raw kale salad with walnuts, pecorino, lemon and mushrooms/balsamic blackberry juniper ravioli

My first couple of seasons in the food co-op, I was not exactly what you would call a kale fan. The curly leaves and woody stems would totally languish in the fridge for weeks, and was always in danger of wilting and yellowing and even getting thrown out. I had no idea what I was supposed to do with the stuff, to be honest, and even I had a hard time finding many kale recipes online. Oh how times have changed.

red pepper salad with hard boiled eggs and anchovies

So my last two posts have both involved roasted red peppers, something that I really enjoy, both eating and preparing. Today, I have one more idea of what you can do with them: a big old salad with anchovies, hard-boiled eggs, garlic, parsley and a nice vinaigrette with olive oil.

grilled mustard chicken with scallions/shredded kale salad with avocado and tomatoes

So it's a rare opportunity that I get to grill anything, being that I am afraid that I would set the roof of my building on fire were I ever to follow through on my dream of dragging a webber up there. Therefore, I was really excited when my brother suggested we commander mom and dad's grill one evening and throw a barbeque for our friends back in August, before he went back up to Cobleskill for school.

Of course, that failed to take into account that our parents live an hour from the city, and that none of my friends were going to come out after a long week of work for a Friday night dinner party. So instead Nathan and Matt and I cooked everything for Mom and Dad instead. I think they were pretty happy to get to eat all the good stuff we made, and it was a really nice family meal, on a beautiful cool summer night, out in the backyard, crickets chirping. Our friends definitely missed out!

salad nicoise

Salade Niçoise is pretty complicated, as far as salads go. I mean, most salads do not involve cooking multiple components in what is ultimately a cold dish, lightly dressed in vineagrette. Not that I'm complaining, because a Niçoise salad is really good, and while it is filling enough to be a meal on its own, it isn't totally gluttonous to the point that it negates all the healthy connotations that go along with eating a salad for dinner. It's got potatoes and hard boiled egg, and some salty anchovies and capers, but all in all it is light and fresh. Laura suggested we make it one day when we had green beans and lettuce and tomato and potato from the food co-op, and it turned out delicious.

maple black pepper pork chop

So a nice fat pork chop is always pretty good... on this blog alone I've covered quite a number of delicious preparations: breaded and baked, pan seared, coffee marinated, braised pizzaiole and agrodolce.

beet and blood orange salad

So I apologize in advance for the quality of these photos. However, if you, like me, are at a loss for what to do with your food co-op beets, this may be just what you need. Alice Water's beet and blood orange salad

citrus sriracha mayonaise over scallops and avocado salad

I am pretty sure that I have never said this before on this blog: drop what you are doing and make this right now. For reals. Your day off plans for Labor Day are now to make scallops with this awesome sauce. I promise that you'll thank me.

This sauce recipe comes from The Amateur Gourmet, but it's definitely something you can imagine emerging from a professional kitchen, and it's simultaneously really easy to prepare. This was hands down the most elegant thing I've ever made on a weeknight, and Nathan and I couldn't stop exclaiming how good it was.

Of course, it all because clear when you read further and learn that Mr. Amateur Gourmet actually jacked this recipe from none other than famous chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten after NYT restaurant critic Sam Sifton selected it as one of his favorite restaurant dishes of 2010. That certainly goes a long way towards explaining this recipe's brilliance-- and if that's not good enough for you, I don't know what else to say.




So I guess you want to know how to make the dish already, right? Well you better be down to make your own mayo*. Don't worry, your arm might get a little tired, but it's totally doable. I have faith in you. Whisk together a splash of sriracha, pinch of salt and egg yolk, adding your oil drop by drop until you get a nice thick mayo. Then you stir in orange and lime juice to thin it out and add some of that citrusy zing and acidity that pairs so nicely with seafood.

The original sauce was served over big, seared, sea scallops, but as much as I love them, they are a bit rich for my blood. I went for cheaper bay scallops, which had sadly been frozen. Obviously, I didn't achieve that nice golden brown carmelization that you so often see on scallops (I cooked them in butter over medium high heat), but I think that's just fine for these little guys. The sauce went SO SO well with these scallops. A little sweet, a little spicy, and a whole lot of creamy deliciousness. So perfect!

To go with our scallops, we had a bright green salad, tossed with our spicy citrus mayo and topped with slices of orange and avocado. It was an excellent accompaniment. You might find that you don't need a rich mayo based dressing on avocado, but the citrus cuts the richness, and the sriracha adds some bite. It really hit the spot.

