Category Archives: Dinner

Grilled Lamb Blade Chops with Hot Mint Chutney

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Nobody hates lamb blade chops.  People either love them, or they’ve never heard of them.  Viewed from a diner’s perspective, lamb blade chops are to loin chops as  pork ribs are to pork loin.  There’s fat, gristle, a bit of bone, and you need to work a bit more to get the good stuff.  The reward is heaps of flavor.  If you fall into the never-heard-of-’em group, then this week’s Grilled Lamb Blade Chops with Hot Mint Chutney is your opportunity to step-away from the fancy-dress dinner party of loin chops, leave your champagne flute of civilisation on the veranda, and stride across the lawn through the baffled croquet players as you peel off your tuxedo and enter the forest.

Torchio Pasta with Squash Blossoms

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Oh, the birds and the bees, you gotta love ’em, especially if you enjoy eating things like this week’s dish, Torchio Pasta with Squash Blossoms.  After Jody’s rant last week about the tyranny of seasonality, we’re presenting another dish that is, well, seasonal.  But move fast, the season for squash blossoms is here and gone in the blink of an eye and you’ll have to wait another year for the opportunity to enjoy their delicate flavor fried, stuffed or, as we do here, expressed in a light pasta sauce.

Grilled Mussels with Coconut Curry Broth

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Grilled Mussels with Coconut Curry Broth–what more is there to say?  Last summer we did a piece about grilling clams.  Mussels–and oysters–work the same way.  You pop them on a hot grill and wait.  When they open, they’re done.  We’re talking about very lightly grilled seafood here.  As you can see from the pictures, Jody first made the coconut curry broth.  Then we grilled the mussels (no, really, we grilled the mussels).  If you’re deft with a pair of tongs you can get the mussels off the grill and into the coconut broth with minimal loss of mussel juice. Toss the mussels with the herbs and the coconut broth and Bob’s your uncle.

Happy Birthday to us – Poached Chicken Breasts with DIY Mayonnaise

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We’re on an egg roll these days.  Last week zabaglione, this week Poached Chicken Breasts with DIY Mayonnaise–and next week… well, you’ll just have to check back next week.  One hint, picnic.  And no, I’m not talking about deviled eggs.

As a younger–and thinner–man, I used to make mayonnaise a lot.  I also used to eat chicken breasts.  Then the original “white meat” took over the world as the healthy convenient food of choice and I just walked away in search of tastier pastures.  I can’t explain why I stopped making mayonnaise, except to say that after I got involved in the restaurant biz, we just drifted apart.  So here we were, decades later, bumping up against each other. Can you ever really go home again? I wanted to find out.

Poor No More – Spaghetti with Clams and Toasted Breadcrumbs

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Spaghetti and Clams with Toasted Bread Crumbs takes its inspiration from two dishes–spaghetti alla vongole, a dish of string pasta with clams popular in Naples, Rome, wider Campania and farther north along the Italian coastline; and pasta con il pangrattato, pasta with breadcrumbs, a very basic dish of la cucina povera, the cooking of the poor.  At its most elemental the latter contains no more than pasta, breadcrumbs, oil, salt and a bit of garlic.  Variations include raisins, cauliflower, anchovies and olives, which is to say that a little stale bread, some pasta and oil is all you need for dinner–if you have anything else you can dine in the lap of luxury.

Dandelion and Mustard Green Gnocchi with Lucky Boy Onions and Pine Nuts

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This week’s Dandelion and Mustard Green Gnocchi recipe features a sauce made with wild Texas onions.  My brother Bob and his wife Monika have have a small ranch, which they call Lucky Boy, in the Hill Country a couple of hours from San Antonio.*  In one of those weird six-degrees of separation confluences friends of ours were visiting family in Texas,  who were in turn friends with my brother and his wife.  Everyone ended up at Lucky Boy for the weekend.  Our friends flew back to Boston with a Texas goodie bag filled with long slender wild onions picked from the banks of the Llano River.  We used the bulb and the pointed flower head (what locals call “the garlic”), and a few inches of tender green stem attached to each.  Most of the stem is too woody for cooking, like the tough parts of lemongrass.  If you look closely at the plate of gnocchi photographed straight down there’s a closed flower head sitting atop the dumpling in the seven o’clock position.