haricots verts, and some croutons I made from a piece of stale baguette found on the counter, all tossed in balsamic vinegar and a drizzle of olive oil.



Steelhead Trout with Orange-Bean Sauce

Many people are not familiar with Steelhead Trout, a sea run form of Rainbow Trout. For all intents and purposes, you treat it like salmon, which is to say that I left it skin on after pulling the pin bones and then seared it hard on the skin side to crisp and gently finished it on the other side, so that it was still medium in the middle.

I'm not usually a sauce guy: I like to buy the best proteins I can find and let them stand on their own merits, so it is highly unusual that I made a sauce for this trout. In retrospect, not sure why I did. It was fine, but the fish didn't need any help. The sauce is a reduction of orange juice with finely minced fresh garlic and fresh ginger, thickened with a tablespoon of soy bean paste, and glossed with a teaspoon of sweet butter.

Trofie "al Pesto"

It's that time of year! Yes, it is hot. Yes, it is humid (or the word I thought of on the way to work this morning: stewmid). But equally and even more emphatically yes, there is basil! Genovese, lemon, purple, and Thai: all are growing by leaps and bounds and I am cutting them heavily this year to force them to grow young tender shoots all summer.

Given all this basil, Ann wanted me to make a pasta with all the ingredients of pesto just roughly chopped and so I did using the Genovese pasta called trofie, a medium length twisted pasta, the traditional pasta for pesto.

Glorious Ingredients

You know dinner is going to be good just by looking at the ingredients: baby yellow haricots filets and basils from the garden, pine nuts from the pantry, cherry tomatoes from the farmers market, and garlic from the refrigerator.

Pine Nuts, Slivered Garlic, and Red Pepper Flakes Stewing in Olive Oil

While the pasta was cooking, I slivered the garlic and set it over a very low flame in some olive oil with the pine nuts and some red pepper flakes. At the end, I added a half a cup of pasta water to this, swirled it together, and poured it over the hot pasta.

All the Flavors of Pesto

I sliced the tomatoes and added them to a big pasta bowl with a huge mound of chopped basil. In the last 30 seconds before the pasta was done, I put the haricots in with the pasta. After draining, the pasta and beans went into the bowl with the tomatoes and basil and over went the garlic-pine nut sauce. Yum!

Summer Sauté

I grabbed some stuff at the farmers market on Saturday to combine with some things from our garden for a simple Sunday dinner after our quick explore of Lost River Brewing Company in nearby Wardensville WV.

We ended up with a quick sauté of the pancetta that I cure at the restaurant, onions, summer squash, red peppers, corn, leek, yellow haricots filets, garlic, basil, and rosemary. The beautiful little yellow haricots are from our garden and are the hugely prolific variety called Isar. The yellow color makes them really easy to spot for picking and they are stringless. Win! Check out the squat, kind of tomato-shaped peppers that we call Cheese Pimientos (because they were once used, pre-annatto, to color orange cheese). They have sweet, thick flesh that turns deeply red and besides having wonderful flavor, make great stuffing peppers. This dish also marks the harvest of our first leek of the year!

A Cheese Pimiento, A Favorite Red Pepper

Tomatoes with Lemon Basil and Borage Flowers

Summer Sauté