Southbound Train

Tastes Like Summer

Summer has fully and wholeheartedly arrived. It has been hot, and sticky, and hot. And have I mentioned hot? I don’t mind, really – it is late July and I’d be disappointed if it wasn’t sultry. Our first summer in Redwood Shores was beautiful, sunny and warm and we sat on our patio and looked at the water and generally gloated at our good fortune. We paid for that gloating every consecutive summer when it would be windy and foggy and so unpleasant that we wore sweatshirts to eat outside. So summer heat is just fine with me, but it does lead to cravings for the pool, ice cream cones and food that tastes fresh and clean and just assembled.

I think that “thrown together” look of summer dishes in magazines is about as real as the “inner glow” look of makeup. It looks simple but always takes more effort than I think it should to execute, and the results (at least in food) often seem to me to remain disparate, if beautiful, parts. Imagine my surprise this week, then, when an abundance of yellow squash led to this:

Ribbons of yellow squash, cooked no more than having the hot pasta thrown over them. Bocconcini . Basil and oregano from my planter boxes, olive oil, salt, pepper. This tasted like summer. It was warm but not hot, bright in flavor from all the herbs and sunny from the squash and thrown together with little effort. I don’t rightly know how it happened, but as far as I’m concerned, it can happen again. And again. And a few more times, until the heat leaves the air and we’re taking sweatshirts to the patio, which I don’t think will be for quite some time.

Clearing the Decks

((I've been documenting what I cook, mostly for my own edification but perhaps to get people to ask to visit, or ask to come to dinner (really! please ask!) here, but every so often I like to spend a few more words on the subject...))

We pick up our weekly CSA vegetables on Wednesdays, and that means that somewhere around Monday I have to critically examine what lurks in the vegetable drawer and find a way to use it. It isn’t that I’m not liking what we get, but it is still leaning a little towards the greens, and those aren’t the easiest to get my cooking head around, at least creatively. This Monday found a particularly large offering; I’m pretty sure I haven’t cooked enough in the face of Arugula’s Star bounty.

A trip to Publix on Sunday evening had turned up Sockeye salmon, fresh and wild and impossibly red. We bought it, remembering a summer in Redwood Shores where the local Nob Hill had it on sale for a week and we ate it exclusively, somehow not tiring of it even after the cat progressed from begging for scraps to refusing bits of actual flesh. It was as good as I remembered, broiled with a little bit of tarragon mustard and local honey, and I missed Martini weaving furrily around my ankles, asking for just a little bit.

I sliced yellow summer squash thinly and put them in a foil packet with a lemony herb so fresh that it bled into spicy, olive oil and a healthy sprinkle of the German herb salad mix I’ve been keeping on the counter. Those went in with the salmon while I tackled three bunches of young fennel, feathery tops and all, in a chef’s pan with olive oil. I wanted to add lemon but Mike had co-opted them for Pisco Sours, so I sliced the rind finely and tossed it into the pan with a spoonful of sugar and kept stirring until the whole mess was wilted together and sporting brownish black edges.

The peaches we’d bought for flavoring vodka demanded attention, too, so I picked out the most ripe candidates, peeled and sliced them and dumped them into a baking dish, topped with a little sweet short dough. I’ve always read that you should make sweet pastry dough by mushing the butter into the flour with your fingers, and this has always seemed a hassle to me that I have avoided with melting butter and stirring and using a mechanical device, but I didn’t want to dirty anything else so I used my fingers. Surprise, surprise, it was easy, quick and resulted in really light short crust dropped over of the peaches.

I made a salad, too, with (what else) CSA greens and radishes, a few dried black currants thrown in for sweetness, but the lettuce was too bitter even for me, and I ended up picking the currants and radishes out and ignoring the lettuce. I’ve been reading about grilled romaine salads recently, and maybe this lettuce has a date with the new grill, but it might be finding its way to the Piggers. They’re certainly asking noisily for fresh greens, and they aren’t picky.

I’m not quite used to cooking in this kitchen yet. I have so much space, but it seems like once I start cooking I’m out of space quickly. I miss being able to chop right on the counter, and I’m never sure if I should be using the island the way I am (facing out) or the other way, making it convenient to the sink. The expanse of counter baffles me, and I feel like things get marooned out on it and make it crowded, so I’m always shoved into little bits and corners. Having worked in a small space for years, I’m still learning how to best make use of this big one. I’ll have plenty of materials to practice with soon enough – CSA pickup is in two hours…

Here’s what we drank – Mike is calling it a Pisco Inferno, and I’m pretty pleased that I spotted the powdered egg whites on the shelf that made it possible!

