Bubble & Squeak

Recently we had a roast chicken catastrophe in the kitchen. OK so catastrophe might be a strong term, but I was tired and when I roasted the chicken upside down, leaving the breast sort of raw in the middle it felt like a catastrophe. Especially since I didn't realise it was upside down until we went to carve it.

Honestly since I started cooking for myself (and others) I've made countless roasted chickens. Its easy, that's its whole draw.  Except after work when your stuffing herbs and lemons into a chicken's backside at 5pm, after cranking through another balls to the wall day during our busy season at my 9-5, with my mind on 700 other things. When my boyfriend came home at quarter to eight and pulled the bird out of the oven he asked if it was deformed...In these cases sometimes you want to cry, and it feels like a catastrophe. We all make mistakes, and sometimes we all eat chicken legs and mashed potatoes while the rest of our dinner roasts in the oven for lunch tomorrow.

Even better: sometimes delicious miracles come from kitchen catastrophe.

Bubble & Squeak is a traditional British dish typically made from the leftovers of a Sunday roast, mashed potatoes with a little egg and flour and whatever leafy green you roasted or boiled a side dish. In this case (and every case really?) I made some substitutions and additions so that it suited our palates, and what we have in the pantry.

I started with the leftover smashed potatoes (skins on is how we roll in this house, and we whip them with a good old fashioned hand masher, skim milk and local butter) I used kale chopped into ribbons and in place of the egg and flour I used a few tablespoons of nonfat cottage cheese and matzo meal (we're multicultural like that)

A quick spin in a warm pan sprayed with just a little olive oil, a flip and then i topped them with a spritz of thyme vinegar and a sprinkle of kosher salt. Its a warm, filling and surprisingly delicious lunch, or supper (I'd add a side salad).

Kitchen miracles can happen.

Bubble & Squeak

2 cups of leftover mashed or smashed potatoes
2 cups of kale, stems removed, sliced into thin ribbons
1/4 cup nonfat cottage cheese
1/2 cup of matzo meal
garlic powder, salt, pepper, and crushed red pepper flake to taste*

Mix everything above together, checking that the texture is not too wet or too dry to make patties if you need to add more matzo or cottage cheese to supplement, everyones leftover potatoes are different.

Form patties and chill while you bring a large skillet to medium heat, add a small amount of oil evenly to the pan and drop in your potatoe cakes. when you acheive a crusty brown bottom, flip them over and dio it again on the other side. Pull them from the pan and rest them for a minute before seving alongside your favorite condiments, we like thyme vinegar and salt, or spicy ketchup. Creamy horseradish sauce would be fabulous too. More...

Picnic Perfect

The best way to keep the memory of an all too brief vacation alive, is to picnic on the very same beach the following weekend. And to encourage your friends to eat your experiments, stored safely in your picnic hamper.

Since my friends are mostly vegetarian, and the beach is home to more than one case of sun induced food poisoning every summer; I decided to make everything veggie friendly, and although the picnic basket is insulated, I steered away from anything that might spoil, and therefore spoil our day. 

A muffaletta traditionally features various deli meats and cheeses layered in an entire loaf of bread with a tapenade mix that balances out all the richness. To Vegetarian-ize (yes, I'm making up my own words now) I grilled super thin slices of zucchini, and summer squash,(tossed lightly in coconut oil) and layered them with grilled onions, baby spinach, tapenade, and hummus. Simply pull out some of the inside of you loaf of bread, smear one side with hummus, the other with tapenade, and fill. Then wrap it up and stow it at the bottom of the picnic basket: it gets better if you give it a bit of a press.

The barley salad was inspired by one of my picnic companions. She once made a dip for freshly baked bread out of olive oil, garlic, and copious amounts of cilantro and I couldn't get enough of it. I’ve made it several times since, and when I was trying to think of a side dish that would be sun-safe and also refreshing it occurred to me that the dip would make a delicious dressing, I cut the olive oil way down and added a splash of white wine vinegar, for good measure a chopped cucumber from our garden went in.


For dessert we had Allison Attenborough’s lemon lavender shortbread. I made it in a small cake pan, so we could bread pieces off as desired. Its delicate enough that you taste the lavender but not so potent that you feel as though you ate a potpourri cookie, or licked your grandmothers drawer liner.

