a sampling of some fresh picked wine berries, huckleberries and wild blackberries – a gift from my friend jack on my birthday last month

it’s not that i’m not cooking. because i am. there are gatherings of friends and just plain hungriness resulting in well, dinner. i even sometimes whip out the nikon and snap a few lame shots but these days not so much. and i’m not sure what’s come over me. but just the thought of posting on ceF was beginning to feel like ‘work’ and god only knows we wouldn’t want that to happen to a nice woman like me… after all, my lack of ambition is my greatest luxury. (i stole that line from my friend emily and have been using it ad nauseum but only because it is SO TRUE.)

but we’ve been to chicago and then i went to cleveland. dallas is this week and seattle comes next. i’m doing the 4 day cooking gig again come the first of october and then i’m off to nyc…  and all i want is to go back to italy. is that asking so much? IS IT? but honestly, i’m not complaining. it’s a charmed life. the past week or so has pretty much revolved around trips to the park in much appreciated cooler than normal temps, so after a 9 week hiatus i’m back on the bike and fighting the fat (albeit somewhat of a losing battle).

but mostly – if i could just say, i’m so deeply grateful for this amazing life that i get to live that i could cry. for those of you that read the sunday ny times magazine section yesterday, we are the fortunate ones…

ok – back to food…

presenting… a summer dinner. grilled corn with flaky maldon salt and a squeeze of lime. grilled tomatoes with thyme and a farro salad with a slightly overcooked poached egg on top. i’ve got just a vague recollection of what was in the farro salad but i’m thinking it was pequillo peppers and goat cheese – and something else but remembering is difficult…

best beans ever. rancho gordo cannellini’s with grape tomatoes, basil, thyme, lemon zest and juice, some potlikker, finely minced anchovy, a very good olive oil, salt and pepper. i think that was it but i’ve no idea because i can’t recall a damn thing.

lamb meatballs with a cherry sauce over whole wheat couscous finished with mint leaves. a lot of ingredients went into that sauce until it was nicely balanced and pretty damn impressive tasting. but i’m not sure exactly what i did – because of my memory…

all cary ever really wants for his birthday are two (2) angel food cakes with his grandmother’s ’7 minute boiled icing’. the icing becomes slightly hard on the outside and then yields to a slightly marshmallow like goo on the inside. ruhlman’s angel food cake from his bestseller ‘ratio‘, takes this cake to where it needs to go – from spongy and boring to totally delicious. in my opinion it’s all in the weighing of the flour and then using both lemon juice and vanilla. for your viewing pleasure i give you 4 pictures as they were all so awful i just couldn’t choose… this is the whitest cake in america and despite the absence of any fats and the overabundance of sugar, somehow it just works.

my icing technique is legendary. obviously.

moving on…

i phone pics before i bought the 3Gs. but this is the wonderful donnie madia pictured at his flagship restaurant blackbird. for my money, he and eduard seitan are the best restaurateurs in chicago with blackbird, avec, the publican and the newest addition, a tacqueria opening very soon. donnie’s attention to every detail is second to none with a modern sensibility that slays me, as i am highly susceptible to such things. with executive chef and partner paul kahan at the helm of the kitchen, it continues to be a recipe for greatness. we were in chicago for only 4 nights and ate at avec, then publican and then blackbird – finishing up with an anniversary dinner at tru, a gift from my mother. and for a whopping $425 that included only one glass of wine, it paled in comparison by such a long shot that i can’t even begin to explain the differences in the food except to say that in the end, blackbird kicked tru’s ass – big time. tru is supremely elegant and the room is lovely. it’s quiet and serious and the servers are ON IT. but dinner at blackbird was once again phenomenal. oh AND best negroni ever – hands down.

so, a few things… and please again – forgive the poor photo quality.

salad of endives with crispy potatoes, basil, dijon, pancetta and poached egg = sheer perfection. not kidding. this salad was incredible in every way.

chilled cuttlefish noodles with green garlic, red onion jam, trout caviar, nasturtiums and buttermilk = amazingness. i loved it.

wood-grilled california sturgeon with english peas, braised peanuts, crispy bacon and bourbon caramel = seriously impressive.

cary had the organic pork belly and crispy sweet shrimp with chinese broccoli, preserved green tomato and black pepper. he started with the pistachio gazpacho with ahi, watermelon confit, sea beans and cocoa. both were smashing.

this was my idea. sorry.

