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!

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.

"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.

Squid, White Beans, and Arugula

There must be foods in everyone's lives, if they ever take the time to reflect on it, that are somehow meaningful in ways that have nothing to do with alleviating hunger, foods that conjure memories. Perhaps it is a dish that grandma used to make, a dessert eaten on a first date, or a secret midnight snack to satisfy a particular craving. In my life, many such dishes make me feel things. Topping the list, perhaps, is white beans with squid and arugula, a dish that I made once again just recently.

Squid, White Beans and Arugula

On the face of it, it is a trivially constructed dish consisting of cannellini beans, baby arugula, raw red onions, and lightly cooked squid dressed with lemon juice, olive oil, salt, and oregano. It is so simple that to taste it is to know how to make it. But it is one of those amazing dishes whose flavors and textures are transcendent, that are more than the sum of the parts. One of my former sous chefs calls it "a perfect dish," high praise indeed.

I cannot in any way take credit for this dish. My history with this dish started in Richmond, VA in the 1980s. Once upon a time, I used to spend pretty much every weekend in Richmond, commuting from my apartment in the DMV in suburban Maryland.

On Richmond's Oregon Hill across from the Virginia War Memorial on the north bank of the James River in a building that looks boarded up sits a restaurant called Mamma 'Zu, a self-styled Italian restaurant that really puts the D in dive. It has no décor to speak of, no fancy furnishings, a surly host, a no-nonsense menu written on a chalkboard, and a wine rack in the back. If you want a bottle of wine, you go to the back and grab a bottle and bring it to your table, or that was the drill 35 years ago.

It is a polarizing restaurant: people love it or they hate it. The restaurant has a well-deserved reputation for taking shit from nobody. They don't accept credit cards, they don't modify their dishes, and you follow their rules or you hit the road. It is a place where the host is intimidating and if you act intimidated, you could be in for a long night. It is also a place where the vibe is chaotically electric and the cooks are jammed into a tiny hell hole of an inferno.

But they turn out some exquisite food. They don't list their excellent pizza anywhere, but if you go there enough, you'll see pizzas coming out along with mounds of pasta. But what I went there for was impeccable seafood. The menu would mainly list the name of the fish and a price, such as "Sardines 24" and "Rockfish 30" and you just ordered them. Woe be unto the newbie who enquired about a preparation or worse, asked for a change in a dish. Me, I never cared. My trust in the kitchen was implicit.

My favorite was an appetizer called Squid, White Beans, and Arugula, the very same dish that you see above, a dish which my then-wife would not touch. I loved it so much that it had to be on the table every time we ate there, which was regularly. Sometimes we would venture to their second location near VCU in The Fan District, a restaurant called Edo's Squid which also had this same dish on the menu. I never liked the swankier location as much, but the food was just as good.

We continued to visit Mamma 'Zu with nearly every trip to Richmond for many years. Fast forward fifteen years or so to a point at which I had opened my own restaurant. One day, into the restaurant walks a young cook looking for employment at a point when I had just lost my sous chef. On the strength of his resume which included stints at both Mamma 'Zu and Edo's Squid, I hired him (and he has gone on to helm many of his own kitchens). In the bustle of getting a new restaurant off the ground, I had put squid and white beans to the back of my mind. He inspired me to put the squid dish on our menu occasionally.

My restaurant was located in Winchester, VA at the very northern point of the state, far, far closer to Pennsylvania than Richmond. The primary industry in Winchester is the hospital which is a large regional trauma center serving a vast geographic area. Many of the employees of the hospital and associated doctor's practices trained at MCV in Richmond and were familiar with the dish from Mamma 'Zu and/or Edo's Squid, which is located just a few blocks west of the hospital.

Many was the transplanted Richmonder who would call me and ask me to make the dish for them on their visit to my restaurant. Such is the nature of the dish that it inspires great loyalty. I have great memories of all the friends and customers who loved this dish as much as I do.

To keep in touch with this dish, I make it from time to time at home. Ann and I both love it. For me, it brings back memories of when I was young, a favorite restaurant, a young sous chef who has gone forth to do great things, of my restaurant and special customers, and of a meal that really resonates with Ann and me. She doesn't have the connection to the dish that I do, but she is the reason that I continue to make it.

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.

