I often plan to make stuff on Sunday or Monday that’s easy to take for lunch all week but don’t always get around to it. School starts tomorrow and we’re still restocking our larder (okay, fridge) after two weeks away and I threw together some super lazy super easy spinach hand pies, mostly out of stuff we have on hand. Voila!

I used 1/2 a big yellow onion, sauteed in a blob of butter (see above). I added garlic, dried oregano and then a package of frozen spinach to that and let it cook until the spinach was softened and some moisture cooked off. I turned it off. Meanwhile, I took some Trader Joe’s puff pastry and rolled it out a little flatter and a little more oblong, so that each sheet could be cut into 1/6ths. (Squares.) I buttered a 12-muffin tin and stuck each little pastry square down into the muffinhole.

To the slightly cooled spinach, I added a package (small) of feta, crumbled three eggs and some black pepper. I folded the edges over and drizzled/brushed a little more butter around on top. I baked that whole thing until it was nice and brown (25 min?) ta 400.

David ate one warm and declared it delicious, and the rest will be tasty room temp for school lunch this week. It’s not the super scratchiest cooking, but it kinda looks good and it definitely tastes good and the prep time was pretty short.

It was cold. I had guilt about wanting to turn on the heat in July. I wanted leftovers.

The Good Life Market a block away on Cortland has had big roasting chickens lately, so I got this one.

Seven and a half pounds! Yay! I went outside to the garden and picked a fistful of all the herbs we have. (Rosemary, sage, thyme, oregano, Italian parsley and mint– I was verrrry sparing with the mint.) I chopped all those up and mixed with olive oil, some ground medium-heat New Mexico chilis and ground mild mustard powder. Oh, and black pepper. Rubbed it all over the chicken, inside and out. Into the chickenhole went a quartered lemon and some onion hunks. I roasted it at 400, breast down for an hour and fifteen minutes, and then breast up (having flipped the bird) for about 45.

Meanwhile, I roasted purple potatoes with butter and rosemary and black pepper in foil. (For the last half hour of chicken roasting time, which gave them about 45 minutes to cook once I took the chicken out to rest.)

To finish off our hearty wint… errrr, light summer meal, I quartered a bunch of big brussels sprouts and coarsely chopped a red onion, tossed with olive oil and roasted them in a baking pan covered in foil. (For about the same time as the potatoes. They got super creamy, nutty and sweet, and the onions just caramelized.)

I always eat some dark meat parts while the skin is still crispy, and then use the breast meat for salads, sandwiches, general snacking.

I impulse bought some lamb shanks (not anywhere exotic– Safeway) and I got four, because having the oven on for as long as I liked to braise seemed like a waste.

Anyway, they are pretty easy. In a dutch-ovenesque pot, I browned the shanks on all sides after rubbing them in a mix of kind of random spices from the spice cabinet: marjoram, thyme, black pepper, ground chili, crushed bay and tiny bits each of orange rind, cinnamon and allspice.

Then I added an onion to the mix, and then poured in about a cup of red wine (I like the highly drinkable screwcap Perrin Cotes du Rhone they sell at TJ if I don’t have some leftover wine sitting around) an onion, some garlic, and a can of chopped tomatoes. I added water to almost cover the shanks, and a few sprigs of fresh rosemary.

I put the cover on the pot and ignored it for about 3 1/2 hours somewhere between 275-300 degrees.

There was some whole thing after I read Heat about nine hour polenta, but this time I just added 1 c polenta to 6 c water, and cooked that until it thickened, added a cup of milk and some salt and cooked it a little longer til it seemed very creamy. This took about 90 minutes.

Turned that off and sauteed/braised the chard for about 10 minutes, finishing it with a little balsamic.

Heaped it all into the bowl above and had a nice fall-aparty lamb shanky dinner, with the rest of the tasty screwcap wine.

Despite all the long cooking times, the shanks were super-easy and you could do a much quicker polenta or a root vegetable mash if you don’t feel like stirring for so long. Braise, my friends, braise!

David is in Las Vegas. I am home feasting on things he doesn’t love. Of course, just getting by on the things he’s not as fond of felt awfully healthy. (Yams, quinoa pilaf, winter squash, garbanzos, cauliflower.) What to do? Kayo said I should make an aviation, and since I a.) had all the ingredients and b.) know I should listen to a fellow slatherer (except for during some unfortunate Shoes ‘n’ Booze incidents) I made one.

About 2 oz gin
and 1/2 oz Creme De Violette
and a little less than that of Maraschino liqueuer
juice of half a lemon (as long as it’s a juicy one.)
Shake shake shake shake shake over ice.
Strain into martini (or similar) glass.

I started out making Sensations, which I learned of as a variation of this drink at the Orbit Room here in SF. They had muddled mint and no creme de violette, but were delicious. More summery than this older-school (old-schooler?) cocktail, which does come out a kind of funny grey color with the creme de violette.

This makes up for the gross chore I made up for myself to do today (while procrastinating something non-gross, of course) and it is my understanding that the lemon juice will prevent scurvy.

I have been on a big winter squash binge the last couple weeks. I think it’s David’s least favorite food, so I have been roasting them up, halved, and eating them for lunch. I’ve gone through a few acorn squashes, a few butternuts and delicatas, but at the farmers market last Wednesday (Civic Center, SF) they had sugar pie pumpkins for a buck each, so here’s one of those.

The hot and cold thing started when I had some curtido (vinegary Salvadoran slaw) leftover (From the Alemany Farmers market) and was looking for something to stick inside my squash-hole after roasting up a butternut one day. It was so tasty! The almost pickley slaw, cold and crunchy, mixed with the hot roasted squash. After that, I went actively filling my squash-holes with salad.

