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 Welcome to Tuesday Recipe — so called because you can sign up here to have a simple recipe emailed to your inbox (almost) every Tuesday and because Tuesday Recipe has the same initials I do (you can find out information about me, Tori Ritchie, here too). Sign up in the box at right to join. It's free and it's fun. Here's what's cooking this week:
tuesday january 31, 2012
I’m not happy about it. The 49ers should be in the Super Bowl this Sunday. Between their overtime loss in the NFC championship and Stanford’s overtime loss in the Fiesta Bowl, I’m very much looking forward to baseball season.
However, if I were to watch the Super Bowl, this is what I’d snack on and it’s what we snacked on while we watched that wretched game two weeks ago. The dip cheered up our group considerably; it’s addictive in the way most dips are, but it’s healthier than guacamole or anything sour cream–based. In fact, it’s sort of a super food if you look at the ingredients. That figures, since I got the recipe from a doctor (who suggested white beans in place of kidney beans—thank you, Jen) who got it from another doctor who is a triathlete. They told me it’s of Georgian (as in the former Soviet Republic, not Newt’s home state) origin, but I found a similar bean dip called “Lubia” in a Persian cookbook. I think I’ll ponder this cross-cultural provenance while the rest of you watch the game this weekend. I just can’t face it.
to print this recipe, click here
tuesday january 24, 2012
The smartest bit of healthy eating advice I’ve heard lately is the simplest: eat something green at every meal. Surely we can do that. Breakfast is covered (green smoothies, remember?). Lunch = crunchy salads (lettuce on your sandwich doesn’t count, sorry). Dinner = Swiss chard, kale, spinach, etc, etc, etc. That’s not so hard.
But why not cook the green right in with the meat? Vietnamese beef with watercress or braised chicken with escarole are two good examples. And come to think of it, this Moroccan chicken tagine qualifies as a greenie, too. It’s packed with cilantro and Italian parsley (from my garden, ‘natch) and while you may not think of herbs as greens, the two parsleys (they are cousins, after all) are packed with vitamins A and C and lots of trace minerals. Nutritional data aside, this is a one-pot miracle. You throw everything in together so it takes about ten seconds to prep (okay, ten minutes). You don’t have to brown the meat. The sauce is based on water and onions and yet is incredibly rich in flavor. The whole thing is cheap cheap cheap and good good good. Serve over couscous, and if you can get your hands on some preserved lemons, chop them up and throw them on there. A little yellow never hurt.
to print this recipe, click here.
tuesday january 10, 2012
Are green smoothies the new cupcakes? Everybody seems to be making them, or at least claiming to. There are endless green smoothie blogs, there’s a Wikipedia entry (“the typical ratio in a green smoothie is about 60% fruit to 40% leafy greens”) and yes, there’s an App for that, too. I usually turn up my nose when I smell a trend (I’ve yet to make a French macaroon), but this is one time I will not. You see, I need all the vitamins/minerals/anti-oxidant/toxin-clearing/body-cleansing help I can get because I’m in major healing mode. I had my hip replaced in December and it’s been a doozey of an experience. I’ll spare you the details, other than one word: OUCH. Now don’t go all jingly and feel bad for me. I’m going to be bouncing around in my hiking boots soon and it was a genetic problem I just couldn’t ignore any longer. By the way, I hope this explains why you haven’t heard from me in so long.
Anyway, back to the smoothies. If ever there were smoothie queens, it’s my friends Mary and Sara, identical twins who built their cookbook career on that topic. So when they sent a recipe for a kale, apple, and carrot blend the other day, I made it pronto. After all, the star ingredient is organic kale, which I grow in my little garden (it’s still leafing out like mad during our mid-winter dry spell). The twins stuck a note at the bottom of their recipe asking if anyone had other green smoothie ideas. I took this as an invitation to play around with the ingredients and I present here my version, which tastes less vegetal and is super-duper emerald colored. I thicken it with chia seeds rather than sunflower seeds and in my opinion, green smoothies always need fresh ginger in them.
