Macaroni and cheese

Eastside Road, February 27, 2013—

THREE GOOD FRIENDS were by for lunch today: Lindsey made macaroni and cheese. It's a staple, of course; it was almost a weekly occurance in my childhood — though never like this: ours came in kit form, in a box, sometimes with Kraft's name on it, sometimes with Chef Boy-ar-dee's.

Lindsey used a recipe she's had for years, in an old pamphlet called Casserole Cookery, published in the mid-1950s, to judge by the copyright notice, by Culinary Arts Institute, which was directed by Melanie De Proft. Lindsey has a number of these pamphlets, on various subjects, all gathered into a binder with WEST BEND stamped on the cover; perhaps they were originally sold with cooking equipment marketed by the West Bend Company, which made cookware, electrical appliances, and two-stroke engines; I see on their website that "For 100 years, West Bend® has connected home chefs and matriarchs across generations." I'm glad to be helping them out in this worthy endeavor.

The recipe is simple enough: macaroni, previously cooked and drained; white sauce flavored with a bit of dry mustard; grated Cheddar cheese; minced onion; a bit of Worcestershire sauce. Lindsey wisely omits the pound of tomatoes called for.

After the main course, accompanied by olives and pickled green beans, we had a green salad; then warm applesauce with vanilla ice cream. Good old comfort food, perfect for a lazy afternoon of conversation.

Cave, Bohigas, nv; Rosé, Domaines Bunan (Bandol), 2011

Lunch and supper in town

Eastside Road, February 26, 2013—

BUSINESS IN TOWN today, including lunch at Chez Panisse: Celery and celery root salad with citrus, capers, and mint; then grilled mackerel with tiny artichokes, fennel purée, wilted escarole, and pancetta. I thought the pancetta a good foil to the mackerel, oily as it always must be, and the artichokes quite delicious.

Rosé

• Café Chez Panisse, 1517 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley; 510.548.5525

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THEN AN EARLY SUPPER in Oakland, to sit out the commute-hour traffic. I had simply the revisionist steak tartare you see here, nice young raw beef with chopped capers and onions already mixed in, along with a little olive oil, and a just-set fried egg on top, because Oakland, I suppose, bans raw egg from restaurants. I liked the watercress accompaniment, and the mildly resonant garlic potato chips.

Côteaux du Languedoc, Château du Lascaux, 2009

• Flora, 1900 Telegraph Ave Oakland, California; (510) 286-0100/

Beans and beans

Eastside Road, February 24, 2013—

BUT BEFORE GETTING to those delicious green beans that we had tonight, let me thank our friends Tom and Elizabeth for a marvelous dinner in their home last night. Tom rubbed some pork ribs with a deep-flavored, very savvy mixture a friend of his had made, home-made chili powder and salt and who knows what else, and cooked them perfectly. With the ribs, sweet potato purée and beet cole slaw.

Now those who know me well know I'm not fond of either sweet potatoes or beets. But I had double servings of these. Tom's sweet potatoes had a perfect amount of butter and cream and nutmeg, and serving them en purée evades the grainy, fibrous, sticky texture that is apparently my chief objection to the vegetable. And the cole slaw was also so perfectly flavored and balanced that the beets did not dominate, simply contributed themselves to an integrated ensemble.

It was a very knowing dinner, topped off with a very nice blood-orange tart. My thanks to a couple of good friends and fine hosts.

Riesling, Kalinda (Rheingau), 2011: perfect with the ribs; Morgon, Jean-Ernest Descombes, 2011 (fruity, spicy, forward, speaking well to the slaw

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Tonight, back home after a ramble in the West Marin hills, we made do with leftover bean soup from the other night, again garnished with avocado, onion, cilantro, and lime. But before it we had delicious green beans cooked in butter with minced shallots, a fine combination.

Green salad afterward, and fruit, and chocolates…

Cheap Pinot grigio

Beans and onions

Eastside Road, February 22, 2013—

PYTHAGORAS, AND BEANS, and all that*: but that's not what interests me just now.

What I"m interested in, is the onions. Lindsey cooks red beans; with a minced chopped jalapeño and some crushed garlic flavoring it; and sets out bowls of chopped cilantro leaves, raw onion, and chopped avocado, along with a quartered lime. We scatter these items on top of the hot beans, squeezing some lime juice over.

