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.