Pasta, vegetables and overcoming deal breakers

A mix of vegetables takes center stage in this Pasta with Chickpeas, Fava Beans, Pecans and Spring Peas, with bacon playing a supporting role. Recipe and variations—including vegetarian and vegan versions—below.

Sundays are often when I cook whatever I’m posting the following Wednesday. But this past Sunday found me spending more than an hour at the Crafty Beaver hardware store, puzzling out what I needed to solve a minor plumbing problem and build a small bookcase. [Don't be overly impressed—the bookcase is going to be, shall we say, elegantly simple.] Then I spent a good chunk of the afternoon solving said plumbing problem and starting on said bookcase. When it became clear I wasn’t going to get around to cooking, Marion offered to make this wonderful dish, solving both dinner and what to post. All I had to do was not start devouring my meal before I photographed it. I’ll let Marion tell you how this excellent pasta came together.

The other day the New York Times ran an article by Kim Severson in which good cooks were asked about their recipe deal breakers, “those ingredients or instructions that make them throw down the whisk and walk away.”

Experienced, talented cooks cited abstruse ingredients [48 freshly picked grape leaves, vast quantities of fresh animal blood], fussy or intimidating instructions [the recipes of Thomas Keller were particularly noted], recipes with several recipes within them, recipes that demand dangerous conditions, extreme equipment [a couscousière, cornet molds—and I say that as, um, the owner of cornet molds, and of a heavy copper tin-lined tarte Tatin pan, hauled home from Paris, that has become a place to keep our bananas]. My favorite example was the author’s own: She will not make any dish that requires an assistant. That made me laugh out loud.

Like every person reading the article, I immediately started putting together a similar list in my head. What magic words stop me from trying a recipe? Here are a few:

• 3 sticks butter
• 1 cup lard
• The phrase “on the third day”
• Any amount of insects [I will cheerfully eat pretty nearly any organ meat, but cannot make myself even consider eating an ant, a grub or a cicada]
• Dried bean curd sheets [I shy off thanks to a series of ridiculous kitchen disasters years back that pretty much became one of those little private running jokes, in this case between me and a never-conquered recipe called Tinkling Bells]
• “Have your butcher bone the pig, leaving the head intact” [that recipe, by the way, also includes the phrase “re-form the pig in its original shape,” which sounds so wistful somehow]

I have been cooking certain cuisines for years, but a long time ago I recognized that no matter how far I reach, there is always going to be an unbridgeable gulf between me and the most genuine examples of these foods. I have already said I am not going to eat anything with insects in it. I am not going to eat anything that in the US is construed as a pet. I am not going to eat any endangered mammals, and certainly not their paws.

Also, I am not going to cook anything out of a book the size and weight of a table, no matter how elegant the illustrations.

Years ago, I was standing in our back yard and reading some Martha Stewart magazine and came across a recipe for a ham baked on new-mown grass. There was a great deal of information about the grass you should choose to mow, how to make sure it is pristine, how to cut it… All I remember is opening my fingers and letting the magazine fall out of my hands and walking away from the magazine, which I believe eventually blew out of our yard or perhaps even decayed there, I don’t care, whatever, and I never read any other Martha Stewart publication again until a couple of weeks ago, when my sister [who for a couple of years had been saying, “It’s not what you remember!”] snuck a copy of Martha Stewart Living into a pile she was passing on to me. Okay, so I read it, fine, and once I navigated past the annoying crafts and the too many pastels I came across a pasta dish that, of course, sounded good, so good we had to mess with. Meaning that, for today at least, one of my ancient deal breakers has been overcome.

This descendant of Martha’s recipe asks you to cook the pasta in a moderate amount of water until the water is all absorbed and concentrated and cooked away leaving just pasta. I am usually nervous about this approach, not least because it means standing over the stove for seven or eight minutes and stirring pretty often, rather than wandering off to pick up the newspaper or look out the window at a puzzling brown bird. But I really like the technique here. It endows the pasta with a depth that is needed in a dish this spare.

This recipe begins with a lot of pasta—one pound uncooked—so it will serve five to six people easily. The next day Terry was able to celebrate Take Your Wife’s Cooking to Work Day.

