Still Life With DayQuil

As the above tableau suggests, I am currently sick.

Earlier this week I came down with one of those awful (and yet utterly ordinary) summer colds that leaves you plugged up, hot, headachy, restless, and feeling like you'd rather do just about anything than confront a stifling New York City subway.

Anything, that is, besides cook. I'd forgotten until now how completely unappealing cooking is when you're ill. The physicality of it is exhausting, the fine motor skills overtaxing, and the sights and smells of food absolutely nauseating. Beyond all that, there's a psychological component -- to me, cooking is above all else about caring for people, and when I'm sick what I want is for someone to care for me.

For these reasons I haven't been in the kitchen much this past week. I got as far as making an omelet last night, depositing it in a heap on The Viking's plate and then shuffling back to the couch to recover from the effort. It was not a photo-worthy result, for me or for the omelet.

Luckily, my summer cold has brought all the mother-hen-types around me out of the woodwork.

Here are a list of remedies that have been suggested to me over the past few days, by actual moms and others with mom-like tendencies: 3 grams of Vitamin C per day; Echinacea; Rest, rest, and more rest; Hot compresses; Fluids; Hot tea with honey; Miso soup; Chicken soup; Zinc lozenges; A neti pot.

Here is my own personal wellness solution: take the maximum allowable dosage of DayQuil, install myself on the couch with a jug of water, and watch reality television programming for about 11 hours straight in a drug-induced delirium. There are also saltine crackers, ginger snaps, and old movies involved. As a cure it might not have the weight of science behind it, but it has provided me with a much needed mental hiatus (and my symptoms seem to be dissipating too).

I suppose that I owe you an accounting of how I used my CSA box this week. I do actually have photos of the various efforts, all undertaken before the cold arrived on Tuesday, but my brain has turned too much to mush to do anything about it for the time being.

Long Live The Zucchini

It's the middle of August, and if you're a certain type of person -- the type who attends farmers markets and talks about "food systems" and reads five different cooking magazines each month -- it's a very special time for food. That's because corn, tomatoes, peaches, plums, and zucchini have hit the farm stands with a vengeance, and we can all finally stop pretending that we're satisfied with our local selection of dandelion greens, pole beans, baby lettuces, stinging nettles, and the like. The heavy-hitters are finally here. It's all very exciting.

This also means that right about now, Yuppie Foodies (Yoodies? No. Fuppies.) are working themselves into a lather over all this August produce (especially the heirloom tomatoes -- ohhh, do fuppies LOVE their heirloom tomatoes), feasting on it with an enthusiasm that borders on mania. This one can't help working into every conversation how she gets just the best sweet corn at a little roadside stand in Quogue; that one will tell you that her community garden is putting out so much zucchini that she can't give it away fast enough.

The moral of the story is that for this four week period when every farmer's market is bursting at the seams with such primo local offerings, those fruits and vegetables are king. Don't bother cooking with anything else.

Rewind to this past weekend, when we had seven friends over for Sunday dinner. It was meant to be a barbecue (in the Yankee sense of the word) but the weather had other ideas. So, we sent The Viking outside to cook strip steaks in the rain and sat inside drinking cold beers, eating bruschetta, and clumsily decanting a Double Magnum of 1996 Barberesco that The Viking had been given as a gift. There have been worse Sundays.

I wanted to incorporate lots of fresh, local produce into the dinner, and my rule of thumb is that the less you do to tamper with these things, the better.

I made a salad of roasted corn, tomato, avocado, and cilantro, simply dressed with a splash of lime juice.



I also did a second salad of thinly shaved zucchini (I shaved it on a mandolin, but you can do it with a vegetable peeler or knife), toasted pine nuts, and chopped basil, tossed in olive oil and lemon juice and topped with some fresh Parmesan (pictured at top).

For dessert, I cut up a quart of local plums, mixed them with brown sugar and cinnamon, rolled them up in tin foil and stuck them under the broiler. I served them, bubbling and juicy, with homemade pound cake and vanilla ice cream.

Qu'est-ce Que C'est Dans Ma Boite Du CSA? Kale, Melon, Tomatoes, Beets, Purslane, Carrots, Peppers, Apricots, and Donut Peaches

Laziness begets laziness. This is the sort of thing that your mother used to tell you when you were 16 and spent your summer vacation sleeping until 11 AM, then relaxing for the rest of the day on a sun lounger, moving only to refill on lemonade and seek out additional gossip magazines. Just, you know, hypothetically speaking.

