Perhaps it was kismet that the day after I read a New York Times recipe for Grated Tomato Pasta, friends dropped by with a box load of farm-stand tomatoes. The ripe and juicy beefsteaks were just what the recipe required. Having its few other ingredients on hand, spaghetti, olive oil, garlic, Parmigiano, and basil, also triggered me to prepare the dish the same day.
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My obsession with pizza continues. For the last several months, I’ve been experimenting with different dough recipes in an attempt to achieve a pizza with a crust that’s both soft and crunchy. Key to realizing this goal is finding the right percent of hydration, or the ratio of water to flour. Although it sounds pretty easy to do, it’s not. As the quantity of water goes up, the dough gets stickier and more difficult to work with. Sure, you can add a little flour as you go to make the dough more manageable, but add too much, and there goes the balance.
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Because of the heat wave that’s been gripping most of the country, along with the frequent extreme temperature warnings, we had planned to make some barbecued chicken leg quarters on our outdoor grill. It had been a sunny day with temps hovering around 85 degrees; but then an hour before we were planning to grill, Mother Nature intervened with a torrential rain storm that our weather app said would continue for most of the evening.
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Last Saturday, a dinner guest presented us with a basket of farm-stand vegetables and herbs. It would have made a perfect subject for a still life; however, lacking any talent in that area, I thought it would provide the ideal makings for a ratatouille.
I’ve prepared several versions of this dish and written about some of them here: a classic stewed one based on a recipe by Martha Stewart and a baked one from a Mark Bittman cookbook. As neither of them was exceptional so, I decided to look for an alternative. When I suggested a more traditionally French version to my husband, he thought it would be too heavy—especially given the current heat wave. I therefore continued my search and eventually chanced upon a roasted ratatouille from Ina Garten.
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A recent post by fellow blogger Diane Darrow evoked memories of a childhood dish my Neapolitan aunt would make frequently during the summer, when zucchini abounded at our local vegetable store: minestra di zucchini, a vegetable soup composed of zucchini, egg, cheese, and either parsley or basil. I hadn’t had it in years, but after reading Diane’s post, I was determined to fill that void.
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A slew of hot and sticky summer days, as well as nights, elicited the subject of this post: a coronation chicken salad. On one of those sultry evenings, our neighbors surprised us with a huge rotisserie chicken: “It’s too hot to cook” they said, “take the night off.” The bird was so big that its legs and wings were enough to sate our appetites, leaving us with more than enough meat for another meal. The following day was another scorcher, which made that leftover chicken sitting in the fridge even more appealing.
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For the past ten years or so, I’ve been trying to make really good pizza at home. To that end, I’ve used numerous recipes for the dough and a few pieces of kitchen gear. The one dough that worked best for me was Roberta’s dough, for which the recipe can be found on the New York Times “Cooking” website.
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My Neapolitan aunt’s stuffed peppers were one of my favorite side dishes. Even at an early age, I relished their savory bread-crumb stuffing laced with anchovies, capers, garlic, and parsley. To date, however, I haven’t found a recipe to duplicate them. But when I came across one for Campania-style stuffed peppers in Arthur Schwartz’s Naples at Table, I thought I’d give them a shot.
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During COVID, we relied heavily on home delivery of our groceries from the supermarket as well as from shopping channels like QVC and HSN. And even now that the pandemic has been declared officially over, we still do a lot of shopping online since we’ve opted not to have a car and also because I’m still wary of crowded stores with narrow aisles. Throughout this period, one of our staples has been frozen salmon fillets which have been remarkably good albeit challenging to cook owing to their irregular size. So, when we get two almost identical fillets, I turn to one of my favorite recipes for them: salmon meuniere.
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I’ve never been into grilling; yet despite my stance on it, we’ve owned three. Our first one was a small electric that we had purchased for our small terrace in our New York studio apartment. We used it three times. When we moved to a downtown-San Diego one-bedroom condo, with a considerably larger terrace, we bought a medium-size gas grill and used that no more than four times before we gave it away when we moved to New Jersey. So last year, now situated in a rural suburban townhouse, with quite a large deck that’s fitted with a natural-gas hookup, we bought an even larger grill and, as you might have already guessed, we used it maybe five times. This year, however, we decided it was time to join the grilling craze and began our outdoor grilling season with a huge ginger-soy London broil.
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Cooking from Books 