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Pasta with Tomatoes, Spinach, Goat Cheese and Black Olives (feeds a crowd!)

22 Mar

The planting season is picking up at Restoration Farm, the C.S.A. that we belong to at the historic Old Bethpage Restoration Village here on Long Island. I say that as if I were right in there, pruning the apple trees and preparing the beds and raising those heritage birds, getting dirty and sweaty in honest, sacred labor on the land.

Uh, well, not exactly.

Farming has always been more theoretical than hands-on in my life. Sure I have come out to volunteer at the farms we have belonged to, but in all honesty, since I’ve had Leandro, it’s been more about picking a couple of pea pods, then taking him to see the pigs or the chickens  or to the bathroom, rush, rush, than it has been about actually doing anything useful in an agricultural sense.

This year will be different, in two ways:

1) We have a little more sun in our yard these days, thanks to some trees that had to come down. Last year we did some experimental container gardening to gauge where we could actually grow vegetables. Now that we’ve established that, we will be putting in some raised beds this year and trying to grow more stuff for ourselves.

2) Leandro is more self-sufficient and mature and I have hopes that our volunteering days at the farm will be less like outings to the zoo and more like real contributions.Call me crazy, but a girl’s gotta dream…..

In the meantime, we attended the season-opening potluck at the farm last Sunday and — while I listened with longing, yearning, and almost dismay as the real farm folks told me with great enthusiasm about everything they’ve been doing in the last few weeks — I tried to keep positive about what is to come for me in the world of growing things! (and we have started peas, tomatoes, peppers and culantro from seed this week).

This was my contribution to the potluck…it seemed to go well for everyone (except my own traitorous offspring who decided he didn’t like the look of it and proceeded to stuff his face with the stuffed shells and the two different baked macaroni and cheese, and the Hardscrabble chicken — anything but my dish, the one I had made thinking he’d love it; thanks for the support, little dude) and I had enough to bring in for my esteemed colleagues. At least one has decided that she doesn’t have to cook this week thanks to this abundant, rich, very easy and super-tasty, creamy dish.

You’ll be able to use this recipe next time you have to feed a bunch of people with stuff you already have on hand!

Pasta with Spinach, Tomatoes, Goat Cheese and Black Olives

1.5 lbs penne or other short pasta

6 Tbs extra virgin olive oil

4 cloves garlic, sliced thin

½ tsp crushed red pepper flakes (more if you want it spicy)

28 oz canned of diced tomatoes (or two Cups fresh)

Coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper

10 oz – 16 oz frozen spinach

20-30 pitted black olives, sliced

½ Cup grated Parmigiano Reggiano or Grana Padano or pecorino

6 oz fresh goat cheese (chévre)

Cook the pasta according to package directions. Reserve ½ cup of pasta water, drain and keep warm.

Meanwhile, heat olive oil in a large skillet. Add the garlic and red pepper and cook at medium low until softened and golden, about 4 minutes. Add the tomatoes, and salt and pepper to taste (if using fresh tomatoes, cook until they begin to soften) and then add spinach, cooking at medium low until the spinach is heated through and incorporated, about 5 minutes. Add olives.

Add the pasta and the grated cheese (and tablespoons of the reserved pasta water if the sauce is too thick) and stir until the pasta is fully coated. Add the goat cheese, mix well (but gently) and serve, with additional grated cheese if desired.

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Found Stock (Waste Not, Want Not)

20 Mar

Hate throwing things out? Me too!

(I am trying to work through a tendency to clutter in all areas of my life, but right now I am referring to the kitchen exclusively).

We are just starting to compost over here – actually, my dad is doing it with lawn clippings and autumn leaves so I can’t claim any credit — and haven’t sorted out how to approach the whole food waste thing. In the meantime, with a freezer bag you can make good use of vegetable trimmings by making a very nice, low sodium stock for soups. No two ever taste the same (and I admit to taking out some of the celery and adding extra carrots or onions for sweetness), but since this is not a professional kitchen – who cares? I like to think of home-cooking more as live theater than a DVD of a movie – full of surprise flavors, new interpretations, flubbed lines and quick recoveries, and the occasional revelatory performance by an understudy. The fact that I don’t have to make it exactly the same every time takes a lot of the pressure right off!

