November 19, 2009
Posted by Robin Bellinger, August 25, 2008 at 11:30 AM
When the dining hall became unbearable in college, I would treat myself to a fresh tomato, mozzarella, and basil sandwich at my favorite bakery. This combination fueled my most desperate studying, even in the dead of winter. At the time, I hadn’t heard of “seasonal” or “local," so I didn’t notice if the tomatoes were imperfect or the basil didn’t taste quite right with snow on the ground.
Since then, I've voluntarily submitted to a much stricter set of guidelines about what to eat and when, which means that I’m on something of a tomato bender right now. Recently, I decided to recreate my old favorite sandwich. If you’re squeamish about squishy bread, then don’t make this in the morning and eat it at lunchtime but for me, dressing-soaked bread is a plus.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, August 11, 2008 at 2:30 PM
I nearly died of excitement when I opened this month’s Gourmet to a recipe section called “Picnic in the Glass.” It features salads that are not just composed but beautifully layered in individual glass jars, an elegant presentation that is also highly portable. The magazine’s editors were inspired by a chic new restaurant in Paris, of course. I had to make one right away and tried the Greek salad with orzo and black-eyed peas that very night.
My usual Greek salad contains neither orzo nor legumes. I was glad to get some chickpeas in this version (no canned black-eyed peas at my grocery store), but I could take or leave the orzo. If you are stuck at work through the month of August with no stylish picnics in sight, this would make a mighty comforting desk lunch.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, July 21, 2008 at 2:30 PM
My relationship with zucchini has never been functional. I want to love it, since there’s so much of it around in the summer and it’s so easy to prepare, but it always tastes watery and disappointing, whether steamed, grilled, or...okay, fried is the exception. But I can’t be breading and frying zucchini all that often.
Recently I tried this zucchini and chicken salad and discovered that, all this time, I’ve been going about things all wrong. Slivered up in a flash with my handheld Japanese mandoline, then tossed with a lemony dressing, raw zucchini tastes great and has a much nicer texture than cooked zucchini. You can eat this plain or tossed with eight ounces of baby spinach, as suggested in the book. Stuffed into a pita, it would also make a nice summer sandwich. I skipped the pecans on account of my husband’s deadly nut allergy, and the Parmesan because I am cheap. We made do with a scattering of sunflower seeds, which were good. Next time I might try chick peas and feta instead of pecans and Parmesan.
For me and zucchini, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, July 14, 2008 at 3:25 PM
Just add roast beef and Bousin!
A baguette, a round of Boursin, and a bottle of Beaujolais is my idea of a Bastille Day lunch. (As you can see, my relationship to France was formed when I was a student, before I had begun to explore more challenging cheeses. I’m afraid I still haven’t gotten around to appreciating fancy wine.) It’s a glorious meal in a park on a sunny day, but it probably isn’t the most practical picnic for a Monday at work, and New York is cloudy today anyway.
Skip the wine, keep the guilty-pleasure Boursin, add some roast beef, and you’ve got yourself quite a celebratory sandwich. Vive la France! Vive le gourmandise! Buy yourself a little tart or palmier or éclair while you're at it.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, July 7, 2008 at 1:15 PM
I don’t think I had ever heard about sesame noodles before I came to New York City. Maybe they were on the Chinese menus in Houston and my family was too excited about egg rolls, spare ribs, fried rice, General Tso, and beef with broccoli to notice. Maybe they were put in front of me several times and my childish disdain for cold noodles of any kind led me to turn up my nose. But in my adult life I somehow became aware that a delicious and highly craveable dish had slipped past me, and my interest was duly piqued.
After trying a couple of dud recipes, I found one that I like in The America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook. That might not seem the likeliest source for an excellent sesame noodle recipe, so please speak up if this looks wrong to you. This is one of the rare cases where I do not have a specific memory or Platonic taste ideal guiding my experience of a home-cooked dish (which is nice sometimes, because you get to enjoy what you’ve prepared for what it is rather than despair over what it is not). Cold sesame noodles make a great lunch on a hot day and are also good to take on car, train, or plane trips.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, June 30, 2008 at 1:15 PM
One of my favorite sandwiches is roast turkey and coleslaw on a Kaiser roll. I happened to overhear someone order it at the inauspicious looking but better-than-average deli near my first office, and I’ve been hooked ever since. I’m always interested to get people’s reactions to this combination because some think it sounds perfectly normal while others think coleslaw belongs in a little cup on the side and nowhere else.
