Brown Butter Summer Squash "Linguine"

Unless you have exceptional knife skills, you do need a julienne peeler for this recipe from Fast, Fresh & Green. I got mine in a set of 3 peelers from Panda last Christmas, but a single one is not expensive and quite a worthy investment. Consider asking Santa for one.

As usual I was a little short of a few key ingredients: I didn't have any chopped almonds or hazelnuts that were called for, so I went in a more Italian direction by using chopped garlic and adding some halved cherry tomatoes as well. To be honest, I was a little underwhelmed by the finished dish. The recipe cooking time is 2 minutes but both Jeeps and I found it sort of undercooked. I also may have used too much lemon. But I loved the very concept of it, and it will definitely be something I fool around with.

Brown Butter Summer Squash Linguine

  • 1 1/2 lbs summer squash, mix of yellow and green
  • 2 tbsp unsalted butter
  • 2 tbsp finely chopped almonds or hazelnuts
  • 1 tsp kosher salt
  • 2 tsp chopped fresh parsley or tarragon
  • 1/2 lemon

Wash and dry the squash and trim off the ends. Using a julienne peeler, peel the squash lengthwise all the way around, dropping the strips into a bowl. Continue peeling until you reach the seed core. Discard the core and peel the other squash in the same fashion. Give all the strips a little toss in the bowl and separate any that are clumped together.

In a straight-sided saute pan, melt the butter over medium-low heat. Add the almonds and swirl the butter around in the pan. Cook the butter until it reaches a nutty brown color, about 2 minutes. Immediately add the squash and salt. Toss the squash gently with tongs until it is well coated with the butter. Continue cooking just until the squash becomes slightly limp, about 1 minute.

Remove the pan from the heat, stir in half the chopped herbs and a squeeze of lemon. Toss, taste, and add more lemon if desired. Transfer to a serving dish, sprinkle with more of the herbs, and serve.

Again, it was good, but not quite right. This strikes me as a very summery dish. It cozied up fine to a baked potato here, but I began to imagine blanching the julienned squash, just to get the right consistency, then tossing it with a vinaigrette and serving at room temperature with grilled shrimp.

Hmm... Hold that thought.

Green Beans with Lemon Pepper Oil

The full name of this recipe (another from Fast, Fresh & Green) is "Provencal Green Beans with Lemon-Pepper Oil and Herbed Sea Salt." It sounds fancier than it is and I did not stay completely true to the recipe for a few reasons. 

1) The lemon-pepper infused olive oil sounded awesome, but my kids would not eat anything that spicy. Green beans are one of the surefire veggies that they will wolf down, so I try not to get too adventurous with them.

2) The herbed sea salt is made by combining the salt with lavender buds. I have no more lavender in my garden, but even if I did, I'm not sure it would go over well. The alternative was to use crushed rosemary, but Jeeps has a funny thing with rosemary.

So I will give you the full recipe here, but just know my version was green beans tossed with lemon olive oil and sea salt. They were perfect alongside some grilled apple sausages and pan-roasted red and blue potatoes. They'd also be great just as an appetizer.

The sausages, by the way, were served with cider-beer mustard made by my amazing friend Becky (who brought me the pyrex dishes full of barbecued chicken, potato salad, and love). We attended her family's incomparable Oktoberfest a few weekends ago, and I left her house with a ziplock bag of bratwurst and 3 darling little jars of cider mustard, cranberry mustard, and dill relish.

Provencal Green Beans with Lemon-Pepper Oil & Herbed Sea Salt

The lemon-pepper oil is made by combining 2 tbsp of olive oil with a tablespoon of lemon zest, and 8 grinds of the pepper mill. Make this first and let it sit for 15-2o minutes to let the flavors infuse the oil. The oil keeps well in the fridge so double or triple the recipe if you like and use it on grilled fish or any steamed vegetable.

The herbed sea salt is made by combining 1/4 tsp chopped fresh lavender buds or rosemary leaves, with 1/2 tsp sea salt. Use a coarse salt like fleur de sel.

