Upside-Down Pear

Tonight, I made goblaki — stuffed cabbage rolls — and that always leaves me with the center of the cabbage leftover — a chunk about the size of my two fists. I also had some medium-sized potatoes that were starting to look at me, so here’s what I did.

Roasted potatoes & cabbage

• 2 strips bacon, chopped up
• Some medium-to-small potatoes, peeled & cut into chunks
• The middle half of a cabbage, cut into chunks about the same size as the potatoes
• Paprika, marjoram, black pepper, & salt (or whatever spices you like)

Preheat oven to 350F.

In an ovenproof skillet, fry the bacon. Add the cabbage, potatoes, and spices and stir well; you want the veggies well-coated in bacon fat. If there is not enough, add some olive oil. Cover the pan with lid or aluminum foil and put in oven for 45 minutes. Remove lid/foil, stir, & cook another 15 minutes without the lid/foil.

I used the same spices I tend to put in goblaki, because I already had them out, and served the dish with sour cream, but that’s just me. Next time, I should use more spices, and cut up some onions to roast at the same time.

I’ve been busy. A week after my new kitchen was finished, so was the baby I’d been baking. He’s six months old now, and although I’ve had time to write posts, I haven’t had the energy!

To try to get myself back into the groove, I am going to tweet the dinners I cook. If you’d like to see them, you can follow udp_dinner on Twitter!

Before…and after. The comparison shots aren’t quite fair, because very little was back into the kitchen when I took the “after” photo — but keep in mind that in the “before” photo, everything is put away, except for the contents of the dish drainer! That is what the kitchen looked like scrubbed clean and put together!

By the way, if you are in the Pittsburgh area, the work was done by James Gyre & a crew he put together — if you want his contact info, drop me a line.

I’ve just spent my first real time cooking since April. I’ve got shepherd’s pie, braised pork ragu, roast fingerling potatoes, and a rhubarb dessert I made up on the fly all cooling in the kitchen. Later, some of the ragu will go over a dish of manicotti & spinach.

The new dishwasher’s running, but I have to concentrate to hear it. The dining room is still a disaster area.

First recipe out of the new kitchen — as usual for me, with only vague measurements:

Rhubarb Cobbler with Tapioca

• enough rhubarb to fill a large pie plate (maybe 3 cups?), chopped into 1″ chunks
• 2 eggs
• some milk
• 1 cup flour
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup dark brown sugar
• some cinnamon, maybe 2 tsp or so
• some small tapioca pearls, maybe 1/2 cup or so
• 2 tbsp butter, melted
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tsp baking powder
• salt & black pepper

Preheat oven to 350F.

Put chopped rhubarb into pie plate with brown sugar, eggs, half the cinnamon, some salt & pepper, the tapioca pearls, and some milk. Mix well and spread evenly.

Stir together flour, white sugar, the rest of the cinnamon, a pinch of salt, and baking powder. Add melted butter, vanilla, and enough milk to make a batter slightly more liquid than a drop biscuit batter.

Spread batter over rhubarb mixture. Bake at 350F for 1 hour. Let cool on counter.

One of the first things we bought when we bought our house was a Weber kettle grill; we had visions of steaks and burgers and skewers of vegetables on hot summer evenings, with cool beer to wash everything down.

After a while, we got more ambitious: let’s grill a leg of lamb! Let’s make the entire meal, including dessert, on the grill! (Note: that last turns out to be a bad idea, in general.)

And then: let’s make a whole chicken on the grill! For Nat’s birthday!

Of course, none of our cookbooks had a grilled chicken recipe in them, and the ones I found on the web made me frown. So off I went to the closest bookstore to my old workplace: Caliban.

It’s a used bookstore; I’m fond of it because it tends to have a lot of old newspapers and magazines as well as interesting books. It also has the usual used-bookstore cruft, of course, but I almost always find a gem wandering through its shelves. Luck was with me, because there on the shelf, in like-new condition, was a slim glossy volume: Chicken on the Grill. Inside the cover, in soft pencil, was written $6-. I flipped through it; it contained a lot of advice about the best way to grill various types of poultry, tips & tricks, and shiny recipes with shiny pictures.

