Salad of Bitter Lettuces with Avocado and Parmesan

I used to have a community garden at a park near our apartment--a ten-foot-by-ten-foot plot, set in a row of like-sized plots, each bordered and separated from the others by a chain-link fence. It was hot there--the nearby apartment buildings blocked the trade winds--but the mosquitoes, bumblebees and carpenter bees, white butterflies, and hungry birds that frequented the garden didn’t seem to mind. My husband did most of the heavy work--adding soil to what was basically a raised-bed, mixing in EM solution and fish-oil fertilizer, and patching fence holes. I tended to daily chores--planting, watering, weeding, and harvesting. Not that there was an awful lot to harvest. We were able to grow basil, cilantro, Swiss chard, now and then a tomato, rosemary, dill, broccoli (leaves at any rate; somehow no flowering heads developed), and lilikoi. Lilikoi--or passion fruit--was our best crop. Its sturdy green vine covered the fence and fruited wonderfully. For some reason, the birds left the fruit alone. Every year for several years, we gathered about a hundred lilikois. We ate them with yogurt; made pies, salad dressings, and ice-cream toppings with them; and froze what we couldn’t use right away. Aside from the lilikoi, the garden produced enough herbs and edible leaves (young broccoli leaves are particularly good) for a number of dinner salads. One evening I found my husband--not known as a salad lover--leaning over the sink, salad bowl in his hand, picking out and eating the last leaves. “They’re so good,” he said, “and we worked so hard to grow them.”

We no longer have the garden, but we recently joined a community-supported-agriculture group. Our first box came yesterday! It had no lilikois in it, but there were various leafy greens to eat raw and cooked, a few Tahitian limes, and a Hayden mango. Those will make wonderful salads too.

The salad given here is one of our favorites. Any lettuce will do--even a mix of sweet and bitter. The recipe is more a guideline than anything. I sometimes put a fried egg on top; chicken or seafood (or breadcrumbs or toasted nuts) would also be good.

For two people, you need a small head of baby Romaine lettuce; a quarter or half head (depending on the size) of radicchio; two shallots, minced; one avocado, diced and squirted with lemon or lime; and two to three tablespoons of grated Parmesan. Wash the salad leaves, roll them in a clean dishcloth, and place them in the refrigerator while you make the dressing.

Put the minced shallots and diced avocado with lemon into a wide bowl. Mix together two tablespoons of olive oil, one tablespoon of white balsamic vinegar, salt and paprika to taste, a dash of Worcestershire sauce, and a quarter teaspoon of Dijon mustard. Pour the mixture over the shallots and avocado. Add the chilled salad leaves, sprinkle on the grated Parmesan, toss well, and serve, with or without the optional egg.

Here are most of the ingredients for the salad:

The avocado and dressing in progress:

The salad ready to toss:

And with an egg on top:

Sunset Scallops

Our good friend E, a colleague of my husband’s, has many talents. He is, among other things, a biologist who studies octopus, a nature printer in the Japanese style, an excellent cook, and a cheerful, kind fellow who is lots of fun to be around. Not long after I first met him, E came to Hawaii to go on an oceanographic cruise with my husband. The day he arrived, dinner was to be hotdog enchiladas, my husband’s specialty (basically, wieners and refried pinto beans wrapped in flour tortillas, topped with enchilada sauce, and smothered in cheddar cheese). I’d forgotten to buy wine or beer on the way home from work, but there was a bottle of California “champagne” in the refrigerator and E offered to make a fruit salad. I figured dinner was in hand. Then I saw E’s salad. It was a work of art--too pretty to eat--but we devoured it in no time, along with the hotdog enchiladas and the champagne.