So, what are you waiting for? Go make this now!

PS. In a pinch you could probably just add sriracha and citrus to regular Hellmans mayo. Don't tell Jean-George I said so.

i miss arthur avenue

arugula, prosciutto and parmesean salad

I am really, really glad that I live in Manhattan now. Yes, it may be upper Manhattan, but it's still way more accessible than our old place in the Bronx. People are willing to come over on days of the year that aren't Fordham homecoming or my birthday party, and I love that.

What I do miss is Arthur Ave. The meat, the cheese, the torrone, the wine, the pasta... So much amazing foodstuff. I love it here in Harlem, but I haven't seen so much as a leaf of basil up here, let alone prosciutto di parma. I'm not asking for specialty Italian food, but a nice butcher would be cool.


red pepper and fresh mozzarella bruschetta

So, when I get a chance to go back, I blow two weeks of grocery money in a single afternoon and eat like a pig. I go to Casa Della mozzarella and buy pillowy little bocconcini. They are absolutely perfect and delicious bites just as they are, but I don't always stop there. I also go to Madonia Bakery for their excellent bread, (and peerless canoli), because bocconcini also make absolutely delicious bruschetta with some garlic marinated roasted red peppers, basil, parsley and some wilted greens.


prosciutto close up

Here we have a lovely and simple little salad that I threw together after my last trip to Arthur. I got a quarter pound of prosciutto di parma and a small wedge of parmesean at Teitel Brothers. I made the salad with the paper thin slices of cured meat, some curls of the cheese, a lemony vinaigrette dressing, and then arugula and tomato from the co-op.


four little bruschetta

Man, this was a good dinner. I wish I could get back up there more often. The ingredients on Arthur Avenue are so good and so flavorful that you barely have to do anything to them!

ravioli with swiss chard, sugar snap peas and garlic chips/radish salad sandwich

ravioli with chard, sugar snap peas and fried garlic chips

So last Monday night when Nathan left for vacation in Italy, I decided to cook up some Borgatti ravioli. I had had a box in the freezer since I was last up on Arthur Ave the last weekend of April, but I was waiting for a special occasion to break it out. I guess I was feeling like if I couldn't go back to Italy, I could at least eat the best ravioli this side of Atlantic. The time was right. (Appropriately, Nathan actually gets back TODAY, and I am so excited!!!)

As I was leaving work, I stumbled across this recipe for spaghetti with swiss chard, olives and garlic chips. I had seen it before, but it hadn't particularly struck me at the time. However, with a bag full of chard slowly wilting back at home, it suddenly seemed much more appealing. So, when I got home, I dug into a fridge full of vegetables and used that recipe as a jumping off point for my dinner.

Obviously, I switched the pasta from spaghetti to ravioli, but other than that I followed the recipe fairly closely, with one notable exception. I've never really liked olives. Lately, I've been coming around on them somewhat, but I still usually avoid them. I definitely don't keep them in the house, and I didn't go out shopping, so they got axed from the recipe.

I sliced the garlic into thin chips and fried it in hot olive oil until golden brown. I removed the garlic from the pan, and added a diced shallot, which I cooked until soft. Then I added a pint of shelled sugar snap peas, (after almost five days in the fridge, the pods were truly sad looking), and then the chopped leaves of a bunch of chard. (I reserved the stems for use in a dish Nathan likes to call chard surprise, but I'll be saving that for another post.) Meanwhile, I boiled my ravioli in a pot of salted water until it floated. Once the chard was wilted and the pasta drained, I tossed it all together and added back in the garlic chips. Yummy!


ravioli with veggies and open faced salad sandwich

I also had some old Italian bread in the fridge, the end of a head of food co-op lettuce, not to mention that never ending bag of radishes. I toasted the bread with some butter so it would taste less stale, and then just topped it with thinly sliced radish, the red leaf lettuce, kosher salt, fresh cracked pepper and a drizzle of olive oil and red wine vinegar. It wasn't as extraordinary as my last radish sandwich, but it was quick and easy and helped me use up some of the food I have in the fridge. (If you too have a surfeit of radishes, you can simplify this even further and just eat them sliced with butter, salt and pepper. That's how I finally finished mine off.)


radish and red leaf lettuce salad on Italian bread

So that was that. Dinner without my boy. Inclusion of peas aside, I think he would have liked it. That being said, for those of you keeping track this type of dinner is getting to be bit of a standard in my kitchen. Olive oil, garlic, onion, cooked greens, an extra veggie and some pasta... It's getting a bit formulaic, and I'm wary of falling into a rut. That being said, when there are so many greens to use up, there's only so much you can do with them. If anyone has any especially interesting suggestions, please pass them along!

