Condiment Class

To add some easy variety to grill night (you don't always have time to make chard and fava salad, after all!), turn to some easy condiments from around the globe. We all know that old standby pesto, great for brushing over grilled chicken breasts or thighs, stuffing trout or scallops before you grill them, or mixing with orzo or rice for a speedy side dish, but food processors and sharp knives make some other flavorings equally easy and accessible. My recent favorites include:

Chimichurri: A condiment for beef in Uruguay and Argentina, this simple combination of lemon juice, crushed red pepper, parsley, garlic, onion and lots of good olive oil is heavenly on a seared skirt steak.

I like The Minimalist's basic recipe (though you will see from the photo I used tiny pequin chiles, about half of the pile you see pictured, ground with a mortar and pestle), but it's extremely versatile -- use as a marinade and/or serve alongside; heavenly with red meat it also works beautifully with seared very rare tuna, grilled shrimp or chorizo (or some skewers of both for a nice mixed grill?), and even these grilled green heirloom tomatoes.



Harissa: North African in origin, you can actually buy this condiment in a jar or tube online if you're a slacker. But trust me, better and more fun to make your own. It's a fairly simple mixture of dried chiles (I have a lot of guajillo and one ancho here; pretty much anything will work depending on your own tolerance/preference for hot versus fruity), garlic, caraway and coriander seed, topped off with a bit of good olive oil. A good starter recipe is here via the LA Times; they even have a nifty slide show if you're nervous about technique. To this basic recipe I add a couple of drained canned plum tomatoes (fresh would probably also be fab but then there's the tiresome peeling/coring/seeding); some people also like to add red bell pepper. The beauty of this is that basically, once you have compiled all your ingredients you throw them into the bowl of your food processor and pulse the hell out of them until you get a fragrant red paste.



Thereafter, do what you want with it -- you can serve it as a condiment brushed on or alongside lamb chops or a fatty fish like salmon; thin it with more oil and use it as a marinade for other meat or fish; even use it as the base for a pasta dish like this gorgeous weeknight meal from Heidi Swanson.

No shortage of good variations and uses for these versatile condiments so these should keep you plenty busy as you squeeze the last over this rapidly-evaporating summer. . .

Grill, interupted

It's August. Summer is just weeks away from ending and the produce is bountiful and awesome. Get thee to a grill! I did:
I got this totally awesome indoor grill about a month ago. Now even the apartment-dwellers among us can enjoy grill lines and smoky charred taste. OK, maybe not as good as charcoal grill (you can't plank; no charcoal or hickory-smoked flavor) but fast, convenient and much, much better than braving the douchebag convention that is my apartment complex's communal barbecue out in the courtyard.

On it you see sweet corn and chard. This grilled chard salad with fava beans, fragrant with lemon and oregano, would make a convert of the most avowed veggie-hater. The heat on the All-Clad grill is fully adjustable, allowing for just the right level of caramelization on the sweet corn.







Of course, what is a grill without some meat? Throw a burger on there:

And then plate everything up and since your teeth into some tasty Amyrrhica.


Plums and berries are also in season so dessert is a no-brainer: plum and berry crisp. Cut plums into wedges and toss with a little bit of brown sugar with a couple of cups of whatever berries you like (blackberies, raspberries, blueberries all good options). Spread into a pan and bake for ten minutes or so at 400 degrees. Toss a cup of oats with a half stick of slightly softened butter, a quarter cup flour and a third cup brown sugar, crumble it over the plum-berry mixture and pop back in the oven until brown and bubbling. Let cool a bit and serve with a dollop of vanilla.

The next day, grill up some more of that corn (trust me, in three weeks it will be nowhere to be found and you'll wish you had); use the rest of the chard salad and as long as you've got the grill on throw some fat, succulent sea scallops.

Be nice; make your guests some sugar cookies. Not just for Christmas anymore!




Like a little bite of sunshine! Enjoy it while you can!

Coincidence!

