A little hot but very cool. Like summer.

What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the word summer? Okay, then what’s the next thing? Well then, the thing after that? No, the thing after… oh, never mind. The correct answer is chicken salad.

When the warm weather hits and the great outdoors beckons, we tend to get lazy in the kitchen. We still want good food, but we want it to be fast and easy to make and satisfyingly filling but not too heavy. Like I said, chicken salad. To me, some leftover chicken and a little mayo is one of the great blank canvases of summer, ready to take on all kinds of flavors and personalities. So for all those reasons, this is the first of probably two or three chicken salads I’ll write about before the season ends.

At the heart of this lively version is hot giardiniera, an Italian mix of pickled vegetables. You’ll find it in most supermarkets and some specialty stores. The mix of vegetables varies, but it always includes peppers of some sort. Other usual suspects are carrots, celery, cauliflower or broccoli florets, olives and pearl onions. Giardiniera is generally available in both mild and hot versions, although hot is relative, and we’ve sampled various brands over the years with varying degrees of success. There aren’t many national brands to speak of, so you really just have to try what’s available where you are. If it turns out to be less spicy than you like, adding a pinch of cayenne pepper to your chicken salad will turn up the heat for you. Also, if you have a choice, go for giardiniera that uses a mix of vinegar and water for the liquid, not one that includes olive oil. You’ll get fewer calories and a brighter taste.

And if you can’t find store bought giardiniera anywhere, recipes for making your own abound online. That sounds rather labor intensive to me, but to someone else, it might be a fun project.

I’ve adapted this recipe from one I found in Bon Appetit. It was part of an article on what prominent chefs like to cook at home. For this recipe, it said the chef [Mary---I forget her last name or the restaurant, sorry] uses leftovers from a purchased roast chicken. Not sure where she buys her gargantuan birds, but I used both legs and thighs and one half of the breast of my purchased roast chicken to come up with the 2-1/2 cups of chicken needed. Not exactly what I’d call leftovers.

You can use this chicken salad to make sandwiches, as I’ve done here. Just as often, though, we eat it as is, with no bread. Some fresh fruit or a fruit salad makes a nice side. When we had this over the weekend, Marion made delicious all fruit smoothies as an accompaniment. We felt very healthy and smug eating this lunch. Yeah, it had mayonnaise in it, but not much. Shut up.

Black-eyed peas and big-flavored steaks

A couple of quick notes. First, for those of you who don’t eat red meat, this black-eyed pea salsa also livens up grilled fish or chicken breasts. And second, I’m doing two posts today, so be sure to scroll down for the second one.

And now to the business at hand. The other day I realized that, as much as I love red meat, you wouldn’t know it to look at this blog. In fact, in the seven months Blue Kitchen has been open, I’ve talked about it exactly once, unless you count the two chili recipes that use ground beef. That is just plain wrong.

Growing up, ground was about the only kind of beef I knew, aside from the occasional stringy pot roast—burgers, meatloaf, spaghetti sauce, more meatloaf… I wasn’t introduced to the wonders of steak until I was in college, and then it was at one of those cafeteria-style joints called BEST STEAK HOUSE [or something equally overpromising] where you watch hairy-armed men tossing steaks on permanently charred grills with flames shooting up all around as the fat sizzled off. A steak dinner with baked potato and iceberg lettuce salad set you back maybe four or five bucks, and it was love at first gristly bite.

I have since graduated to better cuts of meat—and from medium-well to medium to medium-rare to rare. But the pure primal satisfaction that is steak remains undeniable.

Although one of my favorite ways to prepare steak is what I call my French bistro steak, seared in butter and the pan deglazed with red wine, I’m starting with this recipe because when I came across it in my files recently, I immediately wanted the black-eyed pea salsa.

Black-eyed peas are another food item very popular in the south [like last week's okra]. Even though this salsa is named for them, there are lots of flavors at play here. When you first start cooking the green pepper and chili powder, the aroma will be less than encouraging. Don’t worry, though—when the other ingredients are added, it all comes together fabulously. And when it gets together with the steaks with their peppery curry marinade, the results are amazing.

The envelope, please.

I noticed the other day that I was getting more hits than usual from Susan’s link to me over at Food “Blogga”—yeah, I’m still new enough at this that I geek out and check such things. So I wandered over that way and saw that she’d nominated me as a Thinking Blogger. Wow. Coming from Susan, this is high praise indeed. She’s one of a handful of bloggers I read faithfully as much for her wonderful writing style and thoughtful ideas as I do for the great food she showcases. Thank you, Susan.

So the way this works now is I have to nominate five bloggers as fellow Thinking Bloggers. Or rather, I have to edit my list down to five. Susan got away with ten because this is the second time someone’s named her and she didn’t do a list of her own the first time. Or anyway, that’s her story and she’s sticking to it.

So here’s my list, not of the five but of five, in no particular order:

Molly over at My Madeleine. Anyone who reads her wishes, as I do, that she posted more often. But every story is a wonderful, thoughtful jewel. Her current post marks her second anniversary blogging—it tells the story of how unexpected events completely changed her life and her blog far more eloquently than I can here.