White Beans with Potato and Chorizo

Damn, I've gone and done it again. I created a dish that is really comforting, really tasty, and according to Weight Watchers, shitty for you.

White Beans with Potato and Chorizo

Weight Watchers and I tangle every so often. In general, any system that gets people to be accountable for what they eat and to be cognizant of choices is a good thing. But the one-size-fits-all points system unnecessarily penalizes some good things in its crusade against fat and carbs. I don't like the way that they penalize high-fiber good carbs such as beans, lentils, and chickpeas. Ann does Weight Watchers and we get into it now and again. Things were going along really well with this dish until the dreaded points were calculated. Then it became food non grata. I'm still going to make it again, hence my writing this post so that I remember it.

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 large yellow potato, unpeeled, in 3/8" dice, about a cup
2 3-ounce Salvadoran chorizos, skinned
8 cloves garlic, minced
2 15-ounce cans cannellini beans, washed and drained
1 large sweet red pepper, in 3/8" dice
1 bunch green onions, sliced
1/2 medium red onion, small dice
1 tablespoon smoked paprika
salt and pepper to taste

In a sauté pan, heat the olive oil, then add the yellow potato cubes and cook until they are brown and crispy on about three or four sides. Season as you go. Remove half of the potatoes to a salad bowl. Return the remainder to the heat and pull apart the chorizos in small bits into the potatoes. Add the garlic and cook, stirring, until the chorizo is just cooked through. Remove to the salad bowl. Add the drained cannellini, red pepper, red and green onions, and the smoked paprika. Stir well and season to taste.

Butter Lettuce with Smoked Salmon, Clementines, and Red Onions

Butter Lettuce with Smoked Salmon, Clementines, and Red Onions

On Monday, I got home early enough to eat lunch with Ann and she wanted to have a big salad. She really loves it when we make a huge salad, snuggle up in the big chair together, and dig in with two forks. When she suggested a salad for lunch, for some reason, I had bagels with smoked salmon, capers, and red onions on the brain. And so combining the two seemed pretty natural. While making the salad, I spied a bunch of clementines on the counter and so those went in. And Ann dredged up a container of dried cranberries which we added as well. The dressing is lemon juice, clementine juice, mustard, salt, and olive oil.

A Beautiful Weekend

This past weekend had its share of ups and downs, but far more ups than downs especially on account of the beautiful weather. After several weeks of soupy humidity, temps in the upper 90s, torrential rain, and violent thunderstorms, a huge storm front blew through the East Coast on Saturday night, killing business at the restaurant, but on its heels was a cold air mass that brought delightful levels of humidity and a cool breeze to us.

Sunday was a day to marvel at how beautiful this planet is and we spent a good bit of the early morning in the back yard, with me putzing about pruning and trying to control the weeds that are everywhere thanks to the past several weeks of rain.

Our First Sunflower of the Year

Out in the back yard, we noticed that our first sunflower is blooming. While we used to plant ornamental sunflowers, we haven't in the past several years. We haven't needed to. Our bird friends and the four-legged bushy tailed grey birds do a fine job of distributing black oil sunflower seeds everywhere. Even at this immature stage, the goldfinches are all over the sunflower blooms. They've spent the last few weeks on the sage blossoms and recently the anise hyssop.

Eastern Box Turtle

The beautiful weather brought out this fairly young box turtle. The dogs were fascinated. I believe that it was feeding on honeysuckle berries along the tree line in the back. After coffee in the back yard, we decided to grab a quick lunch at the local kebab house, a place near us that has been open for several years. I was always leery of the place and now I know why. The kebabs are pretty miserable. Compared to the places in Northern Virginia, this place doesn't even rate a mention, hence no name and no pictures.

It's always a good time out with Ann no matter what the food. After the fairly miserable kebab experience, Ann started lobbying immediately for soft serve. It was a really good diversion from lunch to sit outside on a beautifully cool and sunny day and eat ice cream without having to crush it before it melted all down my hand. And laugh about lunch.

Back at home, we decided on burgers. I've put enough burgers on the blog this year that I didn't feel the need to photograph yet another one.

Monday was a long, tiring day, kicking off at 2:30 in the morning with a call from the Sheriff's Office informing us that somebody had sneaked out of the house and was busted trespassing with his girlfriend at the high school. The consequences for said person were swift and severe and the repercussions much more than he bargained for, but the whole ordeal left us drained and without a lot of sleep.