Since most anonymous delis don't do this sandwich as well as that one I used to frequent, a homemade version was in order. I roasted a turkey breast and shredded a cabbage. Since I’ve never managed to track down a Kaiser roll I like outside of a deli, a hamburger bun stood in; any bread you like should do, really, and it occurred to me afterward that rye bread might have been especially excellent. Although the turkey was a little dry, this sandwich won high marks not just from me, a coleslaw fanatic, but also from Andrew, who doesn’t like coleslaw much at all. The perfect dessert for this lunch is a ripe peach.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, June 23, 2008 at 3:15 PM
One of the most exciting things about summer is how cheap herbs are at the Greenmarket. I spend the winter making mournful calculations when I read recipes: do I really want to spend $10 on fresh herbs for a single dish? Then comes summer, when the pressure I feel to use suddenly-affordable herbs all the time comes up against my not-so-improvisational cooking style. The weeks I bring home five bunches they tend to wither in the vegetable drawer, but the weeks I refrain from buying any I find myself desperately in need of rosemary or lemon verbena.
Last week I made an unconventional spicy coriander tabbouleh that may be the answer to my problem with herbs. From now on I’ll buy whatever herbs look tempting, and if I haven’t used them by the middle of the week I’ll chop them up, toss them with some bulgur wheat, and see what happens. Stir a drained can of chickpeas into this, maybe some feta if you have it, and it would make a mighty fine lunch.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, June 16, 2008 at 12:45 PM
Last month there was a great thread here about “What do you bring to eat at your desk for lunch?” As interesting as the responses were, I was chagrined to discover near-universal condemnation of people who enjoy tuna salad in the air they share with their co-workers. Whoops! I definitely ate lots of tuna salad at my office job; but then, my colleagues weren’t exactly scared to stink up the place, so I guess I felt it was my right as much as theirs. The woman in the next cubicle used to microwave incredibly pungent curries around 3 p.m., and a woman in a nearby office would attempt to eliminate the odor with room perfume, leaving me in the middle of a knock-down, drag-out Jo Malone vs. cumin death match. Another woman spent hours preparing elaborate feasts in the teeny area meant for adding milk and sugar to your coffee. I guess my tuna fish didn’t seem so obtrusive to me, but now I wonder if people were retching as they passed my desk.
If it weren’t for the scary mercury thing, I would probably eat canned tuna for lunch five days a week. I actually love the way it smells, whether it’s mixed up with mayonnaise and packed onto bread (yum) or gussied up with olive oil, beans, and herbs. Here is Marcella Hazan’s recipe for beans and tuna salad. It’s good, but I usually don’t use a recipe when I want this for lunch; I just combine a can of tuna (oil-packed, or add olive oil to the finished salad), a can of white beans or chickpeas, a tablespoon of nonpareil capers (I like capers, so adjust accordingly), some black pepper, and a dash of red wine vinegar. If I am feeling fancy, maybe some parsley or minced red onion. That makes enough for two lunches, no bread needed. And now that it’s nice outside, you can go eat it on a bench, doing unto the curry lady of your office as you wish she would do unto you.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, June 2, 2008 at 12:45 PM
Despite the fact that roast beef sandwiches were probably born in the days when people frequently had large leftover roasts to use up, today we’re so accustomed to the deli counter that cooking your own sandwich meat might strike you as rather pretentious. I know I was surprised to discover how easy it is. Throwing a roast in the oven is much less time-consuming than, say, baking all your own bread (although that would be nice, too, wouldn't it?). It also saves money and tastes extra good—papery-thin deli meat has nothing on this.
Here is a wrap sandwich made with leftover roast beef. To make a dinner of the roast beef, chop some bell peppers, onions, and potatoes, toss them with olive oil, and add them to the sheet pan with the roast. To make meat for only a few sandwiches, just buy a smaller roast and monitor cooking closely. If roasting meat in June is not your idea of a good time, you could, of course, also make the wrap with deli meat. The black bean relish is a super fast side for this or any meal.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, May 19, 2008 at 1:00 PM
Chefs often say that diners choose entrées based on sides: for instance, anything paired with mashed potatoes moves faster than it otherwise would. At my house, though, I don’t pay much attention to the side dishes, maybe because there’s only one thing on the menu every night. Usually I’m rushing to steam broccoli or make a pot of rice to round out a meal.