Then you simply steam or blanch a pound of green beans until they are tender to the bite but still have their nice green color. Drain, let cool a few minutes, then transfer to a serving dish. Drizzle most of the lemon-pepper oil over them.  Sprinkle with some of the herb salt. Taste a bean and add still more salt if you like ("Be generous!" says Susie Middleton).

They went so fast I could barely snap a picture.

On the subject of lemons, its essential oil is a great thing to keep around the house. Jeeps likes to mix vinaigrette into hummus and add a few drops of lemon EO to make a really tasty salad dressing. Mixed with baking soda and vinegar, it makes a great all-purpose cleaner. And I love to use it when I make soap, especially blended with geranium and rose oils.

The team at OilingPoint.com has a great article about the benefits of using lemon essential oil. You can read it here.

Debbie's Vanilla and Cardamom Squash

Can I tell you how much I love this book? It's become my bible of late, and I have three truly great dishes to share with you. 

I'm sorely tempted to pack all three into one post but I realize that a good backlog benefits the cadence of the blog, so three separate posts it shall be.

Tonight I'll be telling you about Vanilla and Cardamom Glazed Squash, and this post is dedicated to my friend Debbie. I smile with a great deal of irony as I write that because I do consider Debbie my friend, and certainly my foodie soulmate, but I've never met her. We "met" on Facebook through a mutual friend, got to know each other through various comments on food, NPR, scrabble, and such, and then she friended me and I accepted and there we went and there we were. The bond was only strengthened when I was posting about something or other and made reference to the fact that cardamom is my favorite spice. Debbie commented that I was the only other person she knew whose favorite spice was cardamom.

I really should meet her someday. In the meantime, Debbie, I made this for you...

Vanilla and Cardamom Glazed Acorn Squash Rings

The recipe calls for 1 small acorn squash, which I didn't have. I had 2 smallish "carnival" squashes, seen here. Actually I had 3 and they were part of the Halloween display on my kitchen pass-through shelf, but 1 rotted. I'm still killing the fruit flies. Let's not talk about it.

  • 1 small acorn squash, or 1 to 1 1/4 pounds any type winter squash
  • 2 tbsp unsalted butter
  • 2 tsp pure maple syrup
  • 1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
  • 1/8 tsp ground cardamom (mmmmmmm...yes...yes...and no, I don't have an 1/8 measuring spoon, I just eyeballed a few judicious sprinkles)
  • Kosher salt

Preheat oven to 475. Line a baking sheet with a piece of parchment paper.

With a sharp axe (aka a chef's knife), cut the acorn squash in half lengthwise (through the stem end and the pointy end). PLEASE be careful! Scrape out the seeds and fibers with a spoon. 

Put each half, cut side down, on a cutting board. Slice off about 3/4" from each end and discard. Slice the squash crosswise into 1/2" half-rings. If you want, trim off any remaining fibers and goo. Put the rings on the parchment paper.

In a small saucepan, melt the 2 tbsp butter over low heat. Add the maple syrup, vanilla and cardamom. Lean over the saucepan and inhale deeply.  Deeply. Make room for the girl who will stagger into the kitchen, eyes glazed, breathing deeply, wondering aloud, "What is that?" 

Breathe it in again, it's divine.

Use a pastry brush to lightly brush the squash pieces with about half the butter mixture. Sprinkle lightly with salt and turn them over. Brush this side with the other half of the butter mixture but save about 1 tsp if you can, or add another tsp or 2 to the pan for later. Season this side lightly with salt.

Roast the squash for 15 minutes. Use tongs to flip the pieces over. Your kitchen is going to smell amazing. 

"What is that?" Jeeps cried when he and Redman came in from soccer practice. Smile knowingly. You are a goddess.

Roast another 15 minutes until they are nicely browned (the bottoms will be browner than the tops) and tender when pierced with a paring knife. Move to a serving dish.

Reheat the butter mixture briefly over low heat if necessary. Brush the butter mixture over the squash slices and serve.

Some quotes from the dinner table:

"This is like pumpkin pie."

