A new radish keeper

I can't stay for long today. I'm in Maine, sitting on my parents' couch. It's hot and sunny and beautiful, and Fisher's on his bed at my feet, filling the whole room with the smell of wet dog. He just went for a swim at Simpson's Point (the rest of us hardly got our toes in!) and in a little while, we're going to put a batch of pulled pork in the oven for my sister's birthday dinner. But I wanted to stop by, quickly, and remind you about the radishes.

I don't know if you took me up on any of those recommendations a few weeks back, but it's been a radish kind of spring around here. While the sun and the berries and the summer fruits take their sweet time, we've been experimenting with the cold weather crops all kinds of ways. The other day, I added a new radish keeper to my list: radishes washed, greens trimmed, and then greens and roots sautéed.

SAUTEED RADISH SALAD

In the summer, I make a lot of sautés for lunch—usually heavy on the greens, sort of like warm green salads. Recently, I’ve been using radishes—greens and all. If you have extra radish greens (or other braising greens) kicking around, feel free to add them. The greens wilt down pretty significantly, so it’s hard to add too many. This recipe serves two.

2 bunches radishes, with greens

2 slices bacon

4 cloves garlic, minced

a handful of crumbled blue or gorgonzola cheese (I like to use the mozzarella with the gorgonzola dolce inside that Kathleen Kadlik sells at the Provincetown and Falmouth farmers' markets)

olive oil

two slices of rustic bread

1/2 lemon, cut into wedges

Trim the greens from the radishes, leaving about an inch of stem still attached to the bulbs. Wash and dry the greens and set aside. Scrub the radishes, trim their tails, and cut each one in half the long way. Set aside.

Warm up a cast-iron skillet over medium heat. Add the bacon and fry for a few minutes on each side, until it’s done to your taste (I like mine crispy enough to crumble). Transfer the bacon to a plate to cool.

Add the radishes to the pan with the bacon grease and cook for 5-6 minutes over medium heat. When the radishes are soft and a little bit golden in spots, turn the heat down to low and add the garlic. (Add olive oil or a splash of water to the pan at any point if you feel you don’t have enough grease.) Stir well and throw in the greens. Stir again and cover immediately. Cook for a minute, then take off the lid and stir well. The greens should be just wilted.

Transfer the radishes and greens to two bowls. Crumble a slice of bacon over each, and sprinkle half of the cheese over each salad. Turn the heat back up to medium high under the cast-iron skillet, and fry the bread in olive oil until it’s golden brown on both sides. Either cut the bread into cubes and throw it on top of the greens or serve alongside as a slice. Garnish each bowl with a few lemon wedges, and squeeze the juice over top to taste.

Inventory, of the fridge

Prompted by the eternal question: What is for dinner?

• 5 leeks
• 1 gallon raw, whole milk
• 1 pint yogurt, swirled with honey and pumpkin puree and peppered with nutmeg and cinnamon
• 1 cup leftover oatmeal, cold and lumpy
• 1/2 pound green beans, thawing, from our garden last year (overlooked?)
• beets—so many big, earthy, Chioggia beets

It took a while—a few cookbooks, a cup of tea, a brisk, sunny walk—but somehow, from there, we got to this. Happy chilly evening, everyone. I hope you're well fed, and warm.

ROASTED BEET, TOASTED WALNUT, & BLUE CHEESE SALAD

This recipe comes from the Balthazar Cookbook. I had it on my first visit to the restaurant on our trip last spring to Manhattan, and when I realized today I had all the ingredients, I had to have it again. I have swapped out a few of the fussier ingredients (i.e. sherry wine vinegar) for a slightly simpler salad, but be warned: as far as salads go, it's still on the fancy side. That said, if you prep out a big batch of the separate parts of this salad ahead of time, you can have it as an impromptu lunch or dinner all week.

1 cup walnuts
1 cup olive oil, divided
6 sprigs thyme, divided
4 medium beets
1/2 pound green beens (frozen are fine)
4 leeks, thinly sliced
1/4 cup minus 1 teaspoon red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon sherry (optional)
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1/4 cup walnut oil
1 teaspoon salt, or to taste
finely ground black pepper
3/4 pound mixed greens (I used young spinach and red and green lettuces from the garden)
1/4 pound Great Hill blue cheese, cut into 8 pieces

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Spread the walnuts on a baking sheet and toast for about 3 minutes, or until fragrant but not browned.

