I’m in Anaheim this weekend, hanging with a bunch of librarians. It’s the annual American Library Association meeting, and I’m currently sitting in a very air conditioned hotel room right down the street from Disneyland. So far, this has been a great trip, although it would be much better if Sean were with me. I did get to sit next to a pool this afternoon, so it officially feels like summer.
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Monthly Archives: June 2012
Any-Way-You-Like Salmon Burgers
It’s summer, and totally time for grilling. And that means burgers, of course. But what do you do if you’re trying to cut back on red meat? You make burgers out of other things that are not meat. Like salmon! (Ok, I know some people do consider fish a type of meat. I consider it health food, and these are a lighter, healthier alternative to beefy burgers, even if they aren’t straight up vegetarian.)
This basic recipe is from Mark Bittman, and what I love most about it is that it’s so adaptable. I made this recipe once as written, and another time with a teriyaki and ginger bent. I’m looking forward to experimenting with many combinations of flavors this summer. We are going to stretch the limits of burgers, my friends.
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Lime and Honey Beet Salad
Beets can be challenging to cook with. They don’t play well with other foods, and will dominate an entire dish with their vibrant pinkness. Their flavor is distinct: deep and earthy and sweet. They have a wonderful texture, so silky smooth, but firm. When we get them in our CSA box, I think, crap. What am I going to do with these guys? Then I discovered Dorie’s recipe for Lime and Honey Beet Salad. Now I always know what I’m going to do with the beets.
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Mushroom, Broccoli, and Goat Cheese Pasta
I usually consider cooking to be a relaxing, almost meditative activity. But sometimes, life needs to be easier. There are days when I want dinner to be quick and to require very little thinking, and that’s often when I (and you, too, I suspect) turn to pasta. Pasta is the king of the quick and easy dinner. You can mix almost anything into a bowl of pasta and it will turn out great. It requires few dishes, and a minimal amount of time, leaving you the rest of your evening to unwind and feel refreshed enough to face the rest of the week.
The best easy pasta dishes bring together different flavors and textures, and end up so wildly colorful and bright tasting that you can hardly believe it only took 20 minutes to get it on the table. This particular pasta dish absolutely achieves that objective. The mushrooms and pasta are chewy and tender, the broccoli big and crunchy, and it’s all tied together with a little slip of cream and goat cheese. The sun-dried tomatoes and basil bring big blockbuster summer flavor to the party.
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Friday Favorites
It’s still Friday! It counts! Today was a long one. Not a bad one. Just…long. Thus, my very first Friday Favorite is the very fact that it is Friday. Friday!
Ok, for reals.
Right now I am loving our CSA. Look at that bounty! We get a box every week from Full Belly Farm, and it’s a real treat. Sad fact is, Sean and I rarely manage to make it to the Farmers’ market. I wish we did, but we don’t usually get out of the house early enough. With a CSA, I can still get my local organic goodies, and it’s like a present every week. If you’ve never joined a CSA, a definitely encourage you to try it. You can find one near you at Local Harvest.
And while I’m on a produce kick:
I am so excited whenever I see the first bags of cherries at the market. I remember coming up to San Francisco when I was in college, and when cherry season came around my friend would buy a huge plastic cup of them at the corner market and we would walk around the city eating and talking about all the ridiculous things college kids talk about. Cherries are the best.
To counteract all that healthy food, I had a need-comfort-food kind of day this week, so I made tamale pie.
I know it doesn’t look appealing, but trust me on this one. Tamale pie is a creamy, casserole combination of cornmeal, spiced meat, tomatoes, and some other things we don’t need to mention, and it is so good. It always reminds me of my friend Crystal, from whose grandma I learned the recipe. It makes me feel warm and cozy, and thankfully, it makes a ton, so I have comfort food leftovers if I need them again.
I am also loving these new shoes. I’ve been coveting them for a long time, and I finally just went ahead and bought them. They are so cute! But also kind of elegant and lovely. And holy moly, my feet are white.
And my final favorite: Nostalgia. This week I rediscovered a blog that I wrote when I was in my twenties. This thing is still around, and I even still update it, very sporadically. But I spent an evening (or two) this week going back through the posts from 2003 and thereabouts, and remembering my move to Boston and my impassioned political years and my underemployed years and, well, it was a good bit of reminiscing. I’ve been blogging for a long time (I actually started my first blog-like website, before blogging software existed, back in 1998). And I like having that record. I like sharing parts of myself with the world this way, even if sometimes it stresses me out or makes me feel uncertain.
I also realized, in perusing these pages from long ago, that I have always had a penchant for making lists of things that make me happy. It’s nice to know that some things never change.
Happy weekend! I hope you enjoy some of your favorite things today.
Classic Beef and Bean Chili
I think it is fairly well documented that I am a fan of chili. It’s one of the foods I remember most from my childhood, and might be the first thing I learned to cook. I’ve hosted an annual chili party for at least five years. I’ve tried many different recipes, and one of the things I love most about chili is its versatility, but there is one recipe I come to again and again, the recipe that I’m ready with at a moment’s notice, the chili I can make in my sleep. And somehow I have never shared it. I think it’s time to fix that.
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Camping in Mendocino
When I was a kid, we camped a lot. My parents were young and un-monied, with three children and families who lived far away. Several times a year, we packed our car with tents, sleeping bags, and our big wooden camping gear box, and hit the road visiting state parks from California to Washington to South Dakota. We went to the desert and the mountains, camped with friends and with family, and wore our olive green canvas nine-man tent into the ground. I have many fond camping memories from my youth, but after I left home, I never camped again. Until last weekend.
Moving to California unearthed Sean’s Mountain Man desires, and we’ve been stocking up on camping gear for the last five months, just waiting for summer. In March, we reserved a spot in Mendocino County with our friend Eunice and started getting excited. And finally, the day came. We packed up the car, hit the road, and drove up through Sonoma County, the Anderson Valley, and Mendocino before we reached our site at MacKerricher State Park, just north of Fort Bragg.
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Friday Favorites: Foodie Reading
Reading is a pleasure that is right up there next to eating: I cannot imagine my life without it. Books are transporting, engaging, enlightening, and totally enjoyable. When I imagine a perfectly relaxing day, there is always a book there. Over the last few years, my reading as shifting squarely into the food writing camp. Sure, I still read other books (I just finished Vanity Fair
Because it’s the weekend, the best time for reading (and because I finally finished that book; seriously, it took forever), I thought this Friday I would share with you some of my favorite food books.