What I did particularly like about this recipe that made it stand out from the pack was the crispy fried garlic slices. If you too are intrigued by the idea of garlic chips, I also happened upon this post which a couple of other interesting ideas for crunchy fried garnishes. I use a lot of browned garlic in my cooking, but it's generally more finely chopped and serves more as additional flavoring than as stand alone element of a dish. I'm intrigued by exploring this idea of crispy little garnishes and what not. In my first post of the year, I mentioned a dinner that Nathan and I made that included blue steak, creamed spinach and a poached egg with crispy onions. This we did accidentally, but I ended up really liking it. This other blogger's post has got me thinking that there could really be something to this flavorful crispy thing!

skillet mac and cheese with bacon/fried goat cheese salad

Nathan got really mad at me for this one. He's always suggesting we make mac and cheese, and I'm never in the mood and then he gets cranky and accuses me of cruelly withholding his favorite thing that I cook. And then a couple of weeks ago, I made mac and cheese without him. Oops. When he gets back to the states I'm going to have to welcome him with a big cheesy American style pasta dish to make up for it. Maybe I'll go uber traditional and use elbows. Or maybe I'll make it Italian style and add pepperoni and sundried tomatoes. We shall see.

This mac had five cheeses plus bacon and onions. I didn't deviate much from my previously described method. (If you are looking for more mac ideas, Mark Bittman unsurprisingly has some great ones, or you could make Gordon Ramsay's.) I made a cheesy bechamel sauce with butter, flour, a spash of hot sauce, a dash of worcestershire sauce, some salt and pepper, shredded parmesan and grated romano. I fried a couple of slices of bacon and some sliced onions. I cooked up a pound of orecchiette until tender and then mixed that into the sauce with the bacon and onions. I think I also added some little slices of garlic scape. I layered the pasta mixture with grated cheddar, monteray jack and gouda cheeses, and topped with breadcrumbs and extra of all five cheeses. Then I baked it in Laura's cast iron skillet. When we inevitably part ways as roommates, I will miss that the most. Like, aside from her, obviously.


macaroni and cheese

It was pretty good. Orecchiette is one of my favorite pastas, but I think it might be a little too thick and chewy for macaroni and cheese. I'm afraid that the pasta on top got a bit dried out and tough. Otherwise, it was delicious. Obviously a little smokey bacon and sweet onion take things up a notch,and the bacon and gouda really complimented one another well.


skillet baked mac and cheese

I also tried to pair it with a fried goat cheese salad. This didn't end up working out so well, so the horribly out of focus photo is somewhat appropriate. That isn't to say it wasn't tasty, just that I didn't wind up with the beautiful and neat little crisp golden goat cheese cakes that the recipe's author promised...


fried goat cheese in a lemon mayo dressing

As you can see, the breading burned and kept sticking to the pan, and I had to kind of stick it back onto the cheese... And it looked so good, too! In retrospect, it's probably my fault though. I didn't feel like breaking out the eggs, so I just rolled my freezer-firmed goat cheese rounds in bread crumbs and tried to fry them up in a hot pan of melted butter. I bet the egg would have helped everything stick together better. Obviously goat cheese + butter + bread crumbs still = TASTY, but it was a good deal messier and far less attractive looking than I would have hoped.

What was just a perfect as I imagined it would be was the dressing: olive oil, lemon zest, lemon juice, homemade mayonnaise, white vinegar and dijon mustard. Salt and pepper to taste. If I had had poppy seeds, I certainly would have added them, but this dressing was delicious even without them. Very bright and fresh, it tasted delicious over food co-op greens and some of my never ending $1 radishes.

what I did with my CSA share

As you all recall, it was two weeks ago that I picked up the first CSA share of the season, which meant a fridge full of veggies to consume. And what did I do will all that jolly green goodness? Well, I had dinner downtown after I picked up the food on Thursday night, but I kicked off Friday morning with a nice green salad accompanied with a poached egg and goat cheese, both of which I had gotten the previous weekend at the market. I also sliced up some garlic scapes very thinly, as though they were scallions, and added that to the mix. With something so green and cheerful for breakfast, you can't help but feel like it is going to be a good day.


