Dinner
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Herring, Beet, and Potato Salad
Last summer, in what feels like an eternity ago, I visited a friend in London. We spent the days roaming the city, eating goat cheese and lox on baguette, and browsing through second-hand bookstores. In one of these bookstores, I spotted Luisa Weiss’s My Berlin Kitchen. Although my next flight was on EasyJet (which has notoriously terrible limits on carry-on luggage), I knew I had to buy the memoir – and somehow fit it into my already overly-full backpack.
This summer I pulled out the memoir to reread it, and one recipe stuck out: a potato salad with herring and beets. I don’t know what drew me to this, since I was never a huge herring fan. But the recipe kept calling to the Eastern European Jew in me, so one day I grabbed some beets and decided to make it. And I’m so glad I did. This salad is perfect for a hot summer day: filling, yet summery, sweet and a little salty, with just the right amout of crunch. Every time it has been above 90 degrees this summer, I find myself craving this potato salad. For the herring skeptics out there, it’s really good without the herring. But if you eat fish, please try it with the herring. I don’t think that you’ll regret it.
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Turkey Meatballs
When I started this blog, I promised myself that I wouldn’t rely on too many of Deb Perelman’s recipes from Smitten Kitchen. But here’s the problem: because her recipes are perfect, for years they’ve been the core of my cooking. Whenever I needed a recipe – for dinner, a picnic, or a party – I’d turn to Smitten Kitchen, and Deb always delivered. These meatballs are no exception. They are a simple, do-ahead, hearty meal that became a staple for me during law school. Delicious over pasta, they are just as good on their own – and even better with garlic bread.
The original recipe calls for ground beef and pork, but I like to use ground turkey. I’m sure the beef/pork mix is delicious, but I’m not a huge fan of ground pork and it’s never tasted quite as good with beef as with turkey. So I stand by my choice of ground turkey – with a caveat. These meatballs are good when you first make them, but to truly enjoy them as they‘re meant to be enjoyed, make them a day ahead of time. The flavors mix overnight in a way that is magical.
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Gazpacho
Gazpacho is one of the true joys of summer, along with picnics in the park and reading on the beach. As July begins and real summer hits Chicago – hot and humid, and miraculously, this year perfectly sunny – it’s time for gazpacho. For years my mother made this recipe and I always loved it. When I finally asked her for it, I realized just how simple it is. You chop up some vegetables and mix them together with liquid, and then wait for the soup to get cold. That’s it. But despite its simplicity, there’s something special about it – especially when you add the crunch of the croutons to it.
I’ll stop raving about the gazpacho and get to the main ingredient: tomatoes. I know that I’ve already written about tomatoes and that there are a lot of ingredients I haven’t yet discussed. But it’s the middle of summer and a great time for socially distanced picnics, so I want everyone to be able to enjoy this recipe. For this post, I focus on tomatoes from Italy, which is a large producer of processed tomatoes. In 2018 Italy exported 1.74 billion Euros worth of processed tomatoes – 53 percent canned tomatoes, 35 percent tomato paste, and the remaining 12 percent of tomato sauce.
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Mediterranean Fish Stew
At some point during my childhood, fish stew became the dish that my father and I cooked together. This was always an extensive process: we’d buy or make fish stock, which was either bland or way too fishy; we’d cook bacon, chop up all the vegetables, add everything to the pot; and then we’d step back and wait. We’d taste it, realize it was all wrong (often too fishy), and separate the whole thing out into two pots and more or less start over. Somehow it always ended up tasting good in the end, although I still don’t understand how.
More recently, we’ve cooked various Mediterranean-style fish stews. This recipe is the most recent and, in my view, by far the best. I’ve simplified the original recipe so it can be made with household spices, added raisins to contrast with the saltiness from the anchovies, and chosen to use chicken stock instead of water, which some may see as sacrilegious. I don’t care; it’s my kind of fish stew. (I’ve also added shrimp, because what’s a fish stew without shrimp.)
Cod is the center of this stew. A bottom-dwelling fish, cod was once everywhere in the Atlantic; it’s said that you used to be able to walk across the ocean on the backs of cod. But after centuries of fishing, by the 1990s the stock on the North American side of the Atlantic had been drastically reduced – off Canada down to 1 percent of its former level, while on the US side down to around 3 or 4 percent.
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Chickpea and Spinach Shakshuka
Last summer I was studying for the bar and decided to stay in my law school apartment – with no air conditioning. It was fine for the first four weeks, but in the few days before I moved out the real New England summer hit. It was in the mid-90s and humid, and my apartment seemed to suck in all the heat from the street. I dripped with sweat just sitting in my kitchen, as I re-learned contract law and tried to understand what a secured transaction was. One night, desperate for decent food but too lazy to go buy any, I looked around my kitchen and found a jar of tomato sauce, a can of chickpeas, and frozen spinach. I went to my computer, googled “tomato sauce chickpeas spinach” and this recipe popped up. In that moment, I was hoping for a mediocre dinner and instead I got this.
This is a simple recipe. It’s made using a jar of tomato sauce (for my European friends, I’d suggest cooking down about two cans of tomatoes into a sauce with onions and basil), chickpeas, and spinach – the perfect pandemic dinner. But despite its simplicity, the milk provides a creaminess that makes the tomato sauce richer. And let’s be honest, yolky eggs in just about anything are delicious.
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Sweet and Spicy Chicken
I take no credit for this recipe – I straight up stole it from my father. He found it (in this blog, which really deserves all the credit), he made it, and he made it again (and again) when we kept asking for it. (Also: how did my father end up on a food blog??). It’s everything I want from a simple chicken dish: sweet and spicy, bright and tasty, with a little bit of sauce that tastes great on everything (rice, potatoes, the salad next to the chicken on the plate). To be fair, the sugar that goes into the sauce may have something to do with how good it is. It also helps that the chicken is tenderized by being beaten with a mallet (or an ice cream scoop or a rolling pin). In these pandemic times when we are all still stuck at home, pounding chicken breasts is also a great way to let out some pent-up frustration. (But be careful – I was a bit too enthusiastic and chipped a plate).
I wanted to use this recipe now because I think it’s important to talk about labor conditions in the meatpacking industry during this pandemic. The media has covered the issue pretty well, but it’s still worth emphasizing the risks inherent in working in these plants – both during the pandemic and before.
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Thai-Inspired Shrimp and Vegetable Soup
I stumbled across this soup during the early days of the pandemic and instantly fell in love with it. I was cooking it while on Zoom with friends one Saturday night when, from off screen, they heard a “yummmmm, wow!” as I stirred and tasted it. Still, even as I was tasting it, I realized it was missing something – vegetables. And so, the spinach and peas made their way into the soup, never to leave. Without these vegetables, it’s a good soup with a warm, rich broth – and shrimp! But with them, it’s a full and filling meal (plus it’s helped to convince my mother that I do, in fact, eat vegetables). Because I was cooking this during the pandemic with limited grocery shopping, I never did add the cilantro. I assume it tastes great here and would certainly add it if I had any.
While I could write about coconut milk or garlic or some other ingredient, for this first post I want to focus on the soup’s focal point: shrimp. I love shrimp. Shrimp with cocktail sauce, in linguine, in soup, really in and with anything and everything. And I’m not alone. On average, Americans eat 4.4 pounds of shrimp per year. Although canned tuna used to be the seafood most eaten by Americans, 2001 shrimp took the lead and has held that title ever since. We often think of shrimp as something fancy and upscale. In reality it has become a staple of the American diet, in large part based on cheap – and often sketchy – imports.
