tilted skillet

za'atar-deviled eggs

It’s only fitting that my Halloween celebration this year was entirely food-focused. Halloween fell on a Wednesday which, being a weekday, is in my book a night reserved mostly for parties of the dinner variety. My cooking buddy Amy and I wanted a festive menu for our Wednesday night feast, minus the garish food coloring and grotesque shapes often synonymous with spooky food.

Instead, we went the way of the wordsmith, devising a menu of ‘devilish’ fare. Our cocktail of choice, kill devil punch, sported a raspberry-induced not-quite-blood-red hue. Devils on horseback and deviled eggs served as appetizers. We crisped chicken al diavalo-style wings on the grill, and capped off the night with pumpkin devil’s food cake whoopie pies sandwiched with lemon-almond meringue frosting.

It really wasn’t fair to serve anything alongside the devils on horseback which, for those of you unfamiliar with the lesser-known varieties of bacon-wrapped edibles, are unfathomably delicious, grilled bacon-wrapped dates. They’re not the type of appetizer over which people play nice and refuse to take the last one off the plate.

That said, I’d like to make a case for the deviled eggs, which were consumed with only slightly less gusto than the devilish equestrians. Inspired by the za’atar my new friend Tammy gave me last weekend at Eat Retreat (more on that later), I added a few interesting touches to the deviled eggs’ usual one-two punch of mayonnaise and mustard.

I don’t know about you, but I absolutely destroy at least a couple eggs when trying to peel them. I try every trick in the book – using week-old eggs, adding vinegar and a lemon wedge to the boiling water, chilling the boiled eggs in an ice bath for hours. I chalk up my regular egg peeling failures to my absurdly fresh CSA eggs, but either way I base my deviled egg recipe on nine eggs, rather than a full dozen. I usually mash up the deformed bits and pieces with some greens, mayo, and mustard, and spoon the deconstructed deviled eggs atop crackers.

slow-roasted tomato, onion, and garlic frittata

I really should’ve stayed home this weekend. My garden, currently dominated by watermelon vines dying a slow death (WHY?) and monstrous kale trees, needed tending. Our CSA box was actually overflowing this week, and I’d just picked up a month’s worth of meat, seafood, poultry, and pork from Real Food Bay Area. A box of stationery and these pieces of oddly-shaped paper called ‘envelope liners’ laid in wait on top of our printer, ready for a save the date printing extravaganza.

It was almost a three-day domestic goddess blitzkrieg, but instead I headed south to the land of sun, beaches, and more sun: San Diego! Between trips to visit the grandparents (affectionately termed by our family The Geriatric World Tour), quality beach time, and skeet shooting at my uncle’s secluded house in Alpine, I managed to fit in a bit of cookery.

We went to the farmers’ market and I marveled at the unusual produce we don’t often see in the Bay Area: green-shelled macadamia nuts, passion fruit, vibrantly-hued eggplants the size of my thumb, and thimble-sized gherkins that looked more like tiny watermelons than they did heirloom cucumbers.

I picked up some of the usual suspects, including pastured eggs, garlic, and fragrant cherry tomatoes. Before the skeet shooting and sunbathing commenced at my uncle’s house, I whipped up a frittata that perfectly complemented a big watermelon-strawberry salad and my uncle’s homemade smoked pork sausage.

Although I prefer to finish frittatas in the oven, there’s no reason you can’t cook them all the way on the stove if you don’t have an oven-safe skillet. If you go stove-only, keep the heat a little lower and prepare to keep lifting up the edges to let the uncooked eggs run underneath. A larger skillet will speed things up, but isn’t necessary. If you want to get really fancy, you can try to flip the whole thing over. This is a great way to throw 10 expensive eggs on the floor, if you’re into that kind of thing. Sometimes I am, but not when I’ve got a house full of hungry would-be skeet shooters.

one-bite wonders: melon, feta, and mint

When it comes to summer fruit, I think melon gets a bum rap as the unexciting alternative to the season’s darlings, berries and stone fruit. As one of the hardiest fruits around, melons are colorful yet ubiquitous stalwarts on ‘seasonal fruit platters’ all year long. While a South American melon can survive midwinter transcontinental travel, by the time it reaches our shores its flavor and color is at best insipid. Contrast these globetrotting melons with the musky, heavy orbs currently weighing down rickety tables at Bay Area farmers markets. A ripe melon (besides most watermelons) is a bit soft to the touch and emits a pleasantly musky, slightly fermented scent. When purchasing melons, I also check to make sure that there’s a light-colored spot somewhere on the skin. This means that the melon was left to ripen on the vine, in the field.

