Amy's Food Adventures

Dining Out

In the summertime, going out to lunch or dinner often seems more inviting than cooking, however well your kitchen may be air conditioned.

But we find that the summer heat definitely interferes with our interest in "fancy" food or service.  We want good food, but we want it to be unpretentiously prepared and served.  No fancy French sauces.  Nothing wintry (we have one local restaurant that never changes its menu -- it's great on a wintry day, but impossible from May through September. 

So we have a list of restaurants that are "cool."

• Physically cool -- who wants to eat in a room that's as hot as the outside.  That also means we don't eat outside very much, unless it's one of those mythical days when the temperature's in the 70's and there's no humiditiy at all.
• Cool service.  We want it to be competent -- always there but fairlly unobtrusive.
• Cool food -- lots of local produce, simple preparations and simple but beautiful presentations.  Nothing fussy.  Nothing cluttered -- I hate resturants which, on the theory they should give you a lot (presumably so they can charge a lot) crowd your plate with meaningless garnishes and inedible and unrlated side dishes.  I want everything to go together -- s grilled fish or stek whose salad is dressed with the steak's juices and its sauce, for example.

Some of our favorites for summer lunches and dinners:

• Sang Kee Asian Bistro - Asian fusiion food with great service.  It's in a strip shopping center and we can almost always park in front or nearby.
• YangMing - Very authenic Chinese food and Itlian American choices for the member of your party who just doesn't do ethnic.  Sometimes we just order all the appetizers and pretend we're having dim sum in Chinatown without the trip.
• Ruby's - (Not Ruby Tuesday's) - We go to both the Ardmore and King of Prussis ones.  Fast food glorified.  Great hamburgers and shakes.  But also grilled cheese sandwishes, fish tacos, and more.   Only iin off hours -- they usually have a line.
• Primavera Pizza Kitchen - We go to the Ardmore branch, housed in a former bank so there are soaring ceilings and a general open, airy feeling.  They have it just right -- lots of appetizers that can be lunch and half portions of pasta.  Good salads, too.

Of course we are not above eating in a Wendy's or a Taco Bell when the occasion demands something fast.  We also have a few casual Mexican restaurnts in the neighborhood which can be fun.

We seem to have developed our own pattern.  Many days we decide to delay lunch until after something -- work, appointments, errands.  By the time we have lunch it's late in the afternoon and it serves as lunch and part of dinner.  Then we just have a light snack later on (usually the house specialty -- homemade soup -- with a sandwich or desert.

We haven't abandoned going to much more elaborate restaurants for much fancier meals -- just put it away for cooler days.

It's Friday Night

In our condo building of 81 apartments, live many Jewish families.  (That's not surprising; there are two synogogues within a block of our building.)  That means all day on Friday, tantalizing smells circulate through the halls, reminding many of us of Friday night dinners at the family tables of our childhood.

We had long since given up even noticing it was Friday night (if I was home), but now that my office is in several rooms of our spacious condo and more of our meetings take place by teleconference and web, Friday night meals beckon.

There are two traditional meals from my grandmothers' tables; fortunately, my husband's mother cooked them both.  I'm sure my versions are not exactly the same, but they do a good job of evoking nostalgic memories and fulfilling our tastebuds' expectations.

Last night we had meal one:  Braised Brisket made in a gravy of onions and red wine, served with potatoes and a salad.  (Note that salads didn't exist much at our childhood tables.  Also, a Fridaiy night dinner was somewhat ceremonial and would probably have had more courses -- chicken soup with matzo balls or gefilte fish, for example.  Today we save these for Jewish holidays or enjoy them as an entire meal.

Here's my foolproof recipe for the Brisket.

Heat 2-3 rablespoons of vegetable oil in a heavy Dutch onion and thoroughly brown the brisket on both sides.  Be patient.  This works best if you have purchased a slender piece of brisket called the first cut and left the small amount of fat in place.  Brown the fat side first.

When the brisket is quite brown, remove it to a plate and brown 2 peeled and sliced (half moons) large onions.  When the onions are soft and browned, add in 6 or more cloves of minced garlic, salt and pepper, 2 teaspoons of dried thyme, and a bay leaf.  Cook the garlic for a minute and mix in 2 cups of dry red wine (we use up our leftovers this way -- we had quite a spiffy French Bordeaux in last night's dinner), scraping up the bottom. 

Return the brisket to the pan and surround it with baby peeled carrots or cut up peeled carrots (about 1 pound).  Add enough chicken broth to nearly cover the brisket (I usually use 2-3 cups).