salad for breakfast

I had off from work that day, and was thus able to spend the afternoon cooking and planning recipes to use up my vegetable stockpile. I sliced up all the ingredients for a red cabbage and carrot coleslaw with cilantro, garlic scapes and a lime mayonnaise. This I brought to my friend Flood's barbecue the next day. I pickled a jar of sugar snap peas and stored them in the fridge. Then I turned my attentions to that night's dinner, which I made for Nathan and his mom and grandma. A meatball risotto featured garlic scapes, parsley and fresh spinach from the csa, and was served alongside a leafy green salad of boston lettuce, scapes, and Union Square radishes. On Sunday, my parents and I made a delicious dinner that included co-op zucchini and summer squash with tomato sauce and grated cheese, as well as dry rubbed ribs and potato salad with homemade mayo. Later in the week I had more salad, this time with fried goat cheese, which I served alongside bacon and onion loaded five cheese macaroni and cheese. The next night my pasta leftovers got paired with a gingery tatsoi stir-fry tossed with the extra zucchini and squash we didn't cook over the weekend. By the following Thursday, all I had left in the fridge was my arch nemesis kale, a bag of turnips, and some cilantro and parsley.

This week, I've been less successful. Thursday I went straight from picking up the food in Harlem to a bar down by West 4th St, and ended up eating leftovers once I got home. I cooked some delicious pasta with peas and broccoli rabe on Friday night, but Saturday afternoon I went to brunch with Nathan and in the evening Laura, Lauren, Paul and I scored tickets at Shakespeare in the Park to see A Winter's Tale. Sunday I used food co-op basil to make pesto, which accompanied a food co-op salad and coffee pork chops. But Monday I went straight from work to a barbecue hosted by Grace and Marianne, Tuesday I saw Toy Story, and Wednesday I went to a talk about Clementine Paddleford at the New School followed by a bar trivia night, so there was not been much opportunity to use up all this food. I don't even want to think about how much produce awaits me when I go home to cook tonight. Dauntingly, there is another pick up tonight, so it's not going to get any easier!

Even though I fell a bit short in week number 2, I've still built up a substantial back-log of recipes, all of which you can expect to see here in full detail soon.

grilled lamb chops with gorgonzola butter/salad with dried cranberries and candied walnuts

My mom and I prepared this dinner a couple of weeks ago in honor of my dad's birthday. The recipe came together rather serendipitously after we shopped for the ingredients. My dad had asked for lamb, so that was all we had to go on initially. We picked some beautiful little chops at King Kullen, and talked out the rest of the meal on our way through the store. We decided on baked potatoes and a nice red leaf lettuce salad with dried cranberries and walnuts. On our way past the cheese section, I also decided to pick up some gorgonzola, which dad loves. So do I, for that matter.

Anyway, upon our return home, we decided to look online for tips on grilling the lamb. I figured I'd just find a simple marinade or something, but I found so much more when I quickly turned up this recipe for grilled lamb chops with gorgonzola butter. Since we had just bought the cheese, everything else just fell into place. Don't you just love that?


gorgonzola buttered lamb chops and potatoes

We did marinate the lamb for an hour or two with some olive oil, minced shallots and garlic, and salt and pepper. The recipe also called for rosemary, which definitely would have been nice, but my mom has some strange aversion to it so we left that out.

That was the boring part. The fun part was sauteing shallots and garlic in butter, and beating them together with a stick of butter, gorgonzola cheese, minced parsley, a healthy amount of cracked black pepper and a little olive oil and lemon juice. After this was one gooey mass, I rolled it into a log, covered it in plastic wrap, and stuck it in the freezer to firm up before dinner.

My dad took over grilling duties, and cooked the lamb to perfection. Each chop was topped with a healthy schmear of the gorgonzola mixture, which melted like, well, butter. It was both delicate and decadent. We also slathered it on our baked potatoes. Delicious, but definitely too rich for regular consumption. It was without a doubt a birthday type of meal.

