Just Three (Leftovers): Rib Eye, Mac-n-Cheese, Onion Marmalade

Stove-top Rib Eye, basted in Butter and Fresh Herbs

A clear violation of my self-imposed rules of "Just Three", using leftover like this, but the principal advantage of blogging, and self-imposed rules generally, lies rooted in the simple fact that one may ultimately do whatever one wishes. Of course, your readers may kvetch, but that's part of the game.

I could drape my transgression with pearls of wisdom and wit, or I could lean on my earlier arguments (e.g., here, and here) that leftovers play a fundamental role in the kitchen - the avoidance of waste, the efficiency of leveraging time already invested, and, above all, the enforced discipline of making something new out of something old - but the simple truth is that I cooked for company last Saturday night and one of the invited couples was a late-day no-show. Ergo, come Sunday, I had a spare steak (a rib eye from Painted Hills, who really do things right, by the way) and several cubic meters of seriously high-density Mac-n-Cheese (recipe forthcoming from the thread started here). I was also pretty sure I had some more of my spiced onion marmalade somewhere on an upper deck, and a plan came together, a plan with the elusive trifecta of zero prep, zero shopping, and a single pan.

Just Three: Strawberries, Tomatoes, Balsamic

Cruising the Tuesday market with my youngest daughter, under strict orders to return home with the makings of a salad but little other guidance, we walked by Lou Preston's stall, and were stopped in our tracks by Lou's strawberries. As a rule, I'm not a big fan of strawberries, finding them a poster child for the over-engineered style of supermarket fruit: Big, firm, nice to look at, but overly dry and hard to the tooth and utterly devoid of taste. On Tuesday, however, with the oblique angle of the late day sun glancing off their perfectly ripe, almost impossibly red skins, Lou's teeming baskets of rubescent little berries were like traffic lights stopping our egress down the aisle.

Farmer's markets are all about quality over quantity, and the rest of the stall was a case study: Small, compact, efficient, and I wanted to eat everything in it, the rainbow-in-a-box of plump tomatoes, the short and squat sweet peppers and the long, lean, twisting, and vaguely sinister fiery ones, the progressive shading of green into crimson and yellow tracking the late-season maturation of the fruit. On the corner of the table, a wicker basket full of crusty sourdough loaves, labeled "country white", but, to my taste, more closely resembling a dense, chewy version of the classic French miches, with its distinctive tang of rye flour. (Etymological specificity notwithstanding, I took a loaf home. It barely lasted through breakfast the next day.)

Anyway, back to dinner, and our latest installment of "Just Three". Armed with strawberries of such high sugar content, I wanted something with a bit of bite to provide ballast to the dish: Green Zebra heirlooom tomatoes (the little guys in the upper left corner of the picture), with higher acidity and more tartness than most of their heirloom cousins, would balance the flavor profile and a splash of color at the same time. Now, strawberries and tomatoes may or may not sound odd to you - they are both fruits, after all - but the what makes the match particularly interesting is that the tomato is a berry, while the strawberry is not: A botanist will insist that most of what we instinctively classify as berries (with the notable exception of the blueberry, which is a true berry) actually comprises a peripherally related cousin-class called aggregate fruit (many little fruits grouped together), while tomatoes (and bananas, which always surprises me)with their fruit, comprised of flesh from a single ovary, are true berries. Lest you think that's the end of the story, the strawberry is, in fact, neither berry nor aggregate fruit, but is instead an accessory fruit, in which the edible portion has not been produced from the ovary (apparently, the little bunches of seeds are the true "fruit" of the strawberry, but I don't really get that).

Just Three: Cornmeal, Ham, & Cheese.

Polenta with Crispy Serrano Ham and Melted Raclette

I'm going to try something new and sort of gimmicky: I'm going to see how many different dishes I can make, using just three ingredients.

The idea came in response to the frustration of cooking for my kids. Don't get me wrong: I love, love, to cook for, and especially with, my children; I find great joy in bringing children into the kitchen and watching them learn to cook, and I believe strongly that it is every parent's responsibility to help their littles learn what real food tastes like, what tastes good to them, what doesn't, and why. Nevertheless, when the homework hasn't been finished, the bath is getting cold, and our routine is less off-track than it is careening-off-the-rails into some life-imitating-art version of Wiley Coyote piloting a locomotive into a swan dive off the rim of the Grand Canyon, I will readily confess that I find preparing three separate versions of a dish, just to accommodate this week's litany of idiosyncratic likes and dislikes, exceedingly trying.

I recently found myself staring down the barrel of yet another Monday night meal (Mondays are always the hardest, for me, maybe it's the hangover from cooking fun stuff straight from the market all weekend; or perhaps the kids are grumpy with the first homework assignments of the week; and of course, there are lunches to be made; the TV is crap; all in all, I suppose it's mainly that the whole family has lived in some semblance of Party Mode since we all got let out on Friday) and figured, why not put the question back to them? I did a quick inventory of the cupboards and laid out the simplest (for me) and most likely to succeed (for them) options: The ubiquitous pasta-with-butter; some leftover mac-n-cheese; a breakfast burrito; polenta; or, barring one of the above, go get yourself a bowl and a spoon and have some cold cereal, because I'm done. The polenta took it by several lengths, leaving me with the sort of problem I like best: How should I transform a simple ingredient into a main-course dish with a minimum of fuss?