The one above is arugula and red butter lettuce dressed with olive oil and red wine vinegar. There’s a shallot in it, which I let sit in the vinegar a few minutes before I tossed the oiled greens into the bowl. I used a carrot peeler to shave some comte into it. I had planned to use parm, but alas, the parm larder was bare.

After my first few hot-cold squash dishes, I went to Serpentine (a great restaurant in Dogpatch) and saw a salad that was maple-cooked pumpkin with arugula, pumpkin seeds and ricotta salata. In their version, the pumpkin (actually kabocha, I think) was served warm under the bed of greens with the ricotta salata microplaned into a fluffy topping. It was one of the best salads I’ve had in a restaurant ever. The squash was not overly mapley, just a hint of sweetness.

Anyway, go forth and fill your hot squash-hole with cold stuff.

I got some salumi, cheese and mustard, and I like to make little rolls so people can make tiny sandwiches, and on a whim, I decided to snip faces into them. I just used a plain old white yeasted frenchish bread recipe (with added rosemary) and then once I divided the dough into tiny rounds (about 1 1/2 ounces each) I let them rise, and when I turned on the oven to preheat, I used scissors to snip two straight lines for eyes, and one bigger line for the mouth. depending on whether I tugged up or down on the mouth-snip, they smiled or frowned a little.

Then two dozen (mixed) oysters. Well, that was for two of us. Then we thought about what to have next. My friend ordered another half dozen oysters, his preferred variety. While I was deciding between a prawn cocktail and a shrimp salad, the people next to us had a tiny plate full of– I don’t know– something extra-tasty looking.

I was all, what is THAT? Why, sardine sashimi, of course:

I said, I’ll have one of those. I didn’t even order it without capers, despite my caper issues (thanks, Mom) because it looked so perfect. The guy serving us (they are all super cute, by the way, and if they aren’t super cute, they are super friendly and charming which ends up turning them super cute) brought over two big sardines to show me and then went off to sashimi-ize them. They were served slathered in good olive oil and with little bits of shallot, capers and black pepper on there. It was really really good.

Then the guy next to us on the other side said, I’ll have one of those.

Yesterday Miranda (godchild) and I went shoe shopping. I am to be her big-footed mentor, I guess. After a few fruitless stops, we were hungry, so we went to Café De La Presse for lunch. Our usual godmeal is sushi, but I’m trying to push her food boundaries a little.

We sat at a tall table in the bar, which was fine. Good views of the downtown bustle. MIranda got a burger and they HAD NO FRIES. They did have roasted potatoes, which were fine after the initial impression of having gotten a half a plate of olives. And no, she did not eat any of the vegetable matter pictured here (unless you count the ketchup) but I did.

I had the Salade aux Petits Lardons, which was the usual frisée with a poached egg and lardons, only it also had bacon! The egg was perfect and round which I still can’t do. Not only did it have lardons and bacon, but it also seemed to have both croutons and… bagel chips? That’s what they seemed like. Maybe micro-toasts. The server told me they were out of rosé by the glass, but then they poured a glass for someone else at the bar. I somehow got the impression that this server was not actually sure what rosé was. That part was not typical.

Anyway, we had food Miranda would eat, and then we were strong to go in search of more great big shoes. (We found a pair we ordered in another color after we got home.)

This slatherer seated in row 33 had notable mustard use.

Okay, so it doesn’t look so good HERE, but just wait.

At Range on Valencia Street, I had a prune and walnut ice cream with a chocolate souffle. That made me talk about prune ice cream with Kayo, and that made me make prune ice cream today! (Well, I made the custard yesterday.)

I looked up some recipes, but the first one had ten egg yolks which sounded… extreme. So after reading about various versions, I made this one up.

Prune & Cognac Ice Cream

4-5 egg yolks
1 1/2 cups moist pitted prunes
1 pt heavy cream
1 c half and half
1 c milk
1 c sugar (I used 3/4 white and 1/4 brown)
1 vanilla bean
a bit of lemon zest
dash of salt
some cognac
optional: some more cognac

Pour a shot of cognac over 1 cup of the prunes and the vanilla bean (sliced partway through so the seeds can get out) then pour boiling water over them and put them aside while you make the custard.

Heat the milk and half & half in a saucepan until right before it boils. Turn off.

Whisk the sugar and the egg yolks together. While whisking constantly, slowly add the milk mixture to the egg mixture. Return to the pot and cook over a low temperature. Ice cream recipes always say to do this until it forms a coating on a metal spoon, but I have yet to actually figure that one out. Don’t let it boil! I cook it to about 170 degrees. Remove from heat.

Remove the vanilla bean from the prunes. Drain the water/cognac off them. With a handblender, moosh them all up into a prune puree. Add the heavy cream to this and moosh it up some more. It will become a hideous tasty paste.

Fold the hideous tasty paste into the custard. Stir in a pinch of salt. (Ah HA! A trick! Previously I called for a dash.) Zest just a little bit of a lemon and stir that in.

Allow to chill fully.

Stir in an ounce of cognac, and freeze it in your ice cream maker.

While it is freezing, chop up the remaining prunes and spread them out on a sheet in the freezer to freeze a little.

The ice cream will come out pretty soft-servish due to the booze, so when it’s done, scoop it into whatever you are scooping it into and check it every 45 minutes or so for a couple of hours, fluffing it and scraping it off the edges. That’s right. I said fluff it. During one of these fluffings, fold in the folded prune bits. This would be a good time to add nuts if you wanted to add nuts. I didn’t add nuts.

Okay, so this ice cream is really delicious but I did have an epiphany when tasting it: It’s like really super swank rum raisin.