"This is like dessert for dinner."

"You could eat this for breakfast."

"It's almost too sweet."

Oh, and most interestingly, "The skin is the best part!" Yes indeed, you can scoop the squash flesh away from the skin and eat, but amazingly, the skin is perfectly edible and really really tasty. Don't you agree, Debbie?

I thought so.

Chocolate Pear Pudding

“In the world of fruit, pears are a cook’s greatest ally.”
— Laurie Colwin

I bought too many pears. They were on sale, a big bag of Bartletts and in the time it took for them to ripen, everyone lost interest. Suddenly I had a bowl full of ripe pears and no takers. I needed to make something with all of them. Could I?

Why not?

Laurie Colwin's More Home Cooking has an entire chapter devoted to pears, expounding on pears alone with cheese, poached pears, pear crisp and pear chutney. She writes of a recipe from Josceline Dimbleby's Book of Puddings, Desserts and Savouries for chocolate pear pudding. This sounded interesting. In the context of dessert, I usually associate pears with a spice or ginger cake, not with chocolate. But why not both? In the spirit of the chocolate ginger banana bread from A Homemade Life, could I make this a chocolate ginger pear pudding?

Why not?

Why Not Chocolate Ginger Pear Pudding

Original recipe is for a 8x8 cake pan. I doubled it for my supply of pears and my 9x13 baking dish.

  • 2 pounds pears, peeled, cored, and cut in chunks
  • 1/4 cup chopped crystallized or candied ginger (chop fine—you want hints of ginger here and there, and not big chunks to bite into)
  • 12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) butter: the 1/2 stick cut into small pieces, and the full stick melted for the batter
  • 1 1/2 cups flour
  • 2 generous tablespoons cocoa powder (stern look, and you are using the Hershey Special Dark cocoa powder, yes?)
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 1 cup dark brown sugar
  • 4 tbsp Lyle's Golden Syrup (which I actually used to have a bottle of, during Christmas cookie season, but not at the moment. So I used 3 tbsp molasses)
  • 2 eggs, beaten
  • 1/2 cup milk

Preheat oven to 350. Butter a 9x13 baking dish, or spray with Pam. Spread the pears over the bottom of the dish, sprinkle the ginger bits on top, and then dot with the 4 tablespoons cut-up butter.

In a mixing bowl, sift flour, baking soda, baking powder and cocoa. Add the brown sugar to the bowl. Make a well in the dry ingredients, add the milk, eggs, syrup or molasses and begin to whisk. Gradually add melted butter, continue whisking until all dry ingredients are incorporated into the batter. There will be lumps.

Pour batter over the pears. It helps to dollop it here and there and then spread carefully with a silicone spatula. Don't fret if there doesn't seem enough or if it's not perfectly covering all the fruit. It'll be fine.

Bake for 25-30 minutes. Let cool, and serve alone or with ice cream.

This was a very interesting dessert. The top was very cake-like, but then underneath the texture was very much like pudding. And a scoop of Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey with this cake was awesome.

Smoky Carrots & Fennel

My friend Potter got married a couple weeks ago on Governor's Island. It was an exceptionally lovely wedding withe three (3) kinds of cake: red velvet, carrot and key lime. One of them had bride-and-groom rubber duckies on top.

On the way home, we had time to kill in Grand Central before catching our train. The boys went into the MTA museum while Panda and I wandered through Pylones, which is a funky little store with no end of cool things. Often they have great little books. And sometimes great great books. I got a present:

I read it the whole way home, with visions of vegetables dancing in my head. This is a great book—awesome recipes and mouth-watering photos. Vegetable porn. It's too great, actually, because I end up dog-earing every page and then when it comes time to actually cook, I can't make up my mind. I want to make everything. Or I lack some essential ingredient to make the one thing I've been dying to try.