Side dishes were not an afterthought, however, last week when I made Suzanne Goin’s brisket from Sunday Suppers at Lucques. As always this book reminded me that you can make truly amazing food in a home kitchen with the right inspiration and instructions. The brisket’s companions, beluga lentils and sautéed broccoli rabe, made an excellent lunch for the rest of the week: a fancified version of my sack-lunch standby beans and greens. With a slice of crusty bread and a piece of cheese, these leftovers, which are good either heated or at room temperature, would make one of the nicest lunches I can imagine.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, May 12, 2008 at 1:00 PM
Lately I’ve been wondering if I should add "freezing food in individual portions" to my list of interests on Facebook. For one long, dark year I lived in a Park Slope studio with no freezer, unable to save leftovers and frequently forced to eat entire pints of ice cream in a single sitting. Ever since I have appreciated my freezer and used it as much as possible, although the serving size of ice cream that satisfies me now remains tragically huge.
Since I don’t always have the time or ingredients to pack even a sandwich, my frozen stash of soup, stew, and other leftovers has often been the only thing standing between me and a mediocre but depressingly expensive business-district lunch. Although some things (especially potato-based soups, in my experience) suffer for having been frozen, most come out just fine and are given additional relish by the thrill (okay, for me) of enjoying the fruits of my earlier labor.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, May 5, 2008 at 3:45 PM
For a month or two now I have been searching for an Asian or Asian-y noodle dish that would make a nice lunch. A few candidates didn't pan out, and the one that did was a soup, which I know some people don't care to bother packing up for work. Finally, though, Deborah Madison came through with her refreshing salad of chilled mung bean noodles with dulse and crushed peanuts from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone.
I'm afraid it looks as if this week is going to be rainy in New York, but for those of you with happier weather, this is just the thing to eat outside on a warm day: cool, full of bright flavors, satisfying without being heavy. I liked the generous dose of raw ginger, but people who find that kind of thing overwhelming might want to start with 1 teaspoon and work their way up. I also added a few dashes of soy sauce and would not have minded a little more spice; maybe I'll leave the jalapeño seeds in next time. This noodle salad keeps in the refrigerator for four or five days, in my experience, and travels quite well: last week I enjoyed it on an airplane while everyone else made do with a doll-sized bag of pretzels.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, April 28, 2008 at 1:30 PM
While I’ve been going on and on here about the pleasures of a thoughtfully packed lunch, I have not revealed a shameful truth: at the moment the only lunch I make is my own. My husband is in the home stretch of medical school, which means that he spends long days in hospitals with little time for indulgences such as "lunch." Most days they're given some kind of greasy Chinese food or inferior pizza to wolf down during a midday meeting, and the rest of the time lunch is catch as catch can. My impression is that sitting down and unpacking tasty leftovers or even a good-looking sandwich would be suspect, food being decidedly too frivolous to concern a busy MD (or MD-to-be).
So Andrew asked me to buy him some energy bars, which I have always regarded with distaste and even suspicion. I just don’t think they count as food. I soon discovered that they are rather expensive, and what's more, many of them contain tree nuts, to which Andrew is deathly allergic. Wouldn’t it be more sensible to make something myself, and wouldn’t I feel better about it?
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, April 14, 2008 at 1:00 PM
Photograph from RockyEda on Flickr
I've been working my way through everyone’s suggestions in response to last month’s post about how to eat sardines. With many methods and recipes left to try, I have already discovered one new favorite. Sardines and hard-boiled eggs didn’t sound like a natural combination to me, but since more than one person cited the pairing with some fondness, I had to try it.
It’s really good! Especially on an English muffin. Thank you, hanak and allakarasik. Obviously this is a great source of protein for people who eat fish and eggs but not meat, and sardines are full of the wonderful fish oil we could all use more of. For people like my dad (who said, “Here’s a recipe for sardines: Give the sardines to the cat and order a pizza”), this could be a good gateway sardine dish. The eggs really mellow out the oily little fish, and the texture of the salad on a soft roll is very comforting.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, April 7, 2008 at 2:15 PM
As a devoted user of How To Cook Everything
, I’m always interested in bloggers’ strong opinions about Mark Bittman. I haven’t run into any anti-Bittman animus in a while, but every once in a while someone really lets him have it. HTCE and the Minimalist have at times led me astray with recipes that were disappointingly bland or didn’t quite work, but successes have far outnumbered failures.