Our CSA proffers only stone fruit and berries (poor us), so I’ve been supplementing our weekly fruit allotment with all sorts of heirloom melons. Beyond the trifecta of watermelon, honeydew, and cantaloupe exists an incredible variety of melons. Like books, you really can’t judge an heirloom melon by its cover. Such was the case when I cracked a green-skinned watermelon and found yellow flesh inside! Heirloom watermelons never got the memo to go seedless, so prepare yourself for some deseeding…and maybe a seed spitting contest?

Although I’ve been plowing through a melon every few days, I reserved some for an easy appetizer I served at George’s birthday dinner party last weekend. The salty-sweet melon bites were a light and fitting start to the rest of the meal, a homemade burger bar that warrants its own post at a later time. This appetizer is easy, so I’m not going to write a formal recipe here. Simply cube the ripe melon of your choice, top with a small mint leaf and a chunk of good-quality (preferably brine-packed) feta cheese, and skewer the three ingredients together with a toothpick. Just before serving, drizzle the whole plate of them with syrupy balsamic vinegar and sprinkle with freshly-ground black pepper.

roasted potato salad with basil, scallions, and mustard-walnut vinaigrette

Does anything bring our finicky tendencies to the surface more than food? Recently, after setting a bowl of just-picked cherries in front of my brother, he popped one off the stem into his mouth, thoughtfully chewing. “This is the first cherry I’ve ever had.”I looked at him like he was a crazy person, but then admitted that I didn’t remember a bowl of cherries ever gracing the family table of our childhood.

A few days later, I discovered the source of our family’s collective cherry aversion. “Oh, I’ve never liked cherries,” my mom said, “but I’ll eat them cooked in desserts, as long as it’s not cherry pie.” I had a flashback to cherries jubilee, a decidedly non-pie cherry dessert that my parents would serve for dinner parties. It always wowed both sophisticated guests and my pajama-clad brother and me with its boozy flammability. Besides the incendiary alcoholic ones, nary a cherry crossed my path until I became a farmers’ market fiend a little over five years ago. 

I encountered the same food funniness while serving potato salad the other night. Mine was not the oft-hated goopy, mayonnaise-drenched mess, but I was a little nervous when I heard my mom and brother nonchalantly chatting about their dislike of potato salad. My friend, after thoughtfully chewing her first bite, said “I mean, I really don’t like potatoes, but I like this.” Throughout the meal, I stole furtive glances at my guests’ dinner plates, trying to make out in the fading light if the piles of food left on their plates were chicken bones or unloved potato salad. 

Turns out I needn’t have worried, as the six of us put away the better part of over four pounds of mixed marble potatoes that night. In my unusual take on potato salad, mini spuds are roasted at high heat while a pleasantly bracing mustard and walnut oil vinaigrette is quickly whisked together. Tossed with plenty of toasted walnuts, fresh basil, and sliced scallions, this potato salad is best eaten at room temperature. I recommend gently smashing some of the potatoes to break their skins and allow the vinaigrette to better penetrate the starchy goodness.

Everyone decided that the potato salad was the best part of the meal, although even the non-cherry lovers agreed that dessert – salted caramel ice cream topped with homemade, uncooked brandied CHERRIES – might have been the sleeper hit. My take-home from all of this? When someone says they don’t like something, feed it to them anyway.

chicken stock- and honey-glazed carrots

Last week, I ate about three pounds of carrots. Supplementing our weekly CSA share with additional vegetables is not unlike a game of Russian roulette: we have a three-day window over the weekend to take advantage of the farm’s online store – which sells products ranging from bulk orders of certain fruits and vegetables, to locally-roasted coffee and artisan jams – but we don’t find out what’s in our weekly box until Tuesday. This means that when I opt to add two pounds of baby artichokes to my weekly share, I have no way of knowing if my CSA will giveth baby artichokes of its own. 