Finally tonight I told myself to be sensible and use up the oldest vegetables in the fridge, which in this case was a head of fennel. I thumbed the pages and decided upon...(drum roll):

Smoky Spanish Carrots and Fennel with Toasted Hazelnuts

Minus the hazelnuts because I did have them, but not toasted. Toasting hazelnuts is a thankless, high-maintenance job which involves babysitting the nuts in the oven, and then giving them a brisk rubdown with a dish towel to remove all the skins. My cleaning lady came today and the last thing I wanted was bits of hazelnut skin all over my pristine kitchen, it was bad enough I was making breaded chicken. Always, always the day Celia comes to clean, I end up making breaded chicken on my immaculate stovetop.

So this dish, sans hazelnuts, uses the "Walk-Away Sauté" method.  As Susie Middleton says:

“It does take time—about 30 minutes—to get the carrots and fennel to the perfect texture. But like most of the walk-away sautés, there’s not a heck of a lot you have to do during that time. Stir. Sip wine. Stir. Sip wine. That’s all. Oh, and you can fret a little when you think the pan is getting too brown. But it isn’t really a problem, I promise.”

I'm in love.

Susie Middleton's Smoky Spanish Carrots and Fennel

  • 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
  • 1 lb (455 grams, and bless her heart, she gives measurements in standard AND metric) carrots, peeled, trimmed, and sliced.
  • 1 small fennel bulb, trimmed, cored, and cut into 3/4" slices
  • 1 tsp kosher salt
  • 1 tbsp sherry or rice wine (I used sherry)
  • 1/2 tsp Spanish smoked paprika (I don't know if mine is smoked paprika or sweet or what, I just used what I had)
  • 3 tbsp coarsely chopped toasted hazelnuts (blah blah blah)

In a straight-sided sauté pan, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the carrots and fennel and season with the salt. Stir well with a silicone spatula to combine. 

Continue to cook, stirring occasionally at first, and more frequently as the pan begins to brown. Be patient, as it will not look like much is happening in the beginning. Keep stirring and cooking (and don't worry about the pan browning), until the carrots have shrunken quite a bit, are tender (test with a paring knife) and somewhat browned, and the fennel is tender—28 to 30 minutes.

Add the sherry to the pan and stir until it has almost evaporated. Sprinkle the paprika over the vegetables and stir for just a few seconds to incorporate the spice and release its flavor. Remove the pan from the heat and let cool a minute. Transfer to a serving dish and garnish with the toasted hazelnuts.

This was a perfect dish, Jeeps and I ate every bit. The fennel was smooth as silk and it and the carrots had great, smoky autumn flavor. This would be amazing over polenta. I can see where the hazelnuts would have added that extra something special so I will make a point of having them, pre-toasted, on hand, to make this again. Oh yeah, I'll make it again.

Slow-dance Chicken

I started writing "Slow-Cooked Chicken" but I guess I had something on my mind because it came out slow-dance. Anyway. I've had this recipe dog-eared for a while because it struck me as what the disastrous maiden voyage of David Crockpott was SUPPOSED to have been: an attractive dish of tender chicken and vegetables. 

Key word: attractive.

So I made it tonight. This is how it looks in the book photograph:

This is how it came out on my plate:

I'm just being honest here, guys! All my chicken slid off the bone and when slow-cooked chicken slides off the bone, it shreds. Especially the white meat. So while it was totally delicious, it obviously didn't have the same eye appeal as the book picture. But I can live with that because it really was delicious.

As Val said in A Chorus Line: "Dance: 10. Looks: 3."

Slow-Cooked Chicken Dinner

  • 1/3 cup flour
  • 1/4 cup All-Purpose Spice Rub (see below)
  • 1 roasting chicken, about 7lbs, or equal amount cut-up chicken
  • 1 1/2 pounds golden or red-skin potatoes, quartered (I used the red and the skins turned a very depressing color. You may as well use golden)
  • 2 tablespoons vegetable oil, divided
  • 1 large onion, cut into chunks
  • 24 baby-cut carrots (I used 30. Ha!)
  • 4 celery ribs, cut into 3/4" lengths (Use a ruler. Ha!)
  • 1/2 cup dry white wine
  • 2 cups chicken broth
  • 3 tablespoons instant mashed potato flakes (stay with me, you'll see. It's genius)
  • 2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley

All-Purpose Spice Rub (Mix all in a small bowl)

  • 2 tsbsp brown sugar
  • 1 tbsp kosher salt
  • 1 tsp paprika
  • 1 tsp dry mustard
  • 1 tsp ground dried sage
  • 1 tsp dried thyme
  • 1/2 tsp dried rosemary
  • 1/2 tsp garlic powder
  • 1/2 tsp ground black pepper.