Gazpacho: Cold, tangy, perfect for summer

Chilled, chunky and chock full of healthy vegetables, this lively gazpacho makes a refreshing, simple first course all summer long.

Late last August, I was surprised to see that I hadn’t written about any of the cold soups we enjoy in the spring and summer, so I somewhat belatedly posted a recipe for Watercress Vichyssoise. In an effort to not make the same mistake twice [after all, there are so many exciting new mistakes to be made], I’m turning the kitchen over to Marion and her wonderful gazpacho this week.

I remember the first time I had pizza. I remember the first time I used chopsticks and the first time I made a pot roast and the first time I saw Terry and my first actual cocktail in an actual bar [it was a brandy Alexander—hey, I was an entry-level drinker—and it was Chumley’s].

I no longer remember the first time I had gazpacho. Although clearly there must have been a day when this Spanish soup came into our life, somehow I no longer remember it. Looking back it seems gazpacho has always been there for me, alongside Chinese food and raspberries and inhaling and exhaling.

Gazpacho is so much a part of our everyday life that it is a staple in our household every summer. Preparing it is so simple, almost as simple as eating it, and it is ever so useful. You can serve it to a vegan. You can make it when you don’t have electricity as long as you have a knife and a bowl and a willingness to chop. It is cooling and calming, it is reliable, it is esthetically pleasing, and it is full of healthy deliciousness.

Culinary histories trace gazpacho back to the Middle Ages in Andalusia. Originally, gazpacho was most likely pounded bread, garlic, oil, and water—the most basic sustenance, food for survival. Then came the Columbian era, and the arrival of the tomato from the New World. By 1600, tomatoes were being cultivated and devoured all over the Mediterranean. I sometimes wonder which tomato dish came first—the cooked or the raw. I can see some practical Spanish countrywoman, standing among her vines on a slow hot morning, holding the hot red fruit in her hand and thinking It seems a shame to fire up the stove.

Alice B. Toklas believed that gazpacho had inspired many cultures to create their own cold soups of chopped fresh vegetables. Actually, she regarded a host of cold vegetable-based soups—gazpacho, Polish chlodnik, Turkish cacik, and Greek tarata—as the same soup, which may be stretching things from the pragmatic side, but I get her taxonomic point.

There are many versions of gazpacho—probably more versions than there are cooks. Some call for hard-boiled, sieved eggs, some for ham, shrimp, peaches, veal broth, beef broth, red wine, aquavit, strawberries, yellow tomatoes, green tomatoes, roasted tomatoes. There are some recipes floating around online that are based on watermelon. The classic Andalusian form also calls for a paste of bread and olive oil, or a paste of pounded almonds. I want to try them all.

Mushrooms: In praise of the basic button

After weeks of meat and fish, it’s time for vegetables to take center stage with another in the series of A Little Something on the Side.

We all remember the rotary phone, right? Before the advent of the touchtone phone, though, the retroactively dubbed rotary phone was just “the phone.”

And not so long ago in most American supermarkets and kitchens, humble button mushrooms were just mushrooms. Unless you were one of those people who trekked out into the woods collecting wild mushrooms [and in doing so, inspiring countless articles about the deadly dangers of toadstools], button mushrooms were pretty much the only game in town.

Now, between fresh and dried varieties, we have an embarrassment of mushroom riches at our fingertips. The portobello, once exotic and hard to find, is now almost boringly available in most stores. Shiitake, crimini, oyster, porcini, chanterelle, morel and a dazzling array of other fungi are increasingly finding their way onto store shelves and into our culinary hearts. Just this past weekend, I found enoki mushrooms, those slender, almost alien-being looking Japanese beauties, shrink-wrapped and sharing shelf space with portobello caps and pre-sliced “baby bellas” [they're just crimini mushrooms, people---don't get all wound up] in my neighborhood grocery store.

With competition like this, it’s easy for dependable old button mushrooms to get kicked to the curb, to be seen as somehow less wonderful than their more exotic, more expensive brethren.