NOTE: There is nothing wrong with using fancy picnic fare to bribe friends to come to the beach with you, even though you know they have to work that afternoon.

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Zucchini Panzanella

Remember that zucchini that cropped up while I was on vacation? Well its starting to look like it might be the only one my Jurassic size plants create. And since it was enormous, I figured it deserved a place in the center of dinner, maybe to honor it in front of the garden gods so that they might give me one more zucchini.


Panzanella is a fabulous dish for when its too hot to eat, cook, or live in general. If you are like me, and lighting the grill and standing over it when its ninety degrees seems unappealing, you can use a grill pan and stand in your underwear in the kitchen.

For this version, I grilled cherry tomatoes until just blistered and corn on the cob until it looked - and smelled- really roasted, because my grill pan is teeny I  sauteed the zucchini with a sweet white onion but if you have the space I encourage you to grill all the vegetables.

I used a whole wheat rosemary bread bought at the farmers market, and toasted the cubes under the broiler. In this heat I sometimes just eat popsicles for dinner, so I'm willing to call this a win, even if its not really grilled the way I like it.


I dressed this with homemade raspberry vinegar, olive oil and salt and pepper and a shallot all whizzed up in the blender. This is a substitution friendly sort of a dinner salad, so feel free to use whats on hand, if you have no zucchini, use another squash, or make it a little more fresh with a cucumber.


Quasi Grilled Panzanella
1 pint cherry tomatoes
2 ears of corn, shucked and cleaned
1 loaf of rosemary bread
1 mammoth sized (or 2 small) zucchini
1 small sweet white onion
Raspberry Vinaigrette

Heat your grill to high, and place on the tomatoes and the ears of corn whole, turning occasionally to give an even char. * Once they reach your desired level of doneness, remove them from the grill and set them aside. To remove the kernels from the cob,I like to stand the ear of corn on the pillar in the center of a bundt pan and cut the corn off the cob with a sharp knife in a downward motion, just let the pan well collect all the roasted corn goodness. While you are grilling your vegetables, toast the cubes of bread and saute the onion and zucchini If you let this go as long as you grill the corn you should get a lovely caramelization on the onions. toss the ingredients together and serve warm with a drizzle of raspberry vinaigrette.

*Pay close attention to the tomatoes as they can explode in the heat, you want them just blistered, then you can remove them. Let the tomatoes cool while you prepare the rest of this salad, while cooking them deepens their flavor, because of their liquid insides they become finger and mouth scalding bombs when you cook them.

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Summer

This week I took time off to visit friends in New Hampshire. Sometimes living in an area where you have to get in the car and drive in order to see the woods allows you to forget that an hour up 95 there is open space and trees and fields that aren't rationed off to those who can afford to live near them. I spent alot of time lying in the sun, staring at the cornfield, and drinking dandelion wine.

 It was a solid reminder that somewhere other than my life things move a bit slower. Nothing particularly amazing happened in the way of food, except for a tour of a fairly sizable vegetable garden, but when I came home I got my first zucchini off our plant, and the first cucumber too. The gifts just keep on coming.

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Faux Pho

Its been a hell of a month, and it doesn't look like our summer is headed in direction that we had hoped. I'm working on a side project, trying to get it up and running before all the summer produce slips away from my fingers, and running myself in two directions. The man, who broke his ankle a few weeks ago and is awaiting a second surgery does a surprisingly large amount of 'the dirty work' keeping the kitchen, and the rest of the house running...and now that he's laid up for at least another month....Well lets just say I'm desperately clinging to the idea that he'll be magically healed in a week...
When he came home from the hospital the first time I had promised him whatever made him feel better would be dinner...cut to Eggs Benedict with hollandaise that was almost clear, takeout Chinese, and a mess of other kitchen horrors that look appetizing... until you bite into them and realize I've been so tired that I forgot salt...on everything.

