Menus, February 25, 2014

“To those of you who received honors, awards ,

 and distinctions, I say, well done.

 And to the C students I say, you, too,

 can be president of the United States.” 

George W. Bush

Last Sunday, the world celebrated the giving and receiving of prizes to those who were the very -est. The fastest, the slidiest, the stick and puckiest, the luckiest, the creatiest, the spinniest, the jumpiest...that's right, it was 

the taste season finale.

Wait, you thought I was talking about this?

Here's a funny thing about prizes- they always go to the something-est. Even if the something-est is impossible to measure. There are prizes for the most beautiful dog:

This is Huckleberry, winner of the fourth annual Beautiful Bulldog
competition. Because some people do not consider
 beautiful and bulldog to be oxymoronic.

and prizes for the cutest dog:

this is Boo, who scored a super sonic score
on the awwww meter to win his place in
cute dog history

and even prizes for the ugliest dog:

my personal favorite, and my nominee for
most interesting and funniest.

but there are no prizes for most average, normalest dog. 

For the most brilliant humans among us, there are Nobels and Pulitzers; for the most weirdly brilliant, the Ig Nobel awards, and for the very least brilliant, there are

 the Darwin awards, rewarding those who serve
mankind by  taking themselves out
of the evolutionary gene pool. 

But there are no award for ordinary, or normal, or average. Probably because as soon as we tried to award a prize for most normal, someone would protest and say-

"Wait! She's the weird one! I'm the normal one!"

This Sunday, the movie-going world watches again as awards are given to more of at least some kinds of     est. Not just the movie going world- even those of us who have seen only 11% of the movies up for best picture will probably tune in (that's one movie out of nine, for those of you who have just reached for your calculators. I saw Philomena.). Whether or not I see them in the cinema or at home I love being told a good story by a good movie, and stories about food? Well, they're often good enough to eat.
That's why this week's dinners are prize winning recipes that may also be reminders of the best food movies and food moments in movies that I can remember- and there's hardly anything that would be more fun that hearing about your own favorite food and movie combos. Here's how I'm hoping things reel out around here:

Wednesday: Tomato Basil Soup and Grilled Mozzarella Sandwiches

Last week, the great food movie Big Night got a replay, so all things Italian are sounding wonderful. Today I'll wander into Costco and pick up a favorite treat:

Marinated mozzarella balls

We'll be using them twice this week- first tonight, in grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches. Don't even think about pouring the oil of this marinade down the sink, unless you're planning on a sink salad- this stuff and a little balsamic vinegar will make the fastest, tastiest salad dressing you've ever had. The soup is, well, super easy. Start it before you gather the ingredients for the sandwiches, and by the time the sandwiches are done, the soup probably will be too.

Thursday: Meatloaf, Mashed Potatoes and Salad

Here's a prize winning meatloaf from Quaker Oats, and to serve alongside it, some prize winning mashed potatoes. You can sculpt whatever you want to with the potatoes, I'll be recreating the mashed potato mountain from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Just to say there were greens on the plate, I'll be tossing something dark green and leafy with some cherry tomatoes, a little of the mozzarella marinade, and balsamic vinegar.
Don't worry about leftovers- both the meatloaf and potatoes get a replay on Sunday.



Friday: Caprese Cod Sandwiches

Guess what the internet answered when asked for "award winning fish recipes"? This terrific looking sandwich!
 If you're trying to stay away from gluten, serve this as a salad or blow a movie-star style budget on a gluten free bun. Everything you need for an easy, nutritious dinner is here, but if a sandwich on its own just doesn't feel like dinner, try some oven fries or some kale chips for a kick of crunchy salty goodness.



Saturday: Triple Chocolate Beef and Bean Chili

Remember the movie Chocolat? Me too. So I went hunting for ways to use chocolate for dinner, and found this gem in a recipe pile that is a wealth of savory chocolatey goodness. We're a little too beef centric this week, so I'm considering substituting additional vegetables or chicken for the beef in this recipe. If that doesn't happen, we may get the necessary veg with this prize winning coleslaw.