Not so fast. Turns out button mushrooms have plenty going on, especially in the health department. According to a recent article in ScienceDaily [sent to me by fellow Internet magpie Carolyn---the magpie motto: "Ooooh, here's another shiny link!"], “The humble white button mushroom [Agaricus bisporus] has as much, and in some cases, more anti-oxidant properties than more expensive varieties.” Who knew? For that matter, who knew that mushrooms even contained antioxidants, let alone that button mushrooms were particularly rich in them?

Which reminds me of a commentary I heard on American Public Media’s Marketplace last week. Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, says that despite the growing cacophony of health claims from processed, packaged foods, the healthiest foods are still to be found in the produce section. “In fact,” Pollan states, “The more processed the food, the less nutritious it typically is. Yet it’s the processed food makers who have the marketing budgets to do the research to support the health claims and then shout them from the rooftops.” So we sometimes forget that “the hands-down healthiest foods in the supermarket are the unprocessed vegetables and fruits and whole grains. These foods sit silently in the produce section or the bulk-food bins. They don’t utter a word about their antioxidants or heart-healthiness, while just a few aisles over the sugary cereals scream about their heart-healthy ‘whole grain goodness.’”

So button mushrooms are healthy. What about taste? Now see, here’s the great thing about mushrooms—they are flavor sponges. In fact, you have to store them carefully so they don’t soak up flavors from your fridge [see Kitchen Notes for storage tips]. So while the more esoteric mushrooms offer delicious variations on the unmistakable earthy theme that make them absolutely worth exploring, button mushrooms, when combined with the right ingredients, can do some pretty amazing things too.

In the quick, simple recipes below, butter and salt combine first with garlic and parsley, then with port, to make the humble button heavenly.

Two delicious: Pan-grilled fish, soba noodle salad

Last week, I posted two recipes for cooking fish that ranged from simple to simpler. I kept them simple because I didn’t want anything masking the taste of the Hawaiian yellowtail I’d been asked to try by Kona Blue Water Farms. This week, two more recipes. First, Marion shows just how well this fish plays with other flavors. Then she streamlines a complex side dish into something quick, simple and simply delicious.

Terry and I both love to cook, but our tastes in cookbooks and food authors don’t particularly overlap. He avidly reads Anthony Bourdain; I go for obsessive re-readings of M.F.K. Fisher. His cookbook tastes run to the school of It’s Better If It’s French. My favorite cookbook is an obscure, grubby, out-of-print one about Szechwan food.

So we think it’s pretty interesting that, when Terry received that lovely shipment of Hawaiian yellowtail, we each, independently, turned to the same author. Ming Tsai—chef, restaurateur, star of two televised cooking shows and author of some very nice cookbooks—really has been our guide in understanding this amazing fish. When it was my turn in the kitchen, I found a pair of recipes in Ming’s Blue Ginger: East Meets West Cooking with Ming Tsai that became the foundation for a meal.

By the way, this morning a friend called and asked me what this fish tastes like. It tastes like standing on the edge of a high bluff looking straight out over the open Pacific, with the surface of the water like light beaten silver, and a faint cold morning wind washing over your face, and the wind has come four thousand uninterrupted miles straight to find you. It’s that clean and beautiful and pure.

The original and very delightful version of this recipe calls for ponzu sauce and snapper, and the fish, once cooked, goes on to become part of a salad with pea sprouts and a Dijon vinaigrette. Here is my foreshortened, non-salad take, abbreviated into a simple grilled dish. This recipe goes quickly once you begin it. Make sure your side dishes are in progress before you start on this.

Potatoes and garlic. What’s not to like?

When I opened Blue Kitchen almost a year ago, I intended to have a recurring feature called A Little Something on the Side. It was supposed to be “all about the dishes that play the supporting role to the star of the plate—and on occasion, steal the scene.” I said as much in my first something-on-the-side post, Marion’s kasha, which she makes every Thanksgiving and as many other times a year as we remember how wonderful it is when we’re planning dinner.

I’ve posted a few sides since then, but somehow, main course ideas keep taking over. They just seem more postworthy, I guess. But you need something to go with them to make a meal, don’t you? So I’m rededicating myself to posting the occasional side on a more regular basis. Sometimes fancy or at least a little exotic, sometimes humble and hardworking, like today’s.