1 1/2 oz Pisco
1/2 egg white
1 oz lemon juice
1 oz 4:3 Simple Syrup - 1 oz = 1 tsp sugar at this ratio

Combine all ingredients in a shaker and shake more than you think you need to - you are working up a heady foam. Pour into rocks glasses filled with ice.  Garnish with Angostura Bitters. ((He’s just taken delivery of a Misto he plans to load with bitters and flame onto the surface of the drink, per instructions from Jeffrey Morganthaler’s blog, a place I can see is going to lead us to all sorts of fun and trouble. If he (and the house) remain unexploded, it should be fun.))

Dotson’s & Monell’s (or why the TN DL has no weight listed)

The house is in a much better state today than it was last Thursday. That’s because last Thursday we confirmed that our friends from Atlanta would be driving up for the weekend, and I was motivated to unpack, clear away and leave a large pile for the trash man, who thankfully comes twice a week. Aside from the motivation, it was great fun to have guests, and since they weren’t here to work (sorry, Anna!) we sat on the screened porch and drank mint juleps in honor of the Kentucky Derby, played Rock Band and drove around downtown Nashville.

We also ate. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that our central activity was eating, and the other things got fit in around it. Mike and I are going to have to live on rabbit food during the week if we’re going to eat like this with visitors, because, well, wow.

Saturday lunch was at Dotson’s, a funky place by the river in Franklin where the parking lot is always packed, a fact that until now has seemed to us odd given the mushed-together-mobile-trailer-with-a-porch-tacked-on look of the place. Now that we’ve eaten at Dotson’s, our car will be in the parking lot too, and we’ll be mushed together inside eating meat n’ threes (or in my case, just the threes, please). And pie. We’ll be eating pie.

I honestly ignore the meat selection at any meat and three, because at a place where mac & cheese and Jell-O are listed as vegetable selections, who cares about meatloaf and fried chicken? Nik and I each got a “three” and pooled our resources in the middle of the table: creamy but not too sweet cole slaw, lima beans that retained just a little resistance to the tooth, swimming in butter, home pickled beets with a crunchy tang, nicely velveeta’ed (and therefore proper Southern) mac & cheese and just off the cob creamed corn that tasted almost like eating it raw, sweet and milky. Oh, and fried okra, which I want to like – feel, in fact, obligated to like – and really find foul. The crunch of the fried coating is fine, the slight bitterness of the okra is nice … but both are completely eradicated by the elemental slime of the okra itself, and I just can’t do it. Mike had his own cole slaw, plus the sweet potato casserole, a bowl of orange marshmallow goop that he wasn’t keen on sharing. Our waitress talked us through the menu in the nicest way possible, and then kept coming back to make sure we’d left room for dessert. OF COURSE we left room, for coconut meringue, chocolate cream & chess pie, and a giant hunk of cocacola cake, slathered with a good half inch of chocolate frosting. They were all good, but the chess pie was perfect – oddly crunchy top, tangy sweet and sticky rich filling. I got tips on making my own from the waitress before slumping into a sugar and starch induced coma from which I woke only when the crushed ice and mint signaled the coming of juleps some hours later. Bourbon is a restorative.

Not knowing how to leave well enough alone, we went to Monell’s for Sunday breakfast. We strolled in just as they were switching over to lunch, but the staff very nicely accommodated our clearly just up at 11am need for breakfast and we ended up with brunch. Brunch Monell’s style just means that we got all the food for both breakfast and lunch, and sentence which should make anyone who we have taken to Monell’s moan with a tantalizing combination of pleasure and fear. A Monell’s meal is family style, and the need to pass the peas, please inevitably leads to some talking with your tablemates. Ours completed our Sunday supper experience by inviting us to their church, since we were new in town, and also confirmed the Franklin-is-a-small-town suspicion I had, as they recognized Mike from standing in line at the county clerk’s office. There were four of us and six of them and I don’t think we even made a dent in the food that went around the table, composed of the following: biscuits and gravy, cornbread, cucumber salad, broccoli salad, mac & cheese, roasted potatoes, mashed potatoes, green beans, peas, corn casserole, pancakes, eggs, bacon, sausage, country ham, pot roast, fried chicken, pork chops, baked apples, cheese grits, cole slaw, crazy good peach preserves – and a piece of pecan pie each. I feel like I’ve left something out there, and that I can’t quite capture the breathless awe we all felt as the food just kept coming. And coming. And coming. There was so much food on the table that we were balancing plates on top of other plates just to set it all down, and it all smelled good and tasted better, and our plates got fuller and fuller as the platters were passed. Jake’s plate was literally mounded with food, and when the pork chops came he gave up and just draped one over the top, like the whipped cream on a sundae.

The best part of Monell’s is that everything that comes out of the kitchen is good, real  Southern cooking good. It might not be pretty, but it tastes fabulous, and everyone eats until they can eat no more – and then finds room for thirds of whatever it was they liked best. And a little more sweet tea, please. It’s a Thanksgiving dinner sort of experience, and the scary part is that it exists, every day of the week, just six miles from our front door. Hold me.