Sunday: Leftover Meatloaf Shepherd's Pie

Look! A thing to do with leftover meatloaf that is not a sandwich! This great one dish meal looks like it'll go together in a snap, and that's a good thing,because I'd hate to be in the kitchen when people start giving out awards for movies I haven't seen...yet.

Whether you watch movies, or award shows about movies
or both, or neither-
This week I want you to know that I know.
I know that there are days when 
you deserve a medal 
for managing somehow to not hurt anyone
with your mouth or your hands or your car.
I know there are days when you deserve an Oscar
for acting like everything is going to be okay.
But I hope that this week 
you'll  find that the rewards you want most
 lay just within your reach
and I hope  this week
surrounds you with so much love and happiness
that you know just what it feels like

to have won first prize.

Weekend Update february 23, 2014

It is normally supposed that something always 

gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately 

to the notion that something can also be gained.” 

Salman Rushdie

There are many ways to say most anything, as most any writer or spouter of rhetoric or any one who uses any form of language for any purpose at all can tell you.  The think is, finding the way to say not only what you mean, but what you want your listeners (supposing here that there is someone listening) to hear. Imagine how different the world would be if instead of saying 
 "Never give in, never give in, never, never,never,never- in nothing, great or small, large or petty- never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense." 
 Winston Churchill had instead said:

The path between speaking brain to speaking mouth to hearing ears and  hearing mind is a long and perilous journey, and like carryons in an overhead compartment, some items may shift during flight.  Mr Rogers was right- there are many ways to say "I love you" but not all of them translate very easily, do they?
There is, for example, trying to say "I love you" in  the language of worry:

Or the language of disapproval:

Or in one of my own personal favorites, the language of food:

As in any other language, the trick is trying to squeeze the toothpaste of what you mean through the tube of what you know how  to say. And when that gets a little too messy,

one can always try to improve one's vocabulary.

 Which is what I tried to do this week, with the help of the poets featured in an anthology called "The Hungry Ear". Poetry inspired food, all week- and like all plans and all poems, sometimes things worked, and sometimes things didn't. 
For instance::
Here's the risotto recipe that I tried in homage to William Matthews' 'Onions", and my own translation on the right:

Okay. What's going on? Did the food stylist insist on cooking the risotto
in water so it wouldn't turn an icky brown? Because mine
turned an icky brown.
Why?

And here's the tilapia in peach salsa, inspired by Wendell Berry's "A Meeting":

The taste was....okay.
The texture was kinda weird.
I think maybe this idea would work
better on salmon.

The grapefruit salad though? That's a definite keeper!

Especially once we topped it with a little goat cheese.

And the chicken baked in peaches? Well that was pretty exciting! No, really! Because- and you know I am not making this up, because I have photographic evidence that I do not have the Photoshop skills to falsify- I came out on the winning side of the translation!

Look! On the left, the recipe picture, on the right, what was actually produced in this actual kitchen. How often does it happen that a recipe actually looks better at home than it did in the picture?

about as often as one finds a perfectly ripe peach at the end of winter.

And that's another thing I learned this week. Frozen peaches. They look surprisingly like peaches- here's the frozen peach salad that I expected to look like a mushy bowl of formerly frozen peach colored mushy things:

Pretty, isn't it?
too bad it didn't taste like peaches.

The raspberries, the cucumber, the mint, the lemon, the dressing- all really good, but as it turns out, frozen peaches are not very...peachy. I'll use this salad again when peaches are in season, and until then, it'll be wonderful with mangoes.

It's a little sad, because it didn't do justice to the sublime poem "From Blossoms" by Li-Young Lee. In July, I shall buy farmer's market peaches and give that poem the translation it deserves.

And that's sort of what I hope for you this week-

I hope that you hear the love you need 

in the way you need to hear it.

And I hope you know that it matters.

Every time you take the chance

to say the I love you

To the people you love 

In a way they can understand,

it matters. 