I was in and out of the office early on Monday and we all converged at the house simultaneously around 1:30, ravenous for some food. I grabbed a couple of boxes of pasta on the way home and we had it simply with sage and a little leftover quesillo especial (aka queso Oaxaca o queso quesadilla) from the fridge. We all, reprobate included, sat at the dinner table for a late lunch.

Cellentani/Cavatappi/Spirali with Sage and Cheese

On Sunday, Ann asked me if I would make a calamari and white bean salad for dinner on Monday, a classic that I learned from two restaurants in Richmond, VA and a former sous chef who worked at both. This is a dish that I hadn't made since our Feast of the Seven Fishes dinner three Christmases ago. It is so dead simple to do: open and rinse some cannellini, slice some red onion, and dress with liberal lemon juice, olive oil, salt, pepper, and dried oregano. Then sear the squid for just a few seconds. Add to the bowl with the beans and some fresh baby arugula. Toss and eat.

Squid and White Beans with Baby Arugula

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!

Tacos, Again

Tacos are the perfect Monday night food for me. Simple, fast, and if I plan correctly, no cooking necessary. Such was the case with the shrimp and black bean salsa taco that you see below.

Shrimp and Black Bean Salsa Taco with Avocado

I refreshed a few small pre-cooked and peeled shrimp under hot water, sliced an avocado, and made a batch of black bean salsa, shown below.

Black Bean Salsa

I've kind of stretched the definition of salsa ("sauce") a bit here; my salsa is more at a relish than a sauce but it serves the same function as a sauce. It contains black beans, tomatoes, orange pepper, red onion, garlic, cilantro, chipotle adobo, green onions, lime juice, and salt.

The basic rules for making salsas are:

1. Pick a fruit or fruits: tomatoes, tomatillos, sweet peppers, papaya, mango, pineapple, kiwi, strawberry, peach, nectarine, etc. The fruits are the primary flavoring. In this case, I used tomatoes and sweet peppers.

2. Pick an onion or onions: red, yellow, white, green, shallots, garlic, leeks. The onions add crunch and some acidity. Here I used three onions: red, green, and garlic.

3. Chop a bunch of cilantro. You could use other herbs, but cilantro (or culantro) is almost always what you want.

4. Pick some heat: fresh green or red chile, pickled chile, chile sauce, chipotle adobo, crushed chiles, etc. I used a little smoky chipotle adobo in this salsa.

5. Pick an acid: lime juice, lemon juice, sour orange juice, other citrus, vinegar of any kind, tamarind, etc. The acid is key. Salsa needs to perk up your palate and for that, it needs to have an acid twang. I used lime juice.

And that's it. How you improvise and embellish is up to you. I love to add vanilla to mango or pineapple salsas. I love to add black beans to almost any salsa. Go, experiment, enjoy.

Annie Makes Soufflé

This past weekend, my wife cooked for me a delightful Gruyère soufflé and one of the best salads that I have ever eaten! Those of you who don't cook for a living have no basis for comprehending how wonderful this is, so just let me assure you that it is always fantastic when someone else cooks for you, especially someone who cooks as fabulously as my wife.

Gruyère Soufflé

This tale started last Thursday when I asked Ann in a casual text if we had any plans for Sunday, my day off and last day to rest before the circus which is Valentine's Day. She replied that we did not but that she was making yummy food for me. Score! I generally cook on Sundays because I want to. There are no other days of the week that I can really cook for her unless she were to come to the restaurant and then I wouldn't be really cooking just for her and she would be reminded painfully that I spend all my nights with my restaurant mistress instead of her. Suffice it to say that it is a huge deal for Ann to cook for me on a Sunday and that I was greatly anticipating it.

Greens with Pickled Red Onions and Warm Balsamic Dressing

This is one of the best salads I have ever eaten. But what a giant pain in the rear! Ann asked me to bring some ingredients home from the restaurant, but our communications were a bit garbled and the long and short of it is that we had to go back to the restaurant on Sunday to get micro-basil for the salad. And then I had to go back to get the prosciutto. I thought Ann was going to cry when we got back to the house to find that we had forgotten the prosciutto. And so I went back to the restaurant and made sure I grabbed a bottle of wine too, because all that running back and forth was not what I planned for my day off and I was a bit frazzled.