Let me tell you, your mother was on to something.

August arrived right on schedule this year, with the past 13 days having been the most phenomenally unproductive since...well...last August. Things are ghostly quiet in the office. The phones are silent, little red voicemail lights have gone dark, and email volume has whittled down to a small fraction of what it usually is. Back on the home front, life has progressed towards complete and total indolence. Of late, there has been a lot of couch time, movie watching, red wine, internet surfing, and sleeping.

And while this happens to be exactly the type of scenario that I dream about when life gets chaotic, a funny thing happens when it actually comes to pass: I don't like who I am. The less I have to do, the less I get done, and what started off as a little extra leisure time ends as full-on torpor.

My new found inertia has got me thinking about adaptation. Last Sunday the New York Times ran a story on a couple who decided to toss away all their possessions and live a simplified, debt-free life. The article talked about "hedonic adaptation," an official-sounding psychological term meaning that once you acquire the nice things you always wanted, you promptly get used to them and they stop seeming so nice anymore. So, you begin wanting even NICER things. This is known to many of us as "being a spoiled brat."

But it's a concept that applies to much more than just wealth. You'll notice that when you start eating too richly (think: a week's vacation in Italy; the entirety of the holiday season), before you know it that indulgent diet becomes merely the new normal. When you're getting 8 hours of sleep a night, you start wanting 10. It also explains why you'll sometimes hear retired people describe their cushy lives as being laced with untold stress and hurry: it's all relative, baby.

Luckily, the concept works in reverse, too. Just out of college many of my friends became i-banking analysts, and I marvelled at how they could possibly put up with a life where 19-hour work days were standard operating procedure. Their answer: "You just get used to it." It's what we do as humans. We adapt.

This is the best argument I've heard for living a life of virtue -- that breaking it is so much fun! If I'm going to adapt to my chosen lifestyle anyway, I'd rather adapt to being too disciplined than being too being lazy, right? If hedonic adaptation is to be believed, we'll all ultimately be happier if we live hectic lives punctuated by the occasional vacation; eat spartanly and indulge in the occasional feast; spend thriftily and every once in a while, blow it out.

You might be wondering how this applies to my CSA box. Well, in my period of sloth, there has not been a lot of cooking, photography, or writing (or working out, or clean laundry, for that matter), so I don't have much to offer you today. Most of what I did in the kitchen over the past week could have been done by a well-trained monkey.

I cut up the green peppers and purslane and mixed them with store bought lettuce and radishes to create a green salad, tossed with lemon-rosemary vinaigrette.



I cut the apricots in half, put them in a roasting pan, sprinkled them with brown sugar, and stuck them under the broiler for 5-10 minutes (until browned and juicy). I used them to top vanilla ice cream, and which would have been a beautiful photo if I had managed to take it.

The beets I roasted, chopped, and mixed with feta, basil, and balsamic vinegar to create a light salad.




The tomatoes got the same treatment as the beets, but weren't photographed.

The kale and carrots went into that kale and white bean stew that I made once before, which I took to work for lunch all week.

No Ifs, Ands, Or Halibuts

Meet Exhibit A: the red snapper that I bought for dinner with my brother and his wife this past weekend. Unbeknownst to me at the time, red snapper populations are at very low levels due to overfishing and it's best not to eat them. Note Red's expression here: bored, annoyed, put-upon. Watching, judging. All this, and I haven't even done a terrible job at grilling him yet.

The trouble with eating is that almost anything you put in your mouth these days is problematic in one way or another. If the food isn't unhealthy (artery-hardening; cancer-causing; diabetes-inducing), it's unethically grown (cruelly raised; brutally slaughtered), grown or processed in an environmentally harmful way (water-intensive; petroleum-guzzling; toxic in its byproducts), or unsustainably hunted (devastating to wild populations).

After I read all of Michael Pollan's books last year, it appeared that in order to eat with a clean conscience I should stick to a diet of barnacles, forest weeds, pond scum, and wild fish.

Now, a few new books on fish and fishing have hit the shelves and spawned (pun intended) interesting reviews by the likes of Sam Sifton and Elizabeth Kolbert in the New York Times and New Yorker respectively. To make a long story short, it appears that wild fish are off the "safe" list too.