This time around, my fridge runneth over with loose carrots. I’d thought it sounded like a good idea to have a couple pounds of carrots laying around for snacking and whatnot, but I didn’t think that, hidden under the bushels of leafy greens, there’d be two more pounds of beta carotene powerhouses.

I did my best with the carrots. I pickled, shaved, and roasted. I dipped, sautéed, and nibbled them like a bunny. By far the best thing I did with the little orange sticks, though, was glaze them with slightly-fatty homemade chicken stock, fresh herbs from my struggling herb garden, and wildflower honey. Reducing two and a half cups of chicken stock and honey until it barely glazes the bottom of the pan can only do wonderful things for the flavor of your dish, and the honey adds a sweet and floral note. 

roasted beet and goat yogurt salad with olives and oregano

Last weekend was a whirlwind, thanks to a roughly 36-hour trip down to LA for a dear friend’s wedding. I could go on and on about the wedding itself, but I’m here to write about food so am going to cut myself off RIGHT NOW before I go down the rabbit hole of wedding fantasyland. We ate well both nights, which, let’s be honest, is somewhat unusual as weddings go. The Mediterranean/California fusion menus were ingredient-driven, seasonal, and mildly innovative yet straightforward enough to appeal to the hundreds of captive diners. 

Due to unfortunate work schedules, we had to skedaddle back up to the Bay Area before the main course was served. Entranced by the first dance, speeches, and salad course, I looked at my watch and was shocked at how fast time was flying. Soon, a catering attendant was shoving into my arms two salmon entrées to-go as we rushed out to pick up our luggage from the valet and slip into a waiting taxi.

The to-go boxes were a nice touch, and I managed to keep them intact both while hopping in and out of heels at security, and while undergoing an unnecessary full pat-down and bomb-swabbing. Ravenous, we finally sat down in a café near our gate to eat and watch the basketball game. Recognizing my impending low blood sugar meltdown, George claimed he wanted a hot dog, leaving me to take down – with haste – two portions of wild king salmon with Meyer lemon-green olive salsa and fennel-herb salad. Bless him.

Sleepy and sated on the short plane ride home, I found myself thinking about goat cheese, which naturally led me to thoughts of the carton of goat yogurt I’d picked up on a whim at Whole Foods last week. Years ago, a friend, and incidentally the bride, had introduced me to goat cheese and thus helped spawn my deep and enduring relationship with what is now one of my favorite foods. Goat yogurt is faintly reminiscent of goat cheese, with a slightly grassy (euphemism for goat-y) taste. I love it, but consider yourself warned.

Tangy yogurt is a perfect match for sweet, earthy beets. In fact, I find that I crave acidic and salty components anytime I eat beets. For this salad, a twist on the traditional beet and goat cheese combo, I lightly coat roasted beets in faux-vinaigrette and top them with oregano-spiked yogurt. The salad is not unlike the wedding menu: mildly innovative yet not so far out there that no one will touch it. Keep in mind that red beets stain anything around them, so heed my advice to enjoy this salad cold and top the beets with the yogurt just before serving to avoid a preemptively pretty-in-pink salad.

in praise of: the one-jellyroll pan dinner

As much as I love to cook, many nights dinnertime rolls around and I have no idea what I want to make. Sure, a lot of things sound good but as someone who cooks and eats a lot, I usually know if a dish’s prep time exceeds the amount of time I can remain comfortably hungry before going gangbangers on a bag of chips (of the tortilla or seaweed variety). On these nights, I either heed the call of the crispy tortilla and pay the price later with a disappointingly measly appetite, or throw together a surprisingly tasty and supremely easy meal for one or two.

It’s rare that there aren’t odds and ends of vegetables, proteins, and starches stashed in our fridge and freezer. My idea of a dinnertime treasure trove – a handful of kale stems, one fat golden beet, 2/3 cup of frozen chickpeas I’d cooked a couple weeks before – may well be trash (err, compost) to others, but give me a crisper of vegetable leftovers and I’ll make you dinner.  

Such was the direction I went after an afternoon spent indoor rock climbing. My amateurish technique requires me to rely extensively on hauling myself up the faux-granite like an ungainly monkey. By the time we returned home, covered in chalk handprints and nursing tired arms, I knew dinner had come down to two options: the one-cookie sheet dinner or In-N-Out. One of us chose In-N-Out.

