Upside-Down Pear

One of my pets has been ill, and had to be hospitalized somewhere quite a ways from my home. On the upside, I got to see what it would be like to commute from a suburb every day. On the downside, we ate out a lot.

Which meant that we both ended up craving some decent vegetables — we tend to eat a lot of veggies, and restaurants generally don’t cut it in that area.

So, tonight, I made a nice light salad for dinner.

Highly Modifiable Green Bean Salad

• about 3-4 handfuls fresh green beans, cut up & blanched
• about 1/4 to 1/3 red onion, sliced thin
• some sweet or hot pickled peppers (I used Peppadews), chopped
• salt & pepper, to taste
• extra virgin olive oil, to taste
• red wine vinegar
• 1 regular-size can tuna

Mix together.

It’s one of those recipes easily modified for taste: take out the peppers, add olives. Throw some mustard in there, if you like. Don’t eat fish? Put in hard-boiled egg or white beans or thoroughly cooked French lentils instead. Sliced fennel? Crumbled crisp bacon? Why the heck not? Put some good-quality cheese chunks on the side (I highly recommend this). Hate green beans? Well…once you replace those, it’s just a Highly Modifiable Salad, not a Highly Modifiable Green Bean Salad. But I suppose you could put some lettuce in there, if you’ve got your heart set on it.

Nat has written an excellent post on pastrami sandwiches. Go, and be enlightened.

So, I have a corkboard in my pantry, and in addition to things like “petsitter’s business card” and “calendar”, it had a zillion and a half recipes tacked up to it. Some of them I’d clipped, some of them were handwritten versions of things I have in my recipe database, some were inherited from my mother. They’re all things I want to make fairly often and/or don’t want to lose, ever.

I had so many that I had run out of pushpins and board space, and the recipes were stacked 3 deep, which meant I could never find anything. Today, as I tried to find a place to tack up the sourdough pancake recipe, I remembered that I’d bought some expanding notebook jobbies for another project and had one left over.

The notebook is sort of a cross between a Trapper Keeper and a scrapbook, and so I glued the recipes onto backing (if they were on small paper) or slipped them into plastic casings (if they were on large paper), stuck ‘em in the notebook, and wrote “Recipes” on the front in silver Sharpie.

Now my board is empty and my recipes are safe. It’s not clear to me why this didn’t occur to me before. Perhaps I am about as sharp as a marble. Still, if you have a corkboard full of recipes that you need to hand, or just want your most common recipes always to hand, it’s worth a try…

I’ve spent the past two weeks at my in-laws’ place. My mother-in-law is a wonderful cook and generally great fun; we had a grand old time in the kitchen (in addition to a grand old time hiking, biking, swimming, and driving a beat-up Jeep along the beach).

Some food highlights: oysters, all local, including oysters my MIL could identify by sight (”Those are West Tisbury oysters; they always have those weird shells.”); meltingly-ripe heirloom tomatoes with balsamic vinegar; perfect just-picked sweet corn; puff pastry shells filled with lemon curd and pistachios; cannelloni and osso bucco; fresh sweet hardshell lobster (this one attacked me post-mortem, leaving a half-inch cut on my hand, but it was tasty all the same); crabcakes; crisp roasted fingerling potatoes.

The two weeks was topped off with a fabulous dinner at the Sweet Life Cafe - more heirloom tomatoes, delicately flavored duck breast, cool, delicious potato salad.

If it weren’t for my cats, I might never have come home.

I’ve been meaning to start a food-specific blog for a long time. My current food writing is scattered over various Livejournals, a few Diaryland entries, some mailing lists, and in disorganized files on my hard drive, and I wanted to make it all available in one convenient location. Some of you who have been following my journal may see some repeats as I get organized, and I apologize. I hope there will be enough new material to keep you interested.

There is a Livejournal syndicated feed available: http://www.livejournal.com/users/upsidedownpear/

Welcome to Upside-Down Pear!