True friends smuggle carne asada from California in their socks.

Parte Uno: Tacos

Philadelphia is proving to be a fantastic food city, particularly in the summer and fall, when local produce is abundant, restaurants try to lure in customers with unique offerings, and everyone has plenty of time for eating a long, slow dinner outside in the warm evenings. I love it. Except that, for me, the epitome of outside summer food is a taco. From a taco truck. And my California upbringing has instilled a ridiculously high standard for taco truck cuisine. Which is silly, since the taco I want doesn't meet the health standards, gets cooked in the back of a hot, stinky truck filled with hot, stinky guys, is loaded up with terribly unhealthy ingredients, and drips spicy orange grease everywhere.

I want one so bad.

So bad that I asked one of my fellow Californians to bring me back something I could turn into a taco in exchange for a ride home from the airport. Which is how, at 6:30 in the morning, I was greeted with a dripping plastic bag of raw carne asada.

I have good friends. Friends who share my absurd love of taco.

Anyway, tacos are very easy to make, although I rarely do it, because they're cheaper and more delicious when you get them from a truck on E.14th in Oakland. When you're in Philly, most taco ingredients can be found in the Italian Market and in little South Philly corner stores. They're of varying quality, so it's worth shopping around a little. The time of year matters too, although I'll never figure out when nopales are in season. Does it matter to a cactus pad what time of year it is? Can you grow big cacti plants in places with winter? Where are my cacti pads imported from? Why doesn't everyone ask these questions?

We also bought tortillas, despite having driven a tortilla press all the way across the country last year. I'm still experimenting with homemade tortillas. I think I need to add lard.

Ok, enough, now to the tacos!

Cook your carne asada well - it's been defrosting in the bottom of an airplane, and could well be poisonous.






We got some nopales too, for a more veggie-based taco, although I usually cover them in cheese, thus completely undermining their health benefits. They can be eaten raw, but for cheese-covering purposes, I usually boil them briefly, and then cook them in a pan with some queso fresco.

We cut up some radishes, onion, and cilantro to garnish our tacos, and we grilled some jalapeños in the toaster oven. The jalapeños really varied in spiciness: next time I'll probably add some directly to the nopales and carne asada so there's a more even flavor.



Everything turned out delicious, and while there wasn't any orange grease dripping out of my tacos, neither did we get horribly ill from the smuggled meat, so all in all it was a definite win.

Parte Dos: Fruta Sorpresa

While we were wandering around the Italian Market making impulse taco buys, we came across an ugly-looking fruit that neither of us had ever seen before. The "mamey sapote" was described as a cross between a coconut and a papaya, although after eating it and doing some google searches, I think a better description might be an avocado that tastes like a sweet potato.

We weren't very impressed.

And then my meat-smuggling friend decided that the fruit's pit smelled good (almond-y) and ate a piece of it while explaining the benefits of cyanide. Another google search, this time on the edible properties of a mamey sopote seed, was extremely inconclusive. Answers ranged from "the seed is said to be fatally toxic if eaten raw by humans or animals" to "use it as if it were nutmeg" to "grate it and add it to your shampoo."

Probably he'll survive.

 

Potato Salad with lots of stuff in it.

It's been terribly hot lately, an oppressive, heavy, wet, humid heat that makes going outside unbearable. So today, when the humidity dropped and the temperature averaged a lovely, cool 87 degrees, I decided that I should take advantage of the opportunity and do some cooking that would last through the next heat wave. Which could only mean potato salad.


Potatoes are easy to come by for everyone, and during these summer and fall months when plant life is sustainable on this coast, I buy my potatoes from one of my favorite growers at my weekly farmers' market - Savoie Organic Farm. Barry Savoie is awesome, knows everything about potatoes, and has introduced me to some fabulous varieties that I'd never eaten before (Rosegold potatoes are really beautiful, crunchy, and delicious). For potato salad, or when I'm feeling vague about my potato plans, I usually get Onaways, which are pretty standard new potatoes.

I'm a big fan of simplicity, and I often make potato salad with whatever leftover ingredients turn up in the fridge, so my usual recipe tends to focus on texture rather than specific ingredients, and goes something like this:

A 4-ingredient vinaigrette-based salad.

a pot full of boiled potatoes
some sort of onion-thing (red, green, shallot, garlic scave)
some sort of crunchy thing (pickles, celery, cucumber, capers)
some sort of green leafy-ish thing (dill, parsley, more green onion, chives)
mayonnaise or vinaigrette
mix together everything, realize you've once again failed to calculate how much potato is really necessary (my math usually goes something like 1 person = 4-6 potatoes, which is way too much potato/person), try to foist leftover potato salad on everyone you know.

But for this potato salad, I wanted to make sure I got some significant vegetable matter in with all the egg and starch. This wasn't going to be some half-assed barbecue side dish, it was going to be a summer staple. It had to have some semblance of balance.

So I went to the grocery store (a rare occurrence lately) and scanned the aisle for impulse potato salad buys. And then I went out to the backyard and picked some chives and parsley. And then I raided the fridge.I ended up with pickles, cucumbers, red onion, fennel, chives, green onion, capers, and parsley. 

Fennel is fine raw, but I decided to sauté mine with olive oil, then add the chopped, boiled potatoes to get a little crispy brown texture into the mess. The fennel caramelized nicely and gave off a subtle

flavor which was, on the whole, a little overwhelmed by all the everything else. I've never used fennel much in cooking, but I'd like to start - it would be fantastic in a more simple, less mayonnaise- based dish.