To up their postworthiness [in my eyes, at least], I’ve enlisted my friend Matt’s help in creating a special graphic for A Little Something on the Side. Maybe that will encourage me to do more of these. Thanks, Matt!

The potato—still #1. For all the low-carb, no-carb hysteria still occasionally gripping the media, potatoes are the most popular vegetable in America. Regarding the whole carbohydrates issue, without launching into a dietary diatribe, you need carbohydrates to live. Period. According to the Dietary Reference Intakes Report issued by the Institute of Medicine in 2002, “the minimum amount of carbohydrate that children and adults need for proper brain function is 130 grams a day.” So wise up. Have some mashed potatoes.

And since you’re having them, make them Yukon Gold. Yukon Gold potatoes are a relatively recent phenomenon in North America, but yellow-fleshed potatoes are common in Europe and South America. They’re the norm, in fact. The Yukon Golds we know and love [enough to pay more for] are the result of years of work by a Canadian research team. They’re a cross between a North American white potato and a wild South American yellow-fleshed variety [we all know that potatoes originated in South America, right?].

The result is an all-purpose potato with a naturally buttery flavor. In texture, it falls between the Idaho or russet [a potato with high starch content, great for baking, frying or mashing] and waxy or red potatoes [low starch, high moisture potatoes that stay firm when boiled and stay moist when roasted]. So while Yukon Golds don’t bake as well as russets do, they do just about everything else just fine.

Including making fluffy, delicious mashed potatoes. Buttery, rich and golden. I make them a lot of different ways, but my favorite is with plenty of garlic. There are probably as many ways to make garlic mashed potatoes as there are cooks. A quick search on epicurious.com turned up 198 recipes. Some called for roasting entire heads of garlic before adding them to the potatoes; some called for sautéing garlic in oil, then adding it to the cooked potatoes. And with some, like mine, you add raw garlic to the water while the potatoes are cooking, letting it impart its oils and flavors to the potatoes—and its wonderful fragrance to the kitchen.

Garlic amounts called for varied wildly too. One recipe called for sautéing a single sliced clove of garlic in oil, then discarding the garlic and adding only the flavored oil to two pounds of cooked potatoes. That one fell firmly into the “why bother” camp for me. At the opposite end of the spectrum, our friend Joan advocates three large cloves of garlic per potato. I haven’t had the nerve to try that one yet.

So without further ado, let me throw one more garlic mashed potatoes recipe on the heap.

The last salsa cruda of summer

A quick note before I get started: Check out Kitchen Notes at the bottom to see how Marion adapted her delicious Plum Cake with pears as the prune plums disappeared from store shelves for the season. But read this post first—no dessert ’til you’ve finished.

 

We didn’t have a garden this year. What with our move and everything, it just didn’t happen. So for the first time in years, we didn’t have tomatoes and basil and rosemary and a host of other goodies straight from our yard.

But at the farmers markets, the produce stands, even the grocery stores, you can see the season changing. Some summer staples are disappearing, and those that remain just don’t seem the same. The peaches that I reveled in for the first time in years are now sometimes being a little more iffy. And tomatoes, though still plentiful, aren’t the deep, robust red found just a week or so ago.

If you’re lucky enough to be harvesting your own tomatoes and basil—or if, like us, you do all your harvesting retail—here’s a quick, delicious way to make use of some of summer’s remaining bounty.

Both Italian and Mexican cooks lay claim to the term salsa cruda, with very different meanings. For both, salsa cruda means uncooked sauce. But Mexican salsa cruda is, well, an uncooked salsa—salsa verde is one example. [Oh, and by the way: Show of hands, who doesn't know that salsa has replaced ketchup as the number one condiment in America? That says something cool about the American palate, I think!]

For Italians, salsa cruda is truly an uncooked sauce, most often to be served over pasta. The only thing you cook is the pasta itself. When you toss it with the salsa, the pasta cools down a little and the salsa heats up a little, creating a light late summer/early autumn meal. A month or so ago, I posted one of my favorite Italian salsa crudas, Pasta Shells with Italian Tuna and Artichokes. This one is even simpler.

