Dinner!

Dinner! ! !

Dinner.
Suddenly this has become (again) an important part of my dietary repertoire.
Tonight, I decided to use the yellow squash, zucchini, tomato and mushroom I'd purchased Monday after work. The meat to this dish was beef. Not filet, but a much less expensive cut of beef. One I was learning how to cook, how to manipulate, so as to get a tender mouth feel, a deep rich taste.

The meal -
begin with Plugra unsalted butter in my iron skillet and add a touch of Lucina olive oil. When the butter begins to sizzle, add the garlic (because everything tastes better with garlic). Lightly brown the garlic, then toss the meat into the mix. Sear the beef. Which means maybe three minutes total time in the skillet, really more like two minutes, with a lot of flipping around to keep from burning. Take the meat out, add the mushrooms, and a lot more butter, just a touch of oil to keep the butter from burning. The mushrooms take in the bulk of the butter, plumping up, filling out, becoming so tender, so juicy, it's practically criminal. Once the mushrooms have married to the butter, add the zucchini and yellow squash, touch more butter. I seasoned with white pepper, and cinnamon. It sounds crazy, I know, the cinnamon. Oh, but boys and girls, it was anything but, I promise. Let the squash simmer with the mushrooms for a few minutes, then add the fresh tomato. I used small vine-grown tomatoes, cut into quarters. As the tomato cooked down, I'd grab the skin and discard. No 'extra' in my pan! I turned down the heat, let everything simmer until the tomatoes were fully integrated into the dish. Now, to finish.

I opened a bottle of Ken Brown 2012 Nielsen Vineyard Pinot Noir - a young, impudent wine with a really round mouth feel, and just a hint of cinnamon - and liberally filled the skillet with this red wine. Heat turned back up, wine cooked down. Beef thrown back into the mix to absorb the wine flavor notes, and a few minutes later, presto! bingo! dinner was done.

Looking at the vegetables and meat in the pan had my mouth watering, but something was missing. Not wanting rice or pasta, I struggled with how to serve it. And then I opened my refrigerator, and there on the top shelf was a container of baby spinach. Of course! Serve this earthy goodness on top of greens, and grate fresh cheese - just a tad - over the mix.

All I have to say is this:  Oh.  My.  God.

SO damn good! So damn easy! So damn fast. 

I admit - I love food. It's a weakness of mine. And when it comes together in such a brilliant, healthy manner, well, I love it even more.

Here's to dinner!

Simple Food Made Simply

As y'all know, I truly, dearly, deeply love to cook. I cook for friends and family, and I'm finally learning to cook for me, too.  The one thing I don't do much of is shop. Put me in a grocery store and I'm like a mini tornado; all I want to do is get in and get out, wreaking as much damage to my budget along the way as possible.

I used to do 'meal planning', you know the sort I mean. Where you list out all the meals you're going to prepare for the next seven days, drive to the store with your 'organized by category' list - i.e., dairy, vegetables, meat, etc. - and slowly peruse the grocery aisles until every item on the list is checked off. And that is a fine and noble way to shop. Unless you happen to be me. I plan the meals, create my lists, dutifully shop to accommodate said lists, get home, unpack, and I'm ready for the week. Right? Oh, so very wrong. Let's just say I'd decided, on Saturday when I created the menus, wrote out my lists, did my shopping, and put all the food away, that Monday night was going to be lightly sauteed spinach, a grilled chicken breast, and some green beans. Great - two greens, a bit of protein, perfectly Atkins-balanced meal. Except Monday rolls around, I've had a long day, and the idea of eating anything even remotely healthy is enough to make me swear off both eating, and cooking, forever. So I order a large pizza, sausage, pepperoni, black olive. Large, you ask? For one person? Well, ever thrifty, I'll freeze most of it and take it out in two-piece increments to consume later. Except that I decide I don't want to eat the pizza alone and invite my neighbors over, and pretty soon the healthy and nutritious meal, which I've already paid for, if you recall, is a thing of the past, and beer, bourbon and pizza abound.

Ahem. Yes, so I rarely plan meals beyond, 'sure, I could eat that'. 

Last night, in the spirit of 'sure, I could eat that', I dug into my refrigerator. Rather dismal sight, the inside of my refrigerator. Eggs and butter are immediately visible. There is a red box that proclaims chocolate lie within. The box misrepresents - what lie within is EVER so much better than chocolate - what lie within is a cigar from my friend Peter. Water, two pitchers, rest on the bottom shelf. The door shelves hold pickles, olives, condiments, V-8 and half and half. That is about the extent of what is readily visible in my refrigerator. The meat drawer holds three cheeses - Monterey Jack, Asiago, and Romano - as well as thinly-sliced turkey breast, bacon, and pork tenderloin. The vegetable drawers hold one head of Romaine lettuce, a mostly-eaten head of iceberg lettuce, two zucchini, two yellow squash, green beans, and mushrooms. The bowl that holds things like garlic and onions and tomatoes has three tomatoes and three gloves of garlic and one scallion. From the meat and vegetable drawer, as well as the vegetable bowl, I need to create dinner. Oh - and even though I have both rice and rissotto, this is a no-starch dinner. (See the Atkins comment above.)