It came home with me, and that weekend, we made Nat his birthday chicken. Since that weekend, years ago now, we’ve made a number of recipes from the book, and never once, not once, had them go wrong. It’s become one of my very favorite cookbooks; if you enjoy grilled chicken (or turkey or duck or Cornish hens), you could do worse than snap up a copy.

I made some apple muffins to use up some aging apples — just put chunks of apples and some spices into a generic plain muffin recipe, and topped them with turbinado sugar. We ate some muffins for breakfasts for a few days, and then got bored and forgot about them.

A week later, I pulled the bag of muffins out of the fridge; they were no longer fresh enough to eat on their own, but I didn’t want to waste them. Instead, I made bread pudding out of them!

Some people maintain that you should only make bread pudding with yeast bread, but this seems silly to me; I have never had any problems making it with quickbreads. This recipe makes individual puddings cooked in ramekins, but you could make it in a larger dish as well; it may need more cooking time in a larger dish.

Apple Muffin Bread Pudding

• 4 leftover apple muffins
• small handful dried sour cherries
• 2 eggs, beaten in a measuring cup
• enough cream and/or milk to fill the measuring cup to about 1 1/4-1 1/3 cups
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tsp lemon extract

Preheat oven to 350F.

Tear the muffins into pieces and place the pieces in 6 ramekins. Sprinkle the dried cherries over them. Combine the beaten eggs, the milk, and the extracts well, then pour into the ramekins.

Cover ramekins with aluminum foil and place in oven.

Bake for 40 min, uncover, and bake 10 minutes more. Serve puddings warm.

Israeli couscous is a larger-sized couscous that looks a little bit like pearl barley. It is toasted, which some people think gives it a nutty flavor; to me, it tastes faintly sweet more than nutty. It makes a great summer salad, but I like to serve it warm in all seasons. This recipe is particularly good as a bed for an entree or vegetable in a rich sauce: it has enough flavor to stand up to a sauce, but not so much that it will clash.

Israeli couscous with cinnamon & bay

• 1/2 medium yellow onion, chopped
• 1 cup Israeli couscous
• 1 cup chicken broth or stock
• 1 cinnamon* stick
• 1 bay leaf
• 2 tsp dried parsley
• extra-virgin olive oil
• salt (if using unsalted broth or stock)

Over medium-high heat, sautee the chopped onion in the olive oil. When it turns translucent, add chicken broth, cinnamon stick, bay leaf, and parsley. When the broth starts to bubble, add the couscous, turn the heat down to low, cover, and simmer for 9 minutes. Remove from heat, but leave cover on for another minute. Fluff with a fork, remove cinnamon and bay leaf, and serve.

* For this recipe, use cassia, not true cinnamon. What’s the difference? Cassia is the regular cinnamon easily found in most US grocery stores; it has hard dark reddish-brown sticks. True cinnamon is much harder to find and its sticks are soft, light-colored, and flaky. A lot of people only know what true cinnamon tastes like from eating cinnamon candy or gum. Why am I bothering to clarify? Because I often use true cinnamon, and if I look at this recipe in a year I want to know which I used!

We’ve used a microwave cart, our old kitchen table, and the big wooden cutting board across the stove burners to cobble together a workspace for the next few weeks. We have a microwave, a toaster, an electric kettle, an espresso machine, and an electric skillet.

As I was making tonight’s dinner (watercress salad with goat cheese, pancetta, and potatoes), I realized that aside from a lack of running water and access to all my pots & pans, this makeshift kitchen is very similar to the original kitchen.

Which I suppose is why we’re redoing the kitchen…

It’s Carnival. I’m 7 months pregnant. And Monday, demolition starts on our old kitchen, to make way for the new one. Our new water heater gets installed Monday, as well.

The dumpster will fit in the driveway. I’m frantically clearing the basement and the dining room to make way for the things that will need to go there or move for the kitchen. I’m also trying to do the Alumni Thing.

Good luck to us!

I’ve queued up a few posts for the Time Of No Kitchen. Let’s hope everything comes out intact on the other side.