Do I feel better after a few days of drinking these? Well, I feel great about having chosen the driest winter on record in California as the year I can’t ski (due to the hip), but maybe it’s just the glow from the smoothies.
to print this recipe, click here.
tuesday December 13, 2011
Hello from the Mediterranean! Just kidding. I haven’t been away. I’ve been ridiculously busy, so I daydream about lolling by a blue-green sea or eating cheese and bread under an olive tree. Part of the reason I’ve got the Med on my mind is that I’m teaching a special 4-week series on the cooking of that region at Tante Marie’s in January. Plus I got a copy of the new Kokkari cookbook and I’m flipping through its lamb- and eggplant-drenched pages, salivating over which Greek recipes to make. I’m also mulling over a trip to Turkey next year to do a food tour with fellow blogster Ozlem Warren and I'm going to Tuscany in April to teach at a food writing retreat with the likes of Pamela Sheldon Johns and Nancy Harmon Jenkins, two real Mediterranean food experts.
So why am I telling you all this? I’m hoping you might want to join me in some part of this dream. Whether it’s a cookbook, a cooking class or even a real trip, what better gift than a touch of the Mediterranean to get you through the winter. If all else fails, make one of the Mediterranean favorites on Tuesday Recipe: a batch of creamy tirosalata for holiday parties; Turkish spaghetti for escapist nights when you’re avoiding wrapping gifts; easy moussaka when you can’t eat one more bite of turkey, roast beef or brisket.
tuesday November 15, 2011
It’s time to get simple, because one of the most complicated cooking days of the year is next week. Thanksgiving. A week away. The mind reels.
I keep it simple by repeating greatest hits every year: warm hazelnuts and persimmons with cocktails, an herb-rubbed turkey and my mother’s stuffing, cranberry-orange relish with ginger, and a pumpkin pie I’ve made so many times I don’t need a recipe. But the one thing I’ve never settled on is the green part. Brussels sprouts? I love ‘em roasted but my nieces do not. Salad? Yes, but not very special. Creamed onions and mushrooms? No green in that. This year I hit on it: green beans prepared the way I had snap peas in the spring at a restaurant in Oregon. There are almonds involved, which satisfies traditionalists, and the preparation is holiday friendly. You can double it to feed a bigger group, you can prep it in stages to assemble just before serving, or you can make it a day ahead and reheat it (I tested that this week just to be sure). But the genius is the spark of lemon. It’s that lift of citrus that a Thanksgiving side dish desperately needs.
to print this recipe, click here.
tuesday November 8, 2011
I love to matchmake, especially when it happens like this: The phone rings. It's a friend who's an editor at a well-known book company looking for a writer to work with a well-known chef. I have another talented friend who has co-written restaurant cookbooks. It so happens I've always thought these two exceptional women — who live 2000 miles apart — should meet. So I make the match, the one hires the other to co-write the book and….what? You thought this was going to be a love story???? Sorry. It's a WORK matchup. They're my favorite kind. Too much risk in the other matchmaking game.
So back to the outcome: Fast forward a year. The cookbook is done. I hold a copy in my hands. It's nearly killed all parties involved putting it together, but the outcome is worth it. I see my editor friend's creative eye in every page layout — simple, clear text overlaid on big, chewy photos of finished dishes with little insets of ingredient shots. I see my other friend's input in every word because the chef would never have got his recipes down without her hand to guide him to the stove. The man moves a mile a minute — that's both a cliche and an alliteration, but there's no other way to put it.