In about the same amount of time it took my burger fiend to acquire and inhale two double-doubles and fries, I was able to prepare and enjoy a filling plate of roasted beets, kale stems, and chickpeas. The combination might sound weird, but sprinkled with Meyer lemon juice and truffle oil, and topped with a scoop of something creamy or saucy, such as pesto or hummus thinned with olive oil, it’s pretty delicious. In the last few minutes of roasting, I often put a couple thick slices of artisan bread directly on the oven rack to toast. Drizzled with olive oil or slathered with butter, the grilled bread elevates this meal to something a little less ordinary.

This isn’t a recipe so much as it is a general strategy and set of suggestions. Either way, I’ve broken it down for you into fun diagrams to guide your dinner-planning. Read on, enjoy, and preheat your oven to the magic temperature: obviously, 415°F.

flourless chocolate beet cake

There were neither egg hunts nor ham and chocolate bunnies at my family’s Easter celebration. Instead, we did Easter proud with a day in the snow, dinner at our favorite Mexican restaurant in Mammoth, and chocolate beet cake. I think the only mention of Easter came as part of my brilliant yet ill-fated plan to distract my dad, the Keeper of the Remote, from FOX news. “Say, Dad, isn’t there an Easter parade on this morning? I love seeing all the colorful floats and flowers!” Lie. I’m not even sure which holiday involves floats with flowers and which has the large balloons. I wouldn’t know, since the only morning TV program we watch is FOX news. At night he switches over to the History Channel for WWII specials and Hitler biographies. I still love him. A lot.

Unfortunately for me, there were neither flowery floats nor large balloons to distract Dad from the conservative news of the day. As I assessed the morning’s cross-country skiing conditions, I browsed cooking blogs and came across an old Elana’s Pantry post full of Passover-friendly recipes. Inspiration struck. I could think of no better way to celebrate Easter than with a gluten-free Passover dessert.

One recipe, a flourless chocolate cake made with beets, piqued my interest. With generous modifications, I realized I could make the cake without a trip down to the grocery store. Plus, I had three beets in the fridge and was running out of time – and meals – to enjoy them before I headed back to the Bay Area. The cake requires no leavener, such as baking soda or baking powder, which is advantageous for both those observing Passover (not I) and the sparse pantry of a ski house (a first-world problem indeed).

After a few hours schlepping my way across desolate ski trails and thinking about beet cake, I returned home and made the magic happen. Smelling the beets simmering with maple syrup and orange juice on the stove, my mom shot me one of her classic ‘I’m not sure you’re my daughter’ looks while I gleefully thought to myself, ‘more cake for me!’ In the early evening, we headed to dinner while the improbable flourless beet concoction cooled on the counter.

Loosened up by greasy Mexican fare and a margarita, Dad agreed to try the cake when we got home so long as we picked up a pint of ice cream that he could use to drown out any funky beet flavors. Full of tortillas and carnitas, we walked the 50 yards to Ben and Jerry's and acquired a pint of what Dad likes to call ‘hallucinogenic vanilla’. FOX News, remember?

Back at home, I served him up a big bowl of hallucinogenic vanilla and a generous slice of cake. Mom took the one bite I fed her and almost couldn’t choke it down. “It’s…not my favorite,” she stammered. Dad, however, a courageous eater and incredible supporter of my cooking endeavors, took it down like a champ and seemed truly pleased.

I think we can all take something away from this: cover anything in hallucinogenic vanilla and it will all be okay. I’m going to put a big scoop of it on top of the TV next time we watch FOX News and see what happens. Love you Dad!

DIY > buy(?): home-made ghee

Do-it-yourself (DIY) foods often save you a pretty penny and reduce the amount of packaging waste cluttering your trash and recycling bins. Take home-made ice cream, for example: I buy milk and cream in glass bottles that I return to the market, shovel sugar into my own containers from the bulk bins, and patronize a poultry farm that reuses the egg cartons I return after brushing away the errant feather or small clod of dirt. 

