05.05.13: appetizer/salad (arugula-pecorino salad wrapped in bresaola)

Bresaola-Wrapped Arugula-Pecorino Salad

I have all of these epic posts in progress right now, but I had to share this half-salad, half-appetizer with you right away as it’s quite possibly the platonic ideal of easy springtime/summer eating. This recipe comes from Polpo‘s cecchetti section as part of a selection of “wraps” that they offer as small plates, and it is absolutely fantastic as an alternative to a big salad when paired with a simple little meat dish. It’s also a great variation of the bresaola carpaccio I assembled a few years ago, albeit a little more substantial and a little more favorable on the meat to salad ratio.

That the meat in question is incredibly lean is merely one more reason to try this little dish; that it’s easy to eat and quite substantial are the primary reasons to do so. It’s not even really fair to call this a recipe, but the inspired presentation, to me at least, is more than enough reason to share it. Just say that you got it from a fabulous Venetian-style restaurant in London.

Bresaola-Wrapped Arugula-Pecorino Salad

adapted from Polpo

serves 2

• 2 generous handfuls of baby arugula, washed well and spun dry
• Juice of half a lemon
• 1/4 cup (max) of grated Pecorino Romano or Parmigiano Reggiano (not fine, if possible–shards are good)
• Up to 1/2 cup good olive oil
• 6 slices bresaola
• Kosher salt to taste (note that the beef is salty, so no heavy hand is needed)

First, dress the salad: take freshly-washed arugula and dress first with lemon juice, then salt, then olive oil, and finally with cheese right before serving. (Any sooner on the cheese and the lemon will break it down too much.) Take a slice of the bresaola, fill with approximately 1/6th of the salad and secure with a skewer. Repeat until you have used up all of the salad. Serve immediately.

03.19.13: dinner (sabor de soledad, burrata on a salad edition).

Arugula salad with citrus, burrata, and prosciutto

Michael has been spending the bulk of the week in Virginia on business, and so I’m on my own when it comes to dinner from Tuesday through yesterday. In my ongoing efforts to avoid defaulting to pasta, I queued up a few recipes that have sat on the bench that is my recipe board on Pinterest, and so instead of eating all of the pasta this week, I am eating all of the cheese. It’s still healthy if it’s part of a salad, right? (I kid. Of course I know the answer to that question. It’s yes.)

01.03.12: dinner (first pizzas of the new year: tomato pie with scallions and bacon and a white pie with ricotta, prosciutto di parma and arugula)

Tomato Pie with Jumbo Scallions and Bacon

I hope the holiday season gave you all time to be still and reflect on the year as it passed perhaps via most golden and perfect of all meditation opportunities, fooling around in your kitchen with no pressing need to generate a large or timely meal, maybe utilizing a night or two in that golden week between Christmas and NYE. If you did not have this opportunity, I guess you missed out.

By the end of it all, even I had had enough. Lasagna and Thanksgiving Food Dinner II with the families, a standing rib roast for the two of us, fried chicken on NYE and a sundry of interspersed meals inspired by greats like Tom Colicchio and David Chang. You might think I’d give up after this feastish onslaught and say “meh” on this particular evening, but the last night before the return to work, waking up early and wrestling I-95 called for something delicious, if not seasonal. E suggested making some pizzas and that felt perfect.

07.19.11: dinner (steak tacos)

Steak Tacos with Avocado, Arugula, Caramelized Onions, Radishes and Cheddar

So how ’bout that earthquake on Tuesday, East Coast?

I’ll be honest–it freaked me out. I was on a call in my office and suddenly the building was moving, and we all emerged from cubes and offices to  verify with each other that we didn’t all have massive cases of vertigo at exactly the same time. What freaked me out the most, though, was that it brought me back to a Friday morning two weeks ago: we had made the rather catastrophic mistake of betting on the George Washington Bridge to get us to New Jersey instead of our normal Tappen Zee–having had a few easy GWB crossings lately, surely trying to go over after rush hour on a Friday morning in the summer would be nothing simpler.

Oh, no. Not even a little bit. We were stuck on the Cross Bronx for two hours. That’s two-thirds of the time it should take to get to Pennsylvania from Stamford. To make matters worse, we were completely without recourse–it’s not like we know the major highways around the city all that well, because usually I do everything I can to avoid the highways around the city. So as we sat trapped on an overpass, Michael started losing his mind and then a kid in the car ahead of us started jumping up and down so violently that he made the entire overpass shake, which proceeded to make me a little panicky. The moment the car crossed the bridge and got on the New Jersey Turnpike was finally when I could breathe a sigh of relief.

