Beer Bettered Fish

Tonight's leftover level: 6 out of 10. Tonight's inspiration level: 3 out of 10.

Let's rock and roll!



You'll never guess what I did with the leftover Caesar salad ingredients. Okay, give up? I chopped them up, tossed them with more Caesar dressing and made Caesar salad!

I'm one of the last truly great culinary improvisers of our time.



I recently picked up some of Brooklyn Summer Ale. I had a strange idea for it: I poured it into a frosted glass and drank it!



But that was only part of my idea! I also used it with a little lemon to poach this salmon. I was going to use some white wine to poach the salmon but there was only this in the fridge. Lighter beer tends to blend well with citrus so why not? The only risk was ruining the salmon. And the beer. And dinner for tonight. And our faith in humanity.

Luckily for us it was not a terrific failure. The salmon poached well in the beer. It was a nice accompaniment to last night's leftover potato salad and some fresh ramps that I sauteed in olive oil.

If You Force It, It Will Come

I generally don't like Summer. Spring is good. Fall too. It's just that the Summer brings with it a lot of sweatiness and general discomfort that I don't particularly enjoy. It does, however, bring with it grilled food which has been absent from our lives over the past decade or so.

So with the temperatures in the lower fifties I was forcing it tonight when I decided to fire up the grill.



First I grilled the romaine lettuce to make this Caesar salad. While I love the flavor and art of grilling over hard wood, on nights like tonight I regret not having purchased a basic gas grill. After working all day the 30-40 minutes it takes to get the grill ready is a bit of a nuisance.



Jen made her famous seasoned burger patties. I think it's a Canadian thing to season your burgers with onions, seasonings, Worchestershire ssauce, and various other ingredients you happen to have lying around. In America it's typical to just put a raw burger patty onto the grill and not even season the exterior. I must be from that mysterious country that lies between the border of Canada and America. It's like Andorra for North America. In this country we liberally season the exterior of the burger, leaving the interior untouched.

I hope my burger country doesn't get invaded.



Jen also made an angel food cake. Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of the final cake but it bore a striking resemblence the Olympic Saddle Dome. The final product was delicious. We served it up with some champagne mangoes and whipped cream.

And with that summer is upon us. A grey, cold, dreary summer, but all the flavors are there.

At this rate we should be roasting butternut squash again by August.

Warm the Cockles

There were a lot of spare greens kicking around the fridge today when I got home from work. There was kale, red leaf lettuce, and the fresh watercress I'd just purchased. I decided that this was their last stand. It was time to clean out these old greens and bring in a new batch for the weekend. The recent truce between me and kale has been going well. I've found a number of ways of preparing it now that don't make me sad so this is a huge triumph. It's taken us more than thirty years to achieve this delicate balance. I'm hoping it remains undisturbed.



I tossed the kale with some lemon, pine nuts, hearts of palm, artichoke hearts, grape tomato, cayenne, and just a drizzle of olive oil. I felt this was sufficient. Actually I though this was probably too much but it was going to utilize some ingredients we'd had for a while.

Jen pushed the envelope by telling me to add avocado and grapefruit. There were a lot of flavors going on in this salad but it seemed to work. Not as delicious as the lime and kale salad from the other night but still pretty good.



It's not often you find fresh cockles that are quite as wondrous as the ones I came across today. I took them home, put them in salted water (one tablespoon of salt in about one quart of water), and watched them all spit out and excess sand. I even put in one of those little robotic divers standing next to a sunken treasure chest to recreate what they were used to.

I put some olive oil and butter in a pan, cooked up some garlic and shallots, tossed in the cockles with a little white wine until they opened then threw in a handful of chopped parsley and tossed in some fresh linguine that I'd just cooked.

It's hard to get any better than that for a pasta dish.



Yesterday I purchased this giant 50 flavor Jelly Belly sample pack for Jen so for dessert we enjoyed some of the recipes they included in the box.



This one was for a banana split. If you close your eyes you can almost taste the banana split. At least I think that's a banana split. It might just taste like a handful of assorted jelly beans.