When put to the test of ‘DIY > buy(?)’, I’m not sure that home-made ghee passes with flying colors. I guess I should back up to talk a bit about ghee, an ingredient most of us globalized eaters have probably ingested whether we know it or not. Ghee, or clarified butter, is a traditional Indian cooking fat. Due to both cost and the misguided views of many nutrition professionals, vegetable oil has in recent times upstaged ghee as the cooking fat of choice in many Indian restaurants and homes. The process through which ghee is created removes the harder-to-digest milk solids from the butter, making it suitable for many people who are lactose-intolerant. 

Making ghee isn’t particularly labor-intensive, but it does take some time and a LOT of butter. You can scale the recipe up or down as you like, but as with many DIY foods, I like to make a big batch at once to save time. It takes about the same amount of time to make ghee from eight sticks of butter as it does from one, and you’d have to be pretty fat-phobic to have your ghee go rancid before you consume it all.

But back to the possibly questionable worth of home-made ghee: at Indian markets and specialty grocery stores, commercially-made ghee is available in jars. Jars that, of course, can be recycled or reused. When I make ghee, I generate substantially more waste: eight wrappers (compostable) and two color-printed paper boxes (recyclable) holding four sticks of butter each. After, I store my ghee in…a jar. I can’t speak to the resources and energy that go into making a jar versus paper wrappers and paper boxes, but when I make my ghee I can truthfully speak to just what goes into it: top-quality salted butter from cows that pasture in the lush rolling hills north of San Francisco.

It may sound overly romantic, but for me that’s an unabashedly big part of making something from scratch. You could buy a jar of ghee, predictably fall in love with its high smoke point, versatility and nutty scent, and continue to toss a jar into your grocery cart every few months. Instead, I encourage you to try making it yourself. It’s interesting to see the transformation something so simple and homogenous as butter undergoes, and incredibly rewarding when you pour that liquid gold into your recycled jar.

A couple grace notes before you go down the yellow butter road: Making ghee is a quiet process, and it is surprisingly easy to forget that you have something on the stove! Set a timer, even if you don’t think the ghee will be done by then. While commercial ghee can be stored at room temperature, I don’t completely trust my butter clarification skills and thus store mine in the fridge. In no way does this affect the flavor.

caramelized beet and tangerine salad with hardboiled eggs, olives and almonds

A few weeks ago, my coworker and I visited one of our area accounts for a tasty lunch. Even while operating under the innocent guise of, well, doing our jobs by giving a couple presentations and answering customer questions, I managed to maintain my laser-like focus on the real question at hand: what’s for lunch? As we made our way down to the café, we stopped by the weekly farmers market held on campus for employees. As is typical of the produce available in the Bay Area this time of year, the bounty seemed caught in limbo between winter and spring. First-of-season strawberries and sugar snap peas were snatched up quickly by customers craving the fresh taste of spring, while boatloads of hearty greens and mud-caked root vegetables languished in the shadows.

As I jostled for position trying unsuccessfully to get my hands on a pint of organic strawberries, my coworker boldly chose what had to be the biggest beet I’ve seen in a very long time. You know, the type of vegetable that looks like a mutant GMO but probably was just left (forgotten?) in the ground all season. I promptly forgot about her beet as soon as we entered the promised land of the café, but later that week she showed up to the office with that honker in a Tupperware to add to her salad.

She told me that it had taken forever to roast the beet whole, and that she’d ended up leaving it in the cooling oven overnight to continue cooking. Just that morning she’d hurriedly peeled it under running water mere minutes before her bus arrived. I thought about how roasting a whole mutant beet is not unlike making ice cream from scratch: an exercise in delayed gratification. The big difference, though, is that with beets there is a faster – and in my opinion, better – way to get some satisfaction.

When I cook beets, especially large ones, I usually peel them before cooking and cut them into smallish slices or wedges. After a quick toss in some sort of cooking fat and a sprinkle of spices, into a hot oven they go for no more than 30-40 minutes. While cooking beets this way will turn your hands red, the stain isn’t permanent and in a pinch can also be rubbed off onto your cheeks for an au naturel blush. Truth! Beets roasted out of the skin take on the caramelized quality and crispy edges I crave, and are a perfect addition to hearty salads like the one pictured above. From time to time I cook beets in the skin, but by the time I get home from work I’m usually hoping to have them done by dinner, not by dessert or midnight snack. So, pick up a mutant beet before the farmers harvest all of winter’s forgotten fruit, and peel away!