This Is Just To Say: Ghee On Toasted Bagels

Just that, I had some bagels frozen in the, uh, freezer and instead of butter I used ghee. It was good, especially on the onion one that I usually try to avoid.

Snapbacks & Tattoos

The first CSA dinner of the year. We got [reading from weekly email] leeks, strawberries, Jerusalem artichokes, kale, oregano and kale. I think that last kale was meant to be lettuce — we certainly get lettuce in our CSA . . . so much goddamn motherfucking lettuce.

I immediately disregarded the lettuce. Look, salads, in the scheme of making dinner in which kids are present, is a giant luxury that just doesn’t work. Besides which, I think salads are so fucking boring. And I’m not saying that because I can’t “enjoy” a salad or figure out how to make salad “really fucking wonderful,” because I can do both, but when faced with four or five green things, there’s only so much you can do. So maybe we’ll have salad another day this week. Or maybe the heads of lettuce will pile up in the crisper like so many packages of shitty baby carrots until they wilt and decay. Fuck lettuce.

So anyway, leeks. Leeks got steamed and then grilled in the grill pan with the skirt steak drippings (as per this but without the romesco component). Leeks are OK. I find the dirt off-putting and the extreme measures you need to take to rid a leek of dirt sort of off-putting. Ultimately they’re [googling] allium, so who cares? This leek treatment was basically OK.

I sauteed the Jerusalem artichokes using this inspiration with oregano — CSA oregano! — instead of sage. I’ve heard crazy things about Jerusalem artichokes — they’ll keep in the crisper for three seasons of the Kardashians — but I wanted them out of my life. So there.

The kale was like baby kale or something, so I didn’t bother it, or rather I put a bunch of bacon drippings in a pan and sauteed the crap out of it. Normally I would have boiled/blanched it for four or five minutes, but it just didn’t seem like it needed it. It probably did, actually.

With the strawberries we used the old standby recipe with the Michel Guérard “cuisine minceur” fromage blanc hack (16 oz. ricotta cheese, 4 tbsp yogurt and a pinch of salt). Not much to report other than IT WAS AWESOME. Such a great recipe.

This Is Just To Say: Fucking Around With Carrot Chips

In the cabinet I found these old vegetable chips I got from Fairway that I was trying to foist on Mr. Kiddo at one point about four months ago: sweet potato, squash (zucchini), taro and carrot. I got this notion to look up (again, because I will never, ever remember) what carrots go with in Niki Segnit’s The Flavor Thesaurus. Found two right off the bat (indeed, I switched to baseball after Game 1 of the NBA finals): cardamom and hazelnuts. The cardamom tasted good (whole shaved with microplane) as did the hazelnuts. You could do a high-concept trail mix and blow minds probably.

This Is Just To Say: Garam Masala In Meatballs

I make meatballs pretty frequently, mostly because, duh, they’re good but also because the boys both will totally eat them. I try to think of stuff that I can goof around with that won’t necessitate scuttling dinner, because that would be disastrous, so I keep the experimentation within a safe orbit.

So this last time I went into Niki Segnit’s The Flavor Thesaurus and worked the angle of tomato, being that we were eating pasta with meatballs in tomato sauce. Sure enough, a lot of the components of garam masala are in there for tomatoes: anise, cloves, nutmeg — like ketchup, I guess. So, anyway, I figured we should try it. It worked. It was good. I would do this again and again, in fact.

This Is Just To Say: Tomato and White Pepper

I have to say, I’ve felt guilty about not using enough white pepper. I first learned about white pepper from The Frankies Spuntino Kitchen Companion & Cooking Manual, which talks about using that instead of black pepper because of their French culinary this or that (a partial explanation here). White pepper has a weird, specific flavor that sort of reminds you of a closet but will also be immediately recognizable if you eat Chinese food. I’ve wanted to appreciate it. I’ve forced myself to use it. I’m not sure I always like it.

But then I had this piece-of-shit out-of-season takeout salad tomato the other day — the kind that Jen would never touch and which she usually throws away. I was just goofing around with and decided to eat it — dutifully using white pepper, of course — and, holy moly, the flavors worked really well together. I googled it to see if I could see why and couldn’t find anything, so then I saved this draft and forgot about it. Anyway, it’s really good. If anyone can explain it, let me know.