Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! I have been a terrible Napa blogger of late, I wish I could say I was busy with exciting adventures, but I’ve really just been living a very dull Life in Napa (not that making granola, the subject of my last post, is so deeply engrossing.)

But Napa has been a little dead these days. The grapes are dormant, the tourists are gone, and it is generally quiet and a little gray (Napa-gray, not actual February-gray for those of you who live in the real world with things like snow.) But like an early spring, I was greeted this morning by a wonderful surprise. Balloons! Balloons everywhere! (here’s a pic from one of the balloon company’s websites). It was like something out of Alice in Wonderland. I’m sure there were more than a few proposals happening just above my head.

Well, my plans for Valentine’s day won’t be as dramatic, but hopefully they will be delicious. You can keep the oysters and caviar, my go-to romance food is a perfectly roasted chicken. It’s special enough for an occasion, but easy enough for a Valentine Tuesday.

I could write sonnets about roast chicken. I wont. But I could. I will only say this: a good roast chicken is possibly the perfect food. It’s classic, comforting, beautiful to present, and low maintenance. Can you say that about your valentine?

Maybe I find roast chicken so romantic because I’ve always been the kind of person who wanted to be married. Like marriage, there is honesty in a roast chicken. You can count on it, and although some people may find it provincial, they are usually the kind of people who don’t know how to be sustainably happy. It’s far from mediocre, but it has a kind of extraordinary ordinariness to it that reminds you of how wonderful and rapturous the everyday things can be.

So this Valentine’s Day, my first as a married lady, roast chicken seems the only fitting thing. Here’s how I make mine: First, you need a good chicken. Preferably free-range, organic is optional. Most “organic” chicken actually isn’t free-range because in order to be certified organic the farmer must account for everything the chicken has ever eaten, which means it probably wasn’t pecking around eating bugs like a decent chicken should.

So get your chicken, give it a rinse and dry it well. Salt the inside of the cavity liberally and then stuff in a quartered lemon, or an onion, or a halved garlic head, a few sprigs of rosemary, thyme, whatever flavor you prefer. Tonight I’m doing lemon and rosemary because both happen to be growing outside my front door.

Tie up the legs with twine and tuck the wings under the body. I’ve done more than a few chickens without stringing them up, so please don’t let a lack of kitchen twine stop you. It will just mean that the legs will splay open in a very un-lady-like way, which, who knows, your Valentine may prefer.

Then you bring on the butter. Slather the whole chicken with several tablespoons of good soft butter and shove a little under skin of the breasts. (this post is really starting to get dirty). Salt and pepper the outside liberally.

Now the next step is up to you. The easiest thing to do it to pop the chicken in a cast iron pan and roast it in a preheated 425 degree oven for about an hour to an hour and a half, depending on the size of the bird. Let it rest for about 20 min,  and then serve with salad and bread (dip the bread in the chicken juices and melted butter gathered in the pan. mmmmmm).

Or you could fancy it up. Lay it on a bed of sliced onions. This will give you the makings for an onion gravy. Or, as I dd for tonight, place chopped potatoes and carrots in a small roasting pan and toss in a whole head of garlic cloves, separated but unpeeled. Toss with olive oil, salt, pepper, and herbs and lay the chicken right on top. When the chicken is done, the veggies will be coated in all the lovely juices.

When you pull your chicken out of the oven, transfer it to a plate and cover loosely with foil to rest for 20 min or so. Pop the veggies back in the oven to crisp. Enjoy with someone who loves you honestly and unconditionally.

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!

I’m not what you’d call “crunchy.”  Ok, yes, I’m a liberal, I live in northern California, and I drive a Subaru, so I suppose I fit the demographic.  But I will proudly say that I have shaved my legs almost every day of my life since I was 12, I hate birkenstocks and the smell of pachouli,  I’ll only “camp” on beaches because there’s a convenient bathing source, and even in a tent I insist on good wine in real wine glasses. My mom said it best: “We’re camping, we’re not animals.”  But I do know how to poach a salmon over a camp fire (also learned from mom) and I do love granola. So there you go, I’m a puzzle.

The problem with granola is that it’s deceptive. It seems healthy, but it’s usually loaded with saturated fat and sugar. And good granola is obscenely expensive, especially when you realize that the ingredients are some of the cheapest things in the market. This annoys me. So I started making my own. It’s so easy. You can make gigantic batches of the stuff on a weekend and the process makes your kitchen smell like the inside of a a gingerbread house.

