Warm Spinach And Grilled Apple Salad

...with goat cheese and hazelnuts.

This is a good means for eating spinach and under ripe apples in nasty weather when you are afraid that if you succumb to the call of comfort food one more time you will come down with scurvy.

1 apple, kinda tart and green, of a variety that holds its shape well when cooked. I'm sorry I have no idea what this was. It sat in the kitchen for over a month and was nearly as hard and green today as it was when I got it at the apple festival back in October.

a sliver of butter

2 handfuls of spinach
some hazelnuts, toasted, no salt
a sprinkle of herbed goat cheese, this was from TJ's
splash of sherry vinegar, balsamic vinegar, and good olive oil

Core the apple, slice it about 1/4" thick, and put them in a single layer in a frying pan. You want the pan to be just above medium-hot so the apples get nice and brown but you don't scorch the butter. Don't poke them around, they'll get all mushy. When the apples are brown on one side, turn them over and do the other side, then shove them to the side of the pan and put in one handful of spinach. Stir it around a couple times, then stir in the apples, and as soon as the spinach is starting to look wilted, dump it onto a plate. Toss it with another handful of spinach and fling in the nuts and cheese. Shake a few drops of vinegar and oil over it and eat it before the fried bits get clammy or the fresh bits go limp.

I have lots of reasons to like this salad. I used up that damned apple. It is not cold, which is very appealing when it gets full dark before 5 pm. It has fat and protein in it, which makes it satisfying to eat, and it has all that leafy stuff you are supposed to eat, which allows me to feel virtuous doing it. And the nuts were the leftovers from another recipe I am Plotting, which calls for hazelnut butter...of which more later. It tastes way more complicated than it is, which I attribute to the 2 kinds of vinegar and the magic of caramelization. And it was fast- cooking, styling, photography, photo editing, eating and writing has all taken me less than 90 minutes.

Spicy Chicken and Basil (with Spinach)

My fella took me to this Thai restaurant on Alberta and now I can't remember what its name was. I got a beef noodle soup which was pretty good, he got a fried catfish which was A. Mazing. It had this dark red chili sauce on it, and some bell peppers, and sauteed basil as a vegetable. I reminded me of some of the few positive experiences I had when I was living in Taiwan. I don't think I had any Thai food there, but some of the stuff I ate there was similar in retrospect. Basil used as a vegetable rather than a seasoning is one of those things.

This makes 2 dinner- sized servings for me.

Prep about 1/2 lb of chicken tenders with salt, pepper & oil. Leave them to sit in the fridge a few days. The day of, you need:

1 T oyster sauce
1 T fish sauce
1 T sesame oil

1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 teaspoons minced fresh ginger
1 teaspoon minced lemongrass- I use a chunk of pre-minced lemongrass that came in a little vacuum sealed packet out of the frozen section at Fubonn.
3 or 4 green onions, tops & bottoms minced. This is optional because the 2nd time I made this dish, I forgot to put them in and it didn't really matter. Up to you.
1 large bunch of basil, leaves only
a double handful of fresh spinach leaves

If you want to eat it with noodles like the picture, put on a pot of salted water. The chicken takes maybe about as long to cook as the noodles do. Start the chicken at the same time the noodles go in the pot. That's if you like your noodles pretty firm.

Chop up the chicken and stir in the sesame oil, oyster sauce & fish sauce.  Heat 2 T cooking oil in a frying pan, and when it's hot enough to almost smoke, put in the pepper flakes, garlic, ginger and lemongrass, plus the onions if you've got 'em. Stir a bit until the seasonings brown and get just a tad crispy then dump in the chicken and stir really fast for about 2 more minutes. When the chicken is looking maybe half done, put the greens in the pan and keep stirring until everything is cooked through and the liquid that comes out of the greens has pretty much evaporated.

On a totally unrelated note, the hummingbirds like my sage plant.

Happy May Day!

Today was the first day of the Hollywood farmer's market, and here's my loot. I had 'em take the tops off the carrots, which makes them look less amazing, but I swear those are the best carrots I've ever eaten. Theyare sweet. They are crunchy. They are tender. They taste floral, and earthy, and herbal and almost like licorice. And they are juicy. HaHA! I bet you never thought of carrots as juicy either. I'm sure their total deliciousness is a fleeting thing, but I had to tell you all about it right away. Yes, I am growing some carrots on my balcony, but I wanted carrots today, not in June.

I got basil, because I miss warm weather. I'll probably make a bit of pesto with it. And I got the beets because the greens look so good. My plan is to braise the greens a bit then make a pie with them.

And here are my plants: the forest of spinach, the enormousness of the poppies and a pea flower.

I should have staked the peas this year, but I was feeling lazy and didn't get around to it. They will just have to sprawl over the railing, I guess.

Edit: "they are taste floral" Christ on a crutch.  I think not, oriental-syntax-man.