This week I tried his curried rice noodles in hopes that they would make a good sack lunch. I’m afraid, however, that this is the kind of recipe that makes people turn against Bittman. The noodles were completely bland because the curry powder never really got integrated, and now I have a pot completely encrusted with cooked-on noodles. I probably should have used a bigger (10 quart?) pot and gotten it hotter, but I’m not going to try again to find out; the one thing I demand of his recipes is that they be idiot proof. In the meantime, for your lunch I propose one of my old Bittman favorites, red beans and rice.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, March 31, 2008 at 12:45 PM
You don’t need me to tell you to pack a sandwich for lunch, but lately for some reason I can’t get peanut butter and honey out of my head. Though I’ve been eating it on spelt bread in a gesture towards healthiness, I often dream of eating it on the dreadfully soft white bread we used to use at summer camp.
As a kid and a teenager I spent three weeks every summer in a screen and concrete cabin on the shores of a lake about an hour outside of Austin. The camp cook, Barney, was a little-seen but much-beloved institution. Each cabin was expected to make up a little song and dance in praise of him at least once a week (no joke). We looked forward to certain meals obsessively, but I can remember only a few now: honeybuns for breakfast, chicken fried steak and apple crisp for lunch, and taco salad for dinner. (For some reason out biggest, hottest meal of the day was served at lunchtime, when the temperature usually hovered around 97 degrees. Perhaps the director’s hope was that we would all pass out during the required post-lunch siesta instead of playing pranks on our sleeping counselors.)
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, March 24, 2008 at 1:15 PM
Nigel Slater’s luxurious and deeply aromatic noodle dish has been on my poorly-maintained “to-make” list since Amazon delivered my copy of Appetite
four years ago. It was the title that won me over, I must admit, though the pictures are pretty convincing, too: fat shrimp, tangled noodles, a beautiful green purée. One thing and another (lack of Cuisinart, fear of fish sauce) interfered, and I didn’t get around to making it until last weekend. And then—it was too spicy for me to enjoy. I suffered through it with a glass of milk and hoped it would mellow overnight.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, March 17, 2008 at 1:00 PM
In the fairytales and adventure stories of my childhood, the first thing a character had to do before she embarked on a journey, whether she was a princess or a milkmaid, was pack a small but sustaining bundle of bread and cheese and sausage. Consequently this trio has always seemed very romantic to me, but only recently did it occur to me as a superfast and easy lunch for non-storybook types, too—all shopping, no work.
I would take a hunk of baguette, some rounds of salami, a slice of good cheddar, and an apple. You might prefer ciabatta, mozzarella, prosciutto, and olives. We’re really just talking about a deconstructed sandwich, I suppose, and not a particularly healthy one, but I love the idea of stopping work and really enjoying these few things instead of continuing to type with one hand while the other moves a sandwich from desk to mouth and back again.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, March 10, 2008 at 1:00 PM
Though I am always looking for new ways to eat quinoa, Heidi Swanson’s lemon-scented quinoa salad from 101 Cookbooks never loses its place in my rotation. It comes together in a flash, it’s healthy and boldly flavored, and it’s substantial without weighing you down. I’ve packed it up not just for work but for long plane trips, too, so far without any objection from the TSA. (I love Continental for trying to serve food, but their mysterious hamburgers and barbecue sandwiches are not for me.) Though lemon and cilantro play leading roles in my kitchen year round, that brightness is, I think, especially welcome in March, suitable for dreary days and balmy ones alike.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, February 25, 2008 at 1:00 PM
My boss used to tease me when I would bring black beans and rice to work for lunch. He thought, as far as I can tell, that this was my subtle way of asking for a raise, but I had no ulterior motives: I am devoted to beans and rice. Make a big pot on Sunday and you have a remarkably healthy, sustaining lunch set for the week. Long ago, when cooking my own beans seemed like too much of a challenge, I enjoyed Zatarain’s black beans and rice; since then I’ve experimented with many different recipes and have come to enjoy boiling up a bag of beans myself (it makes me feel rather smugly frugal, perhaps a little more self-satisfied than is absolutely attractive, but that is the price we sometimes pay as cooks). Madhur Jaffrey’s recipe for Costa Rican Gallo Pinto (“Spotted Rooster”) has had my eye for some time, and last week I finally tried it.
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