smitten kitchen

burrowed blueberries
baked for an eternity
demolished quickly

i like mine busy
onion, celery, pickles
we crunch, contemplate

red smoky spicy
joy, the broiler and i have
found pork chop heaven

from silver palates
summer pasta salad for
the ages, also: me

eggplant gift, curry
craving, watery and dull
better luck next time

artichoke obsessed
i cannot count the ways, but
just added one more

I’ve gotten behind again, and daunted by the task of catching up on six recipes at once, I have resorted to Poetry 101. Turns out, writing Haiku is addictive. Soon, I’ll be speaking less and choosing my words carefully, and Alex will demand of all of you, “Who is she and what did you do with my Debbie?”

[Oh, and for the love of all that is tasty, if you’re actually looking for some solid food-gazing poetry, this is a far more eloquent place to start.]

Have a great weekend! I hope to reemerge in a day or so with some completely over-the-top birthday decadence.

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Have you ever eaten, like, a lot of cabbage over a few week period? I mean, a lot a lot. More cabbage than most people eat in two years, a lot. Well, thank goodness my cabbage-patching was not for nothing as my second NPR Kitchen Window column is up today about, you guessed it, coleslaw. (The first one, in March, was about Russian Zakuski.)

I have to admit that I am particularly pleased with these recipes, though I know that it is silly that it should warrant a confessional. On this site, I have published a couple coleslaw variations over the last year (an Indian-spiced, updated classic, and a green onion version), but I knew there was so much more out there. This article forced me to attack some of the ideas I have had brewing, though I simply can’t condone eating them in the frequency and quantity that we have.

Recipes on NPR include:

• Blue Cheese Coleslaw
• Napa Cabbage and Sesame Seed Slaw
• Spicy Radicchio Slaw with Pecans
• Pickled Coleslaw (a.k.a. my take on Zabar’s Health Salad I promised you way back when)

May your coleslaws never lack luster again!

Elsewhere: Coleslaw: You Could be a Star

Update, wholly unrelated: You know you have truly *arrived* (I kid) when your hosting service emails you to tell you that you’re getting too fat and they had to air lift you to another server. I’m not sure if anyone else would have noticed, but load times have been very sluggish lately, and this site has been down more than once, not including the time Alex and I decided it would be fun to delete it altogether. I am hoping this will be the end of the problems. And now, back to the roughage!

Adding to my infinite list of gastronomical oddities–I consider meat a side dish, cilantro tastes like dirt to me, I don’t drink tea and the only seafood I can stand is mussels–Alex and I finally ate at Mario Batali’s heroical West Village gastropub, The Spotted Pig, two weekends ago and all I’ve been able to talk about since were the salads.

With house-cured bresaola, proscuitto and various homemade sausages on the menu, it’s not named after swine for nothing. And while these are not to be overlooked, the salads were something of a symphony. I’ve said before that I don’t go to fuss-worthy restaurants because I fancy myself some sort of in-the-know foodie; I go for inspiration. Restaurants that don’t give me any new ideas for the Smitten Kitchen rarely get revisits.

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Remember when I said that I have a theory about the weather, that it is mocking you and waiting for you to snap? Well, this is me throwing my hands in the air. Mock away, I say, have your fun. Just give me my back an unsticky neck and the energy level that comes with not being wiped out, the rest of the evening cancelled, after a 1.3 mile walk home.

I know I sound like I have the coping skills of an infant, and I’m okay with this as well. These are not times for pride; I have no expectations that I will come away from this summer looking like any kind of champion. I am not enough of a martyr to grin and bear it, and I am fortunate enough to be friends with people who have no expectation that anyone should.

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My favorite side dish takes five minutes to make. It has only three steps. No garlic or shallots get minced, nothing gets topped with butter, and shockingly, it involves no truffle salt. It has only two ingredients, and the only reason I’ve held out this long telling you about it is because when I see a recipe that swears it will combine two ingredients in an entirely new and innovative way, I roll my eyes.

But this doesn’t mean that you should be limited by my jaded expectations. In fact, I’d be spectacularly sad if you were, because this is wonderful. Fantastic. It’s so fresh but deep, so simple but eloquent. I have craved it incessantly this week, and am certain I could eat it morning, noon and night.

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