Grabbing my iron skillet, I pour about a teaspoon of olive oil into the pan, put the heat on medium, and plop about a teaspoon and a half of butter (lightly salted) into the oil. While the butter is melting, I grind fresh nutmeg into the pan, add basil and thyme and a dash of white pepper, turn the heat down just a touch, and slice the pork tenderloin into half-inch thick medallions. These go into the pan, searing both sides, and then come out. As the pork sears, the mushrooms get sliced. When the pork is done, more oil, more butter, and more of the spices go into the pan, and then the mushrooms get added to the lovely butter-spice blend. Cook down slightly, and as they cook, one each of the zucchini and yellow squash get chopped, added to the butter- mushroom-spice mix. A bit more butter, but not too much, stir around. Chop the three tomatoes, add to veggie mix, stir carefully. Turn the heat down even more, let tomatoes 'stew'. As they cook, I remove the skin when it falls from the meat of the tomato. I've yet to taste anything; instead, I'm going by smell and feel. The base is now rich in vegetable juices, grounded in the juice from the searing of the pork medallions. I put the seven medallions (yes, Tuck got a pork medallion mixed in with his dinner) into the vegetable mix, being sure the pork rests against the bottom of the skillet, and cover each piece with some of the veggies. Turning off the heat, I put a lid over the skillet so that the pork will finish cooking in the ambient heat.

I serve up three medallions with vegetables, grate fresh Asiago cheese over the mix, and sit down with a glass of (diet) Iced Tea at my table to enjoy the meal.

It was so good that I'm actually going to eat the leftovers tonight for dinner - something I rarely, if ever, do, unless it's pizza or Chinese that someone else made. 

Simple food, made simply .... 

Pieces and Parts

It's oft been said that 'home is where the heart is'. As I look around the huge room that encompasses work, reading, talking, eating, kitchen .... in short, life, I see echoes of everyone who has ever mattered to me. Just as people leave footprints on our hearts, so too do gifts leave footprints on our space.

I'm sitting in a chair my daughter and I found at an antique store in LA after breakfast one morning. This will always and forever more be 'Jordan's chair'. Beside that chair is a low table, music system tucked on the shelf. Atop the table is a beautiful bowl my mother made, flanked in the back by two hanging globes to shield a tealight candle, given to me by an ex-boss. Oh - the hanging globes are draped with initials - one has 'N', 'M', 'M', and the other has 'J', 'C'. One side is mine - Natalie, Misty, Matilda (both dogs now gone), the other is my daughter's - Jordan, Cali. We need to add initials - T for Tucker to mine, G for Gideon to Jordan's. And on the other side of the table is my father's chair, no longer a brown corduroy, now a gorgeous, supple red leather. In this one alcove I have father, mother, daughter. And this is only one little piece of my home. I look to the sitting area, see the hope chest I've had since forever, the same one Jordan's dad protected with about a million coats of shellac well before we were even married - and if anyone is doing the math, we were married in 1983. Making the hope chest appear even more rich, more sumptuous, is a rug given to me by my dear friends here in the Valley. The rug warms the entire room, pulls the eye, encourages one to sit, stay. Simple, life changing. Glancing upward at the walls, each mask tells a story - and most of the masks were given to me by friends and family. 

There is not one place the eye can land that doesn't resonate with someone's heart stamp.

Interestingly enough, the bedroom has but two pieces of artwork. One is a HUGE rendering of a woman, back to the viewer, draped in a sheet that covers her hips. Her hair is piled atop her head, and you see a bit of her profile. It's primarily the back, the lean length of thigh, that the viewer sees. It's beautiful - I fell in love with her and coveted her for a year before the purchase was finally made. And now she adorns the bedroom wall, the first thing you see when you walk into my apartment, since the bedroom door is always open. The second piece of artwork is a photo taken by a friend of mine entitled 'Coyote, Tree, Moon'. Elegant in its stark simplicity, the light that perfect twilight, leaching out of the sky, darkening against the earth.

Home. Heart.

A painting of a tulip, my favorite flower, given me by a talented writer friend - this gorgeous tulip was painted in one night. And, across the wall from the painting, is a tulip given me by my daughter, a tulip which sat on my desk in Cleveland, a tulip that, when I would look at it, I saw not the deep red of the tulip, but the brilliant smile of my blond daughter. 

Home. Heart.

A drawing of a woman in a red dress, leaping, exultant, above the earth - given to me by the same loving friends who allowed my sweet Mist to be buried on their property. She entitled it 'The Point of No Return'. It was given to me shortly after my second divorce. And when I look at her, I see joy, excitement, passion. 

Home. Heart.

We can't even GO into the kitchen ..... nearly every single thing in my kitchen, from silverware all the way through to my pots and pans, has a story. I could bore you to tears with the stories. And yet, when I take out my HUGE iron skillet, the same HUGE iron skillet that my mother and father used to prepare countless meals for the six of us kids growing up, it's not just that meal I think about. It's all the meals that came before it, all the cupboards in which that iron skillet has been nestled. And when I take out the hand-held blender I have, I always smile. It's probably one of the very first models ever made - and it's given to me by the queen of microwave cooking. I kid you not, this woman can create a gourmet feast using only the microwave. For one such as I, who loves to cook, loves the entire sensuous aspect of cooking, from choosing the foods, to the cutting, slicing, dicing, to the beginning notes of butter and oil heating up, all the way through to the finished product on the plate, I never thought I'd say microwave cooking was good. But when she does it, it's amazing.

Home. Heart.

Pieces and parts, whose sum is ever so much greater than the whole of the parts.