So, here’s an easy and cheap way to reduce your waste stream and have a terrific stock on hand for spontaneous outburst of homemade soup!

Found Vegetable Stock (makes about a quart)

8 to 10 cups of vegetable trimmings (about a gallon* freezer bag full – just keep adding to a freezer bag or other container in your freezer till you have enough!): carrot tops, onion peels, garlic peels, pea pods, celery bits, stems ends of squash, tomato cores. DO NOT include cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower.

½ – 1 whole head garlic, broken in half, unpeeled

1 onion, quartered and unpeeled

Enough water to cover

1-1.5 tsp salt per quart of water

Bring all ingredients to a boil in a generous pot. Reduce heat to medium low and simmer gently for about an hour. Cool to lukewarm, then strain (I used a colander lined with paper towel) into a fridge or freezer-friendly container and store in fridge or freezer.

*This post has been corrected! The original suggested a quart freezer bag and has been corrected to a GALLON freezer bag. Thanks to my sharp-eyed, keen-witted reader Kendra for catching the error!

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Know Your Food: Egg-Sighting Adventures in the North Fork

17 Mar

Be advised: this post starts off a bit serious — grim, even — but lightens up fairly quickly and has a happy finish!

Stonyfield Farms-– the organic dairy company from which I buy a lot of yogurt and receive too many magazines thanks to their rewards program — is running a Know Your Food campaign (“This Year I Will Know My Food”) that has stuck in my head. As it happens, the USDA is doing the same thing (Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food). Both limit themselves to farmers they work with…still, it is a start, isn’t it?

Leandro and I know a fair bit about who makes what we eat – when it comes to seasonal local stuff – but it’s hard to know everything. And it gets scarier and scarier, what with the pink slime in school lunch meat (can we get any more cavalier – or gruesome — about how we feed children?) and arsenic in apple juice and e. coli everywhere…I am sick, not just because it’s a horrible thing nutritionally, but because I am sick of reading about it, sick of worrying about it, and sick of how complicated it has become to get simple healthy food on the table these days. Heavy sigh.

Can you guess what this is?

But, let’s brighten up and lighten up here.

Here's another look!

We recently spent an amazing couple of days out on the North Fork of Long Island (our Bordeaux on the Sound, as it were), picking up wine from Paumanok, spending quality time with Deborah Pittorino Rivera at The Greenporter Hotel  which she and her husband, Bill, own and where she also serves up incredible food at La Cuvee Wine Bar & Restaurant (see her blog, Seasoned Fork,  here), riding the carousel — Leandro learned how to grab the rings — and watching the Shelter Island ferries shuttle cars back and forth.

We  stopped by one of my favorite places to get fresh, organic eggs. Ty Llwyd Farm has the best fresh eggs (duck eggs too! More on that later), organic vegetables, and sometimes flowers (pussy willows right now!) in Northville on Sound Ave. They also have manure and hay – they do a bit of everything and are moving into dairy. If you blink, you might miss the homely wooden sign – look for a big nursery (van der something or another) across the road and you are close.

It is an egg sorter!

This time I hit pay dirt! The last few times I have stopped for eggs, Leandro was asleep in the car, so he didn’t get to see the cool old egg sorter in operation. This time he was wide-awake – on fire and crunchy from too much enforced restaurant sitting, in fact – and the sorter was in use to sort eggs for the cognoscenti stopping by for the their weekly supply. So owner David Wines was kind enough to let the little guy sort his own eggs…you roll them onto a little chute and they travel along a line of egg-sized scales measuring jumbo, extra-large, large, etc. and the egg rolls off when it tips the correct weighted scale.

We then proceeded to visit all the animals – you may remember that Leandro is very found of chickens – only the egg-layers, though — so we saw the pullets, the free-rangers (who came running to see my little hen-whisperer), the cows, the geese marching in formation, the ducks…

The henhouse...a pretty nice set-up if you are a hen!

When I asked Dave how long he has been there, he said, “Oh, about 300 years” or something like that. Turns out, his people were farmers from Cornwall who came to the North Fork via Connecticut centuries ago and the family still farms. The name Ty Llwyd (pronounced tee clewed) is from his Welsh wife, Liz, also from a farming family.

