I stood in front of the rice bins at Real Food, a San Francisco organic grocery store. The labels read: SHORT GRAIN WHITE RICE, BASMATI WHITE RICE, BROWN BASMATI RICE, ARBORIO RICE, JASMINE WHITE RICE, SHORT GRAIN BROWN RICE, SUSHI RICE, BROWN & WILD RICE, and WILD RICE. There was no Long Grain White Rice. I always thought that was “regular rice,” which is what I thought I wanted to buy. A twenty-something woman walked by and asked if I needed help. I said, “Which one is regular white rice?” She looked at the bins and looked at me and looked baffled. “Maybe the Basmati?” she said. I could go for that, but the Basmati bin was empty.
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, and Markie Makes a Chicken

Carol Cooks a Turkey
Carol was pissed. Our Thanksgiving host prides himself in his turkey, so she had no leftover turkey to enjoy. (I’m not partial to LO turkey, myself.) So she went out and bought her a nine pound turkey and snared a recipe from the techno-wacko Alton Brown of the Food Network.

So here’s the turkey, ready for its apple and onion and rosemary stuffing.

Once stuffed, oil that baby up for the oven, Continue reading →

This is a picture of a sliced sirloin tip with baby mustard greens and sliced radishes. Ummm good.

I wanted to cook the sirloin tip like a steak. I’ve done Hanger steaks, guided by Anthony Bourdain’s Onglet Gascon recipe in his excellent Les Halles Cookbook, and finished them in the oven while making a pan sauce. Those are up to one inch thick at their thickest, and I’ve gone with his times — two minutes a side to brown and 5 minutes in the oven for rare, 8 minutes for medium rare. For this meal, I didn’t bother with a pan sauce. [Anthony Bourdain does this dish with bone marrow, as well as the hanger steak, but I left that out, too.]

My meat, Sirloin Tips from Marin Sun Farms; two hunks of meat about 2 inches at their thickest, tapering to about an inch, were more like small roasts than steaks, weighing a little over a pound, total. I browned them in butter in the cast iron skillet for about 2 minutes a side and finished in a roasting pan in the toaster oven at 400 degrees until the internal temperature reached 130 degrees, about 10 minutes. That was a little on the rare side and chewy, but the flavor was very beefy and good. We ate one and had one, unsliced, leftover, to die for. The leftovers provided two meals, a hash and a steak salad. Not bad, and all for about twelve bucks.

I bought the baby Mustard Greens at the Mariquita Farm stand at the Farmers Market. They were sautéed in olive oil for about 5 minutes while the steak was in the oven and then drizzled with a little vinegar. I bought the red and white radishes at the Eatwell Farm stand, and just sliced them raw for a quick, bright, crunchy complement to the greens. I drizzled the good Stonehouse olive oil over the finished plate to enrich and pull everything together.

Ummm good.

Last winter, Niman Ranch had an online special for beef ribs, two packs per order. They weren’t short ribs, individual ribs with meat attached; it was a slab of meat with three ribs going through it, and not a lot of fat. There was one in a package and each package weighed just shy of a pound. I think they called them Beef Back Ribs. In any case, when it came to cooking them, I got busy doing something else, and then I lost the recipe that Niman was kind enough to send with the meat, so I stuck ‘em in the freezer for later.

Later came last week, when in a confluence of coincidence our oldest son and his wife came to visit for a week and the New York Times ran a David Chang recipe for Braised Short Ribs. So I had more than two mouths to feed and the means to feed them. Hooray.

I supplemented the Beef Back Ribs on hand with 3 pounds of actual Short Ribs from Golden Gate Meats and was good to go.
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Brussels Sprouts for two instead of ten,
A Frittata with Eric’s blue instead of brie.

When cooking for two, it’s important to adapt, not only to quantities, but also to what you have in your larder.

I’ve always been a guy who insisted on cooking the recipe as written the first time, just to see what it’s like, then make modifications in subsequent cookings. In those days we often ended the week with a refrigerator full of leftovers. Not that that’s a bad thing—cooking for two surely involves the creative use of leftovers—but too many leftovers and some inevitably drift into the past the eat-by-date category and wind up down the disposal.
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More from the back of the can…And a Universal recipe.

You don’t have to be a Spam guy to like this, but if you just can’t get your head around the idea of Spam, use a ham slice instead, and some generous shakes of Tabasco.

But Spam has gone practically healthy on us. Remember when your Spam came in a can with a key and you rolled the top off by inserting the little metal tab in the key slot and rolled up a metal band around the key exposing some pink meat (and the tab broke off and the can was pure Hell to open)? When the can got open, there was this geletenous stuff around the meat, and that wasn’t too appetizing, but you could scrape that off and enjoy the wonderful, salty spamilicious Spam, fried to perfection for your sandwich or casserole or a tastey addition to vegetable soup… even for Mom’s Chop Suey.

Now, there’s a tab on top, just like your can of soup, and the top effortly peels off and there’s a way to squeeze the ends of the can and shake the brick of Spam out onto your cutting board. And there’s no fatty geletenous stuff.

Not only that, but there’s a lot less sodium, fat and cholestoral than in the olden days.
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Some soups ‘n’ stuff

Often, on a can, box or bag, there’s a recipe suggesting how to use the contents of the can, box or bag. These are generally okay recipes, after all, the producer wants to show off their product in the best light.

I’m prone to go that one better, trying to create a recipe for something I’ve eaten, and liked. Both cases are illustrated in this post, and in the previous two posts, for that matter.
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A swell soup featuring green chilis, potato and chicken.
This is another “made up” soup.

I bought a container of soup at the big deli and greengrocer on 4th street in Berkeley. This was my lunch on a day of book rep meetings, but it turned out to be darned good and I sought to repeat it at home.

What I could see or taste was:
Green Chilies, the dark green kind with thick flesh
Cubes of potato
Chunks of chicken
Celery
Swiss Chard or spinach.. just a little
Chicken broth

The soup was rich and very brothy and good. In a cup, before stirring, it had probably 2/3 solids with 1/3 broth on top.
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