Piles of Possibility / Farming on Freeways

Farmers Zoey & Jay (photo credit www.exploratorium.edu)

Walking by a cracked and decrepit freeway on-ramp - reclaimed from the morning commute and relegated to the urban wasteland by the Loma Prieta earthquake - two San Franciscans, thinking more like old-school farmers than new-age city dwellers, look at the cracked blacktop bleeding with weeds and saw, incredibly, an orchard. And the topsoil, so manifestly absent in the windswept concrete col, in which these imagined trees would sink their roots? Heaps of rotting compost, strap-compressed cardboard, leftovers from nearby markets, and landscaper clippings - organic detritus, otherwise sentenced to serve out a capital term as landfill, from across the City.

The best bit of the slide show, the whole point really, is the lens through which the farmers see this hard, raw wasteland: Where you and I see trash and blight, they see "piles of possibility". Making soil out garbage. Growing fruit trees on a freeway. Why? Because these farmers believe that everyone - even those of us that, by choice or happenstance, live in high-density, high-land-cost forests of concrete, glass, and steel - should be able to grow at least some of the food that they eat, and that vacant space, by the miraculous fact of its mere presence, offers an invitation (an obligation?) to do so.

The punchline, o at least rwhat resonates most deeply about the project for me, is its preordained impermanence: This orchard can only ever be transitory, because, as we all know, the Bay Area's great armies of cars march through their morning commute with all the inevitability of a glacial ice floe. The trees will be uprooted; the soil scraped away; the pavement once again returned to its urban birthright as. This is not speculation: The City will take the land back - there is no question about this - and yet (or perhaps because) the farmers persist, and until such time as the rubber of our tires replace the soles of their work boots, people will, of all things, eat off that land. I don't know about you, but I think that is just uber cool.

The slide show will eat up about 5 minutes out of your life - which, truth be told, at about 4 minutes, 30 seconds longer than I typically allot to any given byte of digital cellulose, is quite a bit. But it will repay your investment every time you pass a dusty vacant lot, or wonder what to do with your terrace, your windowsill, or that weedy scrap of long-forgotten dirt in the far left corner of your yard.

The Intransitivity of Taste: Pickles, Cheese, and Chocolate

Which of these does not belong?

Pickles, cheese, and chocolate: Three ingredients, three possible pair-wise combinations, two really good and interesting tastes, and one impossibly disgusting mouthful of gag reflex (no prizes for guessing which). If I like chocolate with cheese, and I like cheese with pickles, why don't I like chocolate with pickles? I mean, other than the painfully obvious - in point of fact, it tastes even worse than it sounds - why the apparent lack of transitivity?

What Would Mae West Say? A Tomato Manifesto.

Lemon Boys and Pesto, on Cranberry-Semolina Sourdough

I thought it was Mae West who said something about good sex being great, and bad sex being pretty good too, but I can't find the attribution, so maybe I'm wrong; apparently of similar mind, I did come across one Jimmy Williams (and again, I'm honestly not sure which, but my money is on the old Red Sox manager), who said, “Sex is like money, golf and beer - even when it's bad, it's good.” Whatever the case, I'm going to argue that sex is a really lousy analogy for tomatoes.

Because the thing about tomatoes is this: There is perfect, there is nearly perfect, and there is wholly unacceptable. "Middle ground" is a term better reserved for debating the relative merits of cooking beef to rare vs. medium-rare specifications, or figuring out how to get your tween daughter to clean her room. No, with tomatoes, the territory between "good" and "bad" is more like a DMZ: It's right there in front of you, it's clear and well-defined, and if you spend too much time inside it, you're likely to end up shot. Or, if we're talking about the kitchen, with a mouthful of mealy, watery, flavorless red mush of only the most casual, and likely offensive, relation to what your palate had greedily anticipated. Come to think, maybe that's the better analogy: If your favorite, wisened grandparent, full of love, spark, and pithy bits of folksy wisdom, were a succulent, ripe heirloom cultivar, then the drab supermarket tomato, mass-farmed for the ketchup-and-shitty-pasta-sauce market, picked sufficiently close to granite-like hardness that it will endure hundreds (if not thousands) of miles of open roads, piled en masse atop eighteen-wheeler bin trucks, without suffering so much as a blemish, is a bit like that woebegone uncle or black sheep cousin in a Chevy Chase family vacation movie (or, perhaps, from your own Thanksgiving table). You know that if you actually went out and ran a DNA test, it would confirm that he does in fact share genetic code with the rest of the family, but no empirical evidence, physical nor behavioral, exists to support that conclusion.