Early summer dinner party

My 2 year old GE Profile fridge broke down about 3 weeks ago. Getting a repairman in the Hamptons the week after Memorial Day was impossible! Everybody’s opening up their houses and discovering appliance problems, and the repair services were overwhelmed. Bad timing for a local.  Over a week later, the GE man finally showed up, worked on the fridge for two hours, charged me $108 for a new “freezer computer board,” and left, promising it was fixed. But by that evening both the freezer and the fridge had reached an internal temperature of 84 degrees farenheit. I lost patience entirely with my GE fridge (which I never liked very much anyway) and bought a new fridge: a Bosch. It’s terriffic.

Living for three weeks with the CSA veggies from Sang Lee coming fast and furious but no fridge in which to put them was frustrating.  Tragic, even.  Some fell victim to the situation.  Others I managed to preserve in our little wine fridge, which was mostly taken up with milk and a few other highly perishable items.

With the new Bosch fridge in place, I got back into my groove this past weekend and put together a small dinner party to use up a few backlogged items. I had beets, as ever. I had something totally new to me called garlic scapes. I had Sang Lee cilantro.  I had lettuce.  Tons of lettuce.  Beautiful, delicate, fresh lettuce.  (Lettuce that needs to be refrigerated!) I developed a menu for a small dinner party using these items plus a few more from the supermarket.

This blog could be called 1000 ways to use your beets. I wanted something different, and I felt like smoked salmon.  I googled around and alighted upon a Mark Bittman recipe for rosti made with beets.  The recipe called for rosemary as a seasoning but I decided to use the garlic scapes instead and top it with crème fraîche and smoked salmon. 

My guests asked me what garlic scapes were and I didn’t know the answer.  I still don’t.  I think they have something to do with thinning out the garlic crop, but I’m not sure.  I really didn’t know what to do with these garlic scapes but I suspected they needed to be well cooked to mellow their flavor.  That may or may not be true — I really have no idea, but I didn’t want to take chances.  So I diced them and sauteed them in some butter.

Then I added them to the grated beets, which I mixed with a little salt and flour to make the batter. 

I fried this mixture up like a big cake in more butter in the same garlic-scape-infused skillet, flipped it splendidly onto a plate, slid it back into the skillet with a little more butter, divided it between our plates, topped it with crème fraîche and smoked salmon, whereupon it was devoured.  The garlic scapes were a lovely addition.  They were garlicky in the best possible way, with an extra freshness and absolutely no bitterness.  No fear of garlic scapes!

I intentionally made a fairly rich starter because the main course was very light.  For years I’ve been wanting to master the art of Thai/Vietnamese noodle salads, which I love to eat in restaurants.  My husband and I will never forget a Thai beef salad we once shared in a restaurant in Manhattan in Chinatown down near the courthouses.  It was so spicy, we both started crying while we ate it.  Yet, at the same time, it was incredibly delicious, and we couldn’t stop eating it.  We sat there, shoveling this salad into our mouths as fast as we could, with tears streaming down our faces. 

We don’t really have any Thai or Vietnamese restaurants on the East End, except for an outrageously expensive and mediocre one in Sag Harbor.  That is one big problem with living in the Hamptons:  good cheap ethnic food is almost non-existent.   If you crave something like a Thai beef salad, you’ve got to learn to make it yourself.

That’s what I’ve been trying to do for years, without success.   I didn’t know what I was doing wrong until recently.  I figured it out by reading Mark Bittman’s recipe for the dressing.  (Bittman again!)  He mixes the fish sauce with lime juice and sugar.  Ok, I had been doing that.  But here is the secret:  he tells you to add a tablespoon of water!  It turns out that makes all the difference between a dressing that is unplesantly strong and one that is perfect.  Who knew? 

So here is my take on a Thai beef salad.  Sang Lee boston lettuce, topped with cooked, chopped thin rice noodles, topped with cucumber, grated carrots, copious amounts of cilantro and mint, and chopped dry -roasted peanuts.

I topped it with slices of marinated, grilled flank steak and Bittman’s watered-down dressing, and served it. 

I can’t say it made us cry, but it did satiate (temporarily) my cravings for Thai food.

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Salad for tea

My husband grew up in Ireland and he has mixed feelings about the food he ate growing up.  The main meal was “dinner,” which was eaten in the middle of the day, and was usually a piece of overcooked meat with criminally overcooked vegetables and the ubiquitous (but justly beloved) spuds.  His worst horror stories concern something called “celery in cream sauce.”  I myself once experienced this dish.   It consists of huge, stringy pieces of boiled celery drenched in a white sauce (probably from a packet), which curdles with the fluids leaching out of the boiled celery.   While I enjoy almost all foods (with the exception of beef liver and uni), I understand how celery in cream sauce could be traumatic. 

