Tomato, Pesto, and Mozzarella Sandwich for a Crowd

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Summertime, with its good weather and long light evenings, always means more spontaneous meals with friends.  The past few days we’ve had plenty of them because my sister and I and a couple of girlfriends took all our many children to some nice little cabins by a beach on an island.  We worked hard all day–the pool! the beach! the playground! roasting marshmallows!–and collapsed at the shady picnic tables at the end of each day for a small feast together.  (Although “collapsed” may be wishful thinking here; moms traveling alone with a contingent of young children rarely get to “collapse” for more than two consecutive minutes, I’ve learned.)

One of my favorite strategies for feeding a hungry crowd is to slice a baguette or two in half lengthwise, stuff it full of delicious things, and cut it into many pieces.  Serve a few salads alongside and voila, an easy dinner for as many people as you need to feed.  (Bonus points if you give the kids popsicles for dessert so they can run off and get sticky while the grown-ups linger over another drink.)

The classic caprese combination (tomato, mozzarella, basil) makes one of my favorite sandwiches.  I find that some versions can get a little dry, though, so I juice mine up by using pesto instead of basil leaves and a generous drizzle of balsamic vinegar.

The order of assembly is important here: pesto on the bottom half of the bread, please, and vinegar on the top, so that the vinegar soaks down into the tomatoes, which should be on top of the cheese, which collaborates with the pesto to keep the bottom piece of bread from getting soggy.  Got that?  Top to bottom inside your baguette: balsamic vinegar, tomato, fresh mozzarella, good basil pesto.  Yes, I spend time thinking about these kinds of things.  I can admit it here because I know that you do, too.  That’s why I’m glad we’re friends.

Continue reading Tomato, Pesto, and Mozzarella Sandwich (click for recipe)

Peach and Tayberry Upside-Down Pie

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What?  It’s been four days since I posted the recipe for the Easiest Pie Crust Ever and you still haven’t made a pie?  What are you waiting for?

Ok, ok, here’s a recipe that’s even easier than pie.  I’m calling it an upside-down pie, because it’s a single-crust pie with the crust, get this, on top.  Isn’t that smart?  So you get a scoop of juicy fruit and a crisp, buttery top crust.  That’s it.  The Rustic Fruit Desserts people (I told you you’d be hearing hearing more about them) refer to this dessert by the funny name “pandowdy,” and indeed it was their Gingered Peach and Blackberry Pandowdy that inspired mine.

This dessert was especially sweet because I made it with the last of the peaches we brought home from California and tayberries from our Tonnemaker’s fruit CSA.   (You can substitute raspberries or blackberries or both; tayberries are a cross of the two.)  I personally wouldn’t usually put peaches into a pie–I know, other people do it successfully!–because I think they give up too much juice, resulting in a too-liquid filling and a soggy bottom pie crust.  Both problems are solved by this recipe: the bottom crust has vanished and the filling is thickened to a luscious consistency by macerating the peaches and then simmering the juice to thicken it.

Continue reading Peach and Tayberry Upside-Down Pie (click for recipe)

Arugula Salad with Parmesan and Toasted Walnuts

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In recent years I have prioritized raising babies over raising vegetables, and I haven’t spent much time in my garden.  It’s every vegetable for itself out there, and several have risen to the occasion by growing, flowering, going to seed, and repeating, providing me with a an annual harvest. The crops that have been most efficient in this regard–aside from the herbs; does anyone need parsley?–are a frilly lettuce, a purple kale, and the arugula.  Every spring they pop up and remind me that I had better clear some space if I want anything else to grow this year.

Last week summer came to Seattle and the garden bloomed with a sea of delicate arugula flowers.  I left several plants, of course, to ensure next year’s crop.  And I picked springtime’s last armload of arugula to take into the kitchen.

This is my favorite arugula salad (although this one, with grilled or roasted potatoes and blue cheese, is a close second).   And it’s as simple as can be: greens, grated Parmesan cheese, deeply toasted walnuts, a sweet balsamic vinaigrette.  It goes with anything, but it also makes a fine summer dinner all by itself.

Arugula Salad with Parmesan and Toasted Walnuts: Bake a couple of handfuls of walnut halves at 350, stirring often, until deeply toasted (10-12 minutes).  Meanwhile, wash and dry a big bunch of arugula and tear the leaves if they’re large.  Toss greens with a balsamic vinaigrette (2 parts olive oil to 1 part sweet and syrupy balsamic vinegar plus salt and pepper to taste), then add grated Parmesan cheese and toss again.  Top with the walnuts.