Check this out! The dress worn by Joan Holloway (the redhead in the Center, Madmen neophytes)
is ALMOST the same, in terms of cut, as my very own late-50's Peggy Hunt dress that I wore at my wedding:
(I'm on the right, and it's the best pic of the bustle at my hip that I have. Clearly, I wore it less low and tight across my shoulders than Ms. Holloway).
(Via What Would Joan Holloway Do, awesome in its own right.)

Bal'more, hon

I'm not sure of the provenance of Baltimore's "Charm City" moniker. Even though I've lived not more than an hour away from it for the last four years, I haven't spent much time in it at all. Mostly, I just drive through it on 95 on my way to other places and marvel at how you know you're in Baltimore from the billboards, which almost exclusively promote (1) abstinence, (2) paternity testing, and (3) concerts at the Borgata. Not the usual radio stations, restaurants and Bud Light billboards for Baltimore, no sir.

Whatever its provenance, after a long weekend there I'm more apt to at least go along with the whole "Charm City" concept. It was one of those impossibly hot and humid mid-Atlantic weekends where it was nearly too hot to move, and your skin prickles with goose flesh when you stop outside not because you are chilly but just because of the sheer shock of the heat. Consequently, we decided to lay low and take it easy.

First stop: the Sports Legend Museum on Emory Street, just down the block from Oriole Park and featuring more than you ever wanted to know about Baltimore sports teams and heroes. It's a veritable cathedral of Cal Ripken, Jr.

Next up: crabs. Baltimore's famous, Old Bay-seasoned crustaceans are well worth the mess--better to have them in a restaurant than have to negotiate that mess yourself. This was the first opportunity of many to enjoy a cold beer on a hot day.

Staying closer to the cool water on a hot hot day seemed like a good idea so we decided to Ride the Ducks of Baltimore for a tour of the city by sea and land. Besides the obvious thrill of being in a vehicle that both drives and floats, you got some magnificent views of the Balto skyline
and noteworthy sights like the Domino Sugar sign,
Edgar Allen Poe's grave, and
these nifty old cars (props in a movie
being filmed in Baltimore).


Of course, the highlight of the weekend was the Tigers-Orioles game. While the Tigs managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory despite a seven-run first inning--it was almost like watching 1999's team and their regular implosions at old Tiger Stadium--the heat of the day melted into a nice night at the ballpark with beer, brother and others.

All in all, it was nice to get acquainted with Baltimore as a place other than just America's STD capital. I highly recommend it; check it out next time you're driving up or down I-95!

Guaca-viche night!

The painful irony of the first exquisitely nice official summer Friday in DC is that one's first thought, as the workday starts to draw to a close is, "Today would be a perfect day to go to Rosa Mexicano, sit outside, drink margaritas and eat spicy guacamole." But it's impossible to do that at Rosa Mexicano because they won't let you sit outside for drinks and appetizers (and the entrees are just too boring to be worth getting), and by the time you get out of work Rosa Mexicano will be packed elbow to elbow; will in fact be a sweaty, teeming mass of d-bags jostling for drinks and spilling Negra Modelo on you.

So I decided to Mexicano-at-home, with the new tools of my nicely-equipped kitchen (if you are the first person to correctly identify all the registry items in this post, I will make this meal in your home). The resulting light meal came out so nicely I couldn't resist posting the results, and I thought I might at least try to impart something useful to any wayward web traveler landing on this page. So here it is: a lesson in guacamole.

You will need:
3 ripe avocados
1/2 medium white onion
1 garlic clove
1 jalapeno or half a serrano pepper
handful of fresh cilantro
small tomato, cored and seeded
salt

Your first instinct is probably to start with the avocados, as they are the main ingredient, but that would be wrong. But don't worry, sugar, that's why I'm here: drop that avocado. Instead, give the onion, the pepper, and the garlic clove each a fairly fine dice (do NOT rub your eyes or your nose after doing so, not that you want to do that while you're cooking in any event, but especially not in the presence of a serrano!) and mill the cilantro.