Back to the salad which comprised greens, basil, mint leaves, parsley leaves, red onions pickled in red wine vinegar, shaved Parmigiano Reggiano, prosciutto, toasted pine nuts, and a garlicky warm balsamic dressing. Absolutely fantastic. I had two helpings and ate the bulk of the leftovers in a wrap the next day.

Separating Eggs

Shaving Parmigiano

Just Coming out of the Oven

Dinner was fantastic! Nobody, not even a professional chef, could have made it any better.

Pork Larb Lettuce Wraps

I didn't have a clue what to make for dinner last evening. I wasn't hungry and I wasn't really craving anything. So when Ann sent me an email in the morning asking if we could have pork lettuce wraps for dinner, I was totally jazzed at not having to think about dinner. The figuring out dinner part is the hard part; the execution is always the easy part.

Pork Larb Lettuce Wraps

Last week, I made shrimp larb for dinner and I thought I would reprise that with pork this week. While Ann was off at a meeting, I went out to the garden and picked Thai basil and mint, whose leaves I mixed with cilantro leaves and very thinly sliced red onion in a bowl. And then I sliced some shallots, some Thai chiles, and minced some garlic. The final step in getting set was to mix some lime juice, brown sugar, fish sauce, and Thai chiles to make a sauce to drizzle over the wraps.

When Ann texted me to say she was coming home, I browned the shallots hard in a pan, then threw in a bunch of minced garlic and sliced chiles. Next went in the pork, a touch of brown sugar, and a splash each of fish sauce and water. When the pork was cooked through, I removed it carefully to the bowl containing the herbs and red onion, and returned the liquid to the stove where I reduced it to a syrup and then poured it back over the pork.

I omitted the toasted rice powder: we're watching our carbs. We hate watching our carbs but it is working. I could kill for a bowl of pasta now after three months of low-carbing it!

Vegetarian Sunday

Let's just start with the disclaimer that we are not vegetarians. Anything but, actually. We love our charcuterie, for example: we are those people that keep a drawer full of salame and cheese in our refrigerator. Though Ann is by nature quite a bigger carnivore than am I. I'm always having to fend off her requests for a big hunk of meat on the grill, which interests me not at all. But now it is summertime and the weather is hot and we naturally gravitate towards eating lighter food. Plus we have all these glorious vegetables at our disposal now. So it shouldn't be terribly surprising that we eat a fair amount of vegetarian meals in the summer. And yesterday was one of those days. We didn't plan it that way purposefully. It just evolved that way from what we really wanted to eat.

Lunch al Fresco

This last week at the restaurant kept me really busy, especially executing a wonderful 50th anniversary menu on Saturday. It meant extra long hours for me and 100% of my focus, leaving no time for Ann or thinking about the weekend. She hates these weeks when she really feels the true chef widow. So Sunday morning dawned without any plan. After I spent a couple hours in the back yard working, Ann finally joined me and we got to thinking about what to eat. Lunch was easy: she wanted a reprise of last weekend's Mediterranean mezes plate that I did when Karen dropped by.

A few chickpeas in the food processor, slicing a few roasted red peppers, and a little baguette in the oven and instant lunch.

Roasted Red Pepper Salad

Some days ago, Ann had brought up the idea of a grilled vegetable sandwich but we never got around to it for some reason or other. I brought it back up Sunday and it stuck. So when I made the roasted red pepper salad for lunch, I made extra for our dinner panini. Slice roasted red peppers, chiffonade fresh basil, mince garlic, add salt, pepper, Sherry vinegar, and extra virgin olive oil. Toss. Done.

Grilled Vegetable Panino

This is one of the very best sandwiches that I have ever had. I split a loaf of focaccia, brushed the cut faces with extra virgin olive oil, sprinkled it with salt and pepper, and grilled to a crispy golden brown. Then, while the zucchini, yellow squash, and red onions were grilling, I spread the grilled faces of the bread with pesto. From there, it was a simple matter to layer the sandwich: zucchini, red onion, yellow squash, roasted red pepper salad, and provolone cheese. I left the top off and put it under the broiler to melt the cheese and then put the top back on and cut it into small panini.