Pound-of-Greens Frittata

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A frittata is one of the nicest traveling foods I know.  We made this one tonight and the leftovers will accompany me and my sister on a very Pacific Northwest-y adventure with the kids tomorrow involving ferry boats and beachcombing.

Now that CSA season is underway, packing veggies densely into every meal becomes more urgent than ever.  This frittata will help you to dispatch an onion, an enormous bunch of chard (including stems), and a bunch of spinach–or whatever equivalent greens you need to use up this week.  My bunch of chard actually weighed a pound by itself, but “24-oz-of-Greens Frittata” just doesn’t have the same ring.

The first trick here is to cook the greens very well, until they give up most of their moisture and it evaporates.  The second is to season the vegetables well before adding them to the eggs.  When you combine the soft cooked greens with half a dozen eggs, the resulting frittata is moist and rich.  Not a bad way to eat a pound of greens. Continue reading Pound-of-Greens Frittata (click for recipe)

Raspberry Jam

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Today was a cooking whirlwind.  It was the first day of our Nash’s CSA, and when my sister and I looped through the market to pick up our box I couldn’t resist bringing home a flat of raspberries as well.  So that meant jam-making (and everyone eating countless raspberries off their fingers, of course) in addition to our first CSA salad of the season, followed immediately by a five-hour cooking spree with new and old friends to produce a Senegalese feast.  The dishwasher is now running for the fourth time.

My sister was making gorgeous salads on one counter (greens, strawberries, goat cheese, pistachios, balsamic, thank you!) while I got a habenero chile sauce going on the stove, so J had the bright idea to set up the canner on the barbeque burner outside.  We will certainly be doing that again this summer to keep the kitchen cool.

Here are a few things you should know about making jam.  First, you don’t have to can it.  You can always make just a bowl or a couple of jars; keep them in the fridge and use them within a week or two (depending on the sugar content).  Alternatively, you can make a larger batch and freeze your jam instead of canning it.  Finally, if you use pectin, I recommend Pomona’s Universal Pectin, which doesn’t require a high percentage of sugar to work.  So you can sweeten your jam to taste and it will still set nicely. Continue reading Raspberry Jam (click for recipe)

Easy Perfect All-Butter Pie Crust

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Is it too presumptuous to call this the “perfect” pie crust?  Especially since I’m not a baker who’s tried a great many of them?  It’s perfect for me, anyway, because it’s so easy, so sweet-salt-buttery-flaky, and because it uses all butter instead of shortening.  And although it’s a fairly standard recipe, I found it via Martha Stewart many years ago, and everything she does is perfect, right?

How do you make your pie crusts?  If you have a different perfect method, I definitely want to know.Yesterday, July 5, marked Seattle’s traditional first day of summer, and it arrived right on schedule.  (Apparently the “meteorological cognoscenti” pin the date as July 12, but this year it was indeed July 5.  Note also in that article that it is expected to last through August 15.  Yay?)  My sister and I celebrated by taking the girls to Molly Moons for ice cream, then swinging in the park, then to the local wading pool.

We were on summer slow time, little kid time, and walking a little less than a mile and a half took us more than an hour, even with the incentive of ice cream cones moving us along.  Look, bumblebees!  Leaves with holes!  A leaf in the shape of a magic (better still, say it like my just-now-four-year-old: “magict”) key!  The girls squatted on the sidewalk to peer into cracks, point, and consult.  You cannot rush past any of those things.  We did not rush past any of them.

Here’s where you want to rush in the summertime: in the kitchen.  And so now that it’s summer, to return to my original point, you’ll be needing an easy pie crust.  This is mine.  I make it using a food processor.  If you don’t have a food processor, I recommend following this method where you grate frozen butter directly into your flour mixture.  (I have never, ever understood the directions for using two knives to make a pie crust.)  If it gets too warm/soft/sticky at any point, just pop the dough in the fridge for a few minutes before continuing.  Easy peasy. Continue reading Easy Perfect All-Butter Pie Crust (click for recipe)

Whole Wheat Pancakes with Sweet Cherries and Pecans

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We picked up our first box from Tonnemaker’s fruit CSA this week and–I’m almost sorry to say, for those of you where cherries are already over or not happening at all this summer–I have remembered how good a cherry can be.  We got three varieties this week, each better than the last, each cherry firm and impossibly sweet and dripping juice.  The kids’ hands have been purple since Tuesday.

It was J’s stroke of genius to slice some of the cherries into pancakes, which he did with the girls on the 4th of July.  It’s a weekend and holiday tradition of theirs, making pancakes or waffles for breakfast.  J seems to have inherited this sweet habit from his own pancake-making dad, which makes it doubly sweet.  The cherry on top, so to speak, is that I usually wake up just in time for breakfast (or just leftovers, if I’m really lucky). 