Bring to a simmer, cover, and cook for 2-1/2 hours (or more, if your brisket is quite large -- we usually only do a 2-3 pound brisket for our own Friday night dinner).  The object is for the meat to be meltingly tender.

If you plan ahead, you can wrap the meat in foil and refrigerate it separately from the gravy and carrots.  This will let you lift any fat off the gravy before slicing the meat (easier done cold) and reheating it in the gravy.

You can serve the brisket and its gravy with lots of starches.  Oour favorite is mashed potatoes, but noodles, and kasha (buckwheat groats) are also very authentic.  Or you could try our variation below.  We also serve a green vegetable (steamed green beans or broccoli) or a salad (cucumber in vinegar with dill, green salad, or even Caesar Salad, certainlly something our ancestors wouldn't do),

There are many variations.  Here are two we like.

You can puree the entire contents of the pot (except the meat), to make a thick gravy.  I'd chill it first to be able to remove the fat.  Once the gravy is pureed, the fat doesn't seem to rise to the top for easy removal.

If you have lots of gravy left over and enough meat for a second meal, our favorite thing to do is to cook a fresh set of carrots (just remove the old ones), and one large potato for each person, peeled and cut into large (1-1/2") chunks.  The idea is the let the potatoes absorb lots of gravy in the cooking process, turning pale brown.  The trick is to let them get tender and brown enough without letting them fall to bits.

When we do this we reheat the meat by laying the slices out on a platter, napping them with some of the gravy, covering them with plastic wrap (pierced with a few holes), and heating the meat in the microwave.  That seems to work best.

No one has ever turned down seconds on Friday night brisket!

Summer Daze

It's always hard to decide what to cook when it's really hot.  It's been in the 90's or hotter here for a week and it's wearing us out.  Of course, we could go out to eat, but leaving our air conditioned condo doesn't seem like a gret idea.

Here are some of our summer standbys.  I confess some of them require an early morning trip to the farmer's market to get fresh produce.

CORN AND WHATEVER

When the corn is in (it is) I sometimes wonder if we should just serve a giant plate of it and forget the rest.  But we never do that.

Last night we had corn on the cob (what they call sugar and butter corn hereabpits. which means it has white and yellow kernels mixed), a tomato salad (halved cherry tomatoea, diced red onion, and sliced avocado in balsamic vinaigrette), and grilled filet mignn (we always have some in the freezer).  Blueberries and nectarines with cream for dessert.

HOMEY FOOD

tonight we're going to have yogurt dill cucumber soup, little, very thin breaded fried pork chops (they're more like veal clutlets), baked yams, and fresh stringbeans.  Berries for dessert -- we have strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries in the refrigerator to pick from.

FRIDAY NIGHT

Tomorrow we'll need to turn the ir conditioning up because I'm making traditional Friday night supper as a nostalgic gift to my husband.

We'll be haaving a brisket, cooked with tons of onions and garlic, carrots and red wine, served with mashed potatoes and a salad.  Caesar if I'm that ambitious.  Dessert will be fresh figs baked in an Italian-style free form tart.

Now that I know what I'm cooking for the rest of the week I think I'll take a nap -- or maybe I'll have a snack.  I'm hungary now.

A Summer Lunch

This Saturday, our girls arrived for lunch with great-granddaughter in tow.  I don't like to be cooking when I have the baby for company, so we prepared a table full of vaguely Italian -- or perhaps Mediterranean perhaps -- delights, all to be served at room temperature.

The menu started with canteloupe wrapped witih prosciutto, fresh figs, and Genoa salami, continued with a salad of mini greens, beets, shaved fennel, and goat cheese (in a Balsamic Vinaigrette),  seared and roasted pork tenderlion with fresh mango sllices and a raspberry salsa (not mine, alas, but from a jar), French potato salad, and a baguette and butter.  Lots of choices for munching, talking, and admiring the baby (who liked everything but the cnteloupe and the pork roast).  We ended with an all-American Blueberry Crisp with Vanilla Ice Cream. 

Yesterdy we ended an afternoon at the movies (Andy Garcia's Lost City, which I highly recommend) with a trip through Wegman's, a huge supermarket which adds every kind of luxury comestible to what you would expect in an ordinary high-end store. 

Imagine five kinds of bakeries, including  branch of a real French patisserie with cakes like jewels.  Imagine breads from every corner of the earth and an in-store bakery putting out fresh breads and rolls.  Butcher shops come in multiple levels -- regular, packaged gourmet, and custom butter.  There's a kosher butcher, too.  Seafood is similarly arrated.

