Cooking For Two

Being a pre-teen with a mom who’s hipper than you is both humbling and awesome. While you would have preferred that you revealed to her that Nolita was the latest up-and-coming neighborhood for shopping and dining, when you marched into your Monday homeroom in a pair of the coolest high-waisted magenta suede pants anyone in middle school has ever worn, from a tiny downtown boutique your mom had discovered in a neighborhood your classmates didn’t even know meant “North of Little Italy,” the payoff for being bottom rung on the mother-daughter hipness ladder was clear. (Now that hipness is judged by one’s ability to name streets in the far-flung Brooklyn neighborhoods, it seems incredible that Nolita was ever under the radar, but in 1998 it was. Maybe I’ve lived in New York too long.)

Our downtown outings usually involved lunch at a hip restaurant. After a few jaunts, we adopted a handful of cafés as our own, nourishing beacons in still uncharted urban territory. One of our mainstays was Pommes Frites, of 3am craving fame (we went at 3pm). The other was Rice.

Rice, which closed recently, wore fusion cuisine like the best of its founding decade, the ’90s. Its concept was simple and brilliant. You ordered a bowl of rice–white, brown, Thai black, green–and then added toppings from anywhere in the world where rice is eaten, which is to say everywhere. I might eat Mediterranean lentils while you forked into vegetarian meatballs. I could order black beans and you could choose Indian curry. We craved that variety after walking through Nolita all morning. It’s one dish, the curry, that I want to talk about today, a dish that outlived the fusion trends and endured the crowds that began to stream into Nolita from neighboring SoHo, to remain just as hip today as it was back then.

The reason? Rice’s Indian chicken curry contained bananas. Salty sweet: sounds like 2013. The creamy sauce also coated raisins and mango chutney, and I’ve never forgotten the taste combination of  salty curry, filling meat, and echoing sweetness.

A browse through this site’s recipe index reveals plenty of beef and steak recipes but nothing completely straightforward. Obviously part of what’s fun about BGSK is that I get to be creative in the kitchen. But that doesn’t mean brisket needs five spice powder or flank steak calls for a miso marinade.

For this year’s second Valentine’s Day post, I decided to share a classic meal to go with post #1, my pomegranate salad. If your idea of a perfect Valentine’s Day consists of bringing the quintessential romantic steakhouse dinner home, you’ll have all the tools to make steak and potato wedges without, on the other hand, producing much of a mess. My idea of romance does not include oil burns on my forearms to the tune of the smoke alarm. I concede that this disaster might form a bond or at least a fond memory.

On all other days that I cook steak, I choose cheaper, more flavorful cuts. I’ll slow-cook brisket til it’s falling-apart and rich or grill flank steak and slice it thin.

Last week was slow around here because last weekend I got married to Alex! For all the time I spend internet-ing and on social media, I’m not terribly talented at sharing real life’s big moments online. And the wedding feels private, gloriously so–all ours, and our families’ and our friends’.

So instead of talking about emotions, can we talk about beans?

Baked beans, by Katie Quinn Davis. Katie blogs at What Katie Ate. She’s a food and lifestyle photographer whose images capture texture so evocatively I can feel the crackly skin of her photographs’ roasted chickens and taste the gooeyness of the sauce on the Sticky Chicken with Sesame and Chile on page 187 of Katie’s new book.  Because What Katie Ate is now a book (!) of comfort food so inspiring I didn’t know where to start cooking from it.

In the end, I started at the beginning. The first recipe I made appears on the second page of the breakfast section, though we ate the Homemade Baked Beans on Toast for dinner.

Beans are Alex’s bachelor dinner, what he ate before he met me, what he eats when I’m going to get home late. He has a method for making a can of cannellinis tasty, but it’s pretty simplistic. When I toy around with beans to make them more interesting, he feels like he’s in for a treat.

And Katie’s beans are interesting. Deliciously large morsels of pancetta, dollops of mustard, thyme leaves, Worcestershire sauce, and tomatoes flavor Katie’s version which are a hundred times less cloying than sweet baked beans from a can. In fact, there’s no sugar in these at all. We scooped the beans onto thick slices of fried bread and ate the open-faced sandwiches for dinner. Some broccoli rabe sautéed in olive oil made a really nice side dish if you’re looking for one.