When planning this week’s meals, I had leftover channa masala to use up — but not enough for a dinner on its own. It needed either a side, or to be a side.

I also had boneless skinless chicken breasts in the house; I almost never have these since we get most of our chicken whole. I wanted to use those up, as well. Each piece was about a half-pound and had a very fat end and a thin end, so cooking them evenly was not fun.

So, I took one piece of breast meat and cut it into two thinner fillets (one shorter and fatter, one longer and thinner). I seared these in a hot skillet with some coconut oil, then added a small can coconut milk (5 oz. size), and various herbs & spices from my cabinet: some ground ginger, fenugreek, dried cilantro, and garam masala. I let the sauce simmer down as the chicken finished cooking, and served it alongside the channa masala, over rice.

For something made up on the fly, it came out wonderfully, though I’d make some changes for next time: get a better sear on the chicken, and cook it more thoroughly before adding the coconut milk, so that the milk doesn’t have to almost cook off before the chicken is done. That way, there will be more sauce for the rice!

This is a very quick side dish, by the way — I put the chicken on when there was 10 minutes left on the rice timer, and it finished about 30 seconds after the timer went off. Cutting the fillets took about 1 minute. Very good for a weekday night, or if you’re just really hungry…

One of the recipes in my last post called for pomegranate molasses. Depending on where you live, this might be annoying to find. Here are some options!

1. If you have a local Middle Eastern grocery or deli, check there. Mine is the Alwadi brand. Sometimes, other brands are called pomegranate syrup. Check the ingredients; it should have pomegranate juice and perhaps citric acid in it, not much else.
2. If you have access to a source of real grenadine — NOT colored corn syrup! — guess what real grenadine is? …yep, pomegranate syrup, with extra sugar in it. If you use this, cut the amount of sugar in the khoresht-e fesanjan
3. If you have no Middle Eastern grocery around, and no source of real grenadine, check your regular supermarket for pomegranate juice. You can cook it down into syrup; again, if you do this, cut the amount of sugar in the fesanjan.

The last week of February, I bought a butternut squash, but it didn’t end up in my menu planning for that week. I put it into the next week, and wanted to do something new and fun with it. Fortunately, Nat and I had recently purchased a Persian cookbook, Persian Cooking, by Nesta Ramazani. It was the first place I checked for things to do with my squash, and I found ghalieh-ya kadoo, translated as “lentil-squash casserole”, right away.

The recipe said “serves 5″, and called for two large butternut squashes. There are only 2 of us, and I only had 1 squash, so I halved the recipe. It still seemed suspiciously large, but I figured that if there were leftovers, I’d sort that out later.

The halved recipe turned out to make 6 side servings, easily, but for company or seconds, I would say it serves 4.

Ghalieh-ya kadoo
Modified from Persian Cooking, by Nesta Ramazani, p. 88
Serves 4.

• 1 1/2 medium yellow onion, sliced
• 1 1/2 tbsp butter
• 1 cup red lentils, rinsed & picked over
• 1 medium butternut squash, scooped out, peeled, and cubed
• 1 1/2 tsp lemon juice
• water
• salt & black pepper, to taste

Heat your pan to somewhere between what you’d use for a sweat, and what you’d use for a sautee. Melt the butter in it, then add the onions. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the onions are a beautiful golden-brown. Remove about a third of the onions and set aside.

Add the lentils and enough water to cover them; simmer until tender (red lentils cook fairly quickly — about 20 minutes), and then add the squash and simmer until those are tender (about another 20 minutes). You may need to add a little bit more water. Stir in the lemon juice and the salt & black pepper to taste.

Serve with the reserved onions on top.

To go with the dish, I made a small rack of lamb, rubbed with lemon zest and black pepper, and served the lamb sliced and fanned over a pillow of the lentils.

Now, of course, I had 4 servings left over, so I needed to figure out what to do with them. Back to the cookbook I went, and flipped through the many stews. I didn’t want to go out and buy anything, but luckily I do keep a fair amount of supplies from Salim’s Middle Eastern Foods around, so I figured I’d be able to find something.