I recommend reading the reviews for the full story, but here's the summary version:

1. The history of commercial fishery is one of progressively working our way though various fish species once thought too numerous to be harmed, fishing them to the brink of extinction, and then moving on to the next one.

2. At the current time we've all but obliterated wild populations of most any fish you can think to eat -- this is surprising given that fish are one of few things which Americans are encouraged to eat more of.

3. Farmed fish isn't necessarily a solution, because farmed fish are fed wild fish (is this not mind-bogglingly backward?), and the farms themselves often pollute natural fish populations/habitats.
Unfortunately none of the authors goes so far as to suggest a solution to this sad state of affairs, they just leave you feeling like a nasty, awful, greedy person for eating fish.

But a little additional research revealed that there are certain species that you can eat with a relatively guilt-free conscience. The Monterrey Bay Aquarium puts out a pocket-size Seafood Watch Guide (in fact, a separate guide for each region of the USA) to make seafood buying decisions easy (or, as easy as they can be given that you still need to distinguish between US-farmed and Central America-farmed tilapia). They also have a handy iPhone app.



Consulting my regional Seafood Watch Guide revealed that one of the things that I am encouraged to eat is wild Pacific halibut. This brings me to Exhibit B: pictured above is last night's dinner, a 6 ounce portion of broiled wild halibut, served with a homemade organic zucchini salsa verde and roasted organic new potatoes.

I'm pretty sure that we got through the meal without committing any major moral offenses.

Furthermore, the zucchini salsa verde is from the August issue of Bon Appetit and is highly recommended -- you can find the recipe here.

BYOL: Curried Chicken Salad

Today is a big day. It's the day that I pass my curried chicken salad recipe on to you.

Curried chicken salad has a special place in my heart because it was one of four foods that I made on loop from August 2006 to the spring of 2008. At the time I was making $24,000 -- per annum -- as an editorial assistant at a magazine. In order to live in Manhattan on that budget I had to impose WWII style rationing, alotting an average of just $10 a day for food and drink. New Yorkers can spend more than that each day on coffee alone. To meet my budget, soda, gum, desserts, storebought coffee, and bottled water were eliminated as needless extravagances; snacks were considered a special treat; dinner date invitations were accepted as a matter of principle. A girl needs to eat, as the saying goes. Indeed.

Most of my breakfasts, lunches, and dinners during that time were cooked from scratch. Aside from curried chicken salad, the other three foods I made consistently during this period were this dish (or variations thereof), pastel omelets, and a recipe that I have dubbed Poverty Chili. The Viking happens to love Poverty Chili, much in the same way that Marie Antoinette loved her Norman Hamlet.

I look back on this (admittedly, deeply bourgeois) flirtation-with-poverty period of life with particular fondness, choosing to celebrate my own plucky self-reliance and conveniently forget about the wide, soft safety net laid by parents who would never have let anything truly nasty happen to their only daughter.

In my memories, I was a Dickensian heroine in fingerless gloves, rifling through trash bins and peering from the cold into warm, glowing shop windows. I specifically remember walking by Pierre Marcolini Chocolates on Park Avenue one January day and having an immense, otherworldy, primeval craving for one of the $7 hot chocolates that they serve there. After some mental anguish I finally allowed myself to buy a cup, and still remember sipping it, warm, thick, and silky, as I made my way down 57th street in a state of elation.

Now that I have virtually free reign with the food and wine budget, sensory experiences on this level rarely happen for me. When they do, they tend to involve a lot more than a $7 hot chocolate. That's truly a shame, and ought to serve as a lesson about the value of a little deprivation.

Back to the curried chicken salad. When I was in college I frequently bought the dish from a cafe called Atticus, which is where I got the idea to make it for myself in the first place. Not only did I love the taste of it, but it embodied the Holy Trinity of poverty foods: cheap, healthy, and quick to prepare.



What makes this curried chicken salad recipe so special, you may ask? Okay, it's not exactly the formula for Coke, but I did play around with a lot of different curried chicken salad recipes before I came up with what I deem to be the perfect version. It's based off a recipe that I originally found in a 2002 issue of Gourmet.