Who am I talking about here? The chef is Todd English. The writer is Amanda Haas. The brilliant editor is Katherine Cobbs. The book is Cooking in Everyday English and the recipe I made from it this weekend was Slow-roasted Fennel. It involves four ingredients (plus salt and pepper) and patience — it is slow after all — which is kind of funny, because according to Amanda, she and Todd knocked out an entire book of recipes in three intense days of cooking together in New York (get the full story here). As a result, every dish has fewer than 10 ingredients and is easy to make. "No restaurant food!" was Amanda's mantra. A chef’s book with no chef-y stuff? That's a match made for me.
to print this recipe, click here.
tuesday October 25, 2011
I'm becoming a mono-tasker. You know what I mean: someone who used to be able to handle ten things at once and now can barely do two. Like this morning when I was talking on the phone and pouring out cereal, which ended up on the floor. Or reading the mail while walking around the corner a few weeks ago and spraining my ankle on a snag in the cement. No no no. It's one thing at a time from now on.
Except for pasta. It's such a seamless, logical process, you can do two things at once without stumbling: start the sauce in one pan, bring the water to boil in another, stir the sauce, cook the pasta, combine them both. The only thing to watch is the timing -- the pasta needs to be a little al dente when it goes into the sauce so it can finish cooking there. When I made whole-wheat spaghetti with garbanzo beans and the last heirloom tomatoes for meatless Monday, this two-pot dinner made me feel like a one-task wonder. The fact that it also happened to be healthy made me slap an extra gold star on my chest.
to print this recipe, click here.
tuesday October 18, 2011
I’m not an ageist. I have friends of all ages, or at least from 4 to 84, and I never try to hide how old I am. But this week there’s a number I cannot bring myself to say. It’s my th--, thuh, thuh…thirtieth college reunion. Thirty. 30. That’s class of 1981, if you don’t do math.
Don’t worry. I’m not going to bore you with college nostalgia. I’m only going to say my sophomore year was the best because I spent most of it in Florence—Fiesole to be precise. Let’s just call it Tuscany. In 1979, most Americans didn’t even know Italy had regions, much less regional cooking, but la cucina toscana was the reason I fell in love with food. Salads of bitter escarole, cannellini beans baked in a bottle, pizza blistered by the first wood-fired oven I’d seen, chicken livers on toast, tomato soup thick with unsalted bread. There was always green olive oil in a cruet on the table, poured over everything in a threadlike stream. And pork. Everywhere pork. Roasted with garlic and field herbs and called arista; carved into hunks, slapped into sandwiches and called porchetta that was eaten at an outdoor mercato in the rain, in Umbria, just south of Tuscany.
The other day I stumbled on a cookbook called tuscany (yes, with a little “t”) at the bookstore and saw recipes for fagioli in fiasco, crostini di fegato and pappa al pomodoro. These were my old friends. These were authentic dishes, not some American restaurateur’s interpretation. I took the book home and made pork roast and ribollita. I was in Florence again, at the table with my closest friends (the human ones). Age 19. Forever.
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tuesday October 5, 2011
It's been an embarrassment of tomatoes lately. Not because my garden is bursting with them — I got a total of 3 scrawny Sun Golds from my foggy vegetable plot, about enough to feed an ant — but because the Northern California tomato harvest has run late and farmers' markets, grocery stores and friends' gardens have bushels of them. That's extremely good news because I've made this pasta dish at least four times in the last two weeks, twice in cooking classes and twice at home. Cherry tomatoes, basil and garlic are sauteed over high heat while the pasta cooks, then delicate little mussels (pulled from the shell…just like the Squeeze song says) and some of their cooking liquid are added. When the pasta is still really chewy, you put it in the sauce and finish cooking it there. The tomatoes and the mussel essence end up glazing the pasta and the whole thing tastes so simply of summer and the sea, you will feel homesick for Italy even if you've never been. More importantly, you'll want to eat right away, because pasta waits for no one and must be served the second it is ready. Which is why there is no photo of this finished dish. I'd rather eat than shoot.
to read more or to print recipe, click here...
tuesday September 27, 2011
They're back…those mottled red-and-white fresh shelling beans that come to market in September. We call them cranberry beans, the Italians call them borlotti, and people ask me all the time what to do with them. I always put them in ribollita, a thick minestrone with beans and zucchini and kale, like I had at school in Florence. It was "reboiled" with stale bread (hence the name ribollita) because the Tuscans never waste anything. This is the best time of year to make minestrone because everything you need is in season: basil, zucchini, tomatoes and Tuscan kale (aka dino or lacinato kale). So I cooked up a pot last night and ladled it over good store-bought croutons, which soak up the broth and thicken everything. It was damn close to the ribollita I ate at Cantinetta Antinori on Via Tornabuoni, circa 1979. Why are there some dishes you just never forget? More on that next week….