There’s no set recipe here, feel free to add or subtract as you like. I could see adding dried fruit or coconut if you are less worried about the sugar rush. The measurements, too, are approximate; you can really do all of this by eye.

In a big bowl, I mix a whole 15 oz container of rolled oats (not instant or steal cut, just ordinary rolled oats), 1 heaped tablespoon of cinnamon, about 1 or 2 cups of ground flax seed (this helps bind the oats into clumps without using butter, plus flax provides protein and omega 3s), and about 1 cup each of chopped almonds and walnuts, or use whatever nuts you like. I blitz whole nuts in my food processor until they are coarsely chopped. You can also put them in a bag and bash them to bits with a rolling pin, which is more fun.

In a large pyrex measuring cup, get your wet ingredients mixed. Mix 2 cups of warm water with about 1/4 cup of canola oil and dissolve in about 1 tablespoon of honey. You can also use maple syrup here.

I seem to be the only person on the planet who hates maple syrup. I once mentioned my aversion to some dear friends from Maine and they looked at me like I had just told them I plan to eat my young. I just don’t like it. Its cloying and overpoweringly woodsy and I can’t get over the the fact that it is essentially tree sap, which just doesn’t seem like something people should eat. Maybe I never got into it because I also don’t like pancakes, which apparently makes me a communist. So use it if you like, but I use honey and vanilla.

To the honey-water-oil mixture, I add about 1 to 2 teaspoons of salt and 2 to 3 tablespoons of vanilla. Good vanilla, not the crap imitation kind. My cousin made everyone homemade vanilla extract for Christmas this year (who knew you could do that?) and it works beautifully in this recipe.  Mix the liquid mixture into the dry ingredients until everything is well-coated. It should start to get a bit clumpy and look like course gravel.  If it needs to clump more, add a bit more water.

Spread everything onto 2 cookie sheets. You want a thin layer on each sheet or else the granola wont crisp up. Then place the sheets in a 250 degree oven for about 40 min to an hour until it is golden and crisp.  Be sure to let the cooked granola cool completely before stashing it a jar or bag. In a air-tight container, it will keep for months–although it seldom lasts that long in this house.

As I said, this makes a very non-surgary granola, so if you like the sweet stuff this will not make you happy. But it is very satisfying, and very flavorful. I eat it with blueberries and greek yogurt.

And of course it travels well. You can even take it camping — just don’t forget the chardonnay.  

The new year is well underway. In fact, most studies say that if you made a new year’s resolution, you have probably given up on it by now. Well, have you? I have. But I always make multiple resolutions so that I have the luxury of f*ing up one or two while preserving my self-esteem. This year I vowed to run 15 miles a week, no really, I did. I don’t know what I was thinking either.

My other 2 resolutions were to “eat more healthy, whole foods” and “save money.” And to learn french, which has been about as successful as the running. But there’s still time, France isn’t going anywhere.  And I’m proud to say that I’ve manage the healthy eating and the money-saving with one easy, wonderful discovery: beans.

OK I didn’t just discover beans, I knew about them before. But what I didn’t know was how deceptively versatile, delicious, and exhilaratingly cheap they are when you make them yourself from scratch (as in, from dried), rather than just opening a can.

For years I’ve heard fancy-pants chefs like Davis Tanis say things like “canned beans have no soul”, to which I’ve traditionally responded with a very large eye roll. Clinging to my cans, I mocked Alice Waters’ dried-beans snobbery and shamed her elitist disregard for people who don’t have 6 hours to spend on dinner. Well, all I can say is: I am sorry Chef Tanis and Ms. Waters, I should have known that you knew best all along.

Canned beans, even good canned beans, rarely taste of anything other than starch. But when you make them yourself, they have enough actual flavor to be eaten on their own. And here’s the real pay off: make one large pot of beans on Sunday, and on Monday you can have them warmed over toasted cibatta, drizzled with olive oil and topped with fresh arugula and shaved parmesan (see above). Tuesday, you can have a bean salad with Kalmatta olives, feta, and roasted red peppers (from a jar, I’m not wonder woman). Wednesday, a soul-warming bean soup with kale and carrots and potatoes. Thursday, whiz any left over beans into a hummus like spread with garlic, olive oil and lemon, and slather it over toasted pita and top with veggies.  All from a 2 dollar bag of beans!