Nick and Blake at The Paupered Chef. These guys just blow me away with their view of food as adventure. Not in eating deadly blowfish or any such nonsense, but in exploring cooking techniques just for the sake of doing it. Roasting a chicken at the lowest temperature possible [140ºF, the temperature at which it is completely cooked], for instance, or cooking half a pork belly. And they’re not afraid to share their failures, an admirable quality.

Kristen over at gezellig-girl.com. What can you say about someone who boasts “Winner of absolutely no blog awards!” on her home page [Relax, Kristen---I don't think this really counts]? She is smart and fresh and plain fun to read. And the day I found this snapshot on her charming blog titled hula-hooping until the chicken is done, I was totally hooked.

Ann at A Chicken in Every Granny Cart. Ann is another blogger who makes me think and smile with every new post. She often starts with something sounding completely off topic—a recent example: “I keep telling myself that the little old lady didn’t mean to do it, but I’m not really sure I believe it.” And then she entertainingly brings it back to food. Delicious food, beautifully photographed and discussed.

Oh, dang. I’m down to my last allotted Thinking Blogger. Okay.

How can I not mention Patricia and her wonderful Technicolor Kitchen? If this Brazilian native is this eloquent in English, I can only imagine how poetic her Portuguese-language version is. Patricia is funny, self deprecating, warm and forever upbeat and enthusiastic. And her amazing baked goods both entice me to try a little more baking and intimidate the bejesus out of me with their beauty.

So, there are five. If I were a cheating kind of person, I’d also be tempted to mention Last Night’s Dinner, French Kitchen in America, Kirsten’s Home Cooking Adventures, Smitten Kitchen… But of course, I’m not.

 

“Hot soup, comin’ through!”

The title to this post is a direct quote from my high school swim teacher and coach of the school’s swim team, Coach Otto. It was what passed for etiquette inside his grey crewcut-topped head. Constantly working in the damp, cold [even in warm weather] pool room, Coach Otto had hot soup every day in the cafeteria wihout fail. And every day, he cleared the path before him on his way to the faculty dining area, steaming soup in hand, with his own inimitable version of, “Excuse me, please”… “Hot soup, comin’ through!”

The weather’s been a real roller coaster ride this spring, especially temperaturewise. During one of those Six Flags Over Freezing My Butt Off spells recently, I started jonesing for some soup [for my non-U.S. readers, Six Flags is an amusement park chain---Six Flags Over Mid-America, Six Flags Over Texas, etcetera---that prides itself on having the scariest roller coasters around; they actually budget for a certain number of injury lawsuit settlements every year, rather than slow their coasters down]. But back to soup, I wanted something hearty and filling and warming. But it also had to be quick—it was a weekday, and I was at work.

That soup can even be quick was a revelation to me—and a recent one at that. I had totally bought into the notion that soup had to take hours to make. It was something you started in the morning and occasionally stirred, tended to, added to and fussed over throughout the day. And while there are plenty of soups that do indeed take this kind of time, there are also plenty that don’t. I was stunned and amazed the first time I saw a soup recipe whose total cooking time was in the neighborhood of 15 minutes or so.

In the interest of total honesty, many quick soups—this one included—depend on pre-made ingredients like miso paste or cans of broth, tomatoes or beans. Otherwise, they’d be slow soups.

But all’s fair in love, war and soup. So one recent cold afternoon, I went to Epicurious and searched for quick, hearty soups. I found Creole Chicken and Okra Gumbo. The name was promising, but when I looked at the recipe, I was less enthusiastic. Have you ever read recipes that sound too simple, too stripped down to possibly be good? That was this one in letters five miles high. Only a handful of ingredients and most of those either canned or frozen or somehow processed.

Still, it had okra in it, always a plus in my book. And I reminded myself that the lion’s share of really good New Orleans creole/cajun cuisine makes heavy use of processed foods and herbs and spices. Looking at cookbooks from the region, you’d be justified in suspecting that half the ships you see docked at the Port of New Orleans must be hauling in garlic powder or onion powder. I also reminded myself that I really, really wanted some soup, and I wanted it fast. This soup would be good enough.

Only it was better than “good enough”—really good, in fact. Maybe not omigod-company-dinner good, but flavorful and hearty and satisfying, with just the right amount of zing from the hot pepper sauce. And on an unseasonably cold spring night, it was exactly what we wanted.

Sunday dinners and simple pleasures

Crowd pleasers are nice. Even better is when they’re brainlessly simple and taste rich, calorific and sinful, but are none of the above. That is this sauce in spades—in fact, it’s 100% fat free. And best of all, it was just one part of a simple, crowd pleasing Sunday dinner.

Susan over at Food “Blogga” recently waxed eloquent and passionate about reviving the tradition of Sunday dinners. Of course, the Sunday dinners of her childhood memories took hours to prepare, with “every Italian-American woman with any pride starting the ‘gravy’ [East coast Italian-American for tomato sauce] at breakfast to be ready for 2:00 Sunday dinner.”