Indeed, a recipe for khoresht-e fesanjan (“Chicken (or Lamb) in Pomegranate Sauce”) caught my eye. The original recipe says it is traditional to make this with duck or pheasant, but that it can also be made with chicken, lamb, or ground beef meatballs. Lamb, I had!

It called for walnuts, which…actually, I was out of. Pomegranate molasses? Sure thing. Walnuts, not so much.

I am, however, unafraid of substitution, and I did have almonds….

I also usually do not have beef broth around, but I’d made a rib roast the previous week and turned the leftovers into stock, so I was all set!

Sort-of khoresht-e fesenjan
Modified from Persian Cooking, by Nesta Ramazani, p. 139-140
Serves 2 greedy people who don’t want to share with anyone!

• 1 medium yellow onion
• 1 tbsp butter, plus a little
• approx. 1 lb lamb stew meat (we get our meat from a local farm, and they don’t label, so…), in 1″ cubes
• 1 cup beef stock
• 1/2 cup water
• 1 cup ground almonds
• 2-3 tbsp pomegranate molasses
• 1 tbsp sugar
• pinch saffron (or tumeric if you don’t have saffron)
• pinch ground cinnamon
• pinch ground nutmeg
• 1 tbsp lemon juice
• salt & black pepper to taste

Heat your pan to somewhere between what you’d use for a sweat, and what you’d use for a sautee. Melt the butter in it, then add the onions. When onions are golden brown, remove from the pan. Brown lamb in the pan, adding more butter if necessary. When lamb is browned, add onions back in, along with the beef stock. Cover and simmer for 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, stir together the water and almonds in a saucepan over low heat. Add the pomegranate molasses and sugar and stir well; bring to a very gentle simmer for 10 minutes, then remove from heat and cover.

When the lamb has simmered for 30 min, add the pomegranate sauce, spices, and lemon juice. Cover and simmer for another hour, stirring occasionally to make sure it does not burn. At the end of this time, the sauce should be thick and glossy and intensely flavored. Adjust seasoning with salt and pepper (or with sugar or pomegranate molasses if it is too sour or sweet for you).

The lamb was fork-tender by this point, and the sauce over the ghalieh-ya kadoo was heavenly. Next time, I’m going to have to make a larger batch, and freeze it for lunches!

And after all that, I still have two servings of ghalieh-ya kadoo left. What to do…

One thing I always meant to do, but never quite got around to before I got laid off, was writing up weekly dinner menus. They’ll help keep me organized! They’ll prevent me from forgetting what vegetables I have in the drawers! They’ll let me know what I need to buy!

Except it was One More Thing on top of doing my job and keeping the house clean and maintaining a marriage. Sometimes I’d write up three days or so, and then one of us would have a bad day at work and screw it — we were going out for Ethiopian, or ordering in Indian, and then I never seemed to get back on track. This was particularly a problem during the farm box months (which is more than half the year), because the farm boxes have so many veggies in them that if you don’t keep on top of it, you’re hip-deep in slightly spoiled food before you know it.

It’s easier now to work menu planning into my life — now that there’s less need for it, of course! Still, I enjoy it more than I thought I would.

Sample Weekday Menu

Dinner menu, Feb 23-27
Mon: chicken cottage pie
Tues: roast beef, swiss chard
Weds: pork chops, asparagus
Thurs: leftover roast, sauteed carrots
Fri: red sauce (sausage & pepper), pasta

Things are still subject to change, to unexpected bobbles in life, to unexpected leftovers — this past Monday, I halved a recipe for a 5-serving Persian dish called ghalieh-ye kadoo, and still ended up with enough leftovers that I had to figure out what else to serve with it last night…and I’ve still got 2 servings left. (Maybe the recipe meant 5 servings as a main course?)

But with this kind of planning, it’s a lot easier to know what I have left, what I need to accommodate, and where everything is going!

I haven’t posted in a while, because November and December got more-stressful-than-usual, with family illnesses and so on.

I cooked for my mother’s 60th birthday party, which food was devoured by the hordes, and helped out at my in-laws’ while my father-in-law was recovering from surgery. January’s been a discombobulated month, but despite a nasty cold I’m starting to get back into the swing of things!