He does speak with great fondness, however, of “tea,” the lighter evening meal served with — you guessed it — tea as the accompanying beverage.  This would sometimes be sandwiches made with “doorstops” of fresh bread and “lashings” of butter, sometimes a “mixed grill” of sausages and eggs, or sometimes — in the summertime — a salad.   Their salad would contain soft butter lettuce, beets, boiled eggs, and leftover meat or “tinned” (canned) salmon.  It would be drizzled with “salad cream” — a bottled salad dressing that is essentially a looser, sharper, more vinegary mayonnaise.

I’ve tried to use my husband’s descriptions of his tea-time salads as an inspiration for informal composed salads, which we both love.  Canned salmon, very popular in Ireland, is an under-appreciated pantry item in the U.S.  The salmon that they can is wild salmon, and the canning process softens the bones so that you can eat them, making it an excellent source of calcium as well as the famed omega-3 fatty acids. 

This evening, he wanted salmon, but I felt like eating my leftover steak from Bobby Van’s.  So I made two different variations of the salad.  My ingredients included some delicious Country Hen eggs (from Sang Lee’s farmstand), boiled that morning, Catapano goat cheese, Sang Lee mesclun (from my CSA), North Fork greenhouse tomatoes (from Sang Lee’s farmstand), red scallions (from my CSA), and my own marinated local beets.

I tossed the mesclun together with the scallions, tomatoes, some goat cheese and mint, and dressed it with oil, vinegar, fleur de sel, and pepper.

Then I plated it all up.

And served it.

The perfect summer weeknight dinner.

I don’t think I would ever have made a lovely composed salad like this if my husband hadn’t inspired me with his descriptions of his childhood salad teas.  How has your cooking been changed by the people you cook for?

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Party shopping on the North Fork: Better than Mrs. Dalloway

We have a barbecue party every year in early June to celebrate my husband’s birthday.  It is such a beautiful time of year out here.  The weather is usually great, but I do remember one year when it was in the 50s, and another year when it was in the 90s.  This year they were predicting thunderstorms and there was even a tornado warning, but they spared us and the spectacular weather we have been having this season held out all afternoon.

One of the many great pleasures of my life is driving out Sound Avenue (the northerly of the North Fork’s two main arteries) with party planning in my head.  It takes me past Briermere, past horse farms, vineyards and innumerable planted fields with avenues of sight down their crop rows opening up for a split-second as I drive by. 

I love to cook for parties but I’m careful not to overdo it.  It’s no fun to be so exhausted and stressed from cooking and preparations that you can’t enjoy talking with your guests.  Believe me, I’ve been “in the weeds” (as they say in the restaurant biz) at many of my own parties.  This time I managed to stay out of the weeds by planning a menu that combined a few homemade items with some prepared foods from local institutions.

My first stop was Sang Lee.  We’ve been devouring every bit of our CSA items (mainly in the form of salads, salads, salads), but for a party I needed extra provisions. 

I picked up some exquisite little baby squash to grill along with several bunches of asparagus.  Perfect multicolor carrots, sugar-snap peas and cucumbers to serve as crudites with dips.  Two bunches of beets to steam-roast and marinate, and local Catapano Farm goat cheese to top them.  Also three 8-ounce bags of their pre-washed baby spinach with a bottle of Sang Lee’s own Asian Dressing to make a quick, easy salad.  (Pretty much the only time I allow myself to use a bottled dressing is Sang Lee’s Asian Dressing, which everybody loves, for a party when I don’t want to take the time to dress it my usual way.)

My next stop was for vino.

There are so many wonderful vineyards on the North Fork, we are literally spoiled for choice.  I swung into Lieb on my way back west and picked up a mixed case of Bridge Lane chardonnay (unoaked), Pinot Blanc (a Lieb specialty and a personal favorite grape) and Cabernet Franc (my favorite of the local red wine varietals).

In the old days, before I had my son, I was deeply into wine and bought all kinds of local vintages to age in my basement.  I don’t do that any more.  But for a party featuring local foods, it only makes sense to serve local wines.

For hors d’oeuvres, I made beets with goat cheese (marinated beets with a dollop of goat cheese and a sprinkling of fleur de sel.  This was the opening spread.

The beet hors d’oeuvres were a big hit, as always. 

Here are the veggies before they went onto the grill:

The rest of the menu included barbecued spare ribs (homemade, yummy), Sang Lee spinach salad with their Asian Dressing, and, from another North Fork institution — the Modern Snack Bar, in Aquebogue — delicious potato salad, cole slaw and fried chicken. 