E and our mutual late friend K (of the Mangold steak recipe featured earlier on this blog) came up with the basic recipe below while working in Banyuls-sur-mer, France, where mussels are plentiful. They called it Moules de Banyuls. In Honolulu, good mussels are hard to find, but, as I’ve mentioned before, there are nice frozen, wild-catch scallops, so I use those instead. If you can get good mussels in the shell, double the weight of mussels, clean and cook them (discarding any that don’t open), shuck them, and then place the cooked mussels singly on an intact half shell, top with the sauce, and broil for a minute or two until bubbly. The sauce is really delicious. I want to try it with mild white fish fillets like halibut or sole, with chicken cutlets, and, when I can find good ones, with moules. The adapted recipe follows (with apologies to E for liberties taken).

To serve 4 to 6 as an appetizer, or 2 to 3 as a main course, you need:

1½ pounds of scallops (without shells), 4 tablespoons olive oil, 2 to 3 cloves minced garlic (about 1 tablespoon), 1½ cups finely sliced green onions, 1½ cups diced fresh tomatoes (or a 15-ounce can of diced tomatoes), 1 tablespoon finely chopped cilantro, ½ teaspoon saffron, salt and pepper to taste, Italian herbs to taste (oregano, thyme, rosemary), and ¼ cup heavy cream.

To prepare the sauce, heat the olive oil in a medium-size skillet. Saute the garlic and onions at medium-high heat until soft. Add the diced tomatoes, cilantro, pinch of saffron and other desired seasonings. Continue cooking at medium-low heat for about 10 to 15 minutes. Add the cream during the last few minutes of cooking. When the sauce is done, remove it from the heat and set it aside in a bowl. This stage can be done 2 to 3 hours ahead of time and the bowl placed in the refrigerator until ready to use. Makes about 2 cups of sauce.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees Farenheit. Place the raw scallops in an ovenproof dish, top with the tomato-cream sauce, and bake for 5 to 10 minutes, until the sauce is bubbly and the scallops are cooked through. Take care not to overcook the scallops. Serve as an appetizer with crusty bread to soak up the sauce or as a main course with rice.

Here are the basic ingredients:

The tomato-cream sauce on the stove:

And the Sunset Scallops ready to serve:

Petrale Sole

For a time I lived in Monterey, California. I was studying nursing and working part time at a seafood restaurant. The restaurant was in a Victorian house built by a ship captain named Perry, whose wife, it was said, used to pace the long seaward-facing balcony as she watched for the captain’s return. Now the house is a museum, but when I lived in Monterey a husband-and-wife team operated a restaurant there. The husband kept the books and managed the staff; the wife, E, ran the kitchen. I waited tables. Late weekday afternoons and early Saturday mornings, in the upstairs dining room, I polished glassware and silver, folded napkins so that they appeared tufted like birds, and set flowers on white-clothed tables. It was calming work, often done after a day of classes or hospital training, and for the most part in view of that long balcony walk overlooking Monterey Bay.

E was a marvelous cook. One Saturday for my lunch, she pan-fried Petrale sole bought that morning at fishermen’s wharf. I told her I didn’t like fish; she said I would like this one. And I did. It tasted sweet and fresh and smelled like the ocean. Years later in Honolulu, I came upon fresh Petrale sole flown in from California and brought some home. E prepared her sole simply--dusting it with flour, frying it in olive oil, and squeezing fresh lemon onto it before serving. I complicate mine a little, dipping the fillets in beaten egg (after dusting with flour), rolling them in cracker crumbs, and then frying them in olive oil.  My sole is not as delicious, not as fresh, as the sole E prepared for me that day, but it is still delightful. I look forward to having it whenever I find the fish in the market.

For two or three people, you need 1 to 1 ½ pound Petrale sole fillets (Dover sole is good too), two tablespoons flour, two beaten eggs, a half package Italian-style crushed salt-and-pepper crackers, two tablespoons olive oil, and fresh lemon or lime. Wash and dry the fillets. Dust them with the flour, dip in the beaten eggs, and turn each side of the fillets onto a dish holding the crushed crackers, pressing to coat the cracker crumbs to the fillets. Fry the fillets over medium-high heat for 2 to 3 minutes each side, until they are golden brown and cooked through. Do not overcook. Serve with the lemon or lime slices, tartar sauce (if you like), and a salad.