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tuesday aug 30, 2011
I know I wrote last week that you wouldn't hear from me until after Labor Day, but then I got a call from Martha Stewart Radio and they asked me to talk about stuffing peppers today on the show. Funny, because a few weeks ago I thought about stuffing some homegrown peppers I got from a friend. I wanted to adapt a recipe called California Rice, a Junior League classic that calls for mixing roasted, diced Anaheim peppers with rice, sour cream and cheese and baking it as a casserole. My plan was to turn that inside out and stuff the filling into roasted peppers. Well, I didn't get around to it then, but when Martha Stewart calls (okay it was just her peeps, but still) you hustle! So I did and here's the recipe…which, by the way, would be great with those Labor Day burgers I sent out last week or with any barbecue you happen to be doing.
to print this recipe, click here
tuesday aug 23, 2011
If you have the time, inclination and weather to do one more barbecue this summer, I suggest you make these Japanese Burgers with Wasabi Ketchup for Labor Day. I found the recipe in the New York Times, which in turn got it from the book The Japanese Grill by Tadashi Ono. I have to say these are the best burgers I've made all year, even if I used a broiler because I have neither the weather nor the inclination to grill in my foggy town. Of course I forgot to buy wasabi paste (I always forget something), so I stirred some jarred horseradish into the ketchup instead and it was the best sauce ever. This recipe has made the rounds on the web, which is why you'll get an easy-to-print pdf of it from Tasting Table when you click on this.
I’ll be back with a new Tuesday Recipe after Labor Day. Until then, I'll be dustin’ out the last August cobwebs before real summer starts in San Francisco…which is in the fall.
tuesday aug 9, 2011
You say tomato. I say tomatoes. So here are some Tuesday Recipe tomato classics from the archives. If you don't find something you like, just slice up a few ripe red tomatoes and halve some tiny pear tomatoes, arrange on a platter with sliced avocados, drizzle with olive oil, spike with sea salt, and have at it.
For gazpacho lovers, a traditional Spanish version thickened with bread, or the chunky "liquid salad" Americanized version.
For the cherry tomatoes in your life, a summer halibut dish.
For tomatoes plus all that other summer produce, my easy ratatouille.
Finally, stuffed tomatoes, the way the Romans cook them right now.
tuesday aug 2, 2011
Yoo hoo out there! I know it's been a while since you heard from Tuesday Recipe and I didn't want you to think I'd fallen off the planet. What I did fall into is a pile of work. In the past few weeks, I've taught cooking classes to over 75 people. Don't get me wrong — I'm not sick of cooking yet. In fact, on the one weekend we went away, I made these big billowy pancakes for breakfast and now I will never make pancakes any other way. Thanks go to Mary T., who showed me the recipe at a party at her house. We got on the topic of pancakes (what? you thought we'd be talking about the debt ceiling?), and she ran to get her copy of The Breakfast Book by Marion Cunningham. Published in 1987, this was an instant classic, as was pretty much everything written by the remarkable Cunningham. Until now though, I'd never seen the recipe for Zeppelin Pancakes (so-called because they are plump and airy), which Cunningham had learned from winemaker Don Chappellet. Both those names are icons of a former heyday of Bay Area cooking, so in homage to another era, I pulled out a classic tool to whip the egg whites: a rotary beater I found in the drawer of the cabin where we were staying. Between that and the lack of internet access, I felt like it was 1987 — or even 1957.