Boil the potatoes in several quarts of salted water for 5 minutes. Drain and place in the slow cooker.

Mix the flour and spice rub in a medium mixing bowl. If using whole chicken, cut into 6 pieces and remove skin from all except for wings. Remove wing tips.  Dredge chicken pieces in the flour mixture until thoroughly coated. Pat off the excess flour and reserve the flour mixture.

Heat half the oil in a large heavy skillet over medium-high heat. Brown the chicken on both sides, working in batches, about 4 minutes a side. Transfer to a plate and set aside.

Add the remaining oil to the skillet. Add the onion, carrot, and celery and saute until lightly browned, about 5 minutes. Add the reserved seasoned flour and stir until vegetables are coated. Add the wine and bring to a boil. Add the chicken broth and simmer until slightly thickened. Pour into the cooker. Arrange first dark meat pieces, then white meat on top of the vegetables. Cover and cook for 3 to 4 hours on high, or 5 to 6 hours on low.

Remove chicken to a serving platter and surround with the vegetables. Turn the cooker up to high, stir in the instant mashed potato flakes, and continue stirring until gravy thickens. Stir in the parsley and spoon over the chicken.

I served it over polenta which was very reminiscent of my mother's baked chicken with polenta from my childhood. 

If you want my Gravy, Pepper my Ragu....

“If you want my gravy, pepper my ragu.Spice it up for Mama....she’ll get hot for you.”
— Matron Mama Morton: Chicago, Kander & Ebb

So Frank is doing well and on the mend and, frankly, she is amazing. So was her refrigerator the first week after her surgery. You opened the door and the Hallelujah chorus played. But of course: when someone we love is in need of comfort or sustenance, or in the midst of healing, what do we do? We bring food.

When I miscarried a baby in 2002, my parents were there in an hour with a pot of chicken soup. Frank came a day later with hot chicken sandwiches from Boston Market. Chicken is a no-brainer for comfort. Someone in trouble? Broken heart? Troubled soul? Stuffy nose? I must roast a chicken.

When I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2003 (it was a bad couple of years, don't ask) my friend Becky showed up at my kitchen door with pyrex containers filled with barbecued chicken, potato salad and brownies. This combination of foods might mean "picnic" to most people, but to me, they will always be Becky and her firm, clear loyalty and love, at my kitchen door in my time of need.

For healing properties, however, you must go with slightly heartier stuff. I made my turkey meatballs for Frank, two ways: medium-sized ones plain, and tiny ones in wedding soup. I brought that over with some grilled vegetables and a loaf of ciabatta. This all paled in comparison to what her neighbor had bestowed earlier in the day: mozzarella-stuffed meatballs in gravy.

Gravy.

Now when I say gravy, I don't mean the sauce for roast chicken or pot roast. I mean gravy like the Italians mean it on Sundays. Ragù if you want to get technical, but it's gravy.

GRAVY!!!

Frank's husband and I have been talking about and trying to dissect this completely amazing gravy for ten days now. And no, the recipe is not simply given out to the mere mortals. I've been scouring recipes in the slow-cooker books I own and searching online to try and replicate the holy and wholly secret gravy of Frank's neighbor. It had layers of meat in it: chicken and short ribs and possibly sausage, suspended in rich tomato sauce. Possibly it had crack in it as well, I'm just saying.

So what I ended up with is a mongrel recipe that picked and chose between recipes I found online, and a ragù from my slow-cooker book. It's still open to interpretation and tweaking, and I don't know if you could call it authentic. But it tasted pretty damn good, therefore I will call it mine.