If you are thinking beans take too long, here’s the truth: they really don’t. Yes, you have to soak them, so they are not spontaneous food. But I’m learning that spontaneous food is overrated. Let me ask you, what would you rather do after a long day: spend half an hour on your feet frantically chopping and sauteing, or spend 5 minutes dumping something you planned out last night into pot, and reading a magazine with a glass of wine for an hour? Hmm. Tough call.

Some time Friday night or Saturday, dump a big bag of beans into a bowl, cover them with water and stick the bowl in your fridge. If you forget about them for 48 hours, it’s really no big deal. You can change the water if you want, but really, it’s ok if you don’t.

Come Sunday, drain the beans, put them in a big pot, fill the pot with water, throw in a halved onion  (no need to peel it), a generous bit of salt and pepper and any herbs you like,  a few sprigs of thyme perhaps, or rosemary. Then go do your nails and let it simmer. In about an hour or less the beans will be tender and creamy and ready for whatever you like. I like to eat them just as they are, spooned on to crusty toasted bread. If you want to drain the beans for a salad or spread, be sure to save the starchy, flavorful cooking liquid for soups later on in the week.

My kitchen is now over flowing with bags and jars of dried beans of every shape and size, and less you fear to enter, know this:  when you soak your dried beans in water for 24 hrs. or more, the dreaded gastrointestinal byproduct is completely mitigated (translation: no farts). Happy New Year!

There are few things more comforting to me than a big bowl of spaghetti and meatballs. (What? You expected me to talk about something else? Tisk, tisk.)

I adore that classic, hearty dish that is as therapeutic to make as it is to savor–squashing ground meat between your fingers, rhythmically rolling sphere after sphere while you stare off into space and ruminate on important matters, like which Meg Ryan & Tom Hanks movie is truly superior and why flammable and inflammable mean the same thing (the Husband didn’t believe me, but they do). I can’t think of a better way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

Every time I make meatballs, somewhere in the all the garlic and onion I become possessed by a big-hipped Italian mama, and I have to fight the urge to kiss cheeks and scold skinny women. Although, it may be worth noting, there’s absolutely nothing Italian about the dish. Like many great things, spaghetti and meatballs is a dish born of resourcefulness, amalgamation, immigration, and a willingness to chuck tradition and embrace the irreverence of the American identity. And for that, among other reasons, it ranks in the top 5 of my favorite foods.

I have made a million permutations of meatballs, but this Sunday I went with the easy version. I used up what I had, which is what meatballs are all about anyway. I started with 3 stale pieces of whole grain bread, not because the fancy sprouted whole grain is somehow better, but becasue it’s what we use for toast and neither the Husband or I really like the “butts” of the bread, so they never get used up. Blitz that in a food processor until you have course crumbs. To the crumbs, I added 1 onion, 4 cloves of garlic, a bunch of basil (I normally like parsley, but I had basil on hand), salt, pepper, a good pinch of chilli flake, a few good glugs of olive oil, and about a small handful of parmesan cheese (crumbled off the wedge).

The reason most Americans make bad meatballs is becasue we don’t think like peasants. Meatballs are about stretching the meat with cheaper things like stale bread. If you omit the “fillers” you end up with dense, tight little balls. And no one likes tight balls.  So, blitz all those ingredients until it looks like so…

Taste the bread crumb mixture and correct the seasoning. Remember, it should be pretty salty because you are going to be adding it to your meat. Then get your meat into a bowl and crack in an egg. I used turkey here because it’s what I had on hand, and because I don’t care so much for all-beef meatballs. I do love the taste of the classic veal-pork combo, but I don’t eat veal and I try to avoid pork. So that leaves with me with dark meat ground organic turkey with a high fat content, which actually produces a very tasty ball.

To your meat, add in your bread crumb mixture and get squishing. Don’t over-work the meat, but make sure everything is fairly evenly incorporated. Then you roll. I recently bought a spring-type ice cream scoop, so I gave that a try, hoping that it would help me produce evenly sized balls. But in the end, I think I came to the conclusion that I have a fairly good eye, and it ended up just being one more thing to wash.