Here are most of the ingredients:

The fillets in the pan:

And ready to serve:

Cherry-pecan Baguettes

In the mid 1990s, while staying with my husband for six weeks in Horta on the Azorean island of Faial, I had trouble finding good bread. The town was bustling with European Union money--new houses, new jobs, new cars, trucks, and motorcycles. Before this time most people baked bread at home, and the local bakeries hadn’t yet caught up with demand. Our friend and my husband’s colleague, H, who lived in Horta, had trouble too and would tip us off if she found a good loaf or a package of nice papa seco rolls somewhere. One weekend we stayed across the channel on Pico Island at mutual friends’ vacant cottage (it was just down the road from H and her husband’s cottage) where I found a loaf of homemade bread in the freezer. I’m sorry to say we ate the bread--it was delicious--and the only salve to my conscience was we gave half the loaf to H.

Back in Horta I tried a pizza-dough baguette recipe from Rosie Daley’s In The Kitchen With Rosie, but the yeast and flour were stale, the oven heat was irregular, and my baguettes failed to rise. We ate them anyway. When we returned to Honolulu, I tried bread recipes by food writers Edward Espe Brown, Cass Castagnola, Alain Coumant, Michael Pollan, Chad Robertson, Laurel Robertson and Bronwen Godfrey, again Rosie Daley, and others. Slowly by slowly, I came up with a recipe for baguettes that works for me. I hope it will work for you too.

To make four cherry-pecan baguettes the ingredients are: 1 tablespoon dried yeast, 1 tablespoon honey, 1 tablespoon fine sea salt, 4 tablespoons olive oil, 2 cups whole-wheat flour, 4 cups unbleached white flour, 1 cup full-fat Greek yogurt, 1 ½ cups water, ¾ to 1 cup chopped pecans, and ¾ to 1 cup dried cherries, soaked for 30 minutes and drained well. You can use any nut or dried fruit you like, or for a savory version perhaps rosemary leaves, Parmesan cheese, or chopped olives. Or you can add nothing at all--the baguettes are excellent plain. You can also make them with all white flour if you wish. They will be lighter, but still tasty and with a nice yogurt-y tang.

Place the yogurt in a large bowl and let it come to room temperature. Add to the yogurt the yeast, honey, water, and two cups whole-wheat flour and mix well. Add the olive oil and salt and mix again. Then add the unbleached white flour, 3 cups at first, and the last cup as needed. Mix to form the dough, turn the dough onto a floured board, and knead for 5 or 10 minutes, adding flour as necessary to keep the dough from sticking. Roll the dough into a ball, put it into an oiled bowl, and cover the bowl with plastic wrap.

Let the dough rise 1 to 1 ½ hours, or until doubled in bulk, then place it again on a floured board. Knead the cherries and pecans into the dough (this may feel awkward--it does for me--but just add the fruit and nuts little by little and work them in as best you can; it’s hard to go wrong). Now with a knife or dough cutter, divide the dough into four equal parts. Using a rolling pin or round-sided glass, roll each part out to a roughly ½ inch thick rectangle, then roll up to form a baguette. Place the baguettes seam side down on a large baking pan lined with oiled parchment paper. With a sharp knife make crosswise slashes on the top of the baguettes (some people recommend making the slashes right before putting the bread into the oven, but when I did that my bread collapsed). Cover the baguettes with a damp cloth and let them rise 20 to 30 minutes.

Bake in a preheated 450-degree Fahrenheit oven (or 425-degree convection oven) for 25 to 30 minutes. For a crisper crust, sprinkle the baguettes with water before putting them into the oven, or place an empty pan below the baking rack and fill it with a cup of water to create steam during baking.

Here is the dough rising:

Here are the baguettes ready for the oven:

And fresh from the oven and cooling on a rack: