The sun has finally come out! It’s like “Enchanted April” - a month late. The wisteria is in bloom, the iris are all budding, the lilacs are (finally!) open, and the daphne smells so sweet it almost knocks us out every time we go up our front steps.
After a short trip out of town last weekend, we did a quick swing by the grocery store to get something easy for dinner. Pacific halibut is still looking wonderful, so I picked up a fillet and went home to peruse another of our new cookbooks, West Coast Seafood. This is the book we’ve been needing for a long time - it sometimes seems like all the really comprehensive fish books are either too elaborate for my sort of cooking, or they use fish that we simply never see in this part of the world (turbot? mackerel?). This new book seems like it strikes a nice balance between accessible and interesting, and it uses real fish that we can actually buy around here.
For my halibut, I picked an easy recipe that sounded good, wasn’t too involved, and also used up an old lemon that I didn’t want to waste. I zested the lemon over the fish, then sprinkled on fresh thyme leaves, salt and olive oil. The recipe was for grilled halibut, but we didn’t have time to fire up the grill that evening - so I put the fish in the oven along with the Yukon Gold potatoes I was roasting, and it came out perfectly - tender, juicy, just cooked through, with lots of clear lemon flavor.
I used the juice from the zested lemon to make a salad dressing, with olive oil, salt, pepper and chopped fresh basil. The lemony greens with the lemony fish were wonderful with the sturdy, crisp roasted potatoes. Also, I had just picked up a bottle of La Piece Sous le Bras chardonnay/viognier/roussanne, and it was magnificent with the fish and potatoes. A lovely, summery supper to finish out the weekend.
This is proving to be a mighty busy week. We kicked it off (after a full Monday back at work) with a cooking class featuring dishes from the Andalusia region of Spain. Brian Tolbert of the Dulce Plate did the cooking, we did lots of chopping and running around with plates.
To keep the guests from expiring from hunger right off the bat, Brian started with some fairly simple mussels cooked in a vegetable and wine broth. They were good, of course (fresh mussels, duh), but I would have liked a slightly heavier broth and a lot of bread to sop it up. Fortunately, there was more food coming…
The second course was quite solid: piquillo peppers stuffed with a mixture of yellowfin tuna and bechamel sauce, then dredged in egg and seasoned flour and fried in olive oil. Wowzers, these were good. I could eat a couple of these for a meal.
So we came back home from our Vancouver trip loaded down with new cookbooks, and of course I had to immediately find something new to cook. The first recipe that jumped out at me was a pomegranate molasses-marinated swordfish from the Casa Moro cookbook. Hey, I thought, we still have pomegranate molasses! And, as fate would have it, we were able to buy big fat steaks of Hawaiian marlin at the store - plus the weather was good enough for outdoor grilling!
To go along with the fish, the book recommended a pilaf, so I tried out the Moro recipe for rice with dill and pine nuts. It involved rinsing and then soaking basmati rice so that it took very little cooking - not a technique that I’d tried before, but it worked like a charm.
About two hours ahead of time, I combined pomegranate molasses, cinnamon, cilantro, garlic and salt in a pie pan and rubbed it all over the fish steaks, which then went back into the fridge. Then I measured out the rice, rinsed it several times and set it to soak in warm water and salt. J got the grill started, then sliced eggplant and rubbed it with olive oil and salt. (more…)
For one brief growing season, I worked at a greenhouse. It didn’t pay a lot, and I tended to bring my paycheck home in the form of plants. When we moved I brought many of them with me, and several are still thriving in the garden here, including this pretty exochorda shrub. It’s kind of an awkward plant to grow, since it has a long gangly habit, and despite its resemblance to orange blossoms it has no smell whatsoever. But when it’s in bloom it’s ever so pretty, and the flowering branches can be entwined through other bushes, up walls or over furniture.
A number of years ago, J worked for a summer as a delivery driver for a wonderful local bakery called La Vie En Rose. It meant that he had to leave for work at 1 am, which wasn’t so great; on the other hand, we ate a lot of really great bread that summer. The owner of the bakery occasionally gives cooking classes at Gretchens, and we finally got around to volunteering for one of these, which featured both sweet and savory bites and appetizers.
