Italian Sandwiches

This was a quick and simple meal. My wife made a salad.

And I put together some "Italian" sandwiches. In Italy

these would have been simpler. First some crusty bread.

I cut the middle third out, as the loaf was quite thick. We used

the middle thirds for toast the next morning with scrambled eggs.

I spread some of the pesto I'd previously made on one side, then

some sliced tomato (more on these later).

Followed by mozzarella, and in her case, proscuitto. Then into the

toaster oven.

The end result was delicious.

I'd come across these assorted heirloom tomatoes the other day.

They looked so pretty, I just had to have them.

Lemon Pasta

This is a light summery dish. I cut a fistful of parsley, as well as a collective fistful of sage, rosemary, and thyme, and finely minced it up. I got to use one of my favorite knives for this. It's shaped like a pair of cresent moons set in parallel, with a pair of handles on the ends. You rock it back and forth over a pile of fresh herbs, and then the herbs are minced. I also zested and then juiced a lemon, pressed some garlic, and halved a dozen grape-sized tomatoes.


Warm a generous amount of olive oil, and heat the garlic for a minute or two. DON'T brown the garlic. Remove from heat, then mix in the lemon juice and zest. Add the parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. Top with tomato halves and serve.

Pesto

We keep an herb garden on our deck. Some things do better than others. Rosemary is nearly immortal around here, and sage, oregano, thyme, and lavender all do spectacularly well.

Unfortunately, we have a difficult time with basil. This one's less emerald than I'd like it to be. In fact, parts are downright yellow. This afternoon, I trimmed it aggressively, and with the trimmed portions, I'm going to make pesto.

I start with a few cloves of garlic in a food processor. Oops, I meant to mince those.

It is, after all, a food processor.

I toasted some pine nuts and in they went.

Then as much basil as I could fit into the processor (very observant readers may notice that not all of that is basil. Five points for correctly guessing the secret ingredient du jour).

Some hard Italian cheese. I think this is a blend of parmesan, peccorino, and romano.

A turn or two of cracked black pepper.

Some olive oil.

Blend, then scrape down sides.

Repeat until smooth.

My
wife bagged it into five or six sandwich baggies, and we put them in the freezer. I plan to use them here and there for the next two months.

By the by, this whole process took twenty minutes.

Salmon, Redux

Tonight, we went with the cedar plank salmon I've previously mentioned. This
time I've got pictures.

We start by soaking the plank (it's about a fifth of an inch thick) in water for an hour or two. Lay the salmon on the plank, and then cover with brown sugar, pepper, and other select spices.


I learned how to tell when fish is done from my father in law. I look for the layers of tissue to begin to separate, so the side of the fish looks a bit like an accordion. In the process, the plank blackens and the sugar caramelizes, then burns. It ends up looking like this.

The finished product. Note the accordion effect.



My wife also made a delicious salad, and we had asparagus.

Tuesday, July 17

My carpool ran slow today, so dinner was rushed.

I made a pasta, and my wife made a salad. I sauteed some garlic, added some julienned zucchini and goat cheese, and mixed it with pasta and some parsley, basil, and sage. I also cooked some scallops in a small pan on the side for my wife. I think that next time I should use less butter to sautee scallops.

Wednesday July 11, 2007

A slightly unusual meal this evening. Sometimes, particularly in summer, we make a collection of not necessarily related platters of finger foods. Usually we have some sort of bread and cheese, some vegetable dishes, meat if she's lucky, and some fruit.

I made something in between a caprese and a salsa: tomatoes, onions, parsley, balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and some lemon juice. We put it on top of some toasted slices of french baguette.









My wife sliced up a nectarine and some gouda cheese:

We also had some corn. It was tasty, but didn't photograph well. The flash seems to reflect too much off of the kernels.

The corn, tomatoes, and nectarine were all from a roadside farm on the Eastern Shore. We picked them up Sunday afternoon on our way home. I'd give them a nice plug, but I don't remember their name. The corn was especially tasty, as Maryland Eastern Shore sweet corn tends to be. I doubt other states have corn this good.