Pour 1/4 cup of the olive oil onto a plate. Rub the beets in the oil, then wrap each one individually in tinfoil with a sprig of thyme. Bake for an hour, or until tender when pierced with a fork. Cool, peel, dice, and set aside.

Bring a medium pot of water to a boil. Cook the green beans until al dente, about 5 minutes. Remove the beans from the water with a slotted spoon and transfer to an ice bath to cool. Meanwhile, cook the leeks in the reserved (still boiling) water for roughly 10 minutes, or until tender. Remove the beans from the ice bath and set aside, and remove the leeks from the pot with a slotted spoon and transfer to the ice bath to chill. Once cooled, add the leeks to the beets.

Make the salad dressing: whisk together the red wine vinegar, sherry (if using), remaining 3/4 cup olive oil, walnut oil, salt, pepper, and remaining thyme (picked from sprigs). Toss this dressing, to taste, with your mixed greens.

Get out four salad plates. Create a bed of the beet-leek mixture in the center of each and top with a handful of green beans. Layer a handful of the dressed mixed greens on top of that. Lean two wedges of blue cheese on each salad up against the beets. Sprinkle with toasted walnuts, and enjoy at once.

Ode to tomatoes

My friend Liam coined this phrase the other night.

He typed it up onto a paper menu, a print-out for an opening the restaurant was catering at our friend Susie's gallery, Farm. I saw it during service, pinned up in the kitchen alongside the flats of tomatoes from Jack Stacey's farm—oranges, crimsons, purples—long romas with skin like marbled paper, yellow and red. The words sounded so light—like instead of heat and exhaustion and crowds August meant Ode to Tomatoes Month.

I think for now, I'm going to pretend that it does. So in celebration, here you are—not a left hand turn on Route 6—but a simple, fresh Caprese with basil and slices of gorgonzola-dolce-stuffed mozzarella, piled sky-high on baguette.

ODE TO TOMATOES

The key to this recipe, obviously, is good tomatoes. They should be ripe, sweet, oozy—August tomatoes in the peak of heat. A good, grainy sea salt doesn't hurt either—for sprinkling at the last minute, on top.

1 baguette
4 big, sweet heirloom tomatoes
1 ball gorgonzola-dolce-stuffed mozzarella
1 cup fresh basil leaves, packed
extra virgin olive oil
balsamic glaze
sea salt and freshly cracked pepper, to taste

Slice the baguette in half the long way, like you're cutting bread for a sub. Then cut the halves into reasonable lengths—6 inches or so. Core the tomatoes and slice them into rounds. Slice the mozzarella into rounds, too. Toast the bread, and once it's hot, drizzle it with olive oil and a few drops of balsamic glaze. Layer each piece with a handful of basil leaves, several slices of tomato, and a few rounds of mozzarella on top. Sprinkle with sea salt and freshly cracked pepper to taste.

Hostess for a day

Have you ever wished you could be a professional, full-time, home-dinner-party-hostess, just for a month or two? That each morning involved waking up, taking stock of your refrigerator and pantry, and planning a menu, a guest list, and decor?

There would be chores involved, certainly. Silver gets tarnished, flowers need refreshing, and dusting when you live in a home with a woodstove seems like the never-ending song of tasks. And of course if being a hostess was the only thing to think about, ever, I suppose you might eventually get bored. But I think it would take me a very, very long time. Because home dinner parties are really my absolute favorite thing.

For starters, there's the fact that you get to spend the morning pouring over cookbooks. You get to pull out a butternut squash, or a container of frozen rhubarb, or a pork shoulder and wonder, what on earth will I do with this? That, in my opinion, is the best part, because no matter what you have, there is always an excellent menu to be made. It simply takes a bit of imagination, and lots of time with those books. Which are some of my favorite inanimate objects to spend a day with. They're more fun than some people and can be awfully talkative, I find.


Then there's the cooking, and the whirlwind of friends and hugs and babies and drinks, and the sitting down to a meal you are offering up to feed the people you love. I really like that part, the food. But the part where I'm afraid I start to sound a bit crazy is right now, when I announce that I like dinner parties so much that I don't even really mind cleaning up. In fact, truth be told, I kind of like the routine. There are always a few women in the kitchen, and between the washing and the drying and the gossiping and the sense of tidiness that ensues, there's something awfully satisfying about that time, too.

