Soup and Salad

After the carnivore's menu, we needed something greener, healthier and most importantly lighter.

Soup and salad, with leftover whole wheat baguettes and water seemed like a great after the pig-out meal.

The Soup
Roasted Carnival Squash, Garlic & Arugula Soup
Cut up the squash, add a bit of beef stock and roast at 350° F until fork tender. Set aside.
Mince some garlic and quickly sauté it in some hot oil. Just as it starts to get a bit of color, add the squash and some beef stock. Let simmer a bit, then blend to a smooth consistency. Add cream to taste, salt, black pepper and chili flakes. Garnish with arugula.

The Salad
Raddichio & Arugula with Meyer Lemon Dressing
Wash the arugula, spin dry and set aside.
Quickly blanch asparagus spears, set aside. When cool, cut in half lengthwise.
Wash the radiccio, then slice from top to bottom into quarter to half-inch thick sections. Set aside.
Make the dressing with fresh-squeezed Meyer lemon juice, a bit of fresh lime juice and enough white wine vinegar to bring up the acidity. Add a pinch of salt and some black pepper and some new crop olive oil.
Place the arugula in the plates, then top with the radicchio. Add the asparagus spears as a garnish.
Drizzle with unfiltered, unrefined new crop olive oil.
Beat the dressing to temporarily emulsify it and drizzle it over the salad.

The acid in the dressing tones down any bitterness in the greens, and the asparagus adds a note of richness. Overall, it's still light and fresh, since the only fat in the dressing is itself a fresh-tasting olive oil.

Bacon Salad

The French know how to eat. Really. This is proof. Bacon salad. Bien sûr, they don't call it that; they use the much more refined term, "Frisée aux lardons". Or in this case, "Frisée aux lardons, vinaigrette aux mûres". Pork fat, by any other name, would taste as sweet.

This is a great dish to munch while you're waiting for your mesquite-grilled chicken or some other port-deprived dish. One of the best things about bacon is that after eating it, you're not hungry and can wait as long as it takes for the next course to be ready.

Frisée aux lardons, sauce mûres

Ingredients

• Frisée, one head, base cut off, washed, artfully arranged on a plate in a mound of frizziness.
• Bacon, in this case uncured (that makes it health food)
• Fresh blackberry juice/pulp, seeds strained out
• Brown sugar
• White sugar
• Water
• Red wine vinegar (formerly Two Buck Chuck and mixed reds)
• Salt
• Black pepper
• Lemon juice
• Lime juice
• Garlic (this was some fancy French stuff, and it worked well)
• Pine nuts

(yeah, that's a lot of ingredients for a salad but not to worry)

Process

1. Pour the sugar (to taste) into the water in a pan, reduce down until it caramelizes (this is the base for a gastrique).
2. Add the blackberry juice, reduce some more.
3. While the gastrique is doing its thing, sauté the bacon with the garlic and pine nuts. Reserve.
4. Arrange the washed frisée leaves on a plate, making sure to create an artful and appetizing mound of leaves.
5. Spoon the bacon/pine nut mixture over the frisée.
6. Add the lemon and lime juice to the blackberry sauce.
7. Spoon or pour the sauce over the bacon mixture and frisée.
8. Taste for saltiness. It should be adequate because of the bacon. Likewise, you don't need to add oil because the bacon takes care of this for you. If it needs a bit more salt, garnish with something cool like Maldon smoked salt flakes or Hawaiian black sea salt.
9. Serve immediately while the bacon is still warm.

You don't have to use bacon. You could use Pancetta or some other fatty, porky delicacy. You could even use gésiers de canard confits... but then that would be more of a salade landaise (my absolute favorite, but getting preserved duck gizzards is a challenge here).

Community garden salad

Clockwise from bottom: watermelon radishes, panzanella, Ronde de Nice squash

Cucumber & chocolate mint water, watermelon radish garnish

The community garden in Sutter Park is starting to produce. The recent hot weather really boosted a lot of crops, notably summer squashes. Our garden is on the verge of yielding some bonanza tomatoes: San Marzanos for sauces, Cherokee Purple for eating and orange cherries for whatever we feel like. Silk is showing on the corn, we have a Bell pepper just about ready for harvest, and we usually get a strawberry or two for a treat. The watermelons, beans and squash have a long way to go yet, but hopefully by then end of summer they'll all be producing.