As my cousin once remarked:  “any place with ‘modern’ in the title is certain not to be.”   So it is with the Modern Snack Bar:  it has not changed since 1960 at the latest, thank god.  It still has the same businesslike waitresses in uniform dresses and a classic, limited, home-cooked menu that is totally unaffected by any food trend of the last fifty years.  In fact, while a large part of its clientele comes from the retirement home across the street, I could imagine the place becoming trendy these days simply by virtue of its immunity to trends.

Dessert was two fresh strawberry-cream pies from Briermere.  They were devoured before I could snap any pictures, but I can describe this pie for you:   a sweet, flaky crust, piled with not-too-sweet mixture of whipped cream cheese and whipped heavy cream, and on top, a huge pile of fresh strawberries and a light glaze.  Some of our repeat guests at this barbecue dream about this pie all year (myself included).  It’s only available for a few weeks, when strawberries are in season, and it’s a perfect way to celebrate a birthday at the beginning of summer.

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The meaning of life. Or, salad.

Until I was about 20, I never ate a salad.  I hated salad.

Now, salad is my favorite food.  But I feel it is widely misunderstood.  Salad is not a bowl of lettuce or supermarket mesclun with wedges of cold off-season tomato and bottled dressing poured on top.  (And by the way, how many ways can restaurants misspell the word mesclun?  I know, restaurant menu typos are a classic white-person problem, but seriously, I have even seen it spelled “mescaline.”)

Salad, to me, is a carefully chosen, balanced selection of greens and a few other items tossed with oil and lemon juice or vinegar, salt and pepper.  Period.

The place that changed my mind about salad was Russia.  I visited a family at their dacha outside St. Petersburg, where they spent their summer weekends.  It was very basic, with no indoor plumbing except for a cold-water kitchen sink.  Their grandmother lived at this dacha full-time in the summer and was an avid gardener.  Almost all their food came from her garden, and they made a salad from vegetables they harvested twice every day — at lunch and again at dinner.  Their salad contained freshly cut lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, green onions, and, most memorably, loads of fresh parsley and dill.  Everything was chopped small.  They added a chopped soft-boiled egg or two (from their hens), and dressed it with plain vegetable oil, distilled white vinegar, salt and pepper.  It was amazing.

Another misunderstanding about salad is that it is easy to prepare.  Usually, it’s not.  It is the most time-consuming dish I make, and I generally try to avoid time-consuming dishes.  But salad is a labor of love. 

A good salad can make a meal.  I prefer to have it with the main meal, as a counterpoint to whatever protein I am serving.  In the summertime, I like to serve grilled meat or fish, salad, and bread for dinner.  That is really all you need.

Today was a perfect spring day.  Since my Sang Lee CSA has not started yet, I went to Briermere Farm in Riverhead to see what they had.  Briermere is a good place to go in the spring, because Riverhead averages 5-10 degrees warmer than the south fork, so their products are usually harvested  earlier.  There is a reason that Riverhead has been an agricultural center for generations: it’s a great place to grow fruits and vegetables.  Briermere has fantastic fruit.  They use this fruit in their delicious pies and baked goods for which they are justly famous, but I rarely buy those because they are way too caloric.  I just buy the fruit, and sometimes also vegetables. 

The great “fruit writer” David Karp had an article in the New York Times a few years ago about rhubarb, in which he noted that Briermere has five acres planted with rhubarb — probably the largest in the state.  Five acres is a lot of rhubarb!

They had rhubarb today, of course (it’s always one of the first crops of the season), but I didn’t buy any.  I just bought veggies.  This was my haul.

It’ll take several days for me to use all of this stuff.  Tonight’s menu was grilled pork chops, grilled asparagus, salad, and bread. 

The pork chops I marinated in an ad-hoc asian marinade, with soy, rice wine, sesame oil, sriracha, sugar, ginger and worcestershire sauce.

The asparagus I tossed with a little olive oil, salt and pepper, and grilled them after I took the pork chops off the grill.  This is a great way to prepare asparagus. 

The salad contained baby arugula, scallion greens, multicolor greenhouse cherry tomatoes, grown on the North Fork and sold at Briermere, and a few crumbles of Maytag Blue cheese.  I like salads that have a little bit of something rich —like an egg, avocado, bacon, or cheese — and in this case, the Maytag Blue did the trick.  

I always use the same method of dressing salad.  First, I drizzle it lightly with olive oil and sprinkle it with fleur du sel and pepper, then I toss it with my hands.  Then I drizzle on red wine vinegar and toss it again.  Fini!

The salad was simple but good, mostly because Briermere’s baby arugula was extremely delicate, but still had a strong peppery bite that is missing from lots of plastic-box baby arugula.  I’ve bought full-grown arugula from Briermere later in the summer season in past years, and it’s always super-spicy.  These babies were obviously thinned from that future crop.   

My picture doesn’t do it justice.  If I am going to have a real blog, I am going to have to learn proper food photography!

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