desserts were wonderful. donnie brought us three and each one was greatness. ricotta fritters with compari, rhubarb and pine nut ice cream, pistachio panna cotta with a raspberry consommé and brown butter ice cream and a torn black sesame cake with pineapple that looked a little something like this that was  – out. of. this. world…

avec, a bit more down to earth, is my favorite restaurant in all the land. and at the publican, albeit a bit on the loud side, we had an abundance of seriously excellent food. beer, oysters, fish and pork. just splendid.

chicago is such an extraordinary food town… thank you donnie.

south west of chicago. mies van der rohe’s masterpiece – the farnsworth house. i wept in its presence. it is genius if not impractical.

no tinkering with picassa was going to help this photo taken through the door of my oven. it was shredded zucchini and yellow squash with minced garlic, chiles and ricotta. i stole the idea from city house restaurant here in nashville. their’s was far better and i’m going to work on this because it was frustrating that i couldn’t replicate it. i need to call chef tandy wilson and ask for help. plus my chiles were so strong that they almost hurt. so, fail, although not in an epic way…

the project – buy 20 lbs of balaton cherries from earthy.com and use 10 to make some cherry bourbon hooch. i’ll get back to you in 6 weeks on how it turns out and if you’re on the short list, it’s what’s for christmas, so no surprises here. the other 10 lbs. became a salted cherry vanilla bean balsamic compote.

oh, and jack’s arm after blackberry picking. the things friends do for friends…

the vegetarian was coming by, which is always nice because well, i get to catch up with lesley and i get to ponder what mindful, masterful and meatless dinner i can come up with.  it’s funny because i eat quite a lot of vegetarian dinners but never with any great thought to the matter.  like it just might be a big salad with hummus and flatbread, olives, cheese with roasted red peppers and some crusty loaf, or a pasta with say… fresh cherry tomatoes with greens and a ton of percorino, or ricotta and egg yolk, or creme fraiche and truffle oil, or walnuts and mushrooms, or mushrooms, sweet garlic and arugula, or even just garlic and olive oil – ok ok, i love pasta and could come up with countless meatless combos.  but dinners just happens that way – and really, it’s more often than not.  so, omnivore than i am, i don’t automatically think meat.  (although i do kinda automatically think bacon.)

another night many months ago, i had recently invested in a 5 lb. sack of a grain that was beginning to show up on a lot of menus.  so i made a farro dish for lesley, but since then haven’t made much of it in too long. so i set out once again to prepare something that would appear hearty enough to be called "dinner".  and now that i think about it, i’ve decided that every time lesley comes to dinner from here on in, i will serve farro.  and it will be our recurring theme.  "lesley eats farro at claudia’s".  be sure to tune in…

ok, so there were also giant white lima beans on the side because lesley LOVES the giant lima beans and i since i aim to please, i broke open another bag in the name of both making lesley happy and creating the perfect vegetarian protein of grain and legume together.  but i couldn’t taunt you with those.  not again…

farro con finocchio e arance
(adapted from a market hall foods recipe)

1 1/2 cup whole grain farro
2 Tbl olive oil
salt and pepper
fennel pollen
1/2 cup fennel, diced and blanched
1/2 cup fennel, thinly sliced
red onion – thinly sliced into half moons
zest of 2 oranges
2 oranges, peeled and pithed
12 mint leaves, chiffonade
2 Tble red wine vinegar
a good pinch of chile flakes
1 tsp sweet pimenton
fennel fronds for garnish

toss farro with 1 T. extra virgin olive oil, salt and pepper
toast in a 325 degree oven for 15 minutes
place toasted farro in a pot covered with water. bring to a boil
add fennel pollen. simmer 30-40 minutes. when almost done, add salt
cook until grain is tender, being careful not to stir too much
drain and cool on a sheet pan
mix the rest of the ingredients together, adjusting seasoning as necessary
serve at room temperature 

after a bite or two we realized that my chile flakes were pretty potent, so lesley suggested a side of yogurt and i luckily had some of the the thick rich (yet surprisingly fat free) greek stuff which went wonderfully alongside this dish.

and now, a word from our sponsor.  ok not really, but this is pretty interesting…

Farro: Grain of the Legions
edited from about.com:italian food

Grano Farro has a long and glorious history: it is the original grain from which all others derive, and fed the Mediterranean and Near Eastern populations for thousands of years; somewhat more recently it was the standard ration of the Roman Legions that expanded throughout the Western World. Ground into a paste and cooked, it was also the primary ingredient in the polenta eaten for centuries by the Roman poor. Important as it was, however, it was difficult to work and produced low yields. In the centuries following the fall of the Empire, higher-yielding grains were developed and farro’s cultivation dwindled: By the turn of the century in Italy there were a few hundreds of acres of fields scattered over the regions of Lazio, Umbria, the Marches and Tuscany.

