It’s citrus season!

Moro blood oranges, kaffir limes, cocktail grapefruits… At this stage, the best plan is to simply make one big fruit salad and be done.

Fried hijiki with pork

This turned out really well. Soaked in water until it ballooned to about 10 times its dried size, then sauteed with pork in a nice sauce that was on the package of hijiki: dashi, mirin, soy sauce, and sugar.

It’s pom season.

First time for everything

Hot kitchen, lazy dinners

Some days I feel more motivated.

Other days, we have stuff on toast.

I might just prefer sliced hard-boiled eggs paved on mayonnaise over egg salad. Sometimes the parts are greater than the sum.

And I don’t know if it’s because the tomatoes were not as good this year, but I might even prefer the hard-boiled egg sandwich to the tomato sandwich.

Colder days are nearly upon us.

Carl and Mark: I’m done!

That’s right. I’m done. Over the last four months, as a tribute and adventure, I made all 25 of Mark Bittman’s favorites from The Minimalist. I did them mostly in batches of two or three when time allowed. This was not by any means a Julie Powell-scale endeavor. If anything, it gave me more appreciation for the breadth of Powell’s accomplishment.

Pear, Gorgonzola, and Mesclun Salad

We’ll start at the end. Tonight I made the final dish. Pear, Gorgonzola, and Mesclun Salad. This salad is to the 90s what the Caesar was to the 20s. Who knows how many times I’ve eaten this (plus or minus the toasted walnuts). But it definitely stands the test of time.

Eggs Benedict at home

Yes. At home.

When it’s too hot to cook

I’ll still sweat it out over the stove to make the panade from the Zuni Cafe Cookbook. In fact, through the heat wave in July, I made panade three times — it’s that good. Luisa, from whom I had first learned about this dish, responded when I tweeted about it: “It is obsession-worthy. (But isn’t it a million degrees where you are? Are you still making it in the crazy summer heat?)” Yes. I can’t stop.

Recently, elsewhere on the web

I wrote this and this.

Carl and Mark, part 4

Here we are with five more dishes from Mark Bittman’s 25 Favorite Minimaist Recipes. Now that I’ve made 20 of them, I can look back a little. Most of the dishes have been quite good and have come together quickly. And when I make a dish for this project, it often stands out in an otherwise humdrum week of cooking. If I see a watermelon now, I definitely think of the Watermelon and Tomato salad. It’s not just a dessert or snack to me anymore. So a couple of these dishes will probably become standards for me at some point.

Braised Turkey was lovely and yields enough turkey for an army. The mushrooms and italian sausage lend great flavor to this, too. The turkey breasts came out beautifully thanks to the short cooking time, but the thighs had dried out by the end, like the braised duck legs in Carl and Mark part 2. That was frustrating. I still feel like I don’t understand how to slow-braise dark, tough meat so that it falls off the bone, rather than being dry and chewy. I think it needs to stay wetter (maybe be basted?) and probably cook for less time (the above turkey thigh cooked for 2.5 hours).