Tomatoes are the star of this dish, and straight from the garden is best, of course. I didn’t even think of tomatoes as more than an ingredient in sauces or ketchup until I tasted one Marion had grown in our backyard in St. Louis. Suddenly, I understood what the big deal was.

Store-bought tomatoes are getting better, though. More varieties, better quality—I even saw heirloom tomatoes on a recent Whole Foods visit. Our go to tomatoes at the store these days [not counting grape or cherry tomatoes] are tomatoes on the vine—sold, as the name implies, still attached to the vine. I have to admit, the first time I saw this, I assumed it was just another marketing ploy to separate foodies from their money: Tomatoes sold on the vine command a considerably higher price than their plucked brethren.

But it turns out the vine really does make a difference. It continues to supply nutrients to the fruit, even after harvesting, naturally ripening them and producing firmer, juicier, better tasting, more nutritious tomatoes. How much the actual stem adds to the party isn’t fully understood, but that’s only part of the story. They tend to be better varieties to begin with, and receive gentler handling in harvesting and shipping to keep them attached.

Handle with care. Here are a couple of quick tips on keeping tomatoes and getting the most flavor out of them. First, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never refrigerate tomatoes. As in never. That is the quickest way known to man to rob them of flavor. Also never, never, etcetera place them upside down, resting on their “shoulders”—the raised, well, shoulders around where the stem attaches. All that pressure concentrated on those small points is a perfect way to bruise them and promote rotting. Place them right side up, on their bottoms.

Whatever tomatoes you use—homegrown or store-bought of any variety, including plum tomatoes—this simple, flavorful treatment makes for a light meal on its own or a fabulous side that will vie for attention with a seared chop or other main course.

Salad days for peaches

Peaches and I haven’t always been on the best of terms. In fact, I’ll go entire seasons without buying a single one. First, there’s the way they often go directly from being hard as baseballs to mold-covered science experiments, with no apparent moment of just being ripe and ready to eat in between. And even when they do begrudgingly ripen, there’s often something bland or mealy or otherwise disappointing about the taste.

And then there was the tree. When Marion and I bought an old house in St. Louis, the backyard came equipped with a large, ancient peach tree. It provided a shady spot in the yard and a little extra privacy from the house directly across the alley. We looked forward to eating fruit from our very own tree.

Unfortunately, as with many old fruit trees, it had become diseased. Every summer, it faithfully produced bushel upon bushel of peaches, none of them edible. They would drop to the ground, already rotting, creating a fragrant mess on the lawn. No matter how carefully I picked them up before mowing, the mower would invariably find at least one I’d missed. Every bit as pleasant as it sounds.

And then there were the drunken wasps. Or bees or whatever. Attracted by the rotting, fermenting fruit, hundreds of them would swarm loopily around the tree and the lawn, eating the spoiled fruit and becoming completely intoxicated and lethargic. And the problem was, you never knew if they were going to be happy drunks or mean ones.

Each season, sections of the tree would die off, and we would cut away those parts. Gradually, we whittled it down to something we could entirely cut down. That was one of my happiest days as a homeowner.

This year, though, the peaches are amazing. They’ve broken my heart so many times in the past that I usually just walk right by them in the produce department. But this year I couldn’t. Their deep, beautiful color beckoned, even from a distance. Up close, their heady perfume held promise. I picked one up. Not hard as a baseball—just nice and firm and, well, ripe. So I bought some, hopeful but still ready to be disappointed. They. Were. Incredible. Delicious and sweet, with a big peach flavor and a nice, not-too-mushy texture. And the ones that were maybe a day or so away from ripeness obediently ripened without rotting.

Since that first test batch, I’ve been buying them like they’re going out of style. Which, of course, they are—summer won’t last forever. Besides eating them straight, we’ve been cutting them up on cereal, mixing them with plain yogurt, adding them to fruit salads and constantly looking for new ways to use them. Which led to this salad.

Garlicky vinaigrette and a three-legged beagle

Last week, I talked a little about our weekend road trip to St. Louis. I’m keeping that St. Louis theme going this week.

All of us who love to cook can think of certain “Aha!” moments in our culinary lives. Moments when we’ve learned some new technique or connected a couple of dots and suddenly know something that changes how we cook or how we think about food or, as in the case of this simple vinaigrette, adds a lasting weapon to our food arsenal.

