05.08.12: dinner (shrimp with tequila, orange, and garlic with black bean and avocado quinoa salad)

Shrimp with orange, tequila, and garlic

Do you have at least a few cookbooks that are actually quite good but you don’t turn to often enough, and for no good reason at that? I realized this was the case on Saturday while flipping through our copy of Gordan Ramsay’s Fast Food in search of an easy recipe for the week: it’s been ages since I cracked it open and looked through it, and I couldn’t tell you why that was the case. The layout is kind of strange–meal menus are interspersed with five recipes that fit within arbitrary categories–and some of the photos aren’t as gorgeous as one expects with food photography these days, but it hardly matters because the recipes are good and incredibly adaptable. Two are already in our regular rotation, and when the weekend rolls around and I’m planning for another Tuesday dinner, I’m going to make sure that more are at least given a proper tryout in the future.

07.23.11: tapas (Copper River salmon with mojo sauce, lemon-garlic chicken wings, and mango-pluot gazpacho)

Copper River Sockeye Salmon with Mojo Sauce

Heat waves are awesome, aren’t they? They sap your energy completely, make venturing outside after 8AM and before 8PM a dangerous proposition, and–if you’re anything like me–a big ol’ sweaty mess. I literally walked across the river from my office to go to the farmers market on Thursday at lunch (at most six-tenths of a mile) and came back drenched. And very flushed (from exertion, not from sun thankfully). The trains didn’t fare much better–Friday afternoon three (!) trains coming from New Haven got tangled up in wires because of the heat, so I had to drive myself home because they suspended service around 5:00.

At least I wasn’t one of the poor people who were trapped on those trains.

04.03.11: dinner (white clam and leek-prosciutto pizzas)

White Clam Pizza, New Haven Style

How on earth are you supposed to follow up a five-course meal featuring fifteen dishes (plus appetizers!) with a homemade meal? Are you even supposed to eat? To be honest, I wasn’t expecting to be all that hungry come Sunday–and neither was Michael–so we didn’t put all that much thought into dinner plans. But we knew we’d have to eat something, but none of our typical stand-bys were appealing: we had enjoyed enough tapas the night before, thank you, and we had pasta on Friday, and tacos seemed heavy, and I don’t think either of us could fathom eating another braised meat dish. And then inspiration hit: pizza. Of course.

03.20.11: dinner (tonnarelli cacio e pepe and Roman-style roasted chicken)

Tonnarelli Cacio e Pepe

Guilt can be a powerful thing–and as with all things powerful, it must be used in responsible ways. Michael is headed for a conference this coming weekend, leaving me to fend for myself for six days.* Naturally we’ve had periods of separation before–usually because I’m the one traveling for work–but this will be the longest period we’ve had to deal with since I moved to Connecticut five years ago. I know Michael feels bad about leaving me to have to cook for myself for a whole work week because not only did we have pasta on Sunday night, he was the one suggesting to make it and he acquiesced to my request for cacio e pepe without much protest.

In other words, he brooked no opposition to us having a dish that is, in essentials, pasta and cheese. Yep, that’s guilt.

03.15.11: dinner (kitchen-sink chicken and beward the Ides of March!)

Kitchen-Sink Chicken over Cheesy Brown Rice

This week I have all about completely purposing whatever I have on hand after a slew of over-blown saucy outings that I have yet to even write about, let alone commend the leftovers to the deep as they are now weeks beyond prime.

So today, I’m going to do something different. This was a mid-week meal I came up with off the top of my head, made entirely out of nothing more than a fresh protein, a piece of fruit, a root and some stuff out of the pantry. So, a brief bit of free-styling…

02.19.11: dinner (roast chicken, Greek-style)

I guess we have several running jokes around here, but my favorite is probably my love of chicken roasting. As in,

Elizabeth: What do you want to make tonight?

Michael: I could roast a chicken…

Sometimes I just say it because I don’t want to think of what we’re having and if she says yes then so much the better, win-win-win. Lately I’d been rubbing the bird with some kind of chili or chipotle and shredding it into tortillas, so this time we looked for something still simple but decidedly different. Enter The Silver Spoon which is a tome of no (too) intensive variations on a common theme.

12.27.10: dinner (train troubles and tacos)

Rajas and Cheese Tacos

Christmas had come and gone, and in it’s wake our precious New York was buried in two feet of snow and we were limping our way north despite the wintry conditions. As we sat on our train, stuck behind a broken switch, we started leafing through one of our newest acquisitions, a lovely little cookbook on tacos. With lots of time on our hands, we decided on two, if we ever made it back home.

10.30.10: brunch (Spanish tapas turned into brunch).

Sobrasada Tapa

I had it in my head to make brunch on Saturday. We never eat brunch–I eat breakfast when I get to work, and Michael tends to only have oatmeal on hand, and fighting the crowds on Broadway to enjoy overpriced eggs and bacon holds little appeal for us. Sometimes, though, we’ll make it when friends are staying with us and that’s always fun, but it’s also a lot of work. So the idea of making a few small tapas for brunch had immediate appeal for me: filling but not overwhelmingly so. Michael tends to just eat a few hard-boiled eggs on weekend mornings to get him through until dinnertime, so using that as a base for ideas, I flipped through The Book of Tapas, made a shopping list, and on Saturday morning got to work.

The sobrasada tapa pictured above was by far my favorite–and that includes the tapa that I made with smoked salmon, for crying out loud! It was by far the easiest of the three to make, though, and when it comes to making a brunch spread at home, that’s really important. 

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.

09.11.10 (fried anchovies, raw tomato sauce, roasted chicken and purple basil!)

Purple Basil

This week’s Weekend Cook & Tell on Serious Eats was a good impetus to head down to the Union Square Greenmarket, as it served as a reminder to me to try to take advantage of the local tomatoes that would both be at their peak of deliciousness and also their lowest price. It didn’t occur to me until we emerged from the subway (and overwhelmed by the amazing smells everywhere) that we would also be getting the first of the fall harvest as well, so it took a good lap around the market for us to figure out what we wanted and where exactly we were going to purchase it all.

Michael wanted to roast a chicken, and as we passed the random vendors selling jazz albums and the community compost center he proposed pairing it with a nice pasta made with a gently cooked fresh tomato sauce with basil and mozzarella cheese.

Who am I to say no to that?