OK, now make your sauce. I favor a simple tomato sauce of San Marzano tomatoes, olive oil, 3-4 cloves of garlic, salt, and pepper. That’s it. Simmer for 20 min or so and break up the tomatoes with a spoon. When making the sauce for meatballs I add some water to the tomatoes as well, because the bread in the balls will absorb more liquid.  OK, at this point you have options. You can fry the balls and then bake them in the sauce — tasty, but time consuming. You can add them to the sauce and simmer — less tasty, and requires your presence at the stove. Or the truly lazy method, which also produces moist, juicy balls–you can place a layer of sauce in a heavy oven-proof dish with a lid, place your balls in the pot, cover with the remaining sauce, put the lid on and bake in the oven for 45 min at 350 while you go paint your nails. This also gives you time to put the water on for the pasta. When the meatballs are done, they should look like this….

Toss the meatballs and sauce with the pasta, and top with basil and more cheese. Thems are some yummy balls.

(This post is dedicated to Julie.)

Hmmm….What’s for dinner this week? This week I am fully embracing winter with comfort foods, low and slow cooking, soups and stews.

Monday: White bean stew with homemade challah and an arugula salad. I am really excited about this one. I am normally so lazy, I almost always used canned beans. But this time, I did it up right, soaked the dried beans over night and I’ll be cooking them this afternoon with onion, rosemary, and sage. The challah is already made. It will be a perfect meal for a gray cold day in Napa.

Tuesday: Masa cakes layered with spicy black beans, cilantro, salsa, and avocado. Basically, this…  Wednesday: I want to say spicy red lentil curry with basmati rice and mango chutney,  but it will probably be left over white bean stew.

Thursday: Mushroom tart with thyme and rosemary, with a salad. A Husband favorite.

Friday: I want to do some kind of soup or stew you bake in the oven for hours with a corn bread top. I’m not sure what that will mean, but I feel very strongly about the corn bread. I can immediately think of a beefy stew of braised short ribs, but I would like to keep it vegetarian if possible. I’ll have to think about this one.

Saturday: I’m thinking, roasted acorn squash stuffed with kale and wild rice.

Sunday: Off to LA!

When I was a little girl in a LA suburb, every December my school teachers would drag a big rubber-made tub out of a closet and announce “Craft Time!”

Without a hint of irony, they would instruct us on how to cut snow flakes out of blue and white construction paper. We’d sing the guaranteed-not-to-get-you-sued “winter” songs like Frosty the Snow Man, dip our “snow flakes” in glitter, glue cotton balls to drawings of peeked-roof houses with smoking chimneys,  and hang our creations up around the room. Then we’d run outside for recess, in our shorts. Ah, California.

Grilling out on Christmas, caroling in flip-flops, running a 5 K on New Years day, it never occurred to me to find any of this strange. Then I moved to New York. New York, for all its iconic Jewish culture, knows how to do Christmas. But if I am honest, I didn’t experience winter, real winter–as in, shoveling snow, salting drive ways, scraping ice off your car, life actually slowing down, Winter–until I moved to Ohio.  And I miss it terribly.

I miss it all. I even miss complaining about it. I miss the salt stains on my floors, and the chapped lips, and the trudging through snow. With no blizzards headed for the Napa Valley anytime soon, I have no excuse to spend the whole morning in bed with magazines, and the whole afternoon in the kitchen making something warm and fattening. I have no need for the thick cable knits that hid the extra pounds so wonderfully, no call for the fuzzy socks that masked my unpainted toes, no reason to turn to the Husband and say, “Well, we can’t go out in this weather! Darn. I guess we’ll just have to stay in an snuggle under the blankets and find a way to ‘entertain’ ourselves.”

Now that it is December, I keep waiting for it to arrive. I keep waiting for the temperature to drop and the snow to fall. But I don’t think it’s coming. Sigh…. I suppose I’ll have to take comfort in the wine, and the sunshine. I know, I know. There but for the grace of God go I, the poor, warm, Napa-dweller. I will carry on, and try to coax winter to Napa from my kitchen.

This is one of my snow storm recipes. It’s perfect for snow-days because it is uncomplicated, but requires the oven to be on for a long time and affords a lot of puttering around time. It also allows you bask in a vibrant orange and green on a gray winter day. And of course, the end result is a warm, silky lasagna, best eaten in your sweats, on a sofa, under a fluffy blanket. An added bonus, it feels indulgent but it is fairly healthy.

Set the oven to 350 and cut a butternut squash in half and gut the seeds. Slather the squash with olive oil, sprinkle the inside with salt and then lay it cut side down on a cookie sheet and roast it in the oven for about 45 min- 1 hour (depending on the size of the squash). Go read a magazine.