Like the lamb, the salad was easy and delicious. I tore up some red leaf lettuce, crumbled up some of the gorgonzola, and tossed in a hefty handful of craisins. The only even slightly tricky part was preparing the walnuts, which I decided, in a fit of inspiration, to candy. According to the recipe I used, all you have to do is heat some sugar in a saucepan, add walnuts as it melts, and stir to coat the nuts in sugar. It worked nicely, but I was fairly stingy in the amount of sugar I used since I didn't want a whole lot of extra melty sugar and nothing to use it on. I probably could have done with a spoonful more and been better for it. I think we just used a balsamic vinegrette as a dressing, but regardless this salad was fantastic. So light and fresh and fruity!


a fabulous salad with pungent cheese, crunchy nuts and delicious fruit!

It was all in all a very nice dinner, although it was lucky Nathan was not around for it. First of all, he is crazy and thinks neither fruit nor nuts have any place in salads. Also, we had just enough chops for the four of us, and there weren't any more at the store. Boyfriend would have had to settle for a cheaper, inferior cut of lamb, haha.

Tuna Steaks with Country Toast and Aioli

This is a long-overdue post that Sarah has been haranguing me about for some time now. I got this recipe out of a great cookbook that my mom got me, Alice Waters' The Art of Simple Food. It has a lot of delicious yet relatively easy recipes, which is great for me since I tend to do my cooking after work. Some people enjoy eating at 9:30 at night - I don't.


rare tuna steaks, homemade garlic aioli and grilled pullman bread

Most of this recipe is really easy, so I'll keep it short. To make the tuna steaks, just season them with whatever you want to. I think I used salt and pepper. Cook them on a griddle (I got mine at Good Will for $1.50. It's probably worth more than that just in scrap value and it's one of the best purchases I have ever made). A couple minutes on each wide will do - you just want to get a good sear on the outside while keeping the inside rare. For the toast, just brush some slices of a nice loaf with olive oil and then put them on the griddle, too.

What I found most satisfying about this dish was the aioli. I tried to make aioli once before, in an effort to ape the food at Five Napkin Burger, and it was a complete failure. This time, it was an unqualified success. First I mashed up some garlic, then put an egg yolk on top of that. After that, I slowly added one cup of olive oil, whisking vigorously the whole time. slooowwwllly. Seriously, it took like like ten minutes to whisk it because I was adding it so slowly. Eventually you can start adding more olive oil at a time, but initially it was the feeblest of dribbles. This effort paid off, because the aioli came together beautifully and was delicious. A surprising amount of aioli was produced.

To serve, just give everyone a piece of the tuna, some toast, some aioli and a lemon wedge. You can put the aioli on the toast and on the tuna, or put the tuna on the toast, etc. I guess there are 6 ways you could eat this dish, so go hog wild!

Note from Sarah: We also had a nice salad with our fish. I made a dressing from the aioli, thinning it with lemon juice and adding a healthy amount of salt and pepper. We had a nice mix of regular lettuce and radicchio. Simple, but refreshingly tasty.


lettuce and radicchio in a lemon aioli dressing

rosemary brown butter soda bread

easy soda bread

So when I saw this recipe for a soda bread with black pepper, oats, brown butter, buttermilk and rosemary, I instantly wanted to make it. At the time I had some buttermilk in the fridge leftover from my traditional Irish soda bread, and some rosemary from this amazing Roman pork chop recipe that Nathan needs to blog for y'all. Of course, by the time I got around to making it, I no longer trusted the buttermilk (how do you even tell when that stuff goes bad?), but I just stirred in a tablespoon of white vinegar to some whole milk from the food co-op, and I was good to go. I also used some half white half whole wheat flour from the food co-op, so I wound up with a brown loaf. It was pretty cool.


half white flour from my CSA

This recipe is definitely a keeper. Easy, tasty, and a little bit rustic and different-- what's not to like? It was a bit crumbly, but if you're interested in making bread but don't want to mess around with yeast, a soda bread is a great option. No kneading needed. This one only has a few more ingredients than the traditional Irish one I posted for St. Patrick's day, and is a great every day loaf. The browned butter, the freshly ground pepper, the rosemary, and then oats... And all you have to do is mix the dry ingredients and then add the wet ones! Good stuff. I did worry that my loaf was too wet and sticky, but I added a smidge more flour and it baked up just fine. I initially forgot to brush the tops with egg white, which was definitely unnecessary and kind of became a mess, so I wouldn't fret over that step either.

