Hot Food in the Summertime

So it's officially summer now, and though I haven't posted much since spring, it doesn't mean I haven't been cooking. No, that activity is relentless -- every morning shortly after breakfast I start thinking about dinner -- shopping for it, defrosting, prepping, cooking. My family seems never to be prepared to start sharing preferences that early in the day, but I need to start planning long before anyone has an appetite for it. Including me.

Some of the culinary highlights of the last couple months:

• We got a waffle iron! I splurged on the Breville when it went on sale, and against my husband's wishes for another appliance in the kitchen. It's been a huge hit though, and even he's sold on it. Highlights include making four big waffles at a time, a well to hold all the inevitable excess spillage, a non-stick, easy-clean surface, and a timer that lets you go off and do other things, like stare morosely into your coffee, while you wait for them to be done. Oh, and waffles are a great way to use up buttermilk you bought for other recipes. These are now in the Saturday morning breakfast rotation, and one of these days I will get around to experimenting with savory waffles for dinner. Blue corn waffles with chicken in gravy sounds really appealing to me.

 

• I figured out that my smoothie maker can be put to even better use if I skip the kale and add booze! After drinking what was essentially a delicious sugary glass of half-melted peach sorbet and alcohol at a waterside bar, my friend Sam and I experimented with making frozen Bellinis at home. Mixing frozen peaches (and some strawberries if you like) with peach liqueur in the Magic Bullet, and topping with inexpensive local sparkling wine makes for two very happy moms on the back deck on a Friday afternoon.

• Spatchcocking isn't only fun to say! It's also the best way I have learned to get a roasted chicken on the table that is (a) not half-raw and (b) is done before bedtime. I have my butcher remove the backbone (and save it in my frozen chicken parts bag destined for stock) and I rub that sucker with lots of rosemary and garlic in olive oil. Crisp on the stove, put the skillet in the oven with something heavy pressing it down, and in less than an hour we have crispy but juicy roast chicken. I like to serve with lemon wedges and a little pan gravy. 

• I don't hate fennel if it's roasted and/or sliced super thin in a slaw. And it's really nice to continue the theme and serve with Pernod-orange juice cocktails over lots of ice.
• Fish schnitzel (sole filets crusted in panko and pan fried) is a surefire way to get even Lucas to eat fish with enthusiasm. I served with tiny cheese ravioli in brown butter sauce, carrots, and salad. The kids dipped in ketchup, while the grownups got a little brown butter-white wine-lemon-caper sauce, though I did catch Mr. Gateau hitting the ketchup on seconds.
• File under everything is better with bacon -- creamy fresh corn soup with bacon and some swirls of pesto.

• Grilling season is, in fact, the most wonderful time of the year. No fuss, no muss. Extra points when we eat outside and just sweep the crumbs onto the ground. I've been doing a lot of pork tenderloins, which take to all kinds of seasoning very well and cook quickly while staying moist, and chicken skewers, generally either in a malai kebab yogurt marinade or a red wine-olive oil-garlic marinade.

Really, I Meant to Post

Honestly, I did. It's just that stuff kept happening, such as I had another little Gateau. Lucky me, with each pregnancy my experience of morning sickness got worse and more prolonged, this time coupled with a freaked-out sense of smell that sometimes made it very dangerous to go into the kitchen, so my cooking (and writing about it) fell off sharply.

But now I'm back. It's sometimes hard to cook with a babe in arms, but on the upside, I've pretty much mastered the art of quick vegetable soups that then get pureed into oblivion with a stick blender. They're delicious and good for you, and since they get pureed smooth, it really doesn't matter how nice the chopping job is, as long as the pieces are relatively even in size so they cook at the same rate. In addition to a family favorite White Bean Soup with Red Pepper Swirl from Jeanne Lemlin's Simple Vegetarian Pleasures, one of my recent successes has been with carrot soups. Nobody in our house likes sweetened carrot soups -- and there are a lot of them -- but we all liked this Moroccan Carrot Soup from Epicurious and I recently did another deliciously spicy one based on this chilled soup with curry and coconut milk, though I served it hot. I think the addition of Thai yellow curry paste was a great addition.*

Actually, now that I'm poking around on Epicurious, this one sounds worthy too.

So very much looking forward to the summer cooking ahead of me. A few herbs are in the garden, we have strawberries that actually look like they might turn into something, and I recently planted blueberry bushes. Tomato seedlings are due to arrive soon. The Bobcats are kicking off tonight with a margarita-laden group cookout, and next week we take on Greek mezze. Stay tuned.