It was a wonderful couple of hours we spent and we came home with two dozen fresh hens’ eggs and two duck eggs ($0.75 each) which I fried up a few days later.

The duck eggs

The taste is very similar to chicken’s eggs, but denser and richer somehow. One egg on one slice of toast was enough to fill me for hours. Very satisfying!

So no recipe for today, aside from a teaspoon of vegetable oil heated at medium high, crack two eggs in, sprinkle with good salt, lower heat and cook for four minutes or until they reach your preferred doneness. I covered the eggs to make the heat more even to be able to cook them at lower heat and more slowly. As adaptable as eggs are, a lot of high heat doesn’t do them any favors.

So, duck eggs (which are said to pack more nutritional punch that hens’ eggs) were a great success. People bake with them, but I don’t think that is cost effective. I’d rather enjoy them on their own!

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Sauteed Mushrooms and Onions (Burger Topping Extraordinaire)

15 Mar

Now that I have recuperated from the trauma of car buying and am tooling around happily in my beautiful new (for me) automobile and impressing the neighbors — a bit like Toad, only better-behaved (extra points if you get the reference)  — a host of other little things are making life challenging.

You know, unexpected meetings (note the use of the plural – not one, not two, but many!); unexpected need to write recommendations; unexpected oily messes from poorly shut jars of sun-dried tomatoes that somehow tipped over in the fridge at 11 p.m. after one of those unexpected meetings; unexpected armies of black ants marching through the bedroom, bathroom and kitchen; just unexpected stuff that keeps popping up in the middle of attempting to actually finish something, just one thing, for the love of God!

Still life with mushrooms

So I am swamped and overwhelmed, but none of it is bad or life-threatening, and even though I haven’t kept you informed, we are still eating real food over here (and I am still washing heaps of real dishes, which is becoming a real problem because I have fisherman’s cracked hands). So, I’ll count my blessings and try to catch you up on some recent favorites.

The original topper from which this recipe is derived....YUM-Burger

I promised you this burger topper recipe weeks ago, from a mid-winter BBQ with Marianne & Co. when the weather was mild enough to warrant firing up the grill. It is still mild enough! I have since made it to dress-up black bean burgers – it really made me feel as though I was having a restaurant meal. And I needed that.

With black bean burgers

Onion and Mushroom Burger Toppers

2-3 Tbs salted butter

2 medium onions, sliced

8 oz. button mushrooms, stems trimmed and sliced (2-2.5 Cups)

1 Tbs Worcestershire sauce, plus more to taste (optional: from what I know Worcestershire sauce contains anchovies, so it is not vegetarian; other steak sauces like A-1 may be vegetarian. Check the label!)

Salt to taste

Melt 1 tablespoon of the butter in a skillet on medium-high. When foaming subsides, add onions to skillet, stir to cover and lower heat. Allow to wilt and caramelize (at least five minutes; more if you have the time).

When onions have cooked and browned, remove and set aside. Add mushrooms to skillet with existing butter (add more if desired) and cook at medium –high, stirring occasionally, until mushrooms have released their liquid (about five minutes), liquid has evaporated somewhat and mushrooms are tender and browned. Add more butter, if desired (I desire a lot of butter!), return onions to skillet and stir to incorporate. Add Worcestershire sauce to taste as desired, a teaspoon or so at a time. Serve atop cooked burgers, grilled meats or vegetable or veggie/bean burgers.

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Buying a New Car and Cheesy Savoury Meatballs: a tenuous relationship

10 Mar

I bought a car today. Apparently people think congratulations are in order, but I feel a bit more like puking than celebrating.

I find these big purchases that require loans from the bank are among the most stressful of stressful things, right up there with realizing, as you are halfway down the aisle with your ivory Nicole Miller silk shantung dress, white knuckling your dad’s forearm under a beachfront palapa in the Dominican Republic, that you really shouldn’t marry this person; or signing a mortgage in a fancy San Juan neighborhood that you are terrified of not being able to keep up with; leaning over for your epidural as you are about to become a single mother by choice and realizing you’ve never even changed a diaper…you know, life-changing, oh shit, what have I got myself into moments, irreversible, irrevocable, the type that you can’t later walk away from with a shrug and an “Oh well, that didn’t quite work out as I’d planned, let’s go out for a cocktail.”