Probably if one hadn't started getting really hungry and had planned out her day to provide plenty of time for cooking experiments, one would let the potatoes and fennel cool down before throwing in everything else. This would ensure that the cucumbers wouldn't get warm and flimsy, that the greenery wouldn't wilt, and that everything would be chilled a bit before the mayonnaise hit it.

I got hungry, threw everything in together, peeled some hard-boiled eggs, whipped up some mayo (an egg yolk, a lot of olive oil, and a bit of vinegar), and ate it still warm, completely undermining the entire concept of a cold dinner. It was pretty delicious. Tomorrow, once it's had some quality time with the refrigerator, I imagine it will be even better.

Flat Pie

I didn't have a chance to do anything with the peaches and nectarines I'd picked on Wednesday until Sunday, when the stone fruits I'd left to ripen on the counter were in danger of becoming mush (a couple had already disintegrated) and I had to use them all immediately. Which was fine, because I had two galette doughs in the fridge - the same crust recipe from Smitten Kitchen that I used for the zucchini galette - and a bunch of blackberries in the fridge from Wednesday that I hadn't finished off yet.

I peeled the fuzzy white peaches (dunking them in boiling water for 30 seconds or so) but left the peels on the nectarine slices, figuring that they'd maintain their shape anyway.

Each galette had five or six small stone fruits and about a cup of blackberries with just a little bit of corn starch thrown in. Rolling out the galette dough in 90+ degree heat was a little tragic - it got extremely sticky and tried to melt, which made for some fairly ugly galettes.

I think the heat also made the dough less flaky and crusty, having melted all the butter prior to its introduction to the oven, although some of the blame definitely goes to the blackberries, which don't really macerate very well, but do let out a huge amount of liquid during the baking process. So the fruit juices ran out all over the dough, and soaked the inside, and the sad, overheated dough wasn't really able to overcome the onslaught of summer. And the oven heated up the kitchen to an almost unbearable level. Lesson learned: don't bake on hot days. 

But with all that said, these were some pretty delicious galettes, particularly the peach-blackberry, which played off the sweetness of the almost overripe peaches with the remarkably flavorful blackberries. It's almost too bad that the rest of the peaches went into making this chilled peaches and white wine mixture, except that it was even more refreshing and delicious than the galettes, probably due to a surprisingly wonderful white wine donated to the cause by my peach-picking/baking/eating accomplice.

And apologies to the French, but apparently the term "flat pie" is infinitely more comprehensible and amusing than "galette."

Summer stains my hands with blackberries and all is forgiven.

My favorite kitchen activity is baking. I particularly love crispy, buttery doughs and juicy fillings and sweet-tart pairings, and, predictably, all those things usually amount to pie. And the best pie ingredients are found in the summer, when fruit muscles out all the leafy greens and root vegetables at the markets and piles of sweet, juicy, colorful, ripe summer fruits suddenly burst onto the scene. But I never want to dedicate any of my summer fruit to a pie, preferring to slice it open and eat it as soon as it hits its peak ripeness. Cooking any of it only seems justified if there's such an excess that it couldn't all be eaten fresh without getting a massive stomach ache. So, in order to create such an excess and get my pie, I went out to the country with two of my foodie friends to go fruit picking.

To ensure the best of all worlds, we found a farm with both pit fruits and berries, collecting several pounds of peaches and nectarines and huge handfuls of blackberries.



It was wonderful to get outside this hot, cement city for a few hours (although the farm was plenty hot as well) and to be surrounded by greenery and orchards and fruits and bugs and all those things that us city people usually refer to as "nature" despite the obvious construction, maintenance, and care that goes into farming.

We weren't the only ones enjoying the soft fruit and the cool shade at the farm. I really love interesting, non-human-blood-sucking insects, almost as much as I love peaches.

After a few sweat-soaked hours in the sun, we each came away with a huge bag of peaches and a wealth of blackberries, which will, over the next few days, make their way into a galette, some white wine, and my mouth.

In fact, some already have.

Technically a "vegetable dish" despite the three different types of cheese.

I just want you to know that I'm extra glad you're coming on Saturday-- there is going to be so much food!

Yay! Speaking of which, what food should I bring?

Maybe something veggie-ish? We have a grill at our disposal.

Does this count as vegetable-ish, or is there too much cheese?

oh shit man! I wanted to make that recipe so bad- I would totally freak if you brought that! (read: a resounding :yes, please bring it"!!)

It's such a relief that all my closest friends love food (although probably not coincidental), and because we're all intelligent, well-read, twenty-something, lady foodies, we all read the same blogs. Or at least Smitten Kitchen. And so when there's a new blog post up, suddenly all conversations begin to revolve around the latest recipe and everyone gets a craving. Which is quite convenient; for instance, when you've been craving chocolate doughnuts all day because of SK's latest recipe, and you show up at your friend's apartment and discover that she's been spending the whole day making those very doughnuts, well, life is good. 

And when that same friend is hosting a birthday/house-warming/what-have-you and you want to bring a dish, well, then the conversation at the top of this post occurs. And suddenly cheese counts as a vegetable, at least at our tables. 

I followed SK's recipe for the zucchini and ricotta galette pretty closely, although I think mine had a bit more zucchini in it. The dough is a regular pie dough (butter!) with some sour cream and lemon added in to give it some richness. Very delicate, very delicious.

My favorite part was letting the zucchini sweat, which always looks sort of amazing. And yes, it's slightly embarrassing to admit that I spent several minutes watching water coming out of zucchini slices, but I'm still going to show you one of the dozens of photos I took.