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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When I saw “Tartare to the Tune of International Roses” headline in the Wine Section of the Chronicle a couple weeks ago, I scanned the story and it’s accompanying recipe for Tartare of Ahi and wrote in the margin, “do this with that Rose from France.”

On our first visit to Brian’s new Montpellier abode, we took a day trip to Avignon, on the Rhone River to taste some Chateauneuf de Pape. Little did we know that across the river is the Tavel district, famous for its rose. After touring Avignon and tasting Chateauneuf de Pape, we crossed the river and found Domaine Les Trois Logis, a tiny winery in an addition to a suburban house. We stopped in, chatted up the winemaker and tasted his just bottled rose. It kicked ass! Wow, I bought two bottles, which, with the bottle of Chateauneuf de Pape and two bottles purchased in Languedoc near Montpellier, was the most we could possibly carry back on the plane. I had practically forgotten about it until I saw that headline.
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I’m out of peaches and fresh curd cheese (Monday and Wednesday breakfasts).

I finished my breakfast pizza yesterday (Tuesday and Thursday breakfasts).

What’s for breakfast? I opened the refrigerator and look what I found:

Y’know, leftovers has a bad connotation. There ought to be a snappy euphemism.
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Good Eatin’ vi

This is the sixth 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.

I think of Sunday Dinner as early afternoon dinner of roast chicken or pot au feu, almost always with guests or extended family. Supper is late and simple, to my mind. On a weekday, dinner is the main meal, around seven o’clock.

Sunday is an active day or a lazy day… the end of a weekend or day-trip to wherever or a day like today where I vegged out on the New York Times and NASCAR from the road course at Infineon Raceway at Sears Point in Sonoma County. I can’t really explain the NASCAR, I never watch NASCAR. But this one is local and it’s like so many turns rather than a stupid oval with all turns left, and there are hills and stuff. Then there’s the five o’clock baseball game on ESPN with Jon Miller and Joe Morgan, doesn’t matter who’s playing.
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