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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It’s just a short walk from Green Bean Casserole to St Helena Soup.
The key ingredients are the same: Ground Beef, Green Beans, Tomatoes.

Once upon a time, Carol and I were in St. Helena in the heart of the Napa Valley and needed lunch. This was years ago, shortly after we arrived in California, say 1993. We were walking up and down the street, perusing bookstores—there were two or three at that time, and it may have been the time we bought Madhur Jaffrey’s A Taste of the Far East (published in 1993)—and stopped into a lunch place. I ordered the soup of the day. It was so good, that I shared a bite with Carol. When we got home, we agreed on the ingredients, and C made a recipe. It appeared in the second volume of Eats4One (Eats4One i).
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From Farm to Freezer

It’s almost exactly 100 miles from my house to Mariquita Farm, just outside Hollister CA, and it takes almost exactly 2 hours to get there for the U-pick Tomatoes day. Take 101 through Gilroy and turn left on 25 toward Hollister. Turn left onto Shore Road and left onto San Felipe Road. The farm is on the left; if you cross the creek, you’ve gone too far.

We go almost every year in September and pick enough Early Girl and San Marzano tomatoes to make enough sauce to last a year, two flats. The first year we went, we picked four flats, too much good stuff.

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A Cook’s Weekend

                          

I am a football fan. On Saturdays from now until January there are college games all over the TV, up to 12 on a given Saturday. There are few college games I feel I need to watch, but it’s nice to be able click around and get a sense of what’s going on. My metabolism won’t let me sit in front of the TV from 9 a.m. until 8 p.m., so I can have games on in the kitchen and cook. In the past, with “rabbit ears” TV, we got FOX and ABC fine, CBS was wavy and the sound came and went, and we didn’t get NBC at all, and of course none of the cable channels. Now, with Cable in the kitchen, I can get anything anytime. Hooray!

On this Saturday I made a pound of Rancho Gordo Ojo de Cabra (Goat’s Eye) beans for dinner to serve with Black Cod and a Greek Salad. That was done to the tune of my Buckeyes whupping up on Penn State. I put the beans in to soak about 10.
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As you know by now, I have a penchant for peeling.

tomatoes, tuna tartare, Italian potato salad

Since I made my post on peeling back in January, I’ve learned a thing or two. The breakthrough came in a recipe that included pearl onions in Thomas Keller’s Bouchon Cookbook. Keller said to put the onions in a small container, pour boiling water over them and pour it off after ten seconds or so. Hallelujah Lord, I see the light! I had been used to boiling a big pot of water—which takes forever—and then dumping the pearl onions in, only to take them out after ten seconds or so. This way, I can put the onions in a bowl of a size to fit, boil an appropriate amount of water—a cup or so, which takes no time—pour it over the pearl onions, wait ten seconds, dump the onions into a strainer and go about the peeling.

This works for garlic, as well.

For a weekend lunch, I had some leftover Tuna Tartare and I thought it would be swell to put it on fresh tomato slices.

Well, I wanted to peel three, small Early Girl tomatoes, and not go through the process of boiling a whole pot of water. I put about an inch of water in a saucepan, brought it to a boil in about a minute, put in the three tomatoes and swirled them around for about ten seconds, and lifted them out onto the cutting board with a slotted spoon. I had them cored and peeled in no time! Viola! Later, I did a large Cherokee Purple heirloom tomato the same way. Viola again!

Thank you Thomas Keller, again. I know that Kelly has the Bouchon Cookbook. For you others, buy it. It’s one of the best cookbooks ever.

some baby turnips and a potato

When I go to the Farmers Market on Saturday mornings, I rarely have meals in mind, I just want to see what looks good and what looks good to me on that day. If I’ve been doing recipe research, I might look for specific things, but that’s not usually the case.

For example, at the Shogun Fish Company stand, the scallops looked just beautiful. We hadn’t had scallops in a good while, so I bought a pack of four, about 1/2 pound, perfect for two. At the Iacopi Farms stand, the Romano beans looked great and I still had fresh English peas, another of their specialties, from the previous week. And so on.

As a result, last week we cooked a number of “no brainer” meals. For me, those are the ones where I just go to the kitchen, get out the stuff and get it on. Sometimes there are recipes involved, but when there are, they are so adapted as to be only cue cards to the preparation.
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