Most of us just don’t have that kind of time these days—or at least the desire to devote that kind of time to a meal on a weekly basis. But Susan’s right—there really is something special about Sunday dinners. Marion and I used to host regular Sunday dinners with a rotating cast of characters. Dinner was anything from a simple pasta with red sauce to Chinese [Marion is insanely good at Chinese---her Szechuan dish Ants Climbing a Tree is legendary, both for its taste and its heat] to the biggest pot roast in the store.

Whatever the food, though, dinner also always included wide-ranging conversation, laughter and numerous bottles of wine. And at some point in the evening, Sunday dinner regular John could be counted on to lean back in his chair, make a sweeping gesture toward the stereo and say, with complete conviction and satisfaction, “This is the perfect music for a Sunday evening.” It didn’t matter if it was Mozart on the turntable or Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter tunes or Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys or Coleman Hawkins’ muscular tenor sax. Whatever it was, John always proclaimed the music to be perfect. And somehow, he was always right.

But things change. People move. The Sunday dinners fell by the wayside. Sure, many dinner parties have followed, but there was something so magical about the anticipation of those Sunday evenings and the way they prolonged the weekend, adding a beautiful finish and staving off the inevitable switching to gearing-up-for-the-work-week mode.

So we’re reviving Sunday dinners. Not every Sunday, but more Sundays than not. And if this past Sunday was any indication, it’s high time we did. This one was just family—Marion’s sister Lena joined us. But anytime you get her and our daughter Laurel in the same room, hilarity ensues, as too many bad sitcom descriptions say. Both were in fine form.

I kept the food quick and simple. The whole weekend had been a busy one, so there wasn’t time to fuss over something all day, even if I’d had the notion to do so. If you’re a regular visitor to Blue Kitchen, you’ve probably noticed that such notions rarely strike. In fact, terms like quick, easy and the ever-popular “brainlessly simple” are far more likely to appear in my posts than, say, “time-consuming, but worth it.”

I also don’t mind repeating myself. Deb over at Smitten Kitchen recently confessed to an aversion to ever repeating recipes, always choosing to try some thing new. I have no such issue. Marion and I had so enjoyed the Endive Salad with Blue Cheese and Walnuts I posted last week that I trotted out a bigger version as our starter. It was awesome [another term whose gratuitous overuse has caused me to generally avoid it, but it really was]. Oooohs and aaaahs all around. I had a few bites with everyone, then took my wine glass to the kitchen to continue cooking. When I came back later to check in on conversation, the plate had been picked so clean that a less fastidious person might have been tempted to just return it to the shelf without washing.

The rest of the dinner was equally simple and well received. Garlicky mashed potatoes and steamed green beans tossed with a little butter for sides. And quickly seared salmon fillets with this, yes, brainlessly simple sauce that had people doing everything but licking the bowl. Seriously.

Endive, blue cheese: A great salad remembered

First things first. Blue Kitchen is going global this week. Brazilian blogger Patricia has graciously invited me to post a recipe on her baketastic blog Technicolor Kitchen. No, I didn’t bake [and that's not all Patricia does, but when she does, it's always amazing]. I made a flavor-packed, summery pasta dish with Italian tuna and artichoke hearts—all you cook is the pasta. So check out Patricia’s fabulous blog and this easy recipe. After you read the post below, of course.

Sometimes a restaurant just clicks with you. The food, the setting, the staff—even the moment it’s part of. Lucien, in Manhattan’s East Village, is just such a place for us. The moment it fit so neatly into the first time we ate there was the first time Marion and I managed to get to New York together. Marion had spent lots of time there, and I had made a number of three-day solo forays in search of art, jazz and booze [all plentiful there, by the way]. But we only got around to getting there together when I won a trip for two on Taco Bell’s website a few years ago. Seriously.

Last week I talked about printing out reams of recipes from epicurious.com. Well, anytime I plan a trip to New York, several trees die at the hands of my printouts. In my online research for this visit with my bride, I found Lucien. The reviews looked promising, so I called to make a reservation and ended up speaking with the owner himself, Lucien Bahaj. He was charmingly self deprecating when I told him of the glowing reviews I’d read—even a little alarmed—and wanted to make sure I understood that his restaurant was just a little neighborhood bistro. I told him that was exactly what we were looking for.

And it was. Opened in 1998, Lucien has the nicotine patina of an ancient Left Bank establishment. Tile floors, mirrors on the wall, high tin ceiling and a long, dark wood bar add to the narrow storefront’s authentic French feel. And the food is just as comfortingly familiar and authentically executed. Mussels steamed in white wine, escargots, both a foie gras and a paté, steak frites, cassoulet, duck confit… All served at modest prices in a cozy, welcoming place. We try to get there every time we visit now. If we lived in New York, we’d be regulars.

As it is, we’re already treated like regulars. We walked in with our daughter Laurel one night, having last been there a year before. Our waitress from that previous visit, the lovely, multi-tattooed Lola, came up and hugged us and said, “It took you long enough to get back here!” That trip, we ate there twice. And on one of those nights, we shared a delicious salad with Belgian endive, blue cheese and walnuts as one of our starters. Here’s my shot at recreating that salad.