Mongrel Ragù

(And you must sing "ragù" in the style of old Yahoo commercials:  Ragùuuuuuuuuuuuuu-hù!!)

  • 1 pound sweet Italian sausage
  • 4 boneless, skinless chicken thighs
  • 1 pound steak tips cut into 1/2" pieces (or short ribs, trimmed, which I didn't have but would have used)
  • 2 onions , chopped medium
  • 2 carrots, peeled and sliced
  • 2 celery ribs, sliced
  • 12 garlic cloves, minced
  • 2 teaspoons dried oregano
  • 1 tablespoon dried oregano
  • 1 6-oz can tomato paste
  • 1/2 cup dry red wine
  • 1 28-oz can diced tomatoes, with juice
  • 1 15-oz can tomato sauce
  • 2 cups chicken or beef broth or tomato juice
  • 2 tablespoons each chopped fresh basil and parsley

Heat 2 tsp olive oil in heavy skillet over medium-high heat. Squeeze sausage out of its casings and brown well in skillet, breaking up with the side of a wooden spoon. I don't know why, but I find breaking up sausage with the side of my wooden spoon to be an extremely tedious chore. Remove sausage to paper-towels to drain, then place in slow cooker.

In the rendered sausage fat, brown the chicken thighs 3-4 minutes each side.  Add to slow cooker.

Season steak tips with salt and pepper, then brown in the skillet in batches. Don't crowd the pan or it will steam the meat, not brown it. Put meat in slow cooker.

Deglaze the pan with the red wine, scraping up bits from the bottom with the wooden spoon (which I never find to be a tedious chore). Pour wine over meat in cooker.

Add another tablespooon olive oil to skillet and heat. Saute onion, garlic, celery, carrot, oregano, and rosemary until vegetables lose their raw look, about 3-4 minutes. Add can of tomato paste and stir until vegetables are coated well. Cook another 2-3 minutes and then add to slow cooker on top of the meat.

Add tomatoes, tomato sauce, and broth (or tomato juice) to cooker.

Cover and set to Low for 8 to 10 hours. Then walk away. Just walk away. You want the longest cooking time you can: mine went from 1PM to 10PM and it was a beautiful thing.

Before serving, skim fat off surface, and stir in chopped parsley and basil. Serve over pasta or polenta, or just eat a bowlful by itself. That's what I did for lunch.

Yum. Oh very very yum. Yes indeed. Can we get in closer, please?

Thank you.

Vegetable Mess

Not really, I just love to say that. But I'll save it for the ratatouille post. Tonight I have a few roasted and grilled yummies to share.

First is grilled radicchio. Radicchio, also known as Italian chicory, is very bitter raw, but the bitterness mellows out when you roast or grill it. It's still on the bitter side, but in an appealing way. Like the girl with the interesting personality.

Grilled Radicchio with Interesting Personality

  • 1 small head radicchio, outer leaves discarded
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 1/2 tsp kosher salt
  • Few grinds of pepper mill
  • 1/4 tsp dried thyme or 1 tsp chopped fresh thyme

Quarter the radicchio, leaving the stem end intact because this is what holds the wedge shape.  This never works for me but maybe it will for you.

Put wedges in a large bowl, toss with olive oil, salt, pepper and thyme. My friend Rob recommends tossing in bacon fat if you have some left over.

Grill 3-4 minutes per side until lightly charred.  Below it's served with a quinoa salad with cucumber, tomato and feta, and would also be nice with a wild rice salad.

Radicchio2
Radicchio2

Next is roasted cauliflower. I fell in love with this method from Molly Wizenburg's A Homemade Life, which calls for slicing the cauliflower straight across lengthwise.

Molly's Lengthwise Cauliflower

  • 1 head cauliflower, leaves trimmed but leave stem intact (just trim the nastiest part of the end off)
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 1/2 tsp kosher salt
  • Few grinds of pepper mill

Preheat oven to 425

Slice cauliflower lengthwise about 1/4" wide. You're only going to get two, maybe three slices that end up looking like this:

The rest will just look like small, flat cauliflower florets but that's OK.