For years I was unable to eat raw onion. Even scallions gave me trouble; chopped raw yellow or white or red onions, like those on these beans, would have been virtually impossible. I took this as a matter of course: not that hard to abstain from something you always find physically unpleasant. Raw onions made me physically uncomfortable, in a number of ways I don't think it necessary to describe here.

Then, in my middle fifties, I was offered early retirement from the job I'd had for fifteen years — a job I had begun to find increasingly irritating. Not long after retiring I discovered an amazing thing: raw onions no longer bothered me. I could eat an entire onion raw, if I chose, like a Roman legionnaire. It didn't bother me in the least. In fact, it was delicious.

It still is. Of course the raw onion cooks, just a little, when it's scattered atop (and then sinks into) beans hot from the stove. The secret of Lindsey's garnish is that all these items cook just a bit when they're scattered on the beans. But there's always a little left in the bowls after we've finished our first course, and I simply add them to the salad dressing I've whisked up, and Lindsey tosses them with the torn lettuce. Now they're definitely raw; lettuce isn't going to cook anything, not even when dressed with good Eastside Zinfandel vinegar. And it's only good.

Cheap Nero d'Avola

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*Wikipedia: The Pythagorean code further restricted the diet of its followers, prohibiting the consumption or even touching of any sort of bean. It is probable that this is due to their belief in the soul, and the fact that beans obviously showed the potential for life. Some, for example Cicero, say perhaps the flatulence beans cause, perhaps as protection from potential favism, perhaps because they resemble the genitalia, but most likely for magico-religious reasons, such as the belief that beans and human beings were created from the same material. Most stories of Pythagoras' murder revolve around his aversion to beans. According to legend, enemies of the Pythagoreans set fire to Pythagoras' house, sending the elderly man running toward a bean field, where he halted, declaring that he would rather die than enter the field – whereupon his pursuers slit his throat.

Eggs in tomato sauce

Eastside Road, February 21, 2013—

SOME AIDE-MEMOIRE THIS IS: I've looked up and down through Eating Every Day to see when we may have made this tomato sauce, and I can't find it. There wasn't much time to cook today, so Lindsey hauled a block of frozen tomato sauce out of the freezer, thawed it out on top of the stove, broke four eggs into it, covered the pot, and toasted some bread.

The sauce, she knows, was made for a dish very much the same, but I can't figure out when we may have had it. Maybe it was one of the meals I forgot to blog, or maybe I managed to write about it without using the word "eggs," though that's hard to imagine.

In any case it was a delicious dinner, with a green salad to follow that was mostly mâche — hmmm, that would make a nice title — and an apple and a couple of chocolates for dessert. Sweet and simple.

Cheap Nero d'Avila

Lindsey's potatoes

Eastside Road, February 20, 2013—

THING IS, THESE POTATOES are just so good. You want them to last, but you want more. They're a perfect combination of ingredients with truly Elective Affinities that I'm naming them to the Hundred Plates.

Lindsey peels nice fresh potatoes, just about any kind will do except the mealy Russets, and dices them, and cooks them in water and olive oil with salt, chopped shallots, and chopped parsley. That's all there is to it. With them, as you see, another of Franco's estimable sausages, Toulouse-style; afterward, green salad. A nice meal after a day's fast (and Monday's franks and beans, a decent dinner but nothing to write from home about).

Barbera d'Asti, Rocco dell'Olmo, 2010

Penne

Eastside Road, February 17, 2013—

A FEW SCRAPS OF bacon, browned in the stainless-steel skillet. A good-sized yellow onion, diced, softened in the bacon fat. Three Roma tomatoes halved, quartered, diced. A tablespoonful or so — I measure it out in the cupped palm of my hand — of red pepper flakes. Salt, of course.

If I'd had some cream I'd have added it, but I didn't, and nonfat milk doesn't substitute. I just cooked the penne — or, more truthfully, watched Lindsey cook them — and then drain them and combine them with the sauce in the skillet. And that was dinner, with a green salad afterward, and maybe later a chocolate truffle.

Oh: yesterday. Well, we made do with some tamales Lindsey found in the freezer. I don't know where they came from; they weren't very good.

Barbera d'Asti, Rocco dell'Olmo, 2010: sound and serviceable