Farro would probably still be an extremely local specialty had the farmers of the French Haute Savoie not begun to supply it to elegant restaurants that used it in hearty vegetable soups and other dishes. Their success sparked renewed interest in farro among gastronomes, and now the grain is enjoying a resurgence in popularity in Italy as well, especially among trendy health-conscious cooks.

According to Garzanti’s Italian-English dictionary it’s ‘spelt’, but Luciano Migliolli, author of Il Farro e le sue Ricette (Farro and its recipes), says that though it looks rather like spelt they’re not the same. Farro must be soaked, whereas spelt can be boiled straight off. Also, cooked farro has a firm chewy texture, whereas spelt softens and becomes mushy. What this means is that you have to read the package carefully when you purchase farro to make certain you are getting Triticum dicoccum.

after seeing various versions of this relish, at the very least 3 times within a short span, i began devising a dish using ingredients along these lines. ‘last night’s dinner‘ did a version over striped bass (btw – get a load of the first dish in this post of hers – a pasta to die for), ‘dolce & nutella‘ put her patricia wells inspired version over pasta, and laura from ‘ombi‘ paired hers with grilled haloumi cheese.

at first i envisioned a grilled shoulder of lamb but eventually settled on a shrimp and farro combo. i bought some pitted large green olives from the local olive bar of ‘the fresh market’, a bunch of mint, some parsley, organic lemons for their rind, used my preserved meyer lemons, garlic, salt and pepper – all diced and mixed with my favorite spanish olive oil, l’estornell.

upon further investigation judy rogers of the famed ‘zuni cafe‘ does a version with chopped blanched almonds over pork or chicken. so i’m thinking this combination is pretty versatile and a good one to keep filed away for future use with well, everything. but mostly it’s the way i like to cook. it’s rustic and easy. and it’s all about the ingredients. oh and don’t be tempted to spritz with the lemon itself. just use the rind. mine was a tad too lemony. i still liked it – but next time i’ll show restraint. it was just kind of hard not to use the naked lemons as i knew they’d be relegated into the egg cups on my fridge door only to get all hard and dried up and then tossed in a couple weeks time. i need to squeeze them and then freeze the juice. the old squeeze and freeze… again, next time.

it’s rainy and unseasonably warm in nashville right now.

somehow this dish fit the mood.

a friend dropped in tonight, detouring just slightly off the path of an israeli couscous buying excursion.  i had offered to cook for her and i was fortunate that she was agreeable because these days i seem to feel an undefined obligation to ‘nablopomo‘ my life away, relentlessly chained to both the kitchen and the computer simultaneously (a.k.a. my usual life), and with the need to cook. 

my friend is a vegetarian which is a pretty comfortable genre for me.  my life consists quite happily of numerous meatless days.  at the beginning of this year i was a raw vegan for a solid 4 months – just because.  and now i’m not.  but i could be again.  you just never know with me.

i believe one of the most impressive food bloggers that exists hands down is heidi from ’101 cookbooks‘.  her recipes are always impeccable, her photography is true art and her voice is kind and real.  and she’s a vegetarian.  so today i wandered around her site until i spotted our dinner.  i had everything i needed except a slice of montrachet, fresh thyme and a red onion.  perfect.

i am the proud owner of a 5.5 lb. bag of semi-pearled farro from market hall.  i’d seen that it was on “sale”, if only minorly - and i decided to stock up.  i’m growing quite fond of this nutty, chewy little spelt like grain.  i also just happened to have on my counter one of my infamous csa butternut squashes just begging to get used.  i’m thinking csa veggies somehow have a greater guilt attached to them.  these vegetables know they were a challenge to begin with and to remain unused is to, quite frankly, reduce you to a failure as a cook.  all that to say, my kitchen has been a tough room these past few months.

i read heidi’s post carefully, in the end making only a few small adaptions.  i upped the fresh thyme, scaled down both oils and added a few grinds of black pepper. and i never minced some of the onions after they roasted – but that was only because i forgot.  once i had my mise en place i never referred back to the recipe or measured a thing.

