I am trying to get back into a regular yoga routine (a routine abandoned years ago, after two good stints of beneficial prenatal yoga, after Eli proved uninterested in mom + baby yoga) and I’m getting better at getting to class and moving through the poses. But concentrating on my breathing? Concentrating on the poses? That’s not really happening yet. Instead, I have to admit, I spend much of the 90 minutes, especially the final savasana, pondering my next meal.
So it was today. I lay there, eyes closed, bolster over my legs, thinking about the tub of leftover pasta in the fridge, the arugula going wild in the backyard, the juicy tomatoes from the CSA. On the drive home, I remembered we still had some eggs. And so, with a grating of fresh parmesan and a sprinkle of lemon zest salt, a quick lunch was born. Its origins remind me a bit of garbage salad and although its perhaps prettiest at first, like this:
It is most delicious, like that salad, when you take your knife and fork to it and slice everything up in your bowl, letting the arugula wilt and mellow a bit with the heat of the pasta and egg, the runny egg yolk and tomato juice making your sauce, like this:
It made a great lunch, though of course it would make a nice simple dinner, too, with some crusty bread on the side; your salad is already in the bowl.
As I mentioned last week, I watched a terrific new documentary recently that addresses school lunch and other food issues in such an accessible, engaging, and kid-friendly way that I’m urging all my friends — including you — to watch it. Here’s an excerpt from my column on the movie, What’s On Your Plate?:
My boys, as I tell them regularly, are incredibly lucky with their school lunch program. It wasn’t always this way. My husband went to the same school, in a time when on hot dog day one lucky kid was served a rubber hot dog, which meant free seconds and a bag of chips. I always wonder how many kids bit into that rubber hot dog (and how many of them took two bites before realizing their mistake). The school, like most schools, used to house vending machines full of sodas and candy. But then gradually — and not without difficulty or complaint — things changed.
Please read the rest of the piece over at Literary Mama.
As I’ve written before, I love a salad for lunch, but when it’s rainy and cold, as it’s been in the Bay Area lately, something warmer is called for. Sometimes I make roasted potato and kale salad, but the other day I didn’t have quite the time, energy or ingredients to pull it together. So instead, I improvised with some dinner leftovers and one fresh market egg to make a warm and brunch-like dish that I will make again, even if I don’t have the leftovers with which to start. Here’s how it goes:
1 potato
1 handful of kale
1 egg
olive oil
salt & pepper to taste
Scrub and chop the potato and boil till tender, 5 – 10 minutes depending on the size of the chunks.
While the potato is cooking, stem, chop and rinse the kale. Steam in a saute pan (or, if you’re really efficient, in a bamboo steamer over the boiling potato) until tender, about 5 minutes.
Drain the vegetables. Heat some olive oil in a pan and add the potato, then fry until browned and crisp around the edges. Add the kale, plus some salt and pepper to taste, and heat until warm through. Off load the vegetables on to a plate and now fry an egg in the pan. When the egg’s just how you like it, slide it onto the vegetables. Drizzle with a bit of hot sauce if you like, and enjoy!
When I was in high school, my boyfriend and I went to Manhattan to see some show or other, but before that, we went to a classic French bistro for lunch. I suppose I ordered onion soup, and he ordered something else, and when we done ordering the server, who was an older, very severe, motherly kind of French woman looked sternly at us an asked with more than a little “And what will you have first?”
“Nothing,” we replied, not really understanding the concept of appetizer (beyond that plate of cheese and stone-wheat crackers we sometimes saw at parties), suburban kids that we were. She pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows and seemed absolutely to judge us. But a few minutes later she returned with two perfectly composed plates of salad. “You will eat this first,” she said. “It is Salad Nicoise.” And we did, and we thanked her, and it was delicious, and we understood. Since then, I’ve always loved a good Nicoise (in the style of Nice), which is a classic composed salad: rather than tossing the lot of vegetables together, each is tossed separately and arranged artfully on the plate. Or if you’re a real purist, the vegetables (and sometimes tuna) are arragned artfully and just drizzled with the vinaigrette. A good composed salad is a meal in itself. The classic ingredients for a Nicoise will vary, but are selected from tomato, green beans, boiled egg, tuna, red pepper, maybe lettuce. Debate rages about whether or not the vegetables should be cooked. A purist will say all should be crudite.
Basically, all you need is the following vinaigrette recipe and whatever fresh (or leftover) produce you have on hand. You can add fresh tuna, canned tuna, the rest of that grilled pork tenderloin you have lying around, that sausage you didn’t eat (see above), steak…or not.
With apologies to the French and the purists, Salad “Nicoise” works beautifully for a family for the following reasons:
On a busy night, you can whip up the dressing and toss it with whatever fresh vegetables you have around.
You can use up leftover green beans, corn, and all manner of meats swiftly and
The pretty plate makes it look like it’s not “leftover night” even though you know better
It’s healthy
It can be vegetarian or not
You can use whatever you have on hand–whatever is seasonal, local, fresh around you
You can cook or not cook, depending on your family’s taste
Your picky eaters won’t complain about different food touching each other.
1 large garlic clove, minced and mashed to a paste with 1/2 teaspoon salt
Rounded 1/2 teaspoon anchovy paste
1 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 1/2 teaspoons minced fresh thyme
1 1/2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh basil
Make dressing:
Whisk together vinegar, shallot, mustard, garlic paste, and anchovy paste in a small bowl until combined well, then add oil in a slow stream, whisking until emulsified. Whisk in thyme, basil, and salt and pepper to taste.
Caroline makes a fine garbage salad, and a long time ago, I started making a kind of garbage cheese dip. Like so much of what goes on around here, there is no single recipe but rather a set of strategies and tips. This is what you can do if friends stop in unexpectedly. This is another thing you can do if your kids are starving and dinner isn’t ready. This is what you do if you have too many little hunks of cheese lying around in your cheese bin and you don’t know how to use them. There are two basic ways to go about mixing up a fast, delicious spread that you can use for snack, appetizer, or even a quick lunch.
The first, and my favorite, is Jacques Pepin style, a technique culled from one of his classic cooking shows. In a Cuisinart blend together:
all your leftover little pieces of cheese–especially a little piece of blue cheese. The more eclectic the mix, the better.
a splash or so of white wine
one garlic clove
Of course, if kids are going to eat this, you will want to make sure the cheese mixing did not require too much wine–or you can substitute or add some mayonnaise as in the version below for a Horseradish Cheddar Cheese Dip:
shredded cheddar cheese
mayonnaise
a teaspoon or two of mustard
a tablespoon or so to taste of horseradish
I like keeping things like this around, because anytime you bring out a pre-dinner snack, everyone slows down, gathers together and your weeknight can feel a little bit more like a weekend.