I have no idea whether or not this weekend will offer that chance. But if it does, I know exactly what I'll make. Here's an early March menu, in case you find yourself in the lucky seat of host or hostess for a day. You might have to make a trip to the library, of course, but that's the whole fun.

— cocktail hour —

The Old Fashioned, to show off bourbon's charms
from The Essential Cocktail by Dale DeGroff and featured in Gourmet, March 2009

Cracker stacks with Brad's Bread and Butter Pickles and Great Hill Blue Cheese

— dinner —

Butternut Squash in Cream and Cinnamon
from The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food, by Judith Jones

Cod baked in foil with leeks and carrots
from Cook's Illustrated, March & April 2009

— dessert —

Tinky's Cozy Apple-Maple Pudding
from Yankee, March/April 2009

As a general rule

We went skiing this weekend. In my book, skiing as a general rule ought to include the following: normally attractive friends totally nonplussed by the fact that their greasy, bodyless hair has taken on the shape of a ski helmet, long underwear so beloved and worn it forms a saggy hammock reaching nearly to your knees, and, most importantly, headbonk medicine.


My father first came up with headbonk medicine when my sister and I were little girls. He was a bit of a ski Nazi. Anytime it snowed, we had to go skiing, or else he would get "ski stress," as my mother referred to the affliction. Growing up in Maine as we did, this meant we went skiing quite a bit. To ensure we skied through all fifty dollars of our day passes, my father kept a supply of Starbursts, Rolos, and miniature Snickers bars in his pockets. Anyone who bonked their head and wanted to go in could be easily enticed into another run with a reach into his jacket.

While I have come to love skiing and no longer require bribery, I still always ski with a good supply of headbonk medicine in my jacket pocket. My favorite kind is Milk Duds, which freeze into brittle lumps of caramel in your pocket and last the entire lift ride slowly melting sugar from your teeth. If you carry enough headbonk medicine, I've even found you can skip lunch on an especially spectacular powder day.

We had one of those Sunday. It snowed nearly a foot while we were out, and it was hardly worth stopping for long. We went in for hot chocolate late morning, and a quick p.b. and j. in the early afternoon, but other than that we were squatting recklessly down the hill and hitting every puffy cloud of fresh snow we could. The Milk Duds got us through the day, and even into the hot tub and through a few bottles of beer, but needless to say they weren't doing much when dinner time rolled around.

Luckily, we'd made a big pot of soup the night before, so all that was left to make was a few sides. It was a haddock and chorizo soup, with corn frozen this summer, and lots and lots of sea scallops, and saffron, and onions, and plenty of garlic. It was salty, warm, and above all, filled you up quite well. But after a day of chocolate, caramel, and elaborate hot drinks, we thought maybe a salad and some bread would be a good idea too.

That's where the blue cheese dressing came in. We had sort of a motley assortment of foods in the fridge, but the one thing we had plenty of was blue cheese. We had nearly 10 pounds, in fact, certainly enough to top a salad. So I began whisking an egg yolk while a friend drizzled in olive oil, and before long we had a greenish, virgin oil mayo.


I added a bit of smoked sea salt, a whole wedge of cheese, and a bit of apple cider vinegar. The resulting dressing was certainly not light, but it was very good. It was especially good over a wintry mix of bitter greens, with thinly sliced onions, and nothing else.

HEARTY BLUE CHEESE DRESSING

1 egg yolk
3/4 cup olive oil
1 small wedge blue cheese
cider vinegar

In a medium sized measuring cup, using a small whisk or fork, beat egg yolk for several seconds. Begin drizzling in olive oil, very, very slowly at first, whisking all the while. As the mixture thickens and turns opaque, begin adding oil more quickly, still whisking constantly. The egg yolk should absorb all 3/4 cups of the oil.

Using this homemade mayonnaise as a base, crumble in blue cheese. Stir well, and add 1 tablespoon cider vinegar. Taste the dressing. Continue adding vinegar to taste, or until it balances out the mayo and blue cheese. You won't need much of this over salad; a little bit goes a long way. It's especially good over endive leaves or spinach tossed with red onion and small pieces of bacon.