08.04.11: dinner (or rather, engagement steak salad trumps engagement chicken)

Steak, Roasted Garlic, Caramelized Onion and Arugula Pasta Salad

When I lived in New Haven, the two apartments I lived in were above the oldest drug store in the city and the building was old and beautiful and made of brick. This meant that the laundry room–one washer and dryer for the four apartments–was in the basement, and the basement was straight out of a horror movie: cobwebs everywhere, stone walls, bare light bulbs that only worked occasionally, and a floor so dirty you’d sooner throw out a wayward sock or pair of underpants that happened to touch it rather than try to rescue it. I’m pretty sure there were spiders everywhere to boot, and so I’d scurry down there and load my laundry as quickly as I could and got the hell out of there.

In other words: I loathed it.

05.30.11: dinner (steak dinner from the broiler)

NY Strip Steak with Arugula-Lamb-Mache Salad and Baked Sweet Potato Fries

These lovely pictures were snapped by E on our first weekend in Stamford. We were still surrounded by boxes but we decided we needed a break from packing tape and our piles of treasured shit and return to the center of our New York power- we visited our beloved Fairway. [Ed.--one, if not both of us visited Fairway every day over the Memorial Day weekend, including Friday.]

Briefly (I think E is planning a far more detailed breakdown for a later date), the food fanatics behind Manhattan’s best supermarket, Fairway (131st St and 12th Ave), have opened a branch right here in our new little corner of the metro world in Stamford on Canal St in from what I can tell from Google Maps was a vacant lot. But I digress.

02.12.11: dinner (duck ham and caramelized onion pizzas)

Duck Ham Pizza with Ricotta, Arugula and Grana Padano

It’s cold, it’s dry, it’s been a little while since you’ve set off the smoke alarms, so you decide to cook up some homemade pizza.

All E had said about the meals that weekend was: I want to make duck ham. Simply making a pair of cured duck breasts and just eating them, while enticing, felt like a bit of a waste. We decided a nice pizza, where our salt-cured duck breast could take the traditional place of prosciutto in a classic Emilia-Romagnan piadina recipe we had read about a few years back would be perfect. I blind-baked the crust for five minutes, then topped it with ricotta,  arugula, grana padano. I waited on adding the delicate duck until the last few minutes to ensure it didn’t cook opr worse still, dry out. [Ed.--we did put a few slices through the broiler, but having some of the fresh-cured and the broiled slices made for a nice flavor and texture combination.]

01.16.11: dinner (pistachio pesto and bresaola, carpaccio-style)

Bresaola with Arugua and Parmigiano-Reggiano

The first Saturday of December found Michael and I out and about on a very brisk day to escort my parents around Midtown; they had boarded a bus to New York around 7:30 that morning from PA, and emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel about two hours later, so we ended up escorting them around Midtown for a good seven hours (notable to us only when we realized that we spent 6 of those hours walking). Once we had gotten them on their tour bus home (a surprisingly harrowing ordeal thanks to there being at least 30 buses all jockeying for a spot along 42nd Street at Bryant Park) we made our way home, stopping for a quick drink to discuss the evening’s plans that left me feeling torn on whether to bundle back up and accompany Michael to the Village for a party or to stay home. I was tired but I felt bad after saying I would go with him, and as the exhaustion from the exertions of the day set in, I’m pretty sure that it crossed a wire or two in my head because I got a little irrationally angry at the choice of either having to stay home alone or schlepping it down to the subway again. In any case, I wisely chose to stay indoors and sent Michael on his then-grumpy way, resigning myself to an evening of some of my favorite DVDs and the Wii, promptly remembering that I actually enjoy having nights to myself from time to time.

Well, in the midst of all of this (very silly) drama I had my first taste of bresaola–air-dried,salted, lean beef from the Lombardy region of Italy–in the form of what could be the most perfect meat-and-cheese sandwich ever: bresaola and goat cheese between two slices of toasted bread. That’s it.

10.02.10: anniversary dinner and a film (steak frites)

Onglet Garcon with Pommes Frites

[Ed.--And here's part 2 of our epic steakhouse dinner and a movie anniversary dinner. Michael elaborates on how things got...interesting.]

I love my wife. I know I do because I put up with this ass-ache of a meal to celebrate our second wedding anniversary. We began planning the feast with the noblest of intentions, and honestly, by the time the movie started everything was again right with the world. In the interim, things were tense at times, annoying at others. The fault, dear reader was not in our stars, but in our selves; the meal we selected was… ambitious to say the least, taking a snarky page- actually several snarky pages from Tony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook.

09.23.10: dinner (Catalan lemon and garlic sauce over Cornish game hens)

 

Cornish Game Hen in Lemon and Garlic Sauce

 

Thank you for linking in, readers! Elizabeth found this recipe inside of a Catalan cookbook she’d found recently and after going my own way on the Spanish chicken wings, I promised to make it according to factory specifications later in the week. We have a good deal of Spanish cookbooks in the house, probably more than of any other national cuisine save perhaps Italian, so I can say that this dish was very emblematic of its nation. [Ed. - SIX SEVEN Spanish cookbooks to TWELVE Italian books, thank you very much!] I know we’ve been hitting España pretty hard lately, so we’ll be posting one last solidly Spanish plate then moving East.