And I hope this week, that not a single heartbeat

of the love and wonder you have to share with the world

gets lost in translation.

Menus and grocery lists February 19, 2014

If music be the food of love, play on

Shakespeare

I neglected, in all the ups and downs of cooking through gravity, to mention one of the year's most important food holidays. It's an easy oversight- Valentine's day may be one of the year's most important food holidays, but that doesn't mean it's an important cooking holiday, now does it?

well, I suppose it all depends on what you're cooking.
(I wonder if this "what's a little cannibalism between friends"
 attitude may explain why so many chefs are in the kitchen
on Valentine's day instead of on a date)

It's an eating holiday, but an eating out holiday- the second busiest day of the year for American restaurants- in fact, 61 percent of consumers celebrate Valentine's day, and of those, 34 percent give the gift of a dinner out. Wait....If 34% give dinner out as a gift, that means that another 34% are eating out with them, and that makes 68%. Which is more than......wait again.....

so, this is why math has never been
called the food of love.

It's music that is the food of love- and always has been:

here's an ancient pictogram in which a long ago Romeo
asks his love to a concert after the giant beast roundup.

flash forward a century or seven,

and we have this love-struck girl thinking that if
she can just keep tapping those right hand notes,
it'll be a nice long time before Dad starts to wonder
how the lesson is going.

and more recently, we've got Woodstock, where music was famously in the air, and there was

lots of lovin' everywhere.

but sometimes, the most powerful food of love is, well, food. 

Conjure up a memory of falling in love, or a memory of feeling safe and loved, and chances are, there was  food nearby. Food -whether it's a  four course dinner or a box of chocolates- is, to misquote Mister Rodgers, one of the many ways to say "I love you".

And if I neglected to observe the high feast day of Love last week, I'm making up for it this week.  Thanks to my excellent sister-in-law, I have here on my left a copy of "The Hungry Ear", a pretty little book stuffed tighter than a Thanksgiving turkey with poems about food and drink, and I'll be cooking through these yummy poems all week long. 

Here- I'll show you what I mean:

Wednesday: Pot roast with mushrooms 

Mary Oliver's poem Mushrooms, and Mark Strands poetic memories of his mother in the poem "Pot Roast" Serve as tonight's inspiration. The recipe calls for dried porcini mushrooms, but I can actually but fresh ones for less money around here, so I'll be using those, and this may cook in the slow cooker. Maybe.  Either way, it's a great end of winter meal

Thursday: Beans and rice  

This  poem, "The bean eaters" by Gwendolyn Brooks, is everything a bowl of beans and rice ought to be- simple, homey and satisfying. Any leftover pot roast gravy would be terrific stirred into these beans, and and leftover beef can be chopped up and stirred into the pot, or sliced and served along side tonight, or served with risotto and greens on Saturday.

Friday: Tilapia with peach salsa and Grapefruit salad

The first of two dinners this week that feature peaches- I know, it's impossible to find good fresh peaches right now, but read this charming poem "A meeting" by Wendell Berry and tell me that you can wait till June for a peach. Frozen peaches (not canned) will work just fine in this salsa, and the fish should be super nice next to this lovely "Meditation on a Grapefruit" by Craig Arnold. Oh, I mean next to this simple avocado and grapefruit salad, which we will be spooning on top of salad greens.

Saturday: Greens and Risotto 

Since I have yet to figure the in and outs of collage creation on this laptop, I can only give you a picture of the greens, and this poem by Lucille Clifton, "Cutting Greens" that'll make you want to sharpen your knives and enjoy the preparation. William Matthews, in "Onions" makes the delicious observation that onions can lead to all sorts of happiness- like risotto. If you've ever made risotto, stirring and stirring and adding liquid a teensy bit at a time, you'll be as curious about this easy recipe as I am. This is our vegetarian meal of the week, but any leftover pot roast or fish would be very nice here. Actually, there's not much that's not nice with risotto. 

Sunday: Baked Chicken and Peaches  and peach salad.