When the Squash is cooked and cooled, scoop it out of the skin into a bowl and add about a tablespoon or two of butter, s&p, a few leaves of dried sage, a pinch of chili flakes, a hint of cinnamon, and mush it into a lovely puree. Be sure to taste it, it should be good enough to eat on it’s own. Then make a bechamel, I like this recipe but add a few more grinds of nutmeg than you usually would since you are dealing with squash and spinach, both of which love nutmeg.

When you have your sauce, defrost a package of spinach and wring out all the extra water in a clean kitchen towel (I use the organic frozen spinach from TJs). Yes, if you want to used fresh spinach, go nuts. But I will warn you, I’ve tried both and the frozen spinach always produces a better end result.  This is a snow-day recipe after all. You can’t be steaming arm fulls of fresh spinach, you have chick flicks to watch!

Once you have all your components ready.  Start layering by putting a thin film of sauce on the bottom of the buttered dish, then a layer of no-cook lasagna sheets, then squash, spinach, more sauce. Then start again. Make sure the top layer of pasta is well covered in the sauce and then top with parmigiana cheese, a little more olive oil, and bread crumbs. Bake in the oven for about an hour and it should look like this. Then dig in and pretend its snowing.

In the countdown to the Husband’s and my 6 month wedding  anniversary on the 21st (yes I know we’re disgusting), I’ve been thinking a lot about our wedding, and this inevitably makes me crave paella; that giant chorizo and seafood bespeckled dish that graced our wedding banquet.  I love paella, obviously, but unfortunately I can not indulge every kitchen craving on a moment’s notice, (God knows I try!). So last night when I absolutely needed to fill my kitchen with Spanish aromas, I created a mid-week, budget not-paella. The goal was to get the romantic warmth and saffron scent without having to go to three stores, pick up a bunch of different ingredients, or buy the special pan. I got everything I needed at Trader Joes and I think the total came to about 20 bucks, including the wine (the cat’s out of the bag now: we drink cheap wine).

So here’s what I came up with. Obviously, I wasn’t the first person to combine chicken with rice and saffron. It has a name: arroz con pollo. Predictably translated, rice with chicken, but arroz con pollo sounds so much more romantic, don’t you think?. It is so easy, try it next time you need a Spanish fix.

Here’s what you need:

Preheat your oven to 350. Dice one onion, and 4-5 cloves of garlic. Drain 1 jar of roasted red peppers and cut them in to strips. If you want to roast your own, go nuts, but this was a week night, so please forgive me for reaching for the jar. Then get a large, heavy, high-sided pan with a lid heating over medium heat with about 3 tablespoons of olive oil.

Rinse and dry some drumsticks and season them all over with salt and pepper. Place in the hot pan (I used organic free range chicken, the flavor is so much better). Brown the chicken, turning every few minutes to get an even brown. Then remove to a plate. (Your not trying to cook the chicken through here, just to get a sear on the skin.)While the chicken is browning, pour 4-5 cups, or 1 box of low-sodium chicken stock in to a pot over low heat. And a pinch of saffron and let the stock come to a simmer. This will infuse the stock with saffron flavor. Now, I know saffron is not cheap. In fact, my walking-encyclopedia friend Casey once told me that it was the most expensive substance, by weight, on Earth. It even beats out heroin, and is much better for you! But since I was using chicken drumsticks, rather than expensive seafood and sausage, I decided it was worth the splurge.

In the same pan where you browned the chicken, add a drizzle more oil, and then your onions, and after about a min., your garlic. Cook and stir until both are just tender, do not let the garlic brown. Season generously with salt and pepper and 2 tea spoons of smoked paprika.   Then add about 2 to 2 1/2 cups of rice. I used basmati, but any long grain white rice will do. Stir and toast the rice slightly in the oil and onions and garlic and paprika,  add the roasted red peppers and then add half a glass of white wine (what you do with the other half is up to you.) Scrape any bits off the bottom of your pan.

Nestle in your browned  chicken and then add the hot saffron stock. Put the lid on and put the whole thing in the oven for about 30 minutes. After about 30 minutes take it out of the oven and strew about 1 1/2 cups of frozen peas across the top then place the lid back on for about 7-10 minutes, or until the peas thaw. It should look something like this….

Serve up and enjoy! Then pretend it’s your wedding night (wink wink).