Today, I opened my freezer to select something to defrost for dinner, and noticed the neatly-wrapped chunks of leftover smoked pork butt. Upstairs it came! But what to have with it? My fresh produce drawer was nearly-empty, and the pork is quite heavily spiced, so I didn’t want to clash with it.

Friends suggested baked beans; a review of my bean drawer revealed that I need to make a bean-buying run, for both canned and dried varieties. I did have two cans of pinto beans.

I didn’t feel like making any of my normal bean recipes, either, so I turned to Google for inspiration. On cooks.com, I found Baked Beans (Beer) and decided to go from there.

Here is what I ended up with:

Maple Baked Beans with Beer

• 2 cans pinto beans
• 1/2 c. onion, chopped
• 1 tsp. dry mustard
• 1/2 c. tomato ketchup
• 1/2 c. brown sugar
• 1/4 c. maple syrup
• 1 c. brown ale (I used Peak Organic Nut Brown)
• 2 bay leaves
• Frank’s Red Hot and salt to taste

Preheat oven to 350F.

Drain & rinse beans thoroughly. Put in oven-safe dish. Mix in rest of ingredients, except Red Hot and salt.

Cover and bake for 1 hour, stir, bake 1/2 hour longer, stir. Uncover and stir. If, when stirred, they seem to be in a thickish sauce, they are done. If they are still wet, cook uncovered 10-15 minutes; you do not want the beans burning or drying out, so keep an eye on them.

Adjust taste with Red Hot, then with salt. (We used 4 dashes of “Xtra Hot” Red Hot, and no extra salt. Your mileage will almost certainly vary.)

Last night, I had a wild hair for a grilled cheese sandwich. Not just any grilled cheese sandwich, indeed, but one on cheap puffy white bread, with processed American cheese. A terrible grilled cheese sandwich, that’s what I wanted.

Off I went to the grocery store, to purchase pre-sliced processed cheese and soft white bread. (Some chocolate thumbprints fell into my basket. Don’t know how.)

Today, when I went to cook up the sandwiches for lunch, Nat expressed a desire for tomato soup to dip them in. I don’t keep canned tomato soup around, and I wasn’t changing out of my comfy weekend lounging-about pajamas to go get some. So, instead, I made a very simple tomato soup from chopped onions, good canned tomatoes (since fresh tomatoes are out of season), parsley, extra virgin olive oil, salt & pepper. Once it had simmered a bit, I whirred it all around in a blender and thinned it with water; we added cream tableside to taste.

The homemade, semi-rustic soup went surprisingly well with the oozy, buttery, overly-processed sandwiches. I’m not sure this is the equivalent of wearing an H&M dress with Prada shoes, but it amused me nonetheless.

I had some leftover roasted stuffed leg of lamb to use up, and no side dishes to go with it. Today was farm box day, though, and the farm box came with two small Italian eggplants and some white mushrooms. They seemed to call out for a quick, light treatment.

I cubed and purged the eggplant with salt, before rinsing it and cooking it over medium heat in extra-virgin olive oil. I added cubed onion and mushrooms, fresh-ground black pepper, granulated garlic, and a dash of cayenne pepper, fresh parsley, and balsamic vinegar.

It was light and fresh, yet earthy and autumnal: perfect for October in Pennsylvania.

Balsamic Eggplant & Mushroom

• 2 small Italian eggplants, cubed
• 1/2 medium yellow onion, cubed
• 4 large white mushrooms, cubed
• a nice handful of fresh parsley
• granulated garlic, black pepper, cayenne pepper, and salt to taste
• balsamic vinegar to taste
• extra-virgin olive oil for cooking
• kosher salt, for purging

Cube all vegetables, and place eggplant cubes in a colander over a sink or bowl. Salt the cubes and let the purge for a half-hour or so, shaking them every few minutes. Rinse thoroughly with water.

Heat olive oil over medium heat. Add rinsed eggplant cubes and stir to coat with oil. Cook until eggplant is soft, then add onion and mushrooms; add more oil if necessary. As soon as the onions are translucent, stir in chopped parsley and seasonings to taste. Turn off the heat and add balsamic vinegar to taste.