Mostly I've just been eating it on its own, but tonight we ate some sliced, toasted, and slathered with butter. We also made tortellini with a rosemary tomato sauce with jarred tomatoes from the food co-op, garlic, fresh parsley and a little red pepper for a kick. I was worried it might be too spicy, but Nathan has a deft hand with the spices, and the sauce was great. I also bought some mesclun and made up a salad with scallions and my previously blogged new favorite dressing. It was a good dinner.


soda bread with dinner

an old standby

spaghetti carbonara

One of the first things I ever tried to make myself for dinner was spaghetti carbonara. It is deceptively simple: just linguine, eggs, half and half, grated romano cheese, parsley, bacon, garlic, salt and pepper. However, the proportions of these things are extremely important. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my general tendency to wing things, which generally serves me well, often is my undoing when it comes to carbonara.

Unfortunately, this particular evening was a prime example of poorly proportioned carbonara-- dry, and short on bacon. Plus the problems were exacerbated by two less than ideal substitutions: spaghetti for linguine and a particularly pungent parmesan for romano. Nathan will disagree with me but I really feel that the creamy sauce coats the flat linguine noodle much better than it does a round spaghetti strand. That being said, I think that this linguine's biggest problem was the parmesan, which we got from Whole Foods. Normally, I use grated Romano, which is cheaper, but I'm always happy when restaurants serve parmesan. The grated cheese is a big part of the recipe, but with parmesan, it became quite overpowering. I'm not sure whether to chalk this up to simply adding too much cheese, or to the parmesan being more strongly flavored than the romano and therefore serving better as an accent than as a main component of the sauce. You live you learn, although that's not to to say it still wasn't pretty tasty.

I've asked my dad for the exact recipe for my own future reference and to also benefit our non existent readers. Unfortunately, even that's a bit sketchy on the exact ratios. What he's written down is a quarter pound bacon and "lots of garlic," one egg and four tablespoons half and half. I'm not sure how much cheese he uses, or even how much pasta that's for. I know he normally doubles those quantities, so maybe that is what he uses for a half pound linguini? Haha, I guess this is where I get my tendency to just add ingredients haphazardly without measuring. I will add that it is a good idea to reserve some of the pasta water to add to the sauce if you find that it is too dry. This probably would have helped me out on this particular occasion.

We accompanied our pasta with a fresh green salad that we made up at Whole Foods. This is generally a good plan for us since we don't have to buy a whole head of lettuce, which will often go bad before it is used up. We make sure not to add too many heavy toppings to keep the weight and by extension, the price, down. For example, we can make up a hard boiled egg once we get home if we so desire. Usually Nathan is on salad making duty, but on this night I took the helm. I used all three salad mixes they offered at the salad bar: spinach, arugula and micro greens, and topped it off with some red onions and plenty of croutons and blue cheese. I don't recall exactly, but I think we just dressed it with some simple olive oil and vinegar.


blue cheese salad

I'll leave you with a shot of the lovely Picket Fence wine that completed our meal, which Nathan got from his dad for Christmas. I won't tell you what our evening activity was that night, but the eagle eyed reader will take note of the subtle clue in the following photo.


picket fence wine

cooking 2010

Nathan and Jess both independently have suggested I keep note of everything that I cook, so I figured it could be somewhat of a project for the new year.

I didn't cook anything the week after Christmas, but I think I quite made up for it this week.

Nathan recently got me this great book, The Flavor Bible, and I happened to flip open to the monkfish page on Monday. For every ingredient, they have complied a list of other ingredients that accomplished chefs consider to be complementary, as well as brief descriptions of their go-to dishes for that ingredient. Serendipitously, monkfish was described as a great match with cabbage, garlic and potatoes, (all of which I had recently gotten from my CSA food co-op), and bacon, (which I pretty much always have on hand). Since I wasn't sure of what to do from there, I typed in those ingredients into google, and came up with this recipe, which included a couple of other things I had lying around: shallots, red wine, fresh thyme, bay leaves, orange juice, and chicken stock, which I had made and froze myself. All I had to buy was the parsley and monkfish, which cost $10 a pound.

I quartered the shallot and also a small onion and I think a couple of smashed garlic cloves, and sauteed them with the bay leaves, parsley and thyme in some butter and olive oil. I added a cup of wine, some stock, the juice of two small oranges, some salt and pepper and cooked the cabbage in the mixture for 40 minutes. There was a lot of liquid involved, but in the end it all cooked off, leaving a deliciously flavored vegetable behind. I think that the homemade stock really gave it an added richness and depth of flavor, but even without it this cabbage would have been a winner.