But tonight, I was on my game...probably has something to do with having yesterday off and doing very little. Tonight I took what remained of the leftover ground beef from burgers we (ahem, my father) grilled on July 4th and made little ginger and beef meatballs, I thinly sliced pea pods from Allandale Farm and cabbage from Two Fields Farm and sauteed it in the wok. I simmered vegetable broth with ginger and garlic and a chile, and after the meatballs got a quick browning, they went into the vegetable studded broth to simmer. Flat Chinese egg noodles sparingly dressed in toasted sesame oil made little nests that cradled the meatballs (more like little meat dumplings, without dough, really) and swam with the broth. I topped it off with some of our very own cilantro and a super finely chopped garlic scape. Rose was poured and we ate before it got dark. I was the winner. The dish reminded me a little of the Pho we used to eat years ago when we lived by the beach. It was pretty easy and more importantly satisfying,(when you aren't eating on a regular schedule, sometimes salad will not cut it for dinner, even if its eighty degrees...besides that's why we have air conditioning)

These are the kind of nights I look forward to, when lunches are packed and the vegetable garden is watered and I live in (feigned) ignorance about the fact that there is not a single clean towel in the house.

I may be tired and not very good company but I'm still cooking.... More...

Jump Start

Yesterday the farmers market opened...I bought some seedlings, arugula, kale, French breakfast radishes and green onions...the market is a great reminder that while you may be seeing corn on the cob and zucchini as thick as your forearm in the grocery store, its still only the beginning of June in Massachusetts, and those things are still a few weeks away around here.

The market served as a beautiful jumping off point for me...I haven’t stopped cooking but its gotten awful quiet around here...and admittedly over the winter I did overindulge a bit. I’m blaming a new job, the holiday season and a damn fine French cookbook...holy-majoly, I was not eating right! But I’m back to eating my vegetables and watching my portions and I couldn’t be happier to see the warm weather (and the sunlight that stretches until 9pm) return. With its return I’m hoping to resurrect the writing I do here.

Lately I’ve broken through a few ‘food fears’ of mine: I baked a loaf of yeast baked bread (!!) and I managed to (miraculously) pull an almost flawless bundt cake from its pan. I’ve been feeling rather invincible…you know, until I burn something. The man and I have been experimenting in mixology which is exciting and terrifying at the same time…we are ardent beer and wine people, but I’ve recently found that if you crush herbs into a cocktail I’m totally smitten with it. (Next up: I’m going to conquer the Americano.)

As I said; we haven’t stopped cooking. There have been all sorts of spring risottos, with fiddleheads and asparagus. There was a week of cold rain that was eventually chased away with pasta carbonara (dear whole foods, thanks for selling prosciutto ends for almost free) I made apple rhubarb bundt cake and a loaf of sesame bread. I roasted fish over leeks and tomatoes, and last week I made amazing turkey burgers on our charcoal grill and I knew summer was on its way.

I cant wait to show you what else we're up to this season.

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Asparagus Pizza

have been living with the man for almost a year now, and since I do most of the cooking, and will mostly eat anything that grows in the dirt, I have had to cultivate a short list of Vegetables To Be Eaten Alone...That is to say, vegetables that the man wont be seen with, have on his plate, and are certainly no where to be found in his (our) fridge.Not that the man is a picky eater, in actuality he'll eat nearly anything you set in front of him, but there are certain vegetables that do not pass between his lips.
Sadly I'm responsible for some of his hated vegetables even becoming his enemies in the first place...I introduced him to swiss chard (he wont even be in the same room with it) and I forced beets on him maybe to forcefully.

Asparagus is one of my all time favorites, and when I heard that it was on the list of Veggies Not To Be Named I had to change his mind. So I did what any reasonable young person would do. I made pizza...

White pizza is a weakness of mine and I had some leftover ricotta leftover from a pasta dish earlier in the week. The Portland Pie Co sells their garlic pizza dough at our local grocery store, and when I picked up a glob I knew what I could do to swing the odds in my favor.

I mixed roasted cherry tomatoes and roasted garlic with the ricotta, along with salt and pepper, as well as some crushed red pepper. I smeared this mix on the uncooked dough and topped it with a bit of crumbled bacon and then topped the whole mess with half of a bunch of asparagus, shredded thin with a veggie peeler. The heat from the oven does an amazing job of roasting the thin shreds of asparagus and the seasoned ricotta and tomato mixture make a mellow base. Salty, crunchy bacon won over the man who admitted that he would definitely try asparagus again, and ate the pizza for dinner, as well as breakfast the next day. Win.

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