That’s how I feel about buying a car. It’s worse now that I have that baby (I am a diaper-changing expert now, but don’t ask me to do it because we are DONE with that).  He is almost five now and barely lets me complete a thought, much less a major financial transaction. But, I did what I could, and picked out the make and model I wanted, and went through the no-haggle credit union thing, and found the right vehicle and test drove it, and decided it was the one. Then I filled out the papers, had my sticker shock and signed anyway, with my heart and breath stuck high in my throat.

I was almost done.

It must be five o'clock somewhere (Lorraine's pina coladas would be very handy right now)

Then the saleswoman just wouldn’t quit trying to sell me other stupid insurance-type shit to protect me from all sorts of dire consequences of all the things that could happen to my car that I wouldn’t be able to afford to fix if I didn’t have the insurance (didn’t I just buy the damn thing because it was supposed to be reliable?) and I asked her to please stop, but of course she didn’t. So didn’t I just turn into a puddle right in that stupid office?

Yes I cried, much to the astonishment of the saleswoman (not to me; I felt it coming a mile off), but at least she sort of stopped with the sales pitch in her frantic search for a tissue and I was able to collect myself, get out of there and go pick up Leandro at his friend’s house where I was fortunate enough to be able to leave him for a couple of hours.

All of this is apropos of nothing, except that when we got home Leandro suddenly began to feel a cold coming on, so instead of going to our single mom’s meet-up which we were both really looking forward to and where I was going to tell my tale of woe to a sympathetic audience and then have a nice dinner with Pam and her kids, we stayed home and so now I am telling my tale of woe to you.

That feels much better, thank you.

If you have gotten this far, it is actually a beautiful 2008 Honda CRV in a Royal Blue Pearl, with a gray interior, with about 26,000 miles on it, perfect for our active, outdoor lives, so the car is exactly what I wanted. Now I just need some help to pick it up on Monday…

As far as the food tie-in, well this is going to be  the lamest transition I will ever write in my life. It is bad, really bad, but hopefully I will never ever ever write another one as awful. So, with my apologies, here goes….

Since I am limp from the emotional wringer of car buying and loan-signing, I don’t feel like making dinner. In the freezer I have these delicious meatballs, which I made with my cousin, Lorraine, a couple of weeks ago (to be honest, she did most of the making while I sorted out my son for bed) and I am very likely going to throw them in tomato sauce over spaghetti for a hearty, comforting dish. And then, from here on in, it will be beans, beans, beans, until I can reasonably fit a new car payment into my sad little budget.

I hope you love them!

Cheesy and Savory Meatballs

2 ¼ Cup plain breadcrumbs

1.5 Cup buttermilk

1.5 tsp unflavored gelatin

3 Tbs water

2.5 lbs lean ground beef and 1 lb ground veal or pork (or a 3-3.5 lb meatloaf mix)

1 Cup very finely minced cooked ham

1 oz (about ½ Cup) Parmigiano Reggiano, or Grana Padano

3 large eggs

6 Tbs minced parsley

6 cloves garlic, minced fine

1.5 tsp salt

½ tsp pepper

Put oven racks to lower-middle and upper middle racks and pre-heat to 450°F. Set wire racks or slotted oven rack on 2 rimmed baking sheets covered in foil and spray with vegetable oil spray.

Mix buttermilk and breadcrumbs in a large bowl and let sit until a smooth paste forms (about 10 minutes. You can stir and mash occasionally during the ten minutes. Meanwhile, put water in a small bowl and sprinkle the gelatin over it. Allow to soften for five minutes.

Mix meat, ham, eggs, cheese, parsley, garlic, salt and gelatin into breadcrumb mixture using hands. Pinch off and roll mixture into 2-inch meatballs (makes 48 or more) and arrange on prepared baking sheets. Bake until well-browned, about 30 (if you plan on cooking them further in a sauce)  or 40 minutes, switching and rotating baking sheets halfway through.

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Versatile Blogger Award (II)!!!!

7 Mar

Thanks so much to Farrah at FairyHealthyLife for nominating me for this award! She has an inspiring story of cooking her way to weight loss — to the tune of 160 pounds!!!!!! And her recipes are great, so give her a visit.

