Listening to:  “Since She Started to Ride” — Jonathan Richman

I love this time of year, it’s radish season!  And it’s the beginning of grilling season!  Last night I fixed steak salad (run of the mill — grilled steak, grilled red peppers, romaine lettuce, bleu cheese crumbles, dressing — nothing too mind-blowing there).  But I also figured I’d combine a couple of my favorite things:  radishes, compound butter, and open flame. 

Sweet Fancy Moses.  It was good.

First, I made brown butter, sort of.  It was quite impromptu, and without getting into a lot of psychoanalysis, let’s just say I don’t care much for measuring stuff, so the below recipe may seem a little “uncorked”. 

To make the brown butter:

• brown about 4 Tablespoons of butter (I used the Rosemary compound butter I’d made and frozen earlier in the year) in a skillet
• remove from heat
• if you’re using plain butter, add your rosemary now
• allow butter to cool completely
• add a blob of greek yogurt (confession, I think you’re supposed to use heavy cream, but I didn’t have any.  I also don’t think “blob” is a measurement standard, but I’d guess it was in the 3 tablespoon range of blobs)
• add some lemon or lime juice
• add some salt
• whip it together, taste, adjust

Then you’re ready to grill your radishes:

• toss a bunch of cleaned and trimmed whole radishes in the butter mixture
• either grill in a basket or you could just pan-fry them in a skillet until “tender crisp”.  I think that means that, unlike the vegetables in a school cafeteria, the vegetables are still recognizable as such.

We used the brown butter on the radishes as a little bit of a sauce, and that was wonderful.  And then we dipped a slice of steak in the brown butter…  Mind.  Blown. 

We paired it with Merlot.  Some nights our wine and food pairings are dictated strictly by what we have open.  Okay, so most nights.  And yes, this does mean that sometimes “dinner” for us is standing at the kitchen sink slurping down a bowl of raisin bran and drinking Riesling from a sippy cup.  Don’t judge!  

Listening to: “She’s Got You” by Rosanne Cash.

Everybody has that signature dish they make — the perfect Paella (my friend has a complete Paella set-up with a big pan and burners and everything), the world’s greatest cinnamon rolls, tamales you’d sell your right arm for. 

I wouldn’t say eggs are my “signature dish”, but they are a bit of an obsession for me.  Specifically — boiled eggs.  I don’t like them any other way (okay, I’ll eat them fried sometimes, as in the aforementioned Fried Egg Sandwich).  But boiled eggs, now we’re talking.

To that end, here’s a collection of boiled egg tricks:

• Here’s a handy chart for boiling times for eggs, taken from www.cookinghow.com 
• To hardboil eggs perfectly, start with eggs at room temperature.  Drop eggs into a pan of cold water.  Turn heat up to high.  When the eggs begin to boil, simmer for 12 minutes.  Remove from heat, run cold water over them.
• To easily remove the shell (sometimes in just a piece or two): add some baking soda to the water you’ll boil the eggs in.  It reduces the adhesion of the shell to the egg. 
• “Older” eggs (on the shelf more than 5 days) are also easier to peel after boiling. 
• Properly hardboiled eggs have no green chalkiness around the yolk.  (If you experience this, then the next time either reduce your cooking time or make sure you really cool them down fast.  Boiled eggs will continue to cook a bit in the shell if you just remove them from the heat and don’t cool them down with cold or icy water.)
• To differentiate between raw and cooked eggs, add a couple of drops of food coloring to your boiling water. 
• To boil a “scrambled egg” or to scramble a boiled egg (?), this video shows a fun trick you can try.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aazP6zvJmiQ

Now, as for my “signature dish”?  I think the closest I’ve come to that is recreating my family’s famous potato salad.  Of course, the recipe calls for boiled eggs.  🙂

Waking up to: In Spite of Ourselves,  John Prine and Iris DeMent

Mornings: dark.  Light over the stove is on, casting a soft yellow glow over the kitchen.  The house is silent.  Percolator is chattering away, burbling, bubbling, much “perkier” in the morning than I am.  Thomas Z. Cat is sitting at my stocking-clad feet as I pour a cup of coffee, waiting for me to make my way to the sofa so he can get his morning snuggle. 

The only reason I ever went with drip coffee makers was because I wanted fresh coffee at 5 am without having to get up at 4:50 am and brew it.  I bought a programmable drip coffee maker, when what I really need is a personal assistant.  Living in my kitchen.  And a percolator that the personal assistant living in my kitchen could use to brew coffee for me at ten to 5 in the morning.

My foray into the world of drip coffee makers led to water stains on the kitchen counter, an endless sea of broken carafes, and not near enough coffee ready and waiting for me in the morning.  It wasn’t worth the “convenience” factor. 

This week I bought a Farberware 12 cup percolator.  Just like all my grandmas had.  Just like I used to have before I succumbed to the temptation of automation. 

I compromised a little on the personal assistant living in my kitchen.  I really wanted one, but instead I bought a lamp timer so I can still have my coffee ready when I get up.  Next best thing, I guess.

There are three things you (or your personal assistant) must know when using a percolator:

1. Grind your coffee coarse
2. Fill the pot with water so that the water does NOT touch the basket
3. Use less coffee than with a drip coffee maker.

Fried Egg Sandwiches

About once a week I have to go out and load a half ton of hay (12 bales) on a flatbed trailer.  Then I drive out first to “the boys’ pen” where our geldings live.  Stack the hay, 3 bales on the bottom, 3 on top, then set the feeder over the top.  From there we loop around to the field to feed “The Girls (and Axel)”.  Same thing — rattle out to the middle of their field, stack the hay, set the feeder over the top.  No blankets or down booties in the world can make you feel as cozy and indulgent as knowing your horses have a constant food source. 

This time of year the horses are all fuzzy and soft.  When you go to pet their necks you can bury your fingers deep in the pile of their coats, almost until your fingers disappear. 

Then it’s time to come in, enjoy some more coffee, and have a Fried Egg Sandwich for breakfast. 

Playin’ in the kitchen:  If I Had a Boat – Tony Furtado

My mother staunchly observed the rule, “Life’s uncertain, eat dessert first.”  We often had pie, cake, or sugar-coated cereal for breakfast.

Every Sunday night, after dinner and my “beginning-of-the-school-week” bath, my brother and I bundled up in quilts, curled up on the vinyl sofa in the rec room and watched the Disney show.  (Side note: I’m not sure how, but that sofa is still in the rec room, almost 40 years later.  And still heaped with laundry to be folded.)

Whenever the Apple Dumpling Gang played my brother and I would scream, frantically, “MOM!!!  The Apple Dumpling Gang is on!”
And my mother would know to assemble the ingredients and set her alarm clock, because she’d accidentally created a tradition — whenever the Apple Dumpling Gang came on t.v., mom made us apple dumplings for breakfast the next day.

I’m glad they weren’t the Brussels Sprouts Gang.  Or the Mushroom Gang. 

The recipe is from the Meta Givens Modern Encyclopedia of Cooking, copyright 1959.