Category Archives: Lunch

Warm Radish Salad with Bacon and Pea Tips

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Sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you.  That’s the way it was with Warm Radish Salad with Bacon and Pea Tips.  Salad is a killer to photograph.  Light glints off the dressed surfaces, producing bits of glare or “hot spots.”  And if the salad is one part greens and another part something else, then while it may taste delicious to toss everything together, that homestyle approach doesn’t make for an alluring photo.  The heavier components tend to weigh down the more delicate ones.  What’s a guy with a camera and a chef for a wife to do?

Make the damn salad and photograph it a second time, that’s what.*  The salad above is composed with a photograph, or dinner guests, in mind–radishes here, salad there, easy on the dressing.  The photo shot from straight down later in the post is the way we’d normally eat the salad in all its messy collapsed glory.  Different stees.

You choose.

Fireworks for the Fourth of July – Pickled Eggs 3 Ways

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Pickled Eggs 3 Ways is the final and most colorful installment in our recent trilogy of egg recipes.  We made two batches of each of these eggs, a week apart, both to test the recipes and so I could photograph the process from pickling juice to finished eggs.  As I write this the first batch of three dozen eggs is nearly gone–in case you’re wondering if kids will eat pickled eggs,  the answer is Yes, they will.  Who can resist wedges of a saffron and purple egg, child or adult? These eggs are tart, but not completely sour (note the sugar in the recipes), which makes them a flexible dining companion.  Of course pickled eggs are the ultimate picnic food–festive, not prone to spoilage, and given to pairing nicely with other preserved items like cheese, smoked fish–and great beer.  They stand out with mixed greens–and when combined with with wasabi mayonnaise make a killer egg salad

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.

Wilted Green Salad with Fresh Chickpeas, Feta and Greek Yogurt

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Craig Claiborne, the late pioneer of food journalism for the New York Times once wrote a New Year’s Day column that included the line, “Blessed indeed is the household whose refrigerator contains an overlooked tin of caviar.”  Yes, well.  For most of us, caviar times may be gone, but that only means the return of our salad days.  Substitute chickpeas for caviar and you’re halfway to Wilted Green Salad with Fresh Chickpeas, Feta and Greek Yogurt.

Garlic Love – Skordalia with Parsley Salad

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  In my personal desert island larder (you know, What would you take if you had to choose only a dozen or so dishes or ingredients  on a desert island for the rest of your life?) Skordalia with Parsley Salad would surely rate shelf space.*  And not because it includes potatoes.  But because it includes …

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?

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.

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 …