The Versatile Blogger Award, is a way to introduce bloggers to each other and to promote quality blogs that the readers might not have discovered otherwise.

Here’s how it works:

If you are nominated, you’ve been awarded the Versatile Blogger award.

– Thank the person who gave you this award. That’s common courtesy.

– Include a link to their blog. That’s also common courtesy.

– Next, select 15 blogs/bloggers that you’ve recently discovered or follow them regularly.

– Nominate those 15 bloggers for the Versatile Blogger Award. (Don’t forget to tell the bloggers you nominated.)

– Finally, tell the person who nominated you 7 things about yourself.

Now here are my nominees! (this is not the first time I receive this award, but these nominees are all new)

Visit them and tell them Natalia at Hot, Cheap & Easy sent you!

While Chasing Kids A Russian mom cooks

 Texana’s Kitchen Yee-hah!…Y’all can pretend to have a Southern-cooking Grandma, too!

Frugal Feeding Inexpensive can actually feel indulgent

2MiniCooks A dietician and a café manager make beautiful blog together

Bakin’and Cabbage Irish in the house!

Live2EatEat2Live Hawai’i How’WOW

Assia’s Kaleidescope Reinventing Reality Bulgarian-style

Sad Man’s Tongue – Rockabilly Bar & Bistro – Prague Ink, pin-up girls, food

From Scratch Club – DIY food collective from Upstate NY

Foodimentary — Food history, all day, every day

All About Lemon – Poetry, Food, Photos, Haiku

Creative Noshing – Adventurous!!!

Cookiemomma’s Blog – Making parenting tasty and fun

Going Dutch – a Filipina transplant makes beautiful family, food and photos

Let’s Spice Things Up in Vegas – Face it, you want to know what this is!

My Seven Things:

1. I will soon be publishing a culinary translation dictionary (digital and print!)

2. Rain on hot pavement is one of my favorite smells.

3. Rain on a zinc roof is one of my favorite sounds.

4. I am not a Sarah Palin fan, but I envy that she can field dress a moose.

5. I once interviewed Raisa Gorbachev, with Mikhail sitting patiently by.

6. The Galapagos are on my bucket list.

7. I don’t actually have a bucket list, but if I did, the Galapagos would be on it.

Back to recipes in the next couple of days and….more prizes…thanks to all my blogger buddies for making me a part of your culinary lives!

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Mayo-Ketchup Gets a Much-Needed Makeover (with Chipotle!)

4 Mar

“We totally just licked the bowl!”

I had promised my friend Ashley and my son a “tostones-for-dinner” Friday night and, since I had the plaintains I was ready to go. Ashley had decided to learn to make them, so I set her up with the assembly line of garlic and salt water, hot oil, plates covered in paper towel and tostonera (See Tostones! for the how-to of this Caribbean riff on French fries) and got ready to relax with a bit of the fizzy stuff.

Then I mentioned that Puerto Ricans usually dip tostones in mayo-ketchup – mayonnaise and ketchup stirred together. Without hesitation Ashley said “That sounds like it would be great with chipotle and lime,” and since I had it all in (plus garlic) a new creamy, spicy, lick-the-bowl delicious dip was born. And it was so quick that I still got to drink that glass of fizzy in relative peace….

You. Are. Gonna. Love. This.

Mayo-Chipo-Ketchup

(play around with the proportions to suit your taste)

1 Tbs prepared mayonnaise

1 Tbs plain yogurt (nonfat or lowfat are fine)

1 Tbs ketchup

1 tsp chipotle in adobo (minced)

1 tsp lime juice

1 clove garlic, minced fine

Pinch salt, if desired

Mix all ingredients in a bowl and serve with tostones or other fried, crispy tidbits.

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Shrimp and Avocado Salad with Chipotle-Spiked Vinaigrette

29 Feb

I have been very, very busy these days with several projects (a culinary dictionary is one!), so deserved a grown-up meal made by my own loving hands. But it also had to be something not very involved that I could sling together fast, because  just don’t have enough time for everything I’d like to do!

Whether you are doing the Lenten fish on Friday thing or just happen to have some extra cooked shrimp from a buffet table or recipe, or just defrosted some shrimp that you didn’t get a chance to use and want to do something fun with (and that you have absolutely no intentions of sharing with your spoiled little son for whom you do too much anyway and whose leftovers you are sick of picking at instead of making something proper for yourself)….this is a very simple recipe that looks and tastes like a million bucks.