Ever the expert on all matters, teenager Carter argued with us (but still ate the sandwich) that these are not panini because they have not been pressed. We had to school him a bit in the Italian language. At almost 15 years of age, he still knows that parents are dumber than dirt!

A Lazy Summer Sunday

Money being tight these days, we are spending a lot more time at home cooking and playing on Sundays that we would normally do during the summer. I really, really wanted to go to Glen Manor Vineyard this weekend, but that costs money we don't have, so I shut my mouth and we put together a great menu for the day.

Wine Line Up: Argyle Pinot Noir and Elk Cove Pinot Gris

It ended up being an Oregon wine day. We had Elk Cove Pinot Gris with our shrimp croquettes for lunch and Argyle Pinot Noir with our mussels for dinner. We had a local Catoctin Creek Petit Verdot on hand as well, but it never got opened.

Annie Frying Her Shrimp Croquettes

Shrimp Croquettes: Roux and Shrimp, Chilled and Breaded

Sometime this past week, Ann had made shrimp croquettes by folding cooked shrimp into a thick roux, chilling it, molding into croquettes, and rolling them in panko. She fried them up for lunch on Sunday. They were delicious with the Pinot Gris.

Watermelon Salad with Mint, Feta, and Red Onions

Mussels with Chorizo, Red Onions, Fennel, Garlic, and Orange Zest

For dinner, I made a watermelon salad by dicing seedless watermelon and feta and mixing that with thinly sliced red onion and chiffonaded fresh mint from the garden. A pinch each of salt and pepper and a splash each of extra virgin olive oil and Sherry vinegar finished the salad.

A big bowl of mussels accompanied the watermelon salad. I started by cooking the onion, garlic, and chorizo, then adding a bit of fennel confit (grilled, slow poached in oil, and covered in a tangy vinaigrette) and white wine. The mussels went in and finished steaming in a couple of minutes. I pulled them out and then reduced the sauce just slightly and poured it over the mussels. A good loaf of crusty bread hot out of the oven finished our lazy summer Sunday supper. A great day at home with my wife!

Clams on the Grill

Clams on the brain. I have had clams on the brain for a couple of weeks now and I couldn't figure out why until I just noticed a bowl of steamed clams staring back at me from the cover of the latest edition of La Cucina Italiana. That magazine, which I haven't had have time to read, is sitting on top of a stack of other culinary magazines that likewise haven't been read and nor will they, more than likely ending up in the recycle bin, unappreciated, all for want of time. But those clams have been sending me subliminal signals for a couple weeks now I suppose, sitting there atop the pile on the chair next to my desk. And so to calm the visions of clams dancing around in my brain, I finally ordered a bag from the seafood company.

When the first squash of the year arrived on Friday, I knew I wanted to eat them and the clams too, so I devised a very simple dish cooked all on the grill outside to keep the kitchen cool. Simplicity is always good on my day off.

All Prepped and Waiting for the Grill to Warm

While prepping this very first squash of the year and the other things for the grill, I also quartered a pint of local cherry tomatoes and put them in a large bowl with some extra virgin olive oil and two huge handsful of herbs from the garden: basil, purple basil, fennel fronds, garlic chives, and rosemary.

Clams, Zucchini, Kuta and Yellow Squash, Fennel, Torpedo Onion, Garlic, Chorizo

Clams roast very well on the top shelf of the grill while the rest of dinner is cooking on the grates down below.

Ready for Assembly

As each item cooked, I removed it from the grill. Once all was cooked, I chopped the chorizo and vegetables, making sure to remove the cores from the fennel, and mixed the vegetables with the tomato-herb mixture and the clams.

Grilled Clams and Vegetables

Yellowtail Snapper, Watermelon and Corn Seviche

Seviche with Cancha

Sunday night after dinner, I saw that there were a watermelon and a few ears of corn left in the refrigerator. And Ann had been asking me all day to make some sashimi soon. So Monday, I decided to kill the proverbial two birds by combining all these into a delectable seviche. A better hot weather dinner I cannot imagine. Ann opened a bottle of Amalie Robert Pinot Meunier while I set about breaking down the fish and doing the veg prep. The plan was to let it sit for about an hour before eating it, but it never made it that far. This may have been the best seviche I have ever eaten in my life. We topped it with cancha in the Peruvian style.


Cranberry-Colored Amalie Robert Pinot Meunier