The Kitchen Illiterate

Fresh, Easy Pizza Sauce

In all of my experimentation with pizza-making, I’ve focused almost exclusively on the dough and the toppings. I worked endlessly to find the best dough recipe, and topped that dough with every kind of topping I could imagine. But when I wanted a traditional tomato-sauced pizza, I usually contented myself with buying a jar of pizza sauce from the market and calling it a day. Well, now that I’ve got my dough recipe pretty much down (I usually go for either Smitten Kitchen’s Really Simple Dough, or, if I want to bank some away in the freezer for the future, Peter Reinhart’s neo-Neapolitan dough from American Pie), I figured it was time to nail a recipe for homemade sauce. The good news? The sauce is WAYYYYY easier than the dough.
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Quick Pickled Cabbage Salad

It took me a long time to become a fan of cabbage. In fact, most cruciferous vegetables were anathema to me as a young child, for their somewhat, um, gassy odor. Cabbage was nothing to me but the bitter, slightly wilted filler in salad bars, and the stinky, mayonnaise-clogged pile of coleslaw I avoided at picnics. I never realized you could cook cabbage, but my first taste of the vegetable braised, until it became silky smooth and almost sweet, was an eye-opener. These days, I’m starting to enjoy raw cabbage, but I still usually prefer it cooked until some of the harsh, raw flavor dissipates. However, summer is not the time for long, slow cooking, so yesterday, I decided to try something new. I decided to pickle.

There are a lot of recipes for pickled cabbage, and many of them looked very involved. Some involved long periods of salting and fermentation, but I wanted more fast and easy. This preparation isn’t fancy, and certainly some additional spices and complicated steps might result in something more complex and mind-blowing, but I am quite pleased with how it came out. And as part of a simple composed salad, it’s pretty spectacular.
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White Bean, Tomato, and Chard Salad

I never really thought to eat chard raw, but the stuff I’ve been getting from the CSA is so tender that last week, I decided to give it a shot. Admittedly, this isn’t entirely raw: The bean and tomato mixture was hot, and wilted the chard a bit when they were tossed together. But it still held onto some crunch, and with the addition of cabbage, this salad has a great combination of textures. And the flavor was pretty amazing. In fact, I hadn’t intended this to be a blog dinner. It was just a quick weeknight meal, thrown together from what was in my pantry, but I was so pleased with how it came out, I had to share.
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Pasta Salad with Salmon, Cabbage, and Carrots

Last week, I broke out the grill for the first time in a year and cooked up some lovely salmon fillets. Being as I was only making dinner for one, I ended up with more grilled salmon than I could eat in one night, and the next day I used the rest to put together a huge bowl of this lovely pasta salad. Well, it ended up being more pasta salad than I could eat in one night, and I had pasta salad to last me many days. And I got a little sick of it after it became my fourth lunch in a row, so I might recommend that if you make this pasta salad, you have more than one person around to eat it. Because I do think you should make this pasta salad. It’s pasta salad season, after all, and this one is unique.
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Grilled Salmon and Potato Salad

Last summer, when I packed up my stuff in Boston and moved it all out to Walla Walla, I brought along the mystery grill. The grill showed up a few years back, on a rainy Fourth of July, but for whatever reason was never even unpacked from the box. It first saw the light of day in Walla Walla, when I used it to cook the first meal I made in my new house. I intended to use it often last summer, but instead, I found myself intimidated by it, and uninterested in spending the time and energy required to start a fire when I was cooking for myself alone.

The grill is a tiny thing, a little Smokey Joe. And last week I decided to get over my fear of fire-starting, pull it out of the shed, and give it back its rightful place on my porch. And despite the freezer full of beef waiting to be eaten, I once again decided to cook some salmon on my little grill.
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Rosemary Olive Oil Cake

Just a quick post today, and I’m about to direct you elsewhere, but I just had to share this awesome cake with all of you. I made it for a small Saturday evening gathering with friends shortly before I went on vacation, and it was much beloved. When I first saw the recipe from Heidi Swanson over at 101 Cookbooks, I knew I would have to find an occasion to make it soon soon soon, and thankfully, the perfect gathering presented itself a few weeks ago. This cake is meant for casual summertime parties, the kind that involve cool white wine and sitting around on a patio, conversing about everything and nothing.
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Wild Rice Salad with Peppers and Carrots

I spent the first 10 days of July back in Boston, the land of steamy air, unexpected thunderstorms, sticky skin, and at least for me on this vacation, no cooking. We ate nearly all of our meals in restaurants or at friends’ houses, and while it was certainly a treat (Indian food! My favorite pasta at Delfino! Pizza!) it was awfully nice to get back into my kitchen last night. It’s been pretty hot here in Walla Walla, although the lack of humidity is a vast improvement on the Northeast right now. Still, I wasn’t feeling a strong inclination to stand over a stove for too long, or eat anything too hot. And I felt a pretty desperate need for vegetables after all that pizza and pasta and grilled meat in Boston.

This Wild Rice salad is perfect for that kind of evening, and is even better the next day, straight out of the fridge cold, when all the flavors have had a chance to get better acquainted. It does involve a fair amount of vegetable chopping, and unless you think to cook the rice ahead of time, there is some stove time required, too, but it’s nice, hands-off stove time, for the most part. And the mix of cooked and uncooked ingredients is surprising and lends some good variety to this salad.
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Quinoa and Bean Salad

I must admit that quinoa and I have been slow to warm to each other. It sounded like the ideal food for a mostly vegetarian diet: It’s a grain and also a complete protein. [Updated: It’s not a grain! It’s actually a seed. Ah, research…] And it’s fast and easy to cook. But for some reason, the love just wasn’t there. This quinoa and bean salad, though, might have tipped the scales strongly in favor of quinoa. And it’s a perfect summer meal, as it involves very little actual cooking! I can’t wait to eat this again.
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Rice and Beans and Collard Greens

I believe I’ve talked about rice and beans quite a lot here on this site. It’s one of my staple dishes: filling, cheap, and easy to make enough for lunch all week. And even better: It is very versatile. Just change up the herbs and spices you throw in the mix and you have a whole different dinner on your hands. Last week I got a bunch of collard greens in my CSA share, and as I thought about what to do with them, I realized a Cajun-style rice and beans dish might be in order. I originally thought of making some kind of jambalaya, but I’m not sure it’s quite right to call a dish jambalaya unless it contains shrimp and/or andouille sausage. I used beans instead of meat, and whether or not it’s properly jambalaya, it is pretty darn good.
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Spicy Barley with Snow Peas and Feta

When I pulled something non-leafy out of my CSA box last week, I must admit I got very excited. They sent some lovely, delicate, golden snow peas (and a bigger bag this week!) and I immediately started plotting how they might end up on my plate. A few cursory searches revealed a lot of recipes for basic side dishes and beef-based stir fries. And although I am currently blessed with a freezer full of beef, I wanted something vegetarian. And something that could stand up as an actual meal, not an afterthought, which vegetable recipes so often seem to be. I couldn’t find anything that appealed, so when it came time to cook the snow peas, I winged it. And what I came up with wasn’t half bad.
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