This recipe is J’s standard buttermilk pancake recipe (from Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone), which he made on this occasion with 2/3 whole wheat flour, those outstanding cherries, and some rosemary candied pecans we had lying around.  The result was so good that we ate them plain; the cherries were like built-in jam.  You could also serve them with butter and maple syrup, of course.  You won’t be sorry either way. Continue reading Whole Wheat Pancakes with Sweet Cherries and Pecans (click for recipe)

Sweet Corn Scramble

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What does the inside of your fridge look like?  If I could peek inside, what would it tell me about you?

My fridge is always packed to the gills. Grains, flours, beer at the back. Root vegetables, sometimes of indeterminate age, in the bottom.  Cheeses in a drawer.  Condiments piled (piled, I say!) into the top shelf and door.  Milk and yogurt up front.  And everywhere else: more vegetables, so many vegetables, and leftovers.

It’s a reflection of who I am in many ways: it says that I like food.  That I’m a packrat, maybe, but also an optimist, thinking I’ll cook dinner six nights a week and always snack on vegetable spears instead of the kids’ cheese and crackers.  It is not the fridge of a meal-planner; instead, our meals are often dictated by what’s in the fridge rather than the other way around.

But this week, after coming home from a trip, there’s not much in the fridge.  It’s rather refreshing.  It’s so easy to see the back wall.  But it won’t last, because both of our CSAs start this week.  (Another personality/fridge correlation: the kind of person likely to sign up for two CSAs is the kind of person likely to have an overflowing fridge.)

In the meanwhile, it’s an opportunity to let a few great ingredients shine.

I usually scramble my eggs by letting the bottom layer set then rumpling it up along the bottom of the pan so the uncooked egg runs off  and also sets, then I turn the eggs over briefly.  How do you do yours?  I never gave any thought to scrambling eggs until I tried this “poached scrambled eggs” method, and then I read Julia Child saying not to touch them for the first three minutes, and now I’m wondering what other techniques are out there that never would have occurred to me.  This is an important question in my life because, as you know, I rely heavily on scrambled eggs. Continue reading Sweet Corn Scramble (click for recipe)

Summer Crunch Salad with Feta, Mint, and Lime

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Need a last-minute idea for tomorrow afternoon’s Fourth of July picnic?  Look no further.  After a day that started and ended with chocolate yesterday, we needed a good salad around here today.  (I don’t mean that in a we-must-repent-with-salad way.  I mean that in a let’s-have-more-cake-today-but-maybe-some-salad-too way.)

This one is a beaut.  I think that my love for radishes has been well documented here, and when I saw this Smitten Kitchen recipe I was pretty sure that a radish-less version would be a pale imitation.  But in a very unusual turn of events, my fridge is relatively bare (we were out of town for 10 days and I haven’t gone shopping yet).  The only crunchy vegetables I could scare up were romaine lettuce, a yellow pepper, a few baby carrots, and a couple of green onions.  Into the salad they went.

I toasted pepitas for more crunch, and because I was thinking of Barrio’s chopped salad, a place my mind often wanders in my wistful-for-salad moments.  I piled on the one-two-three punch (is that a thing?) of feta, mint, and lime juice, which I copied from Deb and Deb copied from April Bloomfield.  Genius.  Do it. Continue reading Summer Crunch Salad with Feta, Mint, and Lime (click for recipe)

Chocolate Waffles

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Oh, friends.  You rightly clamored for the chocolate pancake recipe to accompany that Summer Berry Sauce, but I have a confession: not only did I not make those pancakes, but I was probably still asleep when my mom made them.  (Thanks, Mom!)

But today was the Real Birthday.  I think was a good day on the four-year-old-birthday scale, as evidenced by the fact that the house is covered in glitter.  And that the day started, as requested, with chocolate waffles (and ended with chocolate cake).

I have had my eye on the “waffle brownies” from Tea and Cookies for a while, but in the end I decided that they seemed too decadent.  For breakfast.  For a four-year-old.  Instead I went with the first recipe that came up in my Google search, an Alton Brown recipe that seemed a little more like your standard buttermilk waffles but with some cocoa powder and chocolate chips mixed in.  Ok, a lot of cocoa powder and chocolate chips, and the chocolate chips melted and the waffle edges were crisp and it was a pretty great combination.  And then we served them with whipped cream and strawberries.

Obviously my healthier-waffles logic was not crystal clear here, but the resulting dessert-for-breakfast was just delicious.  I think you’ll forgive me about the pancakes. Continue reading Chocolate Waffles (click for recipe)