Also, for future reference, July 11 is "Free Slurpee Day" at 7-Eleven. You can get a 7.11 ounce slurpee, for free. For unknown reasons, 7-Eleven employees HATE "Free Slurpee Day". Also, I don't drive past enough 7-Elevens on my commute.

So now I'm a restaurant critic

I never intended to do restaurant reviews, but that's right out the window.

Disclaimer: there are many words following that will be misspelled, incorrect, inconsistent, and possibly flat out wrong.

My wife and I went to Lebanese Taverna in Baltimore tonight. This may have changed my life. I knew I liked hummus and babaganush, but tonight I discovered that Lebanese food kicks ass. We had something called "mezza", which amounts to a platter with several small portions of different things. We had babaganush (eggplant pureed with olive oil and tahini), hummus (same thing, but chick peas instead of egplant), falafel (fried patties of chickpea and something green), mousakka (eggplant stewed in tomatoes), swiss chard in tahini sauce, tabouleh (parsley/tomatoes/wheat with olive oil), and grape leaves wrapped around something the waiter assured me was vegetarian. There were also some sausages fried with onions, a pastry containing beef, lamb, and pine nuts, and something that looked like a meaty falafel. We enjoyed an unassuming bottle of wine, which turned out to be perfect since it stayed out of the way of the riot of flavors going on with the meal. We finished off with Arabic/Turkish coffees and some baklava.

The food was amazing. Neither one of us knows much about Lebanese food (other than that it's similar to Egyptian), so there's the chance that we mixed up the condiments and did the Lebanese equivalent of spreading strawberry jam on a pepperoni pizza. I don't care even if we did. The babaganuch was very good, but the hummos was the best I've ever had. It had just a hint of sweetness to it, like someone was walking past carrying vanilla beans. The taboole was so fresh it brought tears to my eyes (partly because while we were at the beach, my parsley dried out and died, but mostly because it was so good). My wife enjoyed the sausage, but it didn't seem to be anything special. She was more fond of the pastry/meat (I think they may have been called "kibba"). Also, "Turkish" coffee, as far as I can tell, means "you aren't sleeping tonight. Tomorrow doesn't look good either. By the way, you can fly."

The wait staff was attentive, and seemed genuinely pleased to answer questions about the food. At one point, there was a translation error (strained yoghurt != sour cream), and our waiter seemed a little bit offended that we might mistake a staple of his native land's cuisine with a spoiled milk product. He went so far as to explain how to prepare several of the things we ate tonight.

We would have been hard pressed to break a hundred dollars, but we hit fifty without even trying. Well, throw in a generous tip, and we were close to a hundred, but we also had a bottle of wine, dessert and coffee. I someone's looking for a nice anniversary dinner I can't say enough good things about this place. You cannot find a place more tailor-made for mixed marriages (or marriage-like domestic arrangements) where one partner is vegetarian and the other not. In fact, it was that facet that caught my wife's eye when she read about this restaurant in the Sun.

Father in Law

My father in law is an intimidating presence in the kitchen. He's an excellent cook, and everything he tries seems to come out well. Keeping his daughter happily fed isn't impossible, but he has set the bar for success pretty high. So far as I know, he doesn't have any formal training, just a hunger and a willingness to try things. He's one of those people who can walk into a strange kitchen, one containing only a can of green beans, a cookie sheet, and some dried basil, and he'll somehow walk out having made lobster thermidore and a cheesecake.

He's everything I hope to become in the kitchen.

Guest Post

This is my father in law's description of his dinner tonight: As the former producer of the Ocean City Cooking Show, featuring clamming technics, clam chowder presentations, and Beef at the Beach, comments about this evenings presentations are in order. Please keep in mind that good food starts with good quality materials. Visit Bahama Mama's for fresh seafood. Miller Lite to start, followed by gin and tonics, with flounder fillets and blue crab backfin crabmeat, with lots of butter to create a cream sauce (use half and half), fresh Eastern Shore corn on the cob. A small amount of cream sauce in the crab to give it structure; whole flounder fillets covered with the crab; half a fillet on top; covered with the remainder of the sauce; baked at 375 for 25 minutes. Add a beautiful sliced tomato (knife action by Paul himself). Some rice. Fine meal indeed. Paul enjoyed a veggie burger heated in olive oil, topped with chedder cheese, on a fine bun. Add that sliced tomato. Enjoy.