Spinach with Pink Grapefruit & Pecans

I don't like to eat salad in the winter, because eating cold things in cold weather makes me feel dreary. I think that when the weather has gotten warm enough to actually grow leafy things outdoors, that's time enough to eat them. This year the growing part wasn't just a theoretical guide; this is my first spinach crop. After I grew a bunch, I read the seed package; apparently it isn't really spinach (spinacia oleracea), it's New Zealand Spinach (tetragonia tetragonioides). Who knew. Who cares. It looks and tastes the same, as far as I can tell. And it went extremely well with the pink grapefruit I had sitting around.

a handful of spinach
a few pink grapefruit sections
pecans
olive oil
balsamic vinegar
salt & pepper

The thing about salads is that every item in it should be something you'd want to eat on its own. Keep it simple. For this one, use very fresh spinach, a very ripe sweet grapefruit, and a lashings of  olive oil. Mine has a medium amount of both fruity and peppery flavors to it. The grapefruit has enough acidity that you don't need a lot of balsamic, but it adds something, so pick a kind you really like. Plus, it makes it more fun to look at before you eat it, and who wouldn't want that?

To completely change the subject: inappropriate workplace conversations.  My manager at my retail hell tells me this story. It is useful to know at the beginning that his dog is a pug.

Him: So, my dad sends me a text message and asks me if you need a USB cable to play your ipod through the car stereo. I texted him back, and said no, you use a receiver because an ipod doesn't have a standard, USB port. Then he texts me back and says so, your ipod doesn't play through the car stereo?

(slight pause, with roll of eyes)
 
Him again: So I texted him right back and said No, it plays through my dog's vagina. I waited a second, then texted him again and said, Of course it plays through the car stereo, it's an ipod. Then a minute later my mom calls me and she says "I don't know what you said to your dad, but he was laughing so hard he had to pull over and stop driving." So I told my friend what I said, and he starts laughing, he goes, Yeah, it sounds a little tinny coming out of there, but other than that... (mimes small surprised dog)

Me: Tell him he needs to trade up to a St. Bernard, you get better woofers in those things.

I've been pre-occupied

I have not been cooking anything photogenic. Potato Leek Soup is still just a bowl of grayish goop, no matter how tasty it is.

Sunchoke chips are pretty yummy too, but they look just like potato chips, in any case, they didn't sit around long enough to get a picture. It's the weather. It has been so lovely out, and my plants are doing lots of interesting things.















I have figured out a couple things since last year:








Mustard grows very quickly, but is no fun to eat. Radishes are at least as fun to grow, and the eating part is much more satisfying.


These were the sweetest, tenderest radishes I can remember ever having eaten.



Cilantro starts slowly. Very slowly. But you better give it its own pot, because it gets enormous.

Does anybody know what is making my spinach do this? The ones on the right are looking strangely anemic. Spinach is also very satisfying to grow; it starts early and grows vigorously. Hopefully, I will like to eat it more than mustard.












Speaking of vigorous growers, here are my borage plants. I read that "you won't need more than one" and boy, they were right. On the left, you see that in an optimistic spirit, I planted five.

Five. Seeds. The lefthand picture is from the 18th, the righthand picture, from the 26th. I had to pull out 2 of them, I'm calling the lettuce in the same pot a loss. Borage is very spiny, we had a windstorm and the prickers on the borage leaves savaged the lettuce while flapping around in the breeze.


But that's all right, because lettuce is another of the things I realized that I don't care enough about to bother growing. Some people say that you should grow things that are unusual or that would be expensive to buy. To some extent, this is true, but I think that one should grow the things that one is likely to eat. Yes I could buy spinach, and radishes, but it's also true that I actually do buy them sometimes. Which means that I like eating them enough to go the effort of growing them.  I never buy lettuce.

And this is my tea plant. I don't guess that I will ever be able to harvest any amount of tea from it. But I like the idea.

Tofu Quickie

I like this method of fixing tofu because it doesn't require frying. Not that I don't like fried things, lord knows I do. It's just that when the weather keeps me from opening all the windows, anything that gets fried in my open floorplan apartment hangs around in the air for days. The kitchen vent fan is just for ambience.

Also, this dish requires exactly 2 cooking implements- one spoon for scooping & stirring (and eating), one covered casserole to cook and store leftovers in, plus a microwave. Awesome.

1 lb firm tofu
1/2 bag frozen chopped spinach
assorted condiments to taste. I usually use a mix of:

black bean sauce (master or comrade brands are my faves, but dragonfly is good too.)
oyster sauce- definitely Dragonfly brand. Read the ingredients.
trader joe's pad thai sauce.
sesame oil
sriracha- just a dab usually, more if I have a cold

and sometimes I use fish sauce too.

Drain the tofu and roughly chunk it up into the casserole. Throw on some good sized scoops of your chosen seasonings. Go easy on the fishsauce if you're using that, it's basically just stinky liquid salt. Top with the spinach, cover and microwave 3 or 4 minutes at a time until the spinach is as done as you want it to be. Poke the ingredients around gently between sessions in the microwave to get the flavors well mixed. Taste as you go along. Tofu is powerfully bland. If it's not sweet enough, add a dab of oyster sauce, if it's not salty enough, add bean sauce or fish sauce. If it's too salty, oh well, you're gonna eat it on rice anyway, it'll be fine.

I wish I had a bottle of sake with this...