One of the reasons I like keeping a variety of things around in the freezer is that it makes it easy to turn out a tasty meal even when I’m low on fresh produce. I forgot to go pick up my farm box this week, so I turned to my backup supplies.

In the fridge, I had lemongrass, Thai basil, about a cup of leftover chicken broth, the end of a bottle of Thai chili sauce, and the end of a jar of roasted chile curry paste.

In the pantry, I had potatoes, onions, garlic, and coconut milk.

In the freezer, I had chopped green bell peppers and shrimp.

Clearly, a nice shrimp and potato curry was in the offing!

I chopped the onions and garlic and lemongrass, and sauteed them with the green peppers in a little extra-virgin olive oil. I added the curry paste, chicken broth, chili sauce, and half the can of coconut milk, and let it all simmer together for a bit.

I peeled and chopped the potatoes and boiled them in salted water for 15 minutes, then scooped them into the simmering curry sauce to finish cooking. A few minutes before serving, I added chopped Thai basil and the defrosted, peeled shrimp. When the shrimp were done, so was the curry.

The only change I think I’d make in the future is that I’d put the lemongrass in as bundles; the tender part of it wasn’t quite tender enough, so we ended up picking it out in the end!

I also think that chicken chunks would work well in this, or stew beef — both would require alterations to the cooking method, though, since they’d take quite a bit longer to cook than the shrimp.

Weekend (and holiday) brunches are important in this household. Today’s was simple: a potato-leek frittata dressed up with the long-simmered red sauce I made yesterday.

I lined the small cast-iron skillet with thin slices of potato, gallette-style, cooked everything slowly, and ended up with a firm, creamy dish that lifted out of the pan perfectly.

• 1 medium potato
• white of one leek
• 4 eggs
• 1/4 cup cream
• Salt & pepper to taste
• extra-virgin olive oil

Set a pot of salted water to boil. Slice the potato thin — not quite as thin as you would for potato chips, but thin. When the water boils, put the slices in and let cook for about 5 minutes.

Meanwhile, slice the leek into discs, and sautee in olive oil. (I used the same small skillet for this step as for cooking the frittata.) I like to let them carmelize slightly before removing them from the heat (and from the pan, if you are using the same pan as I am).

Beat eggs with cream and season with salt & pepper.

Preheat oven to 350F.

Brush small oven-safe skillet with olive oil and place over medium heat. Remove potato slices from water with a slotted spoon and arrange in the bottom and sides of the skillet. When the potatoes are sizzling, add the leeks and then the egg mixture. Turn heat to low and let cook for about 5 min.

Put skillet into oven. After 4 minutes, check to see if center is set. If not, check back in another few minutes. When center is just barely set, switch oven to broil mode and broil the top until puffy and lightly browned (about 1 min).

Serve with a side salad or red sauce.

This evening, we picked up our farm box and headed home with it. In my head, I tried to count up what we had left from last week, what we’d need to make room for in the refrigerator, what meals I could make with this new bounty. August is always difficult for me; there’s too much food in the farm box to get around!

Since we had a new head of red cabbage, I decided to turn the older one in the fridge into the first braised red cabbage of the season. I chopped it and tossed it into the Dutch oven with some olive oil, salt, a lot of black pepper, caraway seeds, about a half-cup of dried currants, about a half-cup of water, and a solid glug of some fig-infused balsamic vinegar from my mother-in-law.

I let it simmer a bit, but I felt like it was lacking something. I toyed with adding onions, or sugar, or cider vinegar, or bacon, or chicken broth, or….

Finally, paralyzed by indecision, I resorted to the web; one of the first hits I got included all of the ingredients I’d been toying with. Hah!