There they both are! Frozen peaches again, and the salad recipe actually calls for them. I confess to a little bit of skepticism, because, you know, that is not a picture of frozen peaches.
Any leftover risotto or rice will be perfect with this.
These words from the beautiful poem "From Blosoms" by Li-Young Li will tell you everything you need to know about why peaches, all out of season, sound so wonderful this week:

"There are days we live

as if death were nowhere

in the background; from joy

to joy to joy, from wing to wing,

from blossom to blossom to 

impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom."

I hope that for you, this week is filled with that kind of joy-

joy that feels like wings.

 I hope you have time to learn more

about what it is that makes you and those you love

feel beloved.

And that you find a way to share-

to give and receive-

the food of love,  even if it's the sort of food

that could never fit on a plate.

Weekend Update, February 16, 2014

Gravity catches up with all of us.

Marilyn Monroe

Fight it as we may, gravity eventually shows up at most parties- usually with an uncomfortable reminder of how dangerous it is 

to leave important powers off of the guest list. 

It showed up at the worldwide party in Sochi this week with a bag of naughty tricks-

keeping some things from going down,

and other things

from staying up.

Which made me wonder, what if the laws of gravity were written like other laws? What if they were proposed and passed by some cosmic congress of physicists; the smartest gravity-defying brains on earth- 

 "The motion passes.
Things may fall down, without  falling  apart.
Things may let loose without letting go,
and gravity will not be permitted to wrinkle a face
until the forces of zit have finished with it."

There's the enforcement problem of course- gravity police making sure that every one was literally and metaphorically grounded- there'd have to be anti-gravity courts, and anti-gravity jails, where all the inmates could become

quite dangerously light-hearted.

No it's probably better to leave things as they are. Let the laws of gravity stay on the books, keep giving prizes to those who find the most creative ways to get around them and make sure that those who break them with too much impunity

are made as comfortable as possible
in gravity jail.

Ice skaters and snowboarders weren't the only gravity defyers falling flat this week- there was this souffle....

Well, there was more than one souffle, and that was the problem.

We started with this broccoli and goat cheese souffle recipe, which actually uses the word easy to describe itself. And it is easy- just like this is easy,

when you compare it to climbing Everest in a snowstorm.

The thing is, souffles rise best in pans with straight sides, and over the course of many kitchen adventures, all but two of ours have broken. (An earnest cook is not the same as an unclumsy cook-

as I have proved on more than one occasion.)

There was, however, a relatively straight sided loaf pan...here's the difference that following the rules makes:

in a pretty little straight sided souffle dish

and....

a loaf pan. And the souffle didn't taste that great either.

And if a recipe for oven baked chicken tells you to brown the bread crumbs before using them to coat the chicken, obey that as if it were a law. Really. If you don't, the chicken will be done in 13 minutes, but the coating will not yet be brown. Which means you will have a choice to make: whether to serve for dinner an anemic looking plank of pale chicken that's still juicy inside, or a nicely browned piece of overcooked dried out chicken....

I opted for anemia- and though it didn't look very well,
it tasted great.

Lastly, if anyone tells you that it's possible to make an eggplant Parmesan that is not too hard, and not heavy greasy,

believe them.

This no-frying pan,  oven-all-the-way eggplant parmesan takes some prep time, but not hard prep time- about 40 minutes to put it together, and another 40 minutes in the oven. That's too much time an trouble to make it easy on a weeknight, but if you're having a crew of vegetarians over, or if you're trying for one or two meatless meals a week, this is a great recipe that won't weigh you down.  Bonus: it makes a full 9x13 pan. Around here, that means 40 minutes of work for dinner and three lunches.

And floating through four meals on 40 minutes of work is an acceptable rate of exchange.

And this week, that's what I hope for you 

I hope it's a week of having fun, of

learning which rules to break 

and which rules to abide by.

And if gravity catches up to you,

and you find things falling flat,

I hope that the energetic  love 

with which you've filled your life

bounces back to you

and gives you all the lift you need

to keep your soul aloft.