I've Got a Birthday To Celebrate

On my 16th birthday my sister left for her freshman year of college.  I stood in our kitchen at six o'clock in the morning, surrounded by her packed bags, with the members of my family rushing around the house to make sure nothing was left behind, and it didn't feel like a birthday to me.  Of course, it wasn't the norm for how my birthdays were spent, but it can be hard to have a birthday so close to the back-to-school rush.  Even now that I'm out of school, I still sometimes want to tell everyone to wait-just-a-minute and stop rushing through August! because I've got a birthday to celebrate. 

Tim understands this because his birthday falls near Labor Day so there is the same guilt associated with wanting to make a to-do about getting a year older.  There are always friends on weekend trips away or spending time with family.  It's hard for either of us to assert ourselves and ask for attention.  So we do that for each other.  We get how the other feels. 

For my birthday, Tim went overboard.  He bought me a beautiful fragrance to replace the one I broke (dropped it on the bathroom tile) and he made dinner reservations somewhere he knew I'd want to go.  He didn't tell me at first where we were going, but he's terrible at keeping a secret and eventually confessed.  We were going to Jean-Robert's Table, and I was so excited.  Back when I worked in wine sales, I met Jean-Robert de Cavel at a few parties a mutual friend hosted.  He is jovial and interesting to talk to and everyone flocked to him.  That kind of personality can draw a crowd at a party or to his restaurants, and it makes you wonder why this French ex-pat has chosen Cincinnati as his home. But he came here along while ago and never left.  I'm especially grateful now that I've eaten at Table.  I will go back there again and again.

We had an excellent dinner, and perhaps Tim encouraging me to finish the bottle of wine is partly to blame for no documentation of our food.  Everything we ate was fantastic (Tim had steak and I had duck), but trust me when I say, I didn't need pictures to remember our Heirloom Tomato Salad appetizer.  It was a special, not on the regular menu, and as soon as our waitress began to describe it I had already decided to order it. 

I recreated it at home simply because I needed to eat it again.  The soft cheese served with the salad was the perfect foil to the acid.  This salad is for all of the summer-tomato-lovers out there, and tomato discrimination is not allowed; you'll need a good mix of types and sizes to capture the essence of it.  Also, everything added to the tomatoes is merely there to make it all more tomato-ey.  It's simple.  It's fresh.  It's summer.  Tomatoes will now always make me think of my birthday.

I owe Tim for helping me create new, positive birthday memories--it's harder to do than it seems and he excels tremendously at it.  

Heirloom Tomato Salad
inspired by Jean-Robert's Table
serves 4-6, depending if it is served as a light lunch or an appetizer/side dish

I purchased all of the tomatoes for this salad from the Landen Deerfield Township farmer's market, which is held every Saturday during the summer and continues on occasionally throughout the winter.  For heirloom tomatoes, I am particularly drawn to booth hosted by That Guy's Family Farm.  Guy seems to have the biggest variety of heirlooms, including little yellow plum tomatoes, beautiful multi-colored cherry tomatoes, and an incredible green-striped salad tomato that I wish I could remember the name of.  We also sliced up a big Mr. Stripey from our garden for even more size variance and sweeter flavor. 

If you can't find herb goat cheese at your local market, you can always chop up fresh herbs and mix them in with plain goat cheese.  I'd recommend soft-leaf herbs like parsley, dill, basil, and oregano; add no more than a tablespoon total of herbs. 

At Table we had this salad with French bread but at home I decided to make Flatbread with Honey, Thyme, and Sea Salt from a recipe I found on Smitten Kitchen.  It was really simple to make and I highly recommend it. 

Ingredients
~3 lbs of heirloom tomatoes, a variety of sizes and colors
1/2 tsp kosher salt
fresh ground black pepper
3 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
4-5 leaves of fresh basil
3 oz soft herb goat cheese
crusty bread like baguette or flatbread

Slice the largest tomatoes across like thick sandwich slices.  Cut the medium size tomatoes into quarters or sixths so that you have wedges.  Depending on the size, halve cherry tomatoes or leave the littlest ones whole.  Put all tomatoes in a medium size bowl and toss with the salt and pepper.  Allow to sit for 10minutes to draw out some of the juice of the tomatoes.

Add the olive oil and vinegar and lightly toss.  Transfer mixture, including accumulated juices onto a serving tray.   Chiffonade the basil and sprinkle over salad.  Serve the herb goat cheese on the side with bread.

Build the best bite by putting a smudge of the goat cheese the bread with a juicy tomato on top. 

Summer Standoff

Summer and I have been in a bit of a standoff.  Summer has been holding out on me--forcing me to wait until AUGUST for the good, fresh, local produce.  In fact, when I heard from a friend that local corn was making it's way to the supermarket, my first thought was, "finally!" (Insert childish foot stomping.)

Is it just my imagination or did that early summer rain really push everything back a few weeks?  I am trying to remember when it was that I bought fresh corn last year, but I didn't blog about it and you should really know by now that my memory cannot be trusted.  It's been so hot in southwest Ohio that it's felt like the peak of summer for a few weeks now, and my patience was wearing thin. 

Earlier this week I stopped by my parents' house to have lunch with my mom and borrow an air mattress for my upcoming trip to Chicago.  While I was there I mentioned the corn was ready at Fulton Farms, just outside of town, and she suggested we go pick some up.  The drive from their house to the farm took me past nearly all of the important landmarks of my youth; the high school football field, the now-closed Mayflower movie theater, and the intersection where I rear-ended my high school boyfriend's car.  There are some things I will never forget!

When we arrived, the corn was piled up on wagons at the back of the little market.  There were people crowded around it, shucking their corn on site and stuffing shopping bags full of cobs.  My mom and I squeezed into a spot along one side of a wagon and opted to keep the husks on in case we wanted to grill the corn.  I purchased more than I would need so I could blanch and freeze some extra.  The result of my imagined summer-standoff has been preserving summer vegetables in any way I can. 