This “Aha!” moment happened at the kitchen table of an old French woman, “Aunt” Jo, one Thanksgiving in St. Louis years ago. I used the quotes around Aunt [and I'll dispense with them from here on out] because she wasn’t really a relative, but a friend of the family of such long standing that aunthood had been conferred upon her.

Josephine—Aunt Jo—had come from France in her early 20s [she was well into her 80s by this particular Thanksgiving]. She and her husband had run the Parisian Hand Laundry at the edge of the city’s then posh West End, on Delmar Boulevard. For much of the time they had run the business, that section of St. Louis was home to Washington University professors and old money and was swell enough to support such a lovely, labor-intensive business.

They lived in a beautiful apartment above the laundry. Even back then, I realized what a sophisticated and utterly urban home it was. Big and rambling, with dark woodwork, glass French doors dividing rooms and a handsome, massive [but squared and sleek] couch that ruled the living room. Looking back now, I also realize that the apartment was very Paris.

A little aside here. As suburban sprawl continues to reshape and redefine American life, forward thinking urban planners have been looking to this urban mixed-use model to create a sense of community and life in suburban communities. This approach is called New Urbanism and was pioneered by urban planners Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company [thanks, Claire!]. Increasingly, suburban communities are either revitalizing existing small downtowns or “Main Streets” or building them from scratch. The approach includes putting residential space over storefronts, banishing parking to the back or in central garages and encouraging pedestrianism [as one site calls it] and the kind of life and critical mass you find in urban areas. To me, it feels a little manufactured—not unlike Epcot Center’s take on Europe—but it still beats the hell out of the relentless march of strip malls across the landscape. But I digress.

By the time the aforementioned Thanksgiving had rolled around, Aunt Jo’s husband was long dead [I had never known him] and the neighborhood had become rather sketchy. There was still enough gentility to keep the laundry going at that time—and Aunt Jo ran it with an iron fist even then—but its days were numbered.

Aunt Jo’s main companion at this point was her dog, a beagle named Jean Pierre. Jean Pierre only responded to French commands—“Asseyez-vous, Jean Pierre” and he would sit. Jean Pierre had come equipped with the standard set of four legs, but one evening as Aunt Jo was out walking him, he caught a stray bullet in a hind leg, a victim of crossfire from some gang-related shooting. After the surgery, he was left with three legs. He still got around fine, but had issues scratching his left side.

Back to the Thanksgiving in question [I do love to ramble, don't I?]. I had tired of scratching Jean Pierre’s left side [even though he had not tired of me doing so] and of the living room conversation, so I wandered into the kitchen. The turkey was in the oven, and various pots on the stove held fragrant sides-in-progress. Aunt Jo bashed a fat garlic clove with the side of a large chef’s knife and squeezed it from its skin into a small bowl. She added a couple of healthy pinches of salt and ground the garlic and the salt together with the tines of an old fork. When she poured some olive oil over the mixture and attacked it again with the fork—Aunt Jo was a tall, formidable woman, not unlike Julia Child [only without the sunny disposition]—I suddenly realized she was making her garlicky vinaigrette. The women of the family all professed their sorrow at being unable to make this sublime, simple dressing themselves, but none of them ever seemed to find the way back to Aunt Jo’s kitchen when she cooked.

Aunt Jo didn’t exactly teach me to make it—it was more that I kind of just picked it up as I sat at the table and watched her. She set the bowl aside and tended to other things in the kitchen. I didn’t know [and never will now] if this was part of the process for her or the other things just needed tending to then. Later, she added some red wine vinegar and a couple of grinds of pepper and whisked it all together. That was it. It then sat on the table, letting the garlic do its work, while the rest of the meal came together.

The next time there was a family meal [sans Aunt Jo], I offered to make a dressing for the salad. Eyebrows were raised—the foodie in me had not yet awakened [well, maybe a little], and bottled dressing was still considered just fine for most occasions. But I nailed it. Around the table, the response was a mix of admiration and irritation [mainly from the women who never made their way back to Aunt Jo's kitchen]. I enjoyed both equally.

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.