After I made the beans, I flipped through the rest of the book, and there’s so much good stuff here. Next up, Sticky Chicken with Sesame and Chile and then Sheila’s Retro Beef Curry (circa 1974), and after that, who knows?

Chicken is easy, chicken is quick. Chicken can make a salad a meal, or make a bowl of rice or pasta enticing to a carnivorous type.

Yet chicken is not first on my list of easy and quick dinners. I’m no saint, but plopping a chicken breast on a baking sheet and letting it dry out cook is a sin. I like my food to have flavor. It’s worth taking some time to figure out how to imbue flavor into the blank slate of chicken, the tofu of the meat-eating world.

As I learned when I retrieved Chicken Marbella from the dinner party archives, a marinade is one way to ensure that your chicken is great. It just means you’ve got to do a little bit of planning ahead, as I do for today’s chicken, in which boneless and skinless thighs sit for hours (or all day, even), in a sauce of mayonnaise, vinegar, and herbs. It’s not the kind of sauce you’d slurp up and call delicious, and in fact once the chicken is cooked you don’t even notice it’s there. Stealthily, it leaves the chicken pieces tasty and moist.

I’m happy to report that Food Network’s Summer Fest is back! In the whirring speed of these summer weeks, I missed last week’s zucchini theme, despite the fact that I adore zucchini in sandwiches, curries, pastas, and more. The week before, you may have caught my Summer Fest plum week post about Grandma Esther’s Plum Cake, which keeps so well in the fridge we’re just polishing it off two weeks later.

Today, it’s tomatoes. From cherry tomatoes that taste like candy to meaty red-green heirlooms that need nothing more than a squirt of olive oil and some flaky salt, I can’t get enough of the vegetable that’s really a fruit.

There are a billion tomato recipes on BGSK. I’ll point you to just a few of them. Soon, there will be one more: I’m excited to be working on a recipe for homemade sundried tomatoes, one of my all-time favorite foods.

Another one of those all-time favorites? Raw tomato sauce for pasta. The original no-cook tomato sauce contains just a very few ingredients, and it’s one of my go-to dinners come July and August. Diced tomatoes marinate in lots of olive oil, garlic, salt and some herbs before enveloping hot pasta in the sauce they’ve developed. Perfection.

To that formula, I’ve added a couple of twists today: handfuls of arugula, cubes of avocado, and morsels of fresh wild salmon. A punch of fresh lemon juice helps the ingredients entwine with the pasta, and ta-da, a healthful and original tomato-y dinner is born.

SEAFOOD PASTAS: Spicy Tomato Stew with Spaghetti; Shrimp Angel Hair; Egg Pasta with Saffron, Shrimp, and Peas; Mediterranean Catfish Spaghetti; Sardine Linguine with Sundried Tomatoes and Olives

If I was six and you asked me what I wanted for dinner, I would probably tell you that I wanted Linguine with Clam Sauce–hold the clams. (I liked the briny flavor but not the chewy texture.)

Weird, I know, But all kids are weird, right? Or so I hear.

Anyway, me as an adorable young kid with nearly white eyebrows and blond curls and a shyness so intense I couldn’t order my own dinner in a restaurant is not really what I wanted to talk about today. Though, to be honest, what I have to say today is hardly more interesting because life is still so busy I can’t be relied on to finish a thought.

There’s a redesign for the homepage in process. I’m working on cool new partnerships. My mom and I have been checking wedding to do’s off our list with CEO-like efficiency. Makeup. Dress. DJ. Food.

Top of my New Year’s Resolution list this year was to move out. Being 26 years old and living at home is just not a sustainable state of affairs. And yet, all of a sudden, it was 2012, and I realized I had sustained the situation for seven whole months.

After a week of literally doing nothing but climb fourth-floor walk-ups only to discover that the apartment at the top had a dorm-style mini fridge and no dishwasher, I lucked out and found an adorable studio in Chelsea. When I signed the lease less than 24 hours later (yeah, that’s …