*Special thanks to Chef Jane at the Institute of Culinary Education, who taught the Thai cooking class Ms. Cake and I took together. She encouraged us to think of the numerous ways that Thai yellow, red, and green curry pastes can enhance other dishes, and ever since then I've been incorporating them all over the place. A few of her great idea were red curry in barbecue sauces, yellow curry anywhere you'd use curry powder, and green curry in guacamole.

Summer shows up early again

Just as it did 8 years ago, when Mr. Gateau and I got married, summer has showed up a bit earlier than expected with several steamer trunks and indicated its intention to stick around. This weekend ushered in a 90 degree-plus heatwave, complete with humidity and evening thunder and lightning. It's sticky and dehydrating, but it's also deliciously relaxing to slow down to a crawl, throw some stuff on the grill, and marvel at how the garden is already getting overgrown and lush.

We kicked off the season with an invitation to join our friends for a little cookout. They did hamburgers, hot dogs, sweet Italian sausage, and shrimp skewers rubbed with spicy Cajun seasoning (perfect). I made my Greek-ish pasta salad, which is really the only kind of pasta salad I can stand. It's tricolor rotini (I used whole wheat here, this is a good recipe for that) tossed with pitted kalamata olives, feta, thinly-sliced red onions, sundried tomatoes, halved cherry tomatoes, and a big handful of chopped mixed garden herbs, plus olive oil and a little balsamic vinegar. Other additions that would be good depending on who you're serving it to would be capers, anchovies, or roasted red peppers.

This evening we're expecting other friends for grilling, and I'll be serving roasted red pepper and feta dip with pita chips, lemon-marinated green olives, and marinated mushrooms to start, then grilled flank steak (in my mother's trademark marinade of ketchup, mustard, worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, garlic, pepper, salt, and a little soy sauce), leftover pasta salad, corn with lime-chili sauce or butter and salt, and a salad of stuff from the farmer's market -- roasted beets, baguette slices with herbed goat cheese, lettuce, and arugula, with raspberry vinaigrette. Then we'll have some fruit and ice cream for dessert. My friends are bringing a summer cocktail, can't wait.

Summer Cooking

I was going to name this post something really stupid like "Hot Tips for Summer Cooking" but decided to spare us all.

I'm sure this is getting linked to all over the universe, as it's the #1 most emailed post on the New York Times website, but it's really worth it. 101 great ideas.

In which we kick off the summer eating season

And so Memorial Day Weekend has come and gone. It strikes me that whooping it up in celebration of traffic jams on the way to the beach and the consumption of fine processed meat products may not be exactly what was in mind when a holiday to remember the fallen soldiers was conceived, but far be it from me to put a damper in it.

I spent the weekend in western Massachusetts visiting with my parents and my sister and her family. Mr. Gateau joined us briefly, but mostly I had to cook in between handling the little Gateaux, who are not all that relaxing to deal with, frankly. Still, we managed to eat.

Saturday dinner -- my friend Sarah gave me a recipe for tarragon grilled chicken, which came out very well. You smush together some tarragon, garlic, and olive oil, and let the chicken (which you have salted and peppered) sit in that for a while, then grill it, and serve it with a fresh tomato sauce you make by sticking tomatoes, garlic, tarragon, olive oil, S&P, and balsamic vinegar in a food processor. You don't even cook it. I like this in a recipe. We had that with corn, salad, and string beans, plus some nice chilled Greek white wine. For dessert we had the best effing cherry pie I have ever had. Even by the excellent standards of Taft Farms where we buy our pies, this was spectacular. The cherries were sweet-tart and really juicy, the filling was not at all gummy, and the tartness was balanced by sugar sprinkled on top of the incredibly light and flaky crust. And then I was an ass and turned down taking the leftovers home because of some misguided notion that I am actually on a diet.

Sunday started off with excellent bagels and lox from the Great Barrington Bagel Co. which has not only the best bagels and lox in the Berkshires, but among the best bagels and lox you can get anywhere. These are old fashioned bagels, about half the size of what you get in NYC these days, and custom-smoked fish that is just incredible. The whitefish salad is basically mashed smoked whitefish without much more.

Sunday night we did flank steak, and I was in a fajita kind of mood, so I organized all the accoutrements, including some red beans I cooked up with a bunch of spices and half a bottle of dark beer for good measure. This was a good idea. Also grilled a number of veg, including rings of Vidalia onion. My father made sangria under my exacting supervision, which involved saying things like "Now dump in the bottle of wine. Good, now toss in a glug of brandy. Oh come on, don't be stingy."

By Monday we were all exhausted, and so went out for brunch. Dinner was hamburgers and hot dogs with the leftover grilled vegetables and some organic brand of baked beans. Not as good as the regular supermarket kind, but they were adequate. The meats were good, the location was spectacular, and the company didn't suck either.