The philosophy of the class seemed to be, “life is short, eat dessert first.” So the first course included a puff pastry “daisy” filled with lemon cream, plus a fried wonton full of chocolate and banana. I particularly liked the daisy, because I am a sucker for lemon curd in most circumstances. (more…)
It’s a quandary. Every time we go into Vancouver or Seattle to eat we face the decision: try somewhere new, or go back to a restaurant that we know we love? We frequently opt for a new place, so as to expand our repertoire of great standbys for times when we just don’t want a challenge (like right after a long airplane flight). But some places are so great you just have to go back, if only to make sure they’re just as good as you remember.
We went to Cru a couple of years ago. The small plates/wine bar phenomenon hadn’t gotten nearly as widespread as it is now, and there was still a novelty factor in getting to choose a bunch of different dishes to share. We walked in off the street (through a very nondescript entrance), sat at the bar and proceeded to have one of the best dinners ever - all the more appreciated because we didn’t know what to expect. We’ve since eaten our way through a bunch of other great Vancouver restaurants, but Cru has remained our fondest memory, and we’ve always intended to go back.
So, we were in Vancouver last weekend, doing some damage at Barbara-Jo’s Books to Cooks (a dangerous shop if there ever was one), and decided that it was as good a time as any to check out Cru again. This time, of course, we made a reservation - but we made sure to sit at the bar again. It’s a great way of doing a small plates dinner, because the bartender is always handy to take your next order (although from what we’ve seen, Cru has great waitstaff). We started out with cocktails and a plate of bruschetta. (more…)
One of the joys of Sunday is doing our weekly grocery run and picking up something fresh for a quick but fun lunch at home - in other words, Not Leftovers! This salad is one of my favorites for a fast home lunch: butter lettuce dressed with a simple vinaigrette, split onto plates and topped with avocado slices and prawns cooked with garlic and spices. With this one we drank a Falanghina that was seriously on sale at the grocery store - it was lovely.
Prawns for salad
1/2 pound fresh large prawns, shelled
2 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
cumin
paprika
kosher salt
Dress your salad greens and arrange them on plates. Heat a goodly amount of olive oil in a saute pan. As it gets hot, add the garlic; when it just starts to sizzle, add the prawns. Give them a good shake of salt, cumin and paprika, and stir them around. When the shrimp are pink and curled up on themselves, dump them and their juices out onto the prepared salads.
I am such a sucker for iris, especially miniature dwarf iris. It’s probably just as well that they’re not real easy to find, although I’ve done quite a bit of damage through Monument Iris Gardens in Nebraska - he grows tons of great varieties. But they’re sturdy and early blooming, and they come in a wonderful range of jewel tones that really perk up the May garden. This one is called “Being Busy” - I love the bright blue beard.
I love scallops, and I love crêpes. When I saw a recipe in the April 2007 issue of Saveur magazine for buckwheat crêpes with scallops and scallop cream sauce, I knew I would have to make it at some point. We got around to it last week, on a rare sunny evening. We sat by the stove drinking white wine, frying scallops and eating them rolled in hot crêpes as they came out of the pan. Bliss!
We never remember which buckwheat crêpe recipe we like best, so this time J used Mark Bittman’s version from The Best Recipes in the World. The scallop sauce recipe was written to feed a vast number of people, so I edited it heavily to suit myself. The result was delicious, to say the least, but I’m not sure I would make it quite this way again. I’d rather eat my scallops whole and make a shallot-cream sauce to go on them, instead of using any of them in the actual sauce. But that’s just me - the pureed scallop did have a wonderful sweet flavor, and it’s definitely worth trying.
Scallops with Scallop Cream Sauce
adapted from Saveur magazine
Select a third of the scallops (I picked out the ugliest ones for this part). Pat them dry and season with salt and pepper. Fry them in a bit of butter until golden brown, then puree them in a heatproof container with the broth, wine and cream. Pour back into the pan and simmer until thickened. Salt to taste.
Cut the remaining scallops in half and fry as you go - two pieces per crêpe works well. Cook a crêpe, lay it on a plate and arrange the scallops on it, then spoon a good glop of the sauce on top. Asparagus is a good addition; leeks might be tasty as well. Roll up the crepe and eat.
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