Beach Food

We're in Ocean City for the weekend, staying with my in-laws. My father in law cooked tonight, so this is his handywork:

That's a flounder, stuffed with backfin crab meat, and some sort of cream sauce.


Naturally, I forgot to get a shot of the veggie burger. Here are the tomatoes and corn. There was also some less than photogenic rice. Which was unexpected, since it was a blend of white and wild rices with lentils and other bits of things.

Thursday, June 28

Another late day. We bought some salmon kabobs with a peach salsa, so I grilled that (and a veggie burger for myself). We planned on grilled zucchini, but it was slimy when I cut it up, so I decided to skip that. My wife made a salad, and we heated up some leftover risotto.

I'm not very good with the grill. You can see bits of salmon that remained on the surface when I turned the kabob.

The salmon had some white viscous fluid seeping out of it on the grill. Rendering fat? I'll confess that I have nothing but ignorance on this one.

Wegnesday, June 27

I didn't get home as early as I intended today, so dinner was a bit of a cop-out. Creamed spinach and a simple pasta. The pasta's one of my favorites, it's dead simple and usually goes over well.

Boil some angel hair pasta. We've tried various other noodles, but I don't think any of them work as well. Chop some tomatoes and mince some basil and oregano. Mix angel hair, tomatoes, spices, as much minced garlic as you can get your hands on, mozzarella cheese and some olive oil. It's easier to mix if you add a bit of each thing a little at a time, otherwise you can end up with a ring of pasta surrounding a cheesy garlic mass with tomatoes on the outskirts.

Tuesday, June 26

This was one of the days when we don't even try to do the whole mixed marriage thing. On the left is what turned into cream of asparagus soup, the right became a mushroom risotto. On the back burners are nearly identical pots of simmering vegetable stock, because it didn't occur to me that both dishes called for the same ingredient. I wasn't planning on pointing this mistake out, but my wife noticed it right away.

I'm surprised at how little dairy goes into cream of asparagus soup. Saute some onion, throw in some chopped asparagus. Add a bit of flour and then stock. Then pour the whole thing into a blender (important safety tip: make sure the blender is less than two-thirds full before turning it on. hot soup flying everywhere burns a little bit) and puree. Maybe liquefy. Either way, blender the crap out of it. Return to pot, throw in a splash of half-and-half. Pepper's a nice touch. Oh, and before you do any of this, remove and save the top bits of the asparagus. Blanche those, and throw them in after the rest of the soup gets blended.


The risotto came out very well this time, but I honestly don't have any idea why. In the past it's been hit and miss, but tonight it was creamy and delicious.

Tuesday, June 19

My in-laws came over for dinner. I made cedar plank salmon for everyone (veggie burger for me). I didn't get any photos of the salmon this time. It's pretty simple. You take a salmon steak and put it on a 1/4 inch thick plank of cedar. Spread some brown sugar and black pepper on the top. Spread it thick. Grill the whole arrangement until it looks done. It's probably a good idea to soak the plank beforehand, but I forgot and so ended up soaking it in the sink after I'd spread the brown sugar atop the salmon. Oh, and watch your eyes, the cedar smoke stings a bit.

I also make an aluminum foil tray and grilled some asparagus in it.

Since my wife and I just got back from a trip to Italy, we also made a Caprese salad. This is the simplest thing ever. Slice mozzarella and tomato, tear up some basil, and layer. Drizzle with olive oil. It's impossible to not make this look good.

I don't know if this applies to anyone else, but if so remember that your sister-in-law doesn't like tomatoes BEFORE she shows up.

Welcome

Hey. I'm a vegetarian. My wife is not. Here, I'll talk about what we do about that.