Ingredients excerpted from “Braised Red Cabbage with Bacon”

• 1 medium head red cabbage
• 6 thick slices applewood-smoked bacon, or other smoked bacon, cut into lardons (about 1/4-by-1/4-by-3/4-inch pieces)
• 1 medium yellow onion, thinly sliced
• 2 tablespoons packed dark brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
• 1/3 cup apple cider vinegar
• 1 cup low-sodium chicken broth

I had some black forest bacon and a vidalia onion. In a separate pan (since the Dutch oven was already in use!) I fried the bacon, then tossed the pieces into the cabbage; while the onions fried in the bacon fat, I added some cider vinegar, brown sugar, and dijon mustard to the cabbage. When the onions were ready, in they went…and so did a nice dash of cayenne pepper. I left out the chicken broth, because I’d already added salt and water earlier.

It came out sweet and spicy and rich, with just a hint of autumn in the apple-and-mustard undertones.

Nat asked me particularly to write this one down before I forgot it, and I rather think that’s an endorsement. Next time, though, I’ll probably use the more traditional method in the recipe, rather than the after-the-fact adjustment method!

It’s hot out, and I don’t have central air.

I also hurt my leg at rugby practice.

So I’m not real big on standing over the stove right now.

Fortunately, it’s also mid-August, which means that my kitchen contained everything for one of my favorite summer dishes: green beans with garlic and tomatoes.

The garlic is sweated in extra-virgin olive oil, so I don’t have to stand over the pan like I do when sauteeing; the dish is easy to ignore while you do other things, and it’s tasty hot or cold. The tomatoes add a summery, fresh kick to what is otherwise an everyday kind of dish.

Summer Garlic Green Beans

• 1 lb green beans, ends snapped off, cut into 1″ lengths (or left whole, or haricots verts…)
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 medium tomato, diced
• extra virgin olive oil
• salt
• black pepper

Heat about a tablespoon of the olive oil on low heat. Add a little salt and the minced garlic, spread it around, and let sweat for about 5 minutes. Add green beans and tomatoes, and increase the heat to medium. Every few minutes, give it a good stir around. When the beans are bright green, add the black pepper, adjust the salt to taste, and give it another good stir. Turn off the heat.

You can let it sit there and continue to cook itself in its own warmth, or serve it immediately, or let it cool down and eat it cold with perhaps a dash of red wine vinegar. Personally, I like to time it so that it has been sitting about 5 minutes when dinner is ready for the table.

I’ve long been a fan of eggs with red sauce. When I was a child, I would toast an Italian roll with provolone cheese on it, fry up an egg, and make an egg-cheese-and-sauce sandwich for breakfast or weekend lunch. My sauce of choice in those days was the Newman’s Own “Sockarooni” that my mother stocked, and which I will also admit to eating straight with a spoon.

As an adult, I make my own red sauce, in the old-school simmering-for-hours way, and I’ll often fry eggs and dress them with some sauce for breakfast or brunch. Last week, I made a large batch of sauce with sausage in, and up until today I had two quart containers full in my refrigerator.

This morning, I was cranky and in no mood for any of my normal breakfast options. It was closing in on 11:30am, and nothing I thought of made me happy. I yanked two cookbooks from the shelf and flipped through them, and in Craig Claiborne’s The New New York Time Cookbook I found a recipe entitled “Les Oeufs en Cocotte aux Tomates (Eggs in ramekins with tomato sauce)”.

The tomato sauce in the recipe is not an Italian-style red sauce, but it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to use it in any case: I was going to steal the idea and the cooking method and use the sauce in my fridge.

• about 8-10 tbsp red sauce with sausage chunks (or your favorite red sauce)
• 4 eggs
• salt & pepper
• 4 slices toast

I placed 4 ramekins into a large Pyrex baking dish. Into the bottoms of the ramekins, I put a heaping spoonful of sauce, making sure there was a chunk of sausage in each, and reserving some sauce for topping later. Over each pile of sauce, I cracked an egg, and sprinkled with salt and pepper. I poured boiling water into the Pyrex dish until it came halfway up the side of the ramekins, and then popped the whole thing into a 400 degree oven until the eggs were just set. The original recipe said 10-12 minutes, but that was using hot tomato sauce; my sauce was just out of the fridge and slowed things down considerably — it took about 20 minutes.

I pulled it out of the oven, top-dressed the eggs with a little more sauce (reheated, of course) and served with toast fingers and cafe con leche.

Bliss!