In an avocado shell or on a tostada...this salad looks as good as it tastes!

Shrimp and Avocado Salad Spiked with Chipotle Vinaigrette

(can be double or tripled or more to accommodate a crowd!)

Dressing:

3 Tbs olive oil

1 Tbs fresh lime juice

1 tsp chipotle in adobo – you can use the sauce and skip the peppers themselves, or include peppers, seeded and minced

Pinch salt

Salad

1 Cup cooked shrimp, cut into small chunks

1Tbs red onion, minced

10 grape tomatoes, quartered

1 ripe avocado, sliced in half. Scoop out flesh (discard stone) carefully and cut into small chunks. Reserve shells.

Salt to taste

Extra squeeze of lime to finish

Whisk dressing ingredients in a small bowl until incorporated.

Place shrimp, onion, and tomatoes in a medium bowl. Cover with dressing and stir gently. Then add avocado chunks and stir once again, very gently. Scoop salad into reserved avocado shells (or onto tostadas. Finish with lime and salt and serve.

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Puerto Rican Rice and Beans (Arroz con habichuelas)

26 Feb

I didn’t mean to make arroz con habichuelas last week, but when I dashed into a Latin supermarket for something else, I was stopped dead by the presence of something that looked pretty close to Puerto Rican pumpkin (or calabaza, as we call it). The Fates intervened with my dinner plans.

Native to the Americas, pumpkin (Cucurbita pepo) has been an integral part of diets in this part of the world for thousands of years. The flesh and the seeds are used for many purposes. (in Mexico the crushed seeds are used to coat meats as you might use breadcrumbs). It is also one-third of the famed Three Sisters agricultural practice. Corn stalks make a trellis for beans, while pumpkin enjoys the shade underneath. Each plant supplies a nutrient to the soil that the other one needs, so the soil stays naturally healthy and fertile, while the produce provides invaluable nutrition to people. It just makes sense.

I have published this recipe before, but this time I include more substitutions if you don’t have a nearby source for Latin style ingredients. Check your “International foods” aisle for prepared sofrito – Goya has a wide reach and its sofrito is used by Caribbean Latin cooks all over, so you are in good company with this shortcut.

The new substitution of cooked ham steak for the salt pork reflects what I’ve been doing since I can’t find the kind of cooking pork I like. It is neat and tidy, fairly cheap, adds good flavor, and the extra can be frozen for another day (the cooked ham steaks are super-easy to chop fine or mince when frozen).

If you don’t find calabaza (and in fact the one that made me whip up this pot of beans was a Jamaican style and not quite what I like, but perfectly serviceable), acorn squash is my favorite substitute.

Note: With the leftovers I make quesadillas or nachos…yum. Also goes great with rotisserie chicken!

Don’t be put off by the number of ingredients; once you do the prep, you are almost done.

Ingredients

  1. 1lb calabaza caribeña (Caribbean pumpkin) OR 1 lb. acorn squash, washed, cut in half, seeds removed and cut into big chunks (you can cut the rind off before boiling or peel it off after). It should be boiled for 15 minutes, or until tender. Set aside and reserve ½ cup cooking liquid.
  2. ½ lb salt pork, diced (don’t discard the hard rind, just score the fat as best you can). You can also use ham steak – readily available in the supermarket (4 oz cooked ham is a worthy substitute)

3. SOFRITO

(sofrito is the roux, the mirepoix, the basic saute seasoning of Puerto Rican cooking and is very difficult to reconstruct in the mainland U.S., which is why Goya makes a fortune selling it in jars. So if you can get most of the ingredients for sofrito at the local bodega/supermarket, then do this! –actually, quadruple or quintuple it and freeze it in ice cube trays for use later. Otherwise, buy commercial sofrito and use a couple of heaping tablespoons)

½ onion, minced (about ¾ Cup)

3 cloves garlic, minced

1 cubanelle (long green Italian cooking) pepper, seeded and diced

Five or six ajíes (non-spicy green peppers that look exactly like scotch bonnets/habaneros, but are not at all spicy! Taste them! They are hard to find but Latin supermarkets often have them), seeded and diced. Use another cubanelle – the redder the better — if you can’t get these.)