Now here is the key, the thing you won't know instinctively about guacamole: you are going to start by making paste of these first ingredients, a guacamole "base" if you will. Take about a third of each of these chopped ingredients and mound them together in the middle of your cutting board, give them a generous drizzle of salt and chop and mince these ingredients together until they are a juicy, pale greenish paste. Get your knife on its side and use the flat of the blade from time to time to press and dig in:
Drop the paste into your molcajete. Now you are ready for the avocados. Halve those ripe green bad boys lengthwise--don't
get ahead of yourself and start scooping hem out of their skins--halve them, then grab your paring knife and gently score the avocado flesh into a dice:







Then, and only then, are you ready to gently scoop the scored avocado into your molcajete, and use a spoon and the pestle to gently fold together the paste and the avocado.

NB: In a truly ripe avocado, the pit that remains in one half should just slide out when you grab it with your fingers. A patient, forgiving person would tell you that you can wedge your knife blade into it and twist the avocado and the impaled pit in opposite directions, much as you would open a bottle of champagne, to dislodge the bit, but I am not that patient or forgiving a person. If you cannot easily dislodge the pit, your guacamole will be inferior, and you will have failed. Throw out everything, go to the market and buy RIPE avocados this time, or put your non-ripe avocados away to mellow for a day or so, come back and try it again.

At this point, you can throw in the remaining onion, garlic, pepper and cilantro, as well as your diced, seeded, cored bright red terrific tomato, and gently pound it all together with the pestle. You don't want to completely pulverize the avocado, just to meld the ingredients together and give the chunks a creamy base to hold them altogether.

Taste for seasoning; at this point you can add a bit more salt, a squeeze of lime juice, a dash of smoky chipotle sauce -- whatever floats your boat; go nuts.

I rounded out the menu by breaking out my brand new -- and completely bad-ass -- deep fryer to make some fresh, warm tortilla chips to go along with. I continue to be in awe of Presto's penchant for churning out single-use appliances that, while unnecessary, are so cool and functional in producing basic American comfort food (and they are truly all about Amyrrhican comfort food. Click on that link--their banner features pictures of waffle fries and onion rings). The CoolDaddy works like a charm. Heats up to the specified temperature within twelve minutes, cooks tortilla chips to golden brown perfection in about seven minutes, no grease-spattered stove top or floor. You lower the basket into your roiling oily pit, seal it up to do its thing
and minutes later, you yank out some warm, salty goodness that perfectly compliments the creamy guacamole:
I aslo threw together an easy and relatively quick ceviche de camaron for a hit of sour and spice.


Add in a frosty social bev with a salty rim







Fling the windows open wide; toss some Brazilian Girls on the stereo (I recommend ratcheting down to Astrud Gilberto, the original Brazilian girl, as the night wears on) and enjoy your margaritas and ceviche while sitting down, without anyone spilling drinks on you or having to make your way drunkenly home from Penn Quarter.

¡Feliz viernes!

Muppet Madness

The brilliance of this makes me cry.

Founding Father

I'm obsessed with the HBO miniseries "John Adams." I'm kind of over "In Treatment"--haven't seen an episode in its entirety since the one where Blair Underwood was dead (though I will watch it if I flip to it and Gabriel Byrne is staring out intently and sensitively from the television screen), but "John Adams"--now that is a show. I'm not one to throw around praise for "production values" or mise en scene but good lord--have you seen John Adams teeth, and the way they age and moulder from episode to episode? Our second president looked like Beetlejuice in Part 6. The buzzing fly and mosquito noises, the sweat, the pox episode (my god!), the fantastic mishmash of accents that attempt to mimic what our foundling country must have sounded like, the musty, creaky, construction-site White House. I never would have expected Thomas Jefferson and John Adams butting heads over France to be as exhilarating as the McDreamy-Meredith Grey chase, but dear me. Stephen Dillane must be a real athlete, doing this and The Coast of Utopia so close together--talk about marathons.

How fascinating, at a time when our country's global stature is so diminished, to witness it in all its grit and fortitude before it had any stature in the first place, and to be right in the sweaty, pocked faces of the founding fathers--and their wives (Laura Linney is my hero)--try to wage a war, build a government, and be people. I'm not expert enough on revolutionary history to gauge its historical accuracy but I'll tell you this: it's compelling as hell.