When it comes to having steak at home, more often than not my choice is a thick-cut boneless New York strip grilled on the stove top. However, when my husband returned from the market with two hefty bone-in rib eyes, I had to admit that they looked quite tempting.
Because they weren’t as thick as I like for grilling, I started to look for a recipe or method that would yield a juicy medium-rare steak. Once again, my better half came to the rescue when he emailed me a recipe from Food and Wine for “Butter Basted Rib Eye Steaks.”
While paging through an old cookbook the other day, I came upon a printout of a recipe that I found in December 2006. Titled, “Roast Lamb for One,” it was Nigella Lawson’s recipe for roasting a single lamb shank, a perfect meal for the bachelor that I was back then and why I had tucked it away.
No longer single, however, I decided to double the recipe and make roast lamb for two. The only ingredient that I didn’t have was a red currant jelly for the finishing sauce, so I decided to check out the recipe online to see if any readers had suggested an alternative. That’s when I discovered that the recipe had received a considerable number of negative reviews that shared a common problem; in the words of one reviewer: “. . . just a burnt mess on the bottom of the pan and no juices left at all to make a gravy. The meat was nowhere near tender. . .”
Serendipity led us to last night’s scrumptious vegetarian dinner. On Friday, my husband sent me a recipe by Yewande Komolafe he found in The New York Times for a lentil and orzo stew with roasted eggplant. Little did he know that, just the day before, I had already chosen the very same dish for a future post.
Given the recent dank and dreary weather, atypical for San Diego, the stew was the perfect entree: earthy lentils, slowly simmered with aromatic vegetables and orzo, brightened by finishing with the juice and zest of lemon, and then topped with meaty chunks of eggplant roasted with warm and citrusy coriander. A few shavings of salty ricotta salata or even some crumbled feta completes the dish.
As we’re officially into winter now and even here in sunny San Diego it’s turned a tad chilly, I was in the mood for a winter stew. Having some cubed pork shoulder in my freezer contributed to my looking for a pork stew recipe. After looking through my cookbooks, I settled on a relatively simple recipe from Michele Scicolone’s The Italian Slow Cooker for a Pork Stew Agrodolce.
Ever since Proust memorialized his madeleines, novelists as well as food writers have been forever writing about memories evoked by the aromas or flavors of culinary delights. Well, I’m about to join the crowd with a simple recollection recently elicited by a plate of winter cherries presented to me on Christmas Eve by my better half.
I’d forgotten that I had told him how on one Christmas Eve in the mid 1960s, after a traditional multi-course Italian fish dinner, my aunt proudly presented a cut-class bowl full of bright red cherries. We were all amazed: cherries in December?
My aunt explained that they were imported from South America and weeks later confided to me that they had been quite expensive. If my memory serves me well, she said that they cost $3.00 a pound. In today’s currency that would be about $27.00. I believe, however, that the joy she took in sharing them with us, which was so apparent on her face as she made the presentation, made her feel they were worth every penny.
And from his facial expression, I think my husband, who knew how special that childhood memory was to me, experienced a similar feeling when he surprised me with the plate of winter cherries after our Christmas vigil supper.
Over the past holiday week, it’s been chilly here in San Diego and the cool weather made me long for a hardy winter dish. Looking through my cookbooks, I came upon a recipe from Lidia Bastianich’s Lidia Cooks from the Heart of Italy for a pork ragù with farro Potenza style. The combination of pork shoulder simmered low and slow in a spicy tomato sauce and then combined with nutty farro sounded most appealing.
Fortunately, our local grocery store was having a great half-price sale on fresh bone-in pork shoulder roasts, which added even more appeal to the recipe. Even though I only needed two pounds of meat, I picked up a six-pound roast that would allow me to practice my butchering skills and provide me enough meat for a couple of meals.
Cooking from Books 