deborah madison's kale sesame salad

Not the most beautiful to photograph, but this dish is one of my new favorites - a kale salad with shaved brussels sprouts, green onions, red pepper flakes, sesame seeds, and cold soba noodles, dressed with garlic, vinegar, soy, and sesame oil.* I've made it twice in two weeks, served with broiled salmon, and will probably make it many more times before the summer is over; really, it's extremely versatile and very good. I imagine it'd be great to bring to a picnic. I've had such fun reading through Deborah Madison's Vegetable Literacy - it's like a textbook (and I mean that in a good way). The recipes are generally pretty simple but she's so creative when it comes to combining flavors and textures. Did anyone read this article in the New Yorker a few months back? That article - and a trip to Greens for lunch - convinced me that I needed to own Ms. Madison's latest book, and I'm so pleased to finally be cooking from it.

Hope everyone is looking forward to a good (and short!) week. Back soon.

*Version of the recipe found here. 

david lebovitz's salade lyonnaise

This is sort of a post about salade lyonnaise, but really, it's more of a post about working and cooking. 

For the past few weeks, I've been doing basically no cooking at all - things got busy and unpredictable and I just pushed cooking to the side. Which felt...wrong. I still wanted to eat well, I just had no patience for the process, which was not very nice. So though things are still busy, and likely to stay that way for a while, I've been trying to get into a new pattern that makes cooking easier for me. 

Basically, this means I have to force myself to sit down with a pile of cookbooks, my computer, and a notebook and pen to plan out my dinners for the week so that I can do all my grocery shopping on Sunday in one fell swoop. I tend to be naturally sort of flakey when it comes to this kind of planning, but it turns out that it's pretty much essential if I want to cook during the week.

None of this is particularly novel or revelatory but I've been thinking about it a lot because my schedule is very much in flux - I'm getting a small taste of what my hours will be like after I graduate and I'm realizing how important it is for me to build habits now that will make me able to manage the transition when it comes. There will always be nights where I revert to a plate of scrambled eggs or a box of Annie's macaroni and cheese, but I want those nights to be the exception, not the rule.

So, salade lyonnaise. This is the second recipe from My Paris Kitchen that I've tried out this week and it's another indisputable winner. I made the potatoes and hardboiled eggs in advance so that when I got home, all I had to do was make the croutons and salad dressing and fry some bacon with garlic. It was a very nice dinner and I think would also be a very good weekend lunch, served with a glass of rose and some crusty bread. I'm glad it's Monday, and that I made dinner.

Have a nice week, everyone.

david lebovitz's poulet a la moutarde

A few months back, I went on a cookbook shopping spree. It was a limited spree - four new books I had had on my list for quite some time - but still. I bought these books, leafed through them, then put them on the bookshelf until this weekend.

I took finals at the start of June and then immediately started my summer job, which involves a bit of travel and a lot of social events in the evenings (poor me!), so I've been adjusting to a new routine. This weekend - my first at home since I started work - was lovely and just what I needed. I cleaned the apartment, started a new book, went grocery shopping for the first time in ages, watched the America-Portugal World Cup game, went running, ran a bunch of tedious errands, and, finally, cooked from David Lebovitz's lovely new cookbook, My Paris Kitchen.

Apparently I am in the habit of going straight for the recipe featured on the cover of the cookbook - in this case, poulet a la moutarde. I wanted something that would taste sumptuous without involving excessive effort (I've been very lazy in the kitchen lately) and this fit the bill perfectly. I ended up substituting bone-in chicken breasts for the thighs and legs called for in the recipe just because I felt like it and it turned out splendidly.* We ate it with an arugula salad and bread and I was very pleased. As we speak, I'm boiling a pot of water for hardboiled eggs and another for fingerling potatoes so I can make Monsieur Lebovitz's salade lyonnaise for dinner tomorrow night when I get home from work. This man really knows what he's doing. I can't wait to move on to the dessert section.

It feels really nice to be finding my way in a new routine and getting back in the kitchen. I'll try to stop by here again soon.

*I reduced the cooking time by about 5 minutes.

memorial day

Happy Memorial Day weekend! I'm feeling a little sorry for myself because I have finals coming up and the studying is cramping my style a bit - but I've still found time to catch a Giants game and visit with some friends. Hope everyone is having a lovely long weekend!

heatwave

Man, has it been toasty around these parts over the past few days. I've never really been one for the heat; I'm pale as milk and strongly dislike feeling sticky. Given this, San Francisco is basically the ideal city for me to live in because it almost never gets above 75 here - but this week has been the exception.

But in truth I've found myself enjoying it. As I mentioned, Daniel and I are oven-less at the moment (we found out the oven was broken just after we moved in and a month and a half later are still waiting for it to be repaired. Le sigh.) but the heat has meant I haven't wanted to use it anyway. We've been buying delicious (if breathtakingly expensive) lumps of Cowgirl Creamery mozzarella and fixing simple salads that we eat along with hunks of bread and glasses of very cold rose. We don't have a proper dining table yet so sometimes we eat at the high table in our kitchen, which I love. Daniel has been bringing home flowers; yesterday he bicycled home from the grocery store with some sunflowers that I stuck in our battered aluminum watering can and set on the table, right by the open window.

This heatwave isn't so bad.

happy mother's day

First, I should say happy mother's day to my lovely mother. I didn't see her because she and my father skipped down to Half Moon Bay for the weekend, the lucky ducks, but Daniel and I did end up going to Napa to see his mother and we were treated to some spectacular weather and even more spectacular barbecue. Daniel's dad knows his way around a rack of pork ribs, oh yes he does. I wish I could provide a recipe but I haven't a clue how to cook ribs. Seeing as I have no grill (not even a functioning oven...more on that later) I haven't had much opportunity to learn how to cook such things, so it's always a special treat to have someone else make ribs, which may be in my top ten favorite foods (though I loathe sticky sweet barbecue sauce - dry rub only, please.) Anyway, it was a  completely lovely weekend that we had tough time pulling ourselves out of. 

in the right direction

Being back in San Francisco has been wonderful. The weather has been stunning lately and we've taken to going up on the roof with cocktails some evenings to look out across the water to the Golden Gate. I've been exploring our new neighborhood by going on runs, passing along the Presidio and wending my way through Laurel Heights. We've been sampling the local fare and last night had a terrific dinner at Nico, which was made all the more lovely because we were able to walk there and back from our apartment (stopping for a cookie at Spruce on the way home!)

We're still getting our bearings - our living room is entirely empty save for the television (we've been sitting on an inflatable mattress to watch TV!) and all of my clothes are flopped out on a blanket in the bedroom because I don't have a dresser - but it's slowly coming together. I dragged poor Daniel to West Elm today to fondle fabric samples but we finally ended up picking up a sofa, so I think we're taking steps in the right direction. We also dropped by the Container Store so I could pick up a shoe rack, which I then put together, fumbling and cursing while Daniel chuckled at my incompetence. I'm terribly intimidated by any sort of furniture assembly or interior decorating but I'm trying to get into it a bit so that the place will feel bit more personal and finished. 

I hope the new month has been treating everyone well and I hope to be back here more often as we settle in to our new space!