Cheeses are simply unbellievable.  There are supermarket cheeses, fancy cheeses, specialty cheeses in the Mediterranen appetizer bar (where you get the 12 kinds of ollives, specialty peppers, and hummus), and then there's the gourmet cheese store, bigger and better than nearly any I've seen.

You can tour the International section with aisles devoted to Asia (China, Japan, Thailand all get their areas), India, Latin America, Britain, Ireland, and Germany.  Italy is all over the store!

But the piece de resisstance is the huge produce section.  They have everything and they have it in every way -- big bunches, individiual pieces, prepared and ready to take home -- or out to the car-- and eat.  They have it regular and organic.  In and out of season.  This is the most irresistable part of the store to me.  I always buy too much.

I've left out ther prepared foods section (which is probably 20% of the store if you count its second floor restaurant style eating area).  That's because over time I've become less impressed.  They have quality and varietiy but like most food prepared in quanity it's less exciting than anything I could cook myself.  Okay in a pinch but too expensive for anything else.

So you want to know what I bought?

I always focus on the produce.  Here you get not just strawberries and blueberries and raspberries (yes, we bought them), but also yellow raspberries (yes) and gooseberries) no).   We bought handfuls of herbs to supplement what we grow at home -- parsley, basil, cilantro.  Jalapenos and lime for our next salsa.  Zucchini to be thinly lsliced and sauteed in olive oil with lots of garlic for tomorrow's dinner.  An out-of-season crate of clementines for nibbling.  A few pounds of in-season cherries to savor.

We bought a portable Middle Eastern lunch -- pitas, hummus, babba ganuj, cucumbers in thick yogurt, radishes and tomatoes to garnich the plate.

And an Italian deli dinner -- crisp rolls and slice ham, prosciutto, salami, sharp provolone, and mortadella, plus roasted red peppers for a savory garnish.  And a mini-lemon meringue pie to share.

Shopping at Wegman's is as much an entertainment as a chore.  How nice that it is now directly on our way home from our daughters -- and open until midnight seven days a week!

Summer Daze

My favorite summer activity is meandering through a farmers' market, admiring everything, and then picking out just what I want for tonight's dinner (and maybe tomorrow's, too).

No cookbook is required.  The perfection and lure of summer produce speaks for itself. 

I'm particularly lucky in that we have two farmers' market -- a "real" one, about 20 minutes away, and a fancier, gourmet version much closer.  The gourmet farmers' market has the added attractin of sharing a parking lot with a Trader Joe's so I can dash in and buy any dairy products, condiments, dried fruits and nuts, or much less expensive cheeses to complete my menu.  It's also a great place for bread and flowers.

These produce-driven menus tend to star fruits and vegetables -- sometimes we don't even bother with meat or fish.  At other times, we'll have some grilled meat or seared fish as part of the meal, but it's usually accompanied by featured vegetables, salads, or salsas.

Here are a few of our recent menus.

ITALIAN ANTIPASTO

Heirloom Tomato Stack with Fresh Buffalo Mozarella and Basil

Figs with Prosciutto (I can get the expensive San Danielli at the Cheese store in the farmers' market or cheat and buy a package of very good but much cheaper commercial prosciutto at Farmer Joe's.)

Roasted Peppers with Garlic and Parsley (we provide the garlic and parsley and some Balsamico and Olive Oil), served with Sesame Semolina Bread and Butter.  This is a heavenly combination.

Zucchini Blossoms (stuffed with Ricotta and Parmesan), dipped in a Tempera Batter and Deep Fried.  (If you're in a particularly decadent mood, you omight drizzle on some concentrated Balsamico or a bit of homemade Pesto.)

Romaine Hearts with sliced Chicken Breast and Caesar Dressing

A bowl of Fresh Peaches and Cherries

A FISH TALE

Sered Diver Scallops served with mini field greens and Balsamico Vinaigrette

Half Cold Lobsters with Mango/Watermelon/Mint Salsa

French Potato Salad (Julia Child's Recipe -- my Julia I cookbook automatically opens to this page)

String Beans steamed and dressed with sesame oil and Rice Wine Vinegar while still hot.  Sprinkled with White and Black Sesame Seeds

Blueberry Crisp (crisps are my favorite way to serve fresh summer fruit without the work of a pie) with Vanilla Ice Cream

I'm really hungary -- and I have to plan a lunch for my daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter for tomorrow.  I'll let you know how it turns out.