Five or six hojas de recao – culantro leaves- chopped. (Not to be confused with cilantro, these look like dandelion leaves without the curvy sides. They are hard to get, usually come from Costa Rica and their potency disappears quickly after cutting. I actually grow my own in the summer, which takes forever and yields very little in my part of the world. If you find them, use them as soon as you get them home! If you can’t find them, buy the sofrito WITH culantro)

3 Tbs tomato paste or Latin style tomato sauce/salsa de tomate (optional)

1 Tbs dried oregano (2 Tbs fresh)

2 Tbs chopped fresh cilantro (optional)

  1. two 15-oz cans pink beans (habichuelas rosadas), rinsed and drained

DIRECTIONS

While you are boiling the calabaza, heat the pork in a heavy pot. Cook it through and remove the scored rind. Leave the diced meat. Add a bit of olive oil, if necessary, then sauté the sofrito ingredients until tender, adding optional tomato at the end. Add beans. Add cooked calabaza and the reserved liquid. Cook for 15 minutes and serve on white or brown rice.

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The Chicken Dance (Chicken Cutlets Meunière)

22 Feb

You know we are frequent visitors to my friend, Pam’s, where the kids play while we fuss in the kitchen and try to reassure one another that whatever inadequacies we think we have as parents are not going to cause permanent damage to said children’s psyches or emotionally cripple them or lead to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or cause some such long-term catastrophic effect that will require years of therapy and narcotics to overcome.

Foreground: chicken breast, background: browned butter

It’s not all about anxiety. We also talk about our new projects and ventures (I’ll be telling you about some of mine in the next couple of weeks!) and brainstorm ideas for one another. Now that the children are getting older, there is more space and time to dream about a different future and it is fantastic to have people cheering from the sidelines. It’s good fun and of course it all happens in the kitchen.

And then we all sit down to dinner.

The kids have recently developed a new way to show appreciation when they like the food. They get up and dance! This, of course, makes me feel like a rock star (Everybody get your hands up!). So far so good, but last week we had two additional children who were staying over at the table with us. Is there any tougher audience than a collection of other people’s kids?

I tried this adaptation of a chicken recipe from The Minimalist (The man behind The Minimalist is one of my food and writing heroes – Mark Bittman). The only thing minimal about this chicken was the effort and the leftovers; the flavors were big and the chicken juicy and sure enough…all five kids got up and danced! Admittedly, this can become annoying when they won’t sit back down or someone looks like they are dangerously close to mooning the table or they start squealing too. But it is flattering and festive and fun and thus, today’s title: The Chicken Dance…corny, but hey, what’s a little corniness amongst friends?

We had rice, asparagus spears (oiled up and roasted in the oven for 15 minutes at 350°), and salad on the side. Triumph on the dance floor!

Chicken Cutlets Meunière

6 boneless, skinless chicken breasts (about three lbs), pounded down to cutlets if you want them to cook more quickly

Salt and black pepper

About ½ cup flour or cornmeal for dredging*

Vegetable oil for frying (Bittman also suggests clarified butter)

2 Tbs butter for browning (optional)

1 Tbs fresh lemon juice

2 Tbs minced parsley

Heat a 12-inch skillet (nonstick if you’ve got) over medium high for two minutes. Meanwhile, sprinkle the chicken breasts with salt and pepper and set up the flour or cornmeal on a plate for the dredging.

Pour the oil into the skillet so it is about 1/8” deep and turn the heat to high. When the oil is hot, coat the chicken thoroughly in the flour or cornmeal you have set up on the plate. Add each to the pan as you dredge. You will probably have to do two rounds.

Cook until the chicken is nicely browned (3-4 minutes on each side if the breasts are pounded thin; 6-7 minutes on each side if they are thick). Lower heat if you are getting scorching!

Meanwhile, melt the optional butter over medium heat until nut brown.

When the cutlets are done, drain on papers towels then transfer to a warm platter, drizzle with lemon, and sprinkle with most of the parsley. At the very last minute, drizzle with browned butter and the last of the parsley.

*For variety, season the flour or cornmeal with your favorite flavors – curry, Italian herbs, herbes de Provence, cayenne pepper – it’s up to you.

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