i began by deeply toasting the walnuts in a 350 degree oven until they were fragrant and well browned.  when cooled they were roughly chopped and set aside.  then i put the oven up to 375 and began to prepare the vegetables for roasting.  the squash was cut into 1/2 inch cubes, the red onion sectioned into eighths and it all went on a baking sheet with maldon salt, balsamic vinegar and olive oil.  i ended up using my ‘whole foods ’365′ spanish olive oil’ rather than the yellingbo pictured since i was just roasting and the subtleties of a great olive oil would be lost in the heat of the moment.

the vegetables needed about 20 minutes, tossing twice to make sure they were getting browned on all sides, and out they came.

my semi- pearled farro was soaked in water for 20 minutes, then drained and boiled in fresh water for about 20 more and drained again.  the farro and the vegetables were then added to a mixing bowl along with some salt, pepper, the chopped walnuts and some walnut oil.

the farro and roasted vegetables then got plated with a sprinkling of fresh thyme and some good montrachet.  the beauty of this dish for me, was that in all it’s rustic versatility, it was a flawless blend of ingredients.

a testament to mother nature and her infallible sense of style…

i buy food.  often.  esoteric ingredients are my game.  a real chef would love my pantry but i’m just a mere wannabe.  yet i continue to believe that if i own all these potential elements of a dish that i will be able to transform my meals into something extraordinary.  you see, when it comes to cooking, i’m not big on technique.  so instead i try to go big on the understanding of flavors – as in what works together.  i’m constantly on the quest for what exists out there in the culinary universe that will blow me away.  having said all that, i’ve come to the realization that my pantry is out of control. and i was thinking that if i didn’t shop for anything but obvious perishables for awhile that i would be forced to use what i already have.  why, i could make it a challenge…  i love a good challenge…  ok claudia, you’re on!

excellent!  who knew this would be so easy?

so to begin with, last night’s dinner was nothing more than a no-brainer exercise of what was going on in my fridge/freezer.  i defrosted a pound of ‘raw, peeled w/tail on’ tiger shrimp from plumgoodfood.com, consistently the best source of shrimp that i have found in this town.  i chopped up a bunch of mustard greens that still looked pretty damn good from last saturday’s csa haul.  and then i used my leftover cooked farro, chopped tomatoes and a healthy dollop of gremolata along with two of delvin’s beautiful chili peppers, finely minced.  one pan.  no mess.  no fuss.  and better yet, no guilt due to no waste.  (my grandmother used to kiss the stale bread before she threw it away, although i’m sure if it was challah it was french toast on sunday morning…)

this was not a to-die-for dinner that i’d have served at a gathering.  the mustard greens were actually a bit sharp and over-powering for this quasi – italian dish. but they existed in my immediate universe and i refused to run out for the more well matched rapini or spinach.  and in less than 15 minutes from start to finish we were eating pretty wholesome and healthy stuff.  and i, in my own grand way of thinking found myself saying out loud - this so doesn’t suck.

the farro was soaked for about an hour, drained and then boiled in fresh water for 30 minutes and drained again.  i added a great olive oil from chianti in tuscany (the rest of the address still unknown) and some salt and pepper.  then with inspiration from josh friedland of the ‘the food section’ i chopped some buffalo mozzarella and some fresh tennessee tomatoes.  please look at his picture shown below because mine really was the near identical plate.

but then…

i made a gremolata of fresh parsley, crushed garlic, microplaned lemon peel, olive oil, salt, pepper – and included fresh basil because it felt right.  all of the aforementioned were minced and combined.  then i salted the 9 chops and threw them on a 900 degree grill for about 90 seconds a side.  honestly there were only 8 chops, but that kinda had a nice ring to it…

so, ok.  you with me?  here’s where i need your creative participation.  my plate has a layer of farro, then down one side of the farro is the white mozzarella, down the other side the chopped red tomato.  but now in the center we have a small mound of the green gremolata with 3 chops rising above it all standing in a leaning teepee formation.  i invented this last part.  so now we’ve got a co-written recipe here except jeff has no idea that i exist in the universe.  (hi jeff!)

the dish was totally fabulous.  and i am making it again soon so i can snap a shot.  just for you.

but in the meantime, here is proof of how the dinner began… with a good multi-grain crusty loaf, parmegiano from zingerman’s and truffle honey from market hall.  folks, this combo is not to be missed.  it’s a wow.

i liken this experience to a computer crash without any back-up files. 

it rarely happens twice.

<sigh>