For dinner, I decided to throw together a quick summer salad using the corn.  I simply blanched two of the corn cobs and then cut off the corn.  Then I tossed it with some halved cherry tomatoes, torn cilantro, olive oil, white wine vinegar, salt, and pepper.  Letting it sit for ten or fifteen minutes before eating it allowed the juice of the tomato and fresh corn to be drawn out by the salt and mix with the oil and vinegar.  We ate it as a side dish the first night and then on top of grilled fish the second.  I'm not offering an exact recipe here because it's all to taste and the substitutions are endless.  No cilantro?  Use parsley or basil. Instead of the vinegar, squeeze in some fresh lime juice.  Want it spicy?  Add a minced jalapeno. 

Eat up as much summer as you can while it lasts. 

All Sorts of Things

I had a friend named Craig who would spend all afternoon on Sunday's cooking chicken.  He didn't like to cook after work so he would prepare an entire week's worth of chicken to hold him over until the following weekend.  When asked what he would do with all of that chicken, Craig would sort of shrug and reply, "All sorts of things."

I haven't seen Craig in a few years but I suspect this habit hasn't disappeared.  The convenience of pre-prepared chicken breast is easily overlooked by an eager home-cook like myself.  I plan many meals around the multiple uses of a whole-roasted chicken, but what about when I just want something quick?

Thus the reason that grocery stores like Whole Foods are so popular these days.  I went to Whole Foods solely for the purpose of stocking up on organic strawberries that were on sale for $1.99/lb (!) and, as usual, found myself hungry as soon as I walked in the door.  I wanted something simple and I was craving those strawberries.  I wandered over to their deli section where they a vast assortment of prepared foods and picked out a nicely charred chicken breast.  The very polite deli worker wrapped it up for me and I headed home with my chicken and strawberries.

I tossed the strawberries with some fresh spinach and a quick, homemade vinaigrette (champagne vinegar, honey, chives, olive oil, salt, & pepper) and topped it with sliced chicken breast.  Tim liked it, too, which means that it wasn't too sweet or girly for his manly appetite. 

The more I think about it there really are all sorts of things to do with a cooked chicken breast.  Now that the weather is starting to cooperate and offer some nice afternoons for working in the yard, taking the dogs on walks, and lounging on the patio reading books on my new Nook, I am thankful for the short-cuts. 

I was going to offer a recipe for the vinaigrette but making great homemade vinaigrette is really more about the method than a recipe.  Traditionally vinaigrette's are composed of vinegar, mustard, oil, and salt, but you can play around with those ingredients to meet your tastes.  Molly Wizenberg has a great recipe for vinaigrette over at the Spilled Milk Podcast website that would be a great "starter" vinaigrette.  For this strawberry salad, I wanted more sweetness so I picked a fruity vinegar and swapped the mustard for honey.  The trick is to whisk your oil & vinegar mixture with an ingredient that has some structure--like a dijon mustard or honey--to create an emulsion.  The thick creamy texture of the emulsion is what will help your vinaigrette stick to the salad leaves.  If you find the perfect combination or want to share a link to your favorite vinaigrette recipe, please come back and share!

Brussels Sprout Slaw...finally

I have a story to tell you, but I'm going to save it for when I have more than five minutes to write it out.  As a spoiler, the title is The Christmas Mouse.  Is your interest peaked?  Good, then I hope you come back in a few days to read it. 

Today I do have something exciting to tell you about, but there has been so much build up to it that I don't think it will take me very long to say it.

Brussels sprout slaw.

You may have been wondering why it took me a month to finally post it here, after many broken promises that it was coming soon.  Well, the truth is, I liked the original, but I didn't love it.  I felt like it needed something so each time I opened my blogger account to describe it, I just stared at a blank screen.  I write this little blog to tell you about the recipes and food that teach me to appreciate what I eat in new ways.

So I waited until I had the opportunity to make the slaw again and fix what I thought needed tweaking.  Before I give you my new, improved recipe, I did want to say that this was just to my taste and you should feel free to make this as the original recipe suggests. 

Brussels Sprout Slaw
adapted from food52
serves 2-3 as a side dish

The issues I had with the original were only small.  The biggest one was the even though the recipe suggest soaking the red onion to soften the bite, I still felt like the onion flavor was so intense that it overpowered the rest of the flavors.  As a result, I swapped the red onion for green onion.  I also thought that the slaw needed more sweetness to balance the sharp acidic flavors so I balanced the amount of honey and whole grain mustard.  And lastly, I just didn't feel like buying Pecorino just for this slaw, so I used Parmesan and thought it was perfect. 

For a more colorful salad, add some red cabbage or toasted nuts like almonds.  They would also add nice texture, and I would have thrown them in if I had them lying around.  This recipe would easily double or triple for a large group but I warn you that the slicing of the sprouts is tedious even if you use a mandoline!

Ingredients for the slaw
1.5 cups thinly sliced Brussels sprouts (about 10 sprouts)
2 or 3 green onions, sliced and using both the white and light green
1/4 cup grated Parmesan

Ingredients for the dressing
zest of 1/2 a lemon
juice of half a lemon
1 tsp honey
1 tsp whole grain mustard
3 tbsp olive oil
salt & pepper

In a medium bowl combine the Brussels sprouts, green onions, and Parmesan cheese.  In a separate small bowl, whisk together the lemon zest, lemon juice, honey, mustard, and olive oil.  Season with salt and pepper to taste.  Add the dressing to the slaw and toss.  Chill for 20 to 30 minutes before serving.

Will store covered for 8 to 10 hours in the refrigerator.