Meanwhile, I had marinaded the fish in olive oil with salt and pepper for about a half an hour. Before we started cooking it Nathan had to bone the thing, because I was not paying attention and didn't ask the fish guy to do it for me. My boyfriend is incredible, so he did this perfectly. So impressive. By the way, if you don't know, monkfish is incredibly hideous. We quickly pan seared it in the cast iron skillet, and then wrapped it in two slices of bacon and threw it in the oven for about 15 minutes. I stuck it under the broiler in the end so that the bacon would get nice and crisp. Amazingly, the fish was moist and delicious, but not undercooked. A triumph.

My recipe suggested preparing mashed potatoes, but I wanted something a little more toothsome. The potatoes I sliced thinly and pan fried with garlic in a little bacon fat, (sorry mom and dad). There were way too many of them in the pan, but I kept shifting them around to get as many as possible crispy. I finished them off in the oven with the lid on, and they were great. The crispy ones were great, but even the ones that weren't got cooked through nicely, and there were tasty garlic nuggets every so often.

Together, this made for an amazing meal. The Flavor Bible wasn't playing around when it suggested combining all these different things. Separately, each component of the meal was delicious, but together, the ingredients really sang. Wow. A symphony of taste!

Wednesday night we went a more traditional route and fried up some crispy onions with a couple of small blue seared shoulder round steaks from Whole Foods. These were pretty much raw in the middle, which was really rich and meaty tasting, but probably not a way I'd chose to eat my steak in the future, especially if it was a normal supermarket steak. As our side dishes, we made up some rice, a roasted red pepper, and creamed spinach with a poached egg. We used frozen spinach upon Nathan's insistence, but I'll grudgingly concede that it wasn't even half bad. The other ingredients were pretty basic, just half and half, flour, onions, garlic, butter and nutmeg. It was easy and delicious. Do not fear egg poaching-- just heat a couple of inches of water until bubbles are forming on the sides and then crack in your eggs for four minutes. Remove carefully with a slotted spoon, (Nathan managed to break my yolk, which was so sad and left me way less runny goodness) and this WILL be perfect.

Thursday I was home alone and made one of my standard issue dinners: panfried pork chops, orrechiette with sauteed mushrooms in a homemade tomato sauce with fresh rosemary, parsley and basil, and some steamed broccoli rabe with garlic and oil which I kind of burned because I am bad at cooking alone. I also overcooked the pork, which was a thinner cut than I am used to having. This dinner was not all that well executed, I'm sorry to say. I think I was missing my boy in the kitchen! However, I will say that the pasta was great with some grated Romano cheese. Still have some of that in the fridge to look forward to!

Saturday, Nathan and I had Bart over for dinner and made lamb chops with a radish salad and a potato leek gratin. We boiled the potatoes in the left over half and half from the creamed spinach, and sauted the leeks with butter and a little bit of bouillon because I didn't have a chance to bring my stock over to his house. We actually forgot to cream the leeks, and just poured the extra half and half over the whole thing, which ended up having an extra layer of potatoes on the bottom. This wound up being a little watery, but delicious.

Thinly sliced radishes with plenty of olive oil, garlic and salt and pepper are tasty enough on their own, but try tossing in some leek tops and the crunchy, slightly bitter leaves. Drizzle on the balsamic, and you have an amazing salad.

The third component of the meal offers this cautionary tale: Never cook with jerk seasoning on the stove top unless you have a super effective fume hood, (I suspect the oven would be better, but not a perfect solution). Nathan and Bart made this crucial mistake with their lamb, and we all paid the price. Our lovely chops had been on the griddle for only a few minutes when the jerk spices started burning, and the fumes became unbearable. It was like pepper spray, and Bart and I beat a quick retreat back to Pete's room to take refuge from the smoke. I could barely breathe and could not stop coughing. Nathan somehow managed to continue manning the stove, although he was forced to undercook the lamb a bit to stop the meat from releasing toxins into the air. That stuff is lethally hot, as my lamb managed to take on a considerable amount of heat just from being cooked in close proximity to their stupid jerk sauce. My lips were on fire. Despite that major hiccup, it was a tasty meal, with plenty of good wine courtesy of Bartosz.

All of these meals were great, (or would have been without hellish jerk seasoning), and were actually gluten free, save for the pasta and creamed spinach, which easily could be if you used the right flour and gluten free nutmeg. And that's my week in the kitchen in review, for posterity's sake!