tuesday july 12, 2011
Remember that snap pea recipe I promised last week? Here it is. It's a classic a la minute restaurant recipe, which means it's really quick and easy and buttery and salty. I got it from chef Neil Clooney of Smithfields in Ashland, Oregon, who emailed me these directions: "heat up a saute pan, add a couple of tablespoons of butter, it will start to brown a little. Add some slivered almonds, saute until they take on some brown color. Add your pre blanched sugar snaps and continue to saute until they are hot and have an attractive glazed butter appearance to them. Add your preserved lemon strips and seasoning to taste, serve."
And that's exactly what I did, but I'm giving you some tips to make it even easier. Get 'em while they're hot — snap peas will disappear from markets soon.
to print this recipe, click here
Want to hear what people are saying about Tuesday Recipe? Here are just a few of the comments we've received lately:
Tori, I am writing to tell you how much I love your recipes. I have ALL of your cookbooks and they are my stand-by when looking for a great meal. I am gluten free, and usually have to page through all of my other books to find something sans the bread crumbs or flour. But your recipes usually don't call for any of that. I've realized since my almost 5 year path on a GF diet, so many of the ingredients that turn a dish into something I can't eat, also mess with the flavors of the real ingredients. So bravo to you!
Jen R.
This [eggplant gratin] was AWESOME! I bought everything for a half-batch at the Saturday market, assembled it on Sunday (in my little 6x6 Revol pan ) and baked it up on Monday. Fantastic! The first Thursday of every month I deliver a vegetarian casserole to a Buddhist sitting group, and I can't wait to present them with this one: bright, fresh Mediterranean flavors, and total comfort food...Everyone should have this recipe in her repertoire.
Canice F.
Yesterday, I was baking cookies with my 12-year-old son and commented that I thought he needed to know how to cook more than just cookies. What, I asked, will you do when you go to college, buy take-out all the time? He replied, "No way. I'll subscribe to Tori Ritchie and cook everything that comes on Tuesdays. I'll be fine."
Kate F.
Just wanted to relish you with compliments...I made your Christmas dinner from Bon Appetit and it was absolutely fantastic. The meat was unbelievable and so were all the other accompaniments. Beacuse we enjoyed that meal so much, I looked up your website and tried the best ever chicken and potatoes tonight with a fresh salad. Well, it couldn't have been more delicious, in fact it was perfection. I just wanted to thank you...my family thanks you too.
Felicia H.
Last night I made the enchiladas and the spinach slaw and both were phenomenal. Everyone at dinner asked for your website! Thanks so much for such a great service.
Judy H.
Thought you'd appreciate knowing that I just returned from a 5th grade Mom's night out potluck. I brought Carol's chili-cheese squares and your quinoa salad and in walked the root beer cake that someone else had made. All were hits!
Sally S.
I have been preparing roast chicken and potatoes for many years and frankly, I was in a bit of a rut. But your recipe was so savory, moist and popular that we had very few leftovers.
Margie W.
We had a wonderful al fresco dinner with your recipes, I made your gazpacho, quinoa salad (we had grilled halibut for the main course) and my friend brought your strawberry meringue cake. Everyone loved it! Thanks for your easy yet tasty recipes. My friends and I look forward to them every Tue.
Terri G.
I just wanted to acknowledge how much I am enjoying your recipes. I, too, consider myself "a cook" [not a "chef"] and come from a large family of women who are handy in a kitchen. Providing delicious food has always been a gift of love for me to give to the people I love. I consider cooking in my kitchen a day of play and the recipes I have received from your site are always welcome - great taste, easily prepared. Thank you for sharing your talents.
Pat M.
Your guaranteed dinner party hit, the beer-and onion-braised chicken recipe was indeed a big hit. I served it last night for some friends and they loved it. I did use chicken breasts because one of the guests does not eat thighs. It still turned out tender and juicy. Thanks for your ideas and keep up the good work.
Anita E.
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