Curried chicken salads tend to have fruit and/or nuts in them, most frequently grapes and walnuts. I immensely dislike mixing fruit with meat (besides apples with pork), plus grapes and walnuts are expensive, so they were eliminated right off the bat.



However, you'll need to keep a sweet element in the dressing to counterbalance the earthy, musky flavor of the curry powder. I love Cross & Blackwell's Major Grey's Chutney for this (partly for the way it tastes, mostly for the winsome association with English Colonialism), but you can substitute 1 teaspoon of honey if that's what you have on hand. The touch of sweetness brings an otherwise flat dressing to life.

Then there's the nutrition factor. I substitute fat free Greek yogurt (in all its improbable thickness and creaminess) and low fat mayonnaise in the place of full-fat mayo. I use only white meat chicken. Even the curry powder itself has health credentials -- curry is a spice combination made from turmeric, cumin, allspice, cinnamon, etc, many of which are known to boost immunity, decrease inflammation, and soothe the digestive system.



As for the recipe's ease and simplicity, that mainly comes down to how the chicken is prepared. Listen, simmering boneless, skinless chicken breasts in broth and water is not something they're going to teach you to do at the Cordon Bleu. I'm not going to vouch for the culinary merits, but I can tell you that it's a fuss-free way to cut out all the unpleasantness of a hot oven, dirty dishes, and having to trim and debone a chicken carcass.

Curried Chicken Salad
Adapted From Gourmet Magazine

Serves 5

2 cups chicken broth
1 1/2 lb skinless boneless chicken breast
1/2 c. light mayonnaise
1/3 c. Greek yogurt
5 teaspoons curry powder
1 Tablespoon lime juice
1 -2 Tablespoons Major Gray's Chutney (to taste)
1 medium red onion, finely chopped
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
5 whole wheat pitas
Romaine lettuce (optional

1. Bring chicken broth and 4 cups water to a simmer.
2. Add chicken and simmer, uncovered, 6 minutes. Remove pan from heat and cover, then let stand until chicken is cooked through, about 15 minutes. Transfer chicken to a plate, cool and chop into 1/2-inch pieces.
3. Whisk together mayonnaise, yogurt, curry, lime juice, chutney, salt, and pepper in a large bowl.
4. Add chicken, and onion and stir gently to combine.
5. Each morning, cut a pita in half an stuff with chicken salad and lettuce.

Qu'est-ce Que C'est Dans Ma Boite Du CSA? Summer Squash, Japanese Eggplant, Napa Cabbage, Fava Beans, The List Goes On And On...

This week I found myself in an unfamiliar position: I was actually prepared to use all of my CSA produce -- I had the dishes all planned out! -- and then a lot of it went bad on me.

Food spoilage was a serious, complex problem over most of the course of human history, but the invention of refrigeration around 100 years ago should have changed all that. We live in the golden age of food preservation (actually, maybe the baroque period?). If we can make milk that's shelf-stable for months, I should be able to keep a cucumber fresh for 7-10 days.

And yet, my refrigerator is where vegetables go to be tortured. Earlier this week some of the squash froze to death and some of it appears to have been suffocated in an unventilated Ziploc bag. The cucumbers died of dehydration. Poor old squash and cucumbers.

I think that most of you can relate. When a new fruit or vegetable comes into one's life, it's not always obvious what should be done to keep it happy. Does one put it in the fridge? If so, in a plastic bag? Or in a brown paper bag on the counter? Should one wash it first? And if one is having this much trouble caring for vegetable matter, how can one expect to have a child?

To make matters worse, my refrigerator is unpredictable and mean-spirited. It is the Mel Gibson of kitchen appliances, cruel and volatile, freezing things at random and without warning. It appears to be particularly bigoted against leafy greens. Mel is currently set at 38 degrees and still manages to freeze things, leading me to believe that either the thermostat is a lie or I remember even less from high school chemistry than I thought.

This week of ruined foodstuffs was a wake up call to get my act together. For information about properly storing produce, I found this cheat sheet - it's not the prettiest, but the information is presented concisely and clearly. Were you even aware that certain troublemaking fruits like apricots and tomatoes must be stored separately from the rest of their fruit and vegetable friends? Neither was I.

I also need to get myself a refrigerator thermometer and figure out what parts of my fridge stay at what temperature, and store things accordingly. I can already see The Viking throwing his face in his hands at this, envisioning a future in which he gets in trouble for putting the blueberries back on the wrong shelf. Sorry, The Viking, but it's the world in which you are about to live.