Put all the slices into a large bowl. Toss with olive oil, salt and pepper, turning carefully to coat so you don't break up the nice, big flatties. Place on baking sheet, spreading evenly and as flat as possible—you want as much surface area as possible to caramelize as it roasts.

Roast 20-25 minutes, flipping pieces halfway through, until golden brown.  Below we have some lengthwise cauliflower served over coconut rice and beans and jicama slaw.  A spectacular Meatless Monday Meal if you are so inclined.

Gremolata

“Sit down, Al,” Carlo said. “We’re having a little nosh.” 

He set down a long oval loaf of bread on the table, followed by a huge ceramic bowl filled with cut-up wedges of tomatoes, red potatoes, and hard-boiled eggs, coated with some kind of dressing. 

"This is ciabatta," he said, tapping the bread.

“And this is gremolata,” Nina said. She tore off a chunk of bread, dipped it in the dressing and handed it to me. “Lemon, garlic, olive oil and fresh parsley.”

I took a bite and was assaulted by savory flavors, muted by the hot, doughy bread. It was fantastic. Nina scooped potatoes, tomatoes and eggs onto a small plate for me. Her mother handed me a napkin. 

Carlo was wrestling a bottle and corkscrew. “Who wants wine?”

“Me!” Nina sang, popping a wedge of tomato in her mouth.

“Al?”

“Sure,” I said, with a mouthful of gremolata and a heart plummeting into love.

--Bury my Heart in Cashmere

(Shyly) I wrote that. 

When I started dating Jeeps, he was living on the Upper East Side on the sixth floor of a sixth-floor walk-up. The kitchen was about two feet by four feet, but we did a lot of cooking in that tiny little space. Jeeps had one cookbook: Marion Cunningham's The Supper Book, which was perfect because the tiny kitchen didn't evoke big dinners, but it was perfect for supper. One of the recipes from the book we made a lot that first summer was Eggs, Tomatoes and Potatoes in Gremolata.

It was summer and it was the city and I started capturing the little bits of our romance into stories because that's just the kind of person I was. 

Am. 

Over the years, I began sewing the little stories into a larger story and it became a book called Bury My Heart in Cashmere, and the scene above is from it. Cashmere was never published. What became of it can be read in my fourth book The Ones That Got Away, but briefly: parts of Cashmere combined with an earlier manuscript called All The Running You Can Do, and became The Man I Love.

The Supper Book makes a cameo in my next novel, An Exaltation of Larks, but with a different recipe.

Enough promotion. Fast-forward to the present. 

Jeeps has a bad cold, and I'd been planning to make soup for dinner tonight to baby him. But the day started out muggy and got muggier by the hour. I got home from food shopping with soup makings and couldn't bear the thought of it. A much more summer-like meal was called for and for some reason, I felt like I wanted to make crab cakes. 

Crab meat had not been on the shopping list and I had no desire to go back out and get some. Tuna cakes could be an alternative but I wondered if could take the same premise and use roughy (which was on the shopping list). 

It's a mild fish, and I thought about using the flavors of gremolata—lemon, garlic and parsley—to jazz it up.

Thus were born...

Poor Man's Gremolata Crab Cakes

  • 1 lb roughy filets or other white fish
  • 2-3 garlic coves, chopped fine
  • grated zest of one lemon
  • 1/3 cup chopped fresh parsley
  • 2 eggs
  • 1/4 cup bread crumbs (plain or seasoned)
  • 2 tbsp grated parmesan cheese

Spray a skillet with non-stick spray and heat over medium.  Saute the filets about 3 minutes per side until just opaque.

Let cool and then chop roughly and place in a large bowl.  Combine with rest of ingredients and form into small patties.  Fry in olive oil, 4-5 minutes per side until golden brown.

Drain on paper towels.  Serve with lemon wedges.

These were awesome.  Jeeps and I had them over arugula with focaccia and marinated mozzarella and cherry tomatoes.  A perfect summer supper.  Even for the invalid.