…or Dinner From Head-scratch to Table

Riding home from work at the San Francisco Film Society, I thought about what’s-for-dinner. The cour di bue, Ox-heart heirloom paste tomatoes I brought from the Saturday Market at the Mariquita Farms stall, were getting soft and needed to be used. I had already decided on Tomatoes Concassees, a fresh tomato sauce recipe from Andy at the Farm. It’s quick and easy and good and will use all the tomatoes, including the Early Girls I have. But what to go with?

I remembered seeing sausages, new from Fra’Mani, at Cheese +. I have wanted to try those, what better time? I bought a pack of Classic Italian and a pack of Spicy Italian, three fat sausages to the pack. They looked scrumptious, even the packaging was seductive. Cheese + didn’t have any fresh pasta, not that I noticed, but I didn’t look very hard. I thought we had some Barilla Spaghetti at home.
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Very loosely adapted from a James Beard recipe for braised sauerkraut. And again, I had to use ingredients that were locally available.

Use quantities depending on how many are eating. I’ve done this for one and for up to 8 people. Generally, use 1/4 head of cabbage to 1 each of the vegetables. This can be warmed over once if you like. After that it gets mushy.
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Keep It Simple Stupid

Simple = Seagram Building :: Not simple = SF Marriott

How does one plan a menu?

It’s late in the day and I start to think about what’s for dinner. Something simple, I have a piece of Black Cod and a recipe for Cod with Red Wine Sauce. Good. EZ. Those green beans in the crisper are over a week old, I’ll do those with tomatoes. And I can do sliced fried red potatoes with a cipollini onion from the market.

I did that. Everything was real good, but there were real problems; conflicting flavors for one. And there was no way to serve, except on separate dishes, or one of those plates with three parts like you get in a cafeteria or the paper kind you take on a picnic. (I hurriedly served everything on one plate, disastrously.)
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A Grilled Peach

I buy 2 peaches and 1 nectarine each Saturday, in season, at the Farmers Market. I usually pick semi-hard ones, but even then, they ripen quickly if left out on the counter. These are for my breakfasts, along with fresh curd cheese.

After eating the first on Monday, I had to put the remaining peach and the nectarine in the refrigerator to quell the ripening. All this leads to a cold peach, and a cold peach is not to my liking.

“I’ll bet I could grill that sucker.” (Yes, I do talk to myself when I’m alone in the kitchen.)
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Good Eatin’ vii
This is the seventh in an occasional series of Good Eatin’—kind of a sidebar often involving leftovers—where I will describe an easily put together meal that we enjoyed very recently, maybe yesterday.

Not The Food Chain, but a food chain. One thing leads to another.

The Last Of The Cabbage

I made Shrimp Remoulade for a dinner with friends, so there were some shrimp left, already thawed and peeled. I have to use those soon, or they’ll go south.

I made Country Cabbage Soup for my lunches, which takes half a head of Savoy cabbage, so there is half a head left. When you’re cooking for one or two, that happens.
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When I was experimenting with Asian chicken salads with noodles, I said to myself, “I really have to start making pasta, again.” We used to make it a lot in Newton, as a family. We still have the pasta machine, but I think the only time we have used it in San Francisco is when Brian visited. So I went through my cookbook library and pulled the ones that would feature pasta. I was astounded to see that I have 11! I put them in a pile in some sort of order, pretty much chronological, and started reading and making notes.

Meanwhile, a friend loaned me an audio book called HEAT, by Bill Buford. I had read excerpts from this book in the New Yorker, and it was on my must have list. The subtitle pretty much captures the essence of HEAT: An amateur’s adventures as kitchen slave, line cook, pasta-maker, and apprentice to a Dante-quoting butcher in Tuscany. In short, through a friendship with Mario Batali, Buford quit his job at the New Yorker and went to work in the kitchen of Babbo, Batali’s restaurant in New York. Eager for root knowledge, he made several extended trips to Italy to learn pasta. Later, he went to butcher pig and then cow, but that’s another subject.
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pickled corn, potato cake, halibut

I’m currently reading from Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook. The Introduction and subsequent chapters on General Principles and Scoring the Good Stuff (shopping) are the best I’ve ever seen on the shopping, preparation and service of a meal. (With regard to shopping, I’m concurrently reading Julia Child’s My Life in France, where she spends a chapter on developing relationships with your butcher, fishmonger, equipment shopkeeper, etc.)

The most useful thing I can teach you, is the concept of mise en place. As a cook, your “meez” is your first principle, your belief system, your religion, your Tao. All else springs from this basic relationship with your food and your environment. Literally speaking, mise en place means “put in place,” but it is so much more than that.

Having your meez together means that you have cleaned and cleared your work area in advance and have assembled every item of food and every utensil and tool you will require, and put them in accessible, comfortable locations, ready for use.

Try this when preparing for your next meal: Put everything in a heap in front of you. Every ingredient. Every tool. Then think. Think about the stages to follow. As you reflect on what you are going to do, and when and where you’re gonna put all this, a plan will emerge:

“Well, I won’t be needing the cream until later, so I’ll put that in the fridge. Someplace I can grab it quickly when I need it, The butter, Hmmm. It would be nice if it were soft when I use it. I’ll leave that out.”

And so on. THINK! Generally speaking, any recipe has three distinct stages, often separated by considerable periods of downtime.

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