Pizza Boomerang

After working until 5:00 AM and getting four hours of sleep I'm in the mood for one thing: continuing my monastic dedication to cleaning out our fridge.



I started by buying a bunch of stuff. This is not generally the best way to begin cleaning out a fridge but we have felt in the need for some healthier fare as of late. Therefore I made this salad of kale, avocado, grape tomato, and lime with a little cayenne.

When I first started in the restaurant business I actually believed that kale was not edible. I thought it was edible in the same way that dirt was edible. You could eat it but you wouldn't want to. The only thing we ever used it for was as the base for a lemon wedge next to a casserole of baked scrod. Fifteen years later I think I've discovered that it may actually be (dare I say) delicious!



While I made the salad I enjoyed a Sankaty Light from Cisco Brewers on Nantucket. The beer was delicious but a word to the wise: a single glass of beer on four hours of sleep is akin to taking a handful of quaaludes on a regular night's sleep. don't do it.



After last week's Chicken Pepperoni I still had some pepperoni hanging around. Instead of the trite Chicken Peperoni dish I decided to use it in a much more original way: as a topping for a pizza!

I also used some ricotta, mustard greens, mozzarella, and broccoli rabe on the piza as well.



A problem I've been having lately with the pizza stone is that my pizzas always come out in a boomerang shape. Tonight I took extra care with the dough. I actually practiced my technique several times on a sheet pan before placing it on the pizza stone. The result of all of this practice was in the most boomerang-shaped pizza yet.

I've decided that instead of trying to avoid it I will adopt this as my trademark. Nate's Boomerang Pizza.

Now if only I could get that limo driver from Crocodile Dundee to use this to foil some bad guys. Then this would truly be the best pizza of all time.

The Week of No Grocery Shopping

We generally eat dinner pretty late. Tonight we pushed the envelope a bit by having dinner at 11:00 PM. Jen was working late so I threw together some leftover bits from the fridge so that we could have something quick to eat at the time when we'd be asleep on a normal night, preferably for at least an hour.



I had purhcased this margarita mix from a company called Ripe Margarita Mix based locally out of Wallingford, Connecticut. It's made with fresh squeezed oranges, limes, and agave nectar.

The main reason I made margaritas is because I had purchased this mix for when Jen's mom and sister were in town. When I went to make margaritas for them one night I noticed a key ingredient was missing: tequila. So today I went to the wine store in town where they sell a small variety of spirits. I asked the guy at the counter for a recommendation and he recommended two tequilas. He went on about the merits of one versus the other. This one had more agave, while that one had bluer agave. This one was cask aged and that one was more crisp. I think "crisp" might be a nice way of saying "harsh."

After weighing the pros and cons of things that I cannot understand I went with the one that was $2 more figuring it was probably better and worth the risk of that small an investment.



I cleaned out the fridge (and some items from the pantry and freezer) to make an odd mix of food for tacos. I defrosted some leftover frozen tortilla shells. I had hoped to make beans and rice but discovered that we did not have any black beans.



Since my goal was to not go to the store this week's dinners I opted to go with garbanzo beans. I made a salad by tossing the garbanzos with lime, cayenne, and cilantro. Then I cooked up some scallops with a similar seasoning blend and also a batch of toasted brown rice. I also chopped up some tomato and red leaf lettuce. Only now did I realize that I forgot to shred up the cheddar in the fridge.

Damn.



I'm not a big fan of margaritas but I am, however, a fan of using things up before they go bad. That forces me to eat a lot of things that I otherwise would not. The best part of the margarita for me was the Mineola tangerine I used as a garnish. It was the last in what was the tastiest batch of citrus I've ever purchased in my life.

Tonight's dinner had an air of reaching the end of the road. There's precious little left in the fridge to play with at this point. Tomorrow may be the day when we admit we have no other choice and have to either go shopping or have dinner out.

I'm confident I could do something with what we still have left but it would probably be too weird so that it would tip the balance of the Resourcefulness/Sadness Scale that I have worked so hard to keep level all week.