Without further ado, here's a rundown of how I used my CSA produce:

I sliced the Japanese eggplants and what was left of the squash, brushed them with olive oil, and simply grilled them on a griddle plate on my stove top.



I rescued two cucumbers and used them to make raita, the Indian yogurt, cucumber, and mint sauce. This became a cool, refreshing accompaniment to the grilled vegetables.

The carrots were tossed in with a leftover butterflied lamb shank that I thawed, trussed, and braised on the stove top with tomatoes, lemons, garlic, port, cinnamon, thyme, and bay leaves. I've never cooked lamb this way before and it's worthy of a blog entry of its own - it was sensationally tender and delicately tinged with North African flavors.



The fava beans I blanched and threw together with mint, sliced radishes, sliced red onion, and a honey mustard vinaigrette. I meant to include feta, and that would have been a valuable addition to a salad that ended somewhat too flimsy for its own good.



As previously reported, the Mirabelles became a tart.

As for the Napa Cabbage and Kale...these didn't turn out so well. I braised them in a skillet with garlic and onions and finished them with rice vinegar and raz el hanout. It was a dish that didn't make any sense, and the finished product showed it (it's pictured below with leftover lamb and raita).



This week, only the purslane got left behind. I'll try to do better by it next time around.

A Glut of Mirabelles

Mirabelle. What a great name for a fruit.

Mirabelle comes from the Latin word mirabilis, which mean wondrous. This was not my first impression of the yellow plums that bear that name, but in light of the flattering reputation, I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

You see, for the past two weeks, my CSA box has included a quart of these small, firm, buttercup-yellow UFOs (Unidentified Fruitlike Objects). I could tell that they were probably a type of plum, but no plum that I had ever seen before. They were also too sour to eat as a hand fruit -- at least to my taste -- so I stuck them in a big Ziploc bag in the fridge and vowed to find some other use for them.

And there they sat. And sat. And sat. As of yesterday (12 days after the first batch arrived), they were still firm and fresh smelling, and I decided that their time had come.



A little bit of research revealed that these bright yellow plums are known as Mirabelles, and they are a regional delicacy of Lorraine. If Wikipedia is to be believed, 90% of the Mirabelles harvested become jam or eau de vie, and from what I can tell the other 10% are dropped directly into CSA boxes: nearly every reference to them on the interweb was some message board poster overwhelmed by the number she got from her CSA and wondering what the hell to do with them all. So, my position was far from unique.



I'm not set up with jam-making equipment (though I'd like to be!), so I needed to take a different route. I decided to try a tart. If all went according to plan it would be the perfect, summery dessert for our friends The Diplomat and The Free Spirit, both of whom were joining us for dinner last night.



I used a standard pie crust and surrounded the fruit in creamy custard (note: this tart can be made with any stone fruit; if you are using peaches or nectarines, slice them into segments rather than halves). The final result was a particularly...well...tart tart, in which the Mirabelles had softened and mellowed into a lovely, yolk-colored puree. The Viking and our two guests were big fans of the flavor but if you're like me and want a sweeter finish, sprinkle the top of the tart with sugar five minutes before removing it from the oven, and/or serve it with sweetened whipped cream. It'll be mirabilis.



Mirabelle Tart

Serves 8

For the crust:
1 stick butter
1 1/4 c. flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp sugar
2 - 4 Tbsp ice water


For the filling:
18 oz. Mirabelles, halved and pitted (*can be substituted for small purple plums, apricots, sliced peaches, or sliced nectarines)
2/3 c. cream
1/3 c. flour
1/2 c. sugar
1 egg
1 Tbsp butter

1. Mix together flour, sugar, and salt. Cut butter into 15-20 pieces and while still chilled, work into flour mixture until mixture resembles a course meal. Add water a tablespoon at a time until dough just holds together. Form into a disk and chill 1 hour.

2. Preheat oven to 350 degree. Butter 9 - 10" tart pan. Roll out crust and press into tart pan, discarding any extra dough. Arrange Mirabelle halves, rounded side up, to fill pie crust.

3. Mix together sugar, egg, and cream. Add flour. Pour mixture into tart crust.

5. Bake for 35 - 40 minutes. Let cool at least 20 minutes before serving.