Category Archives: Easy

Sardines with Feta and Salmoriglio

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Photographing Sardines with Feta and Salmoriglio this past week reminded me of a fancy dinner where Jody and I found ourselves sitting across the table from Stephen Hawking’s literary agent, who told a story about A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME.  The original manuscript, we learned, had been an overlong demanding text several times the size of the slender volume that was eventually published.  The agent revealed how he convinced Hawking how to pare it down.  “I explained to him that every time he used a mathematical formula in his book he was going to lose half his readers.”

Hawking must have taken his advice to heart.  There’s nary a single formula in the entire story.

Friends have suggested a similar axion holds for food bloggers.  Every time you publish a photo of a fish with its head on you’re going to lose half your readers.  

Seared Char with Creamed Spinach and Sorrel

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This is the easiest elegant dish you will ever make.  Seared char with creamed spinach and sorrel.  Despite my French introduction to cooking I’m not a fan of the just-add-butter-and-cream approach to life on the stove top. It’s too easy to lapse into a dish whose primary flavors are cream and butter rather than the ingredients you brought home from the store.  Nevertheless, there are combinations that ask for butter and cream.  Salmon, spinach and sorrel is one of them.

Steel-Cut Oats with Dukkah

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Ceci ce n’est pas une poste. This is not a post–it’s a reminder of what you can do with dukkah. In this case, breakfast: steel-cut oats with Greek yogurt, diced beets, a soft-boiled egg and dukkah. If I’d had leftover roasted carrots, or a little braised fennel, or some kale… well, you get the picture. You get a whole grain and a vegetable with some protein under your belt and you haven’t even left the house yet.
Don’t bother clicking on the MORE link. There is no more. This is it.
Ken

Flageolet Soup with Crème Fraiche, Tarragon and Mustard

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After getting back from California we wanted to catch our breath with a simple dish that wouldn’t require a lot of effort. If it went with the the crazy New England weather this week, warm or cold, all the better. Herewith Flageolet Soup with Crème Fraiche, Tarragon and Mustard. Flageolets (fla-as in flag-zhay-oh-lay) are a small, delicate bean, usually (but not always, as you can see in the photos) an alluring pale green. If you examine them closely they’re covered with faint green stripes. They’re removed from the pod before reaching full maturity, which contributes to their delicate flavor. My first encounter with them was an impulse purchase – how could I not buy a package of beans the color of young grasshoppers?

Roasted Asparagus with Pistachio-Basil Pesto

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We eat A LOT of asparagus. I see it on sale, buy an armful, steam it lightly, then use it to fill out other things–steel-cut oats and an egg, a lunch salad with cannelloni beans, a way to gussy up a croque monsieur so I don’t feel like Lonely Guy eating grilled cheese in an empty house. But Roasted Asparagus with Pistachio Pesto is something else altogether. You set this platter in front of friends who aren’t afraid of getting a little messy when everyone’s standing around in the kitchen with a beer (my preference with asparagus, by the way)* or glass of wine, carrying on while you cook. Serious finger food.

No Flat Tires – Steel-Cut Oats with Eggs, Preserved Lemon and Olives

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When Jody and I signed up for the cycling fund-raiser the PanMass Challenge last year we stepped up our game when it came to exercise. Speaking exclusively for my Falstaffian self, I thought it might not be a bad idea to drop a few pounds ahead of the actual 200-mile 2-day ride. That’s how we ended up making dishes like Steel-Cut Oats with Eggs, Preserved Lemon and Olives.

But it was a journey to get there.

Pistachio and Blood Orange Torte

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I first came across a version of the cake that evolved into Pistachio and Blood Orange Torte in Nigella Lawson’s HOW TO EAT. Three things grabbed me about the recipe–how simple it seemed, even for a pastry klutz like me, that it called for cooking oranges for two hours, and that it had no flour.

Two hours! Would the oranges be mush? Inquiring minds needed to know, but inquiring minds didn’t have two hours to spend watching oranges break down. Enter my friend, the pressure cooker.

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Simple Whole Roasted Fish – Part Deux

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I learned to clean fish when I was nine-years old, taught by my father, practicing on the sunnies, perch and bass my brothers and I caught in rural Michigan.  Cleaning fish is a tripartite affair–scraping the scales off while grasping a slippery tail, gutting and removing the viscera, and cutting out the gills and fins, …

Spicy Chickpea Cakes with Romesco Sauce

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After reading Robert Harris’s entertaining novel IMPERIUM about the Roman orator, essayist and politician Cicero, and his parlous ascendency to the position of consul in ancient Rome I assumed I’d gotten most of the salient details of his life.  I was wrong.  Pull up a plate of Spicy Chickpea Cakes with Romesco Sauce–it’s an interesting …

Avocado Salad with Pikliz

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In case you haven’t noticed by now, Jody and I both love condiments, the more unfamiliar the better.  Every year we have to do a major refrigerator purge because the long term residents have moved off the door or the impractical skinny shelf into the space reserved for more temporary tenants like leftovers or fresh …