After our usual Sunday weed and water, I walked around to see what everyone else is growing and how their plants are doing. The result: a conversation leading to a couple of Rondes de Nice squash, a watermelon radish, and another radish with "giant" in the name - long, red and a bit twisted. Combined with an organic cucumber and an heirloom tomato from yesterday's trip to the market, we had everything on hand for a great veggie/salad plate.

The first thing I thought of was a nice panzanella. This is an Italian salad made with croutons, tomatoes, olive oil and whatever else you want to throw in, if you're not being authentic. The gardener who gave me the Rondes de Nice stressed that they're creamier than zucchini (courgettes if we're being French), and to cook them separately to get familiar with their taste. I couldn't resist throwing the radishes in as a garnish, both for the main plate and the drink.

Recipe notes

Ingredients (for everything) 

• Stale bread, cut into 3/4"  to 1" cubes. I used a Chinese cleaver for this, since the bread knife was not liking this task.
• Chicken stock
• Fully ripe summer tomatoes, medium dice
• Cucumber, small dice for salad; julienne for water
• Onion, julienned
• Fresh basil, chiffonade
• Extra virgin olive oil (EVOO to foodies)
• Sea salt
• Pepper
• Rond de Nice squash, large dice (irregular)
• Chocolate mint, chiffonade
• Garlic, fine dice
• Fresh grated Parmesan cheese

 Process

Panzanella
Since it was part of a summer medley, the panzanella didn't get too involved. However, this can be a meal in itself if you add nice fresh cheese, capers, hard boiled eggs and make it bigger. It can have grilled meats, different herbs, whatever you think is appropriate - although I don't consider it a panzanella unless it has fresh, ultra-ripe tomatoes. You could also add anchovies, but in this case I'd hold the cheese. 

1.  Preheat oven broiler
2. Lightly fry the croutons in some oil. 
3. Splash in some chicken stock and add the garlic. This replaces the soaking and squeezing step from the more traditional recipe. Keep stirring so that the croutons don't stick, transfer them to a baking sheet and pop them in the broiler to crisp up a bit. Keep checking them and turn as needed so they don't burn. 
4. Set aside.
5. Assemble the panzanella just before serving time by tossing the tomatoes, cucumbers onions and basil with the croutons in a bowl. 
6. Pour in some strong, grassy EVOO. I skip the vinegar or lemon juice since I don't want it interfering with the acid from the tomatoes. 
7. Once it's plated, grate some Parmesan over the top.

Ronds de Nice
These were done subtly to let the delicate flavor of the squash come forth. 

• Sauté the squash, stirring/shaking constantly so they don't stick. 
• Add chicken stock and some of the julienned onions, salt and pepper.
• Cook uncovered until the liquid has mostly evaporated but things are still juicy.

Radishes
Actually, you don't do much with the radishes. The giant type was julienned and plated under the watermelon, which was sliced into thin rondelles then dusted with salt. The juice from the squash and panzanella will run through the julienned radishes, making them a lot more interesting than simple radishes sitting in a plate as an appetizer.

This was a really healthy lunch, certainly much healthier than some kind of spicy grilled meat just dripping with fat. My cholesterol probably thanks me for eating it. Only one drawback: I'm already hungry again.

Tomato Carpaccio

Although summer officially started a couple of days ago, it's not really summer without vine-ripened tomatoes. Ours are still hanging green from the vine, but they're slowly starting to appear at our local farmers' market. These were small, plum-sized varieties. Two yellow and one red. Three with good tomato flavor and one sweet but otherwise not thrilling.

With hotter weather and good produce, it's easy to create something without all that mucking around in the kitchen, slaving over hot pans and incandescent ovens. This couldn't be simpler: thinly sliced ripe tomatoes, a strong extra virgin olive oil, smoked sea salt, freshly ground black pepper, basil from the garden. And some bread, in this case flax seed ciabatta.

This is a filling dish when you serve it with lots of bread for sopping up all that tomato-basil infused olive oil. No need to pile on lots of protein or add courses. Just four ingredients and two spices (I'm counting bread as an ingredient - but if you want to get fussy, add another five for the bread).