dill – The Kitchen Illiterate

Squash and Swiss Chard Pasta Bake

We spent Thanksgiving weekend with my family in San Diego, and although I had some kind of notion that I would have something to share with you all here, I slipped firmly into vacation mode when I got down there, and barely even touched my laptop the whole weekend. I was far to busy being entertained by my favorite little person. I did cook Thanksgiving dinner with my brothers, as usual (they smoked a turkey this year!), but I didn’t get as intense about the meal as I have in the past. I didn’t come up with a cooking schedule, I didn’t try to manage every corner of the kitchen, I didn’t even have recipes for some of the side dishes we made. And while things might not have come out to the table as perfect as a Martha Stewart photo shoot, I was considerably more relaxed than usual. And that was definitely something to be grateful for (so was that smoked turkey; it was incredible).

We drove back on Saturday, and the drive was not so much something to be grateful for. I think in the future I’ll be much more willing to fly home for Thanksgiving; the traffic could have been worse, certainly. But my back still hurts from 10 hours in the car. And as soon as we got home, we were thrown into a very busy week. I’m just glad my mom sent me home with leftovers, because otherwise we wouldn’t really have anything to eat.
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Squash and Broccoli Pasta

I’m a recipe person. I love to read cookbooks and cooking magazines, and I love to read recipes. I like the lists of ingredients, the step-by-step instructions, and the implicit promise that if you follow the directions, you’ll have something to show for it. Of course, I rarely follow recipes exactly as written, but more often than not, when I’m cooking there is a magazine (or a laptop) open on the kitchen table for reference. Some people are not like this: They make things up as they go along, working largely from instinct, and they aren’t interested in collecting page upon page of cooking instruction. I’d like to think the process of learning to cook, at least for me, is largely about working toward some place in the middle.

As I learn, and gather experience under my apron strings (if I ever remembered to wear an apron), I get more comfortable leaving the recipes on the shelf. And I find some of my favorite times in the kitchen come when I read a handful of recipes and use them as inspiration, cobbling them together in my mind into a single, successful dish. Unfortunately, sometimes the results of these attempts are something less than successful. Sometimes improvisation results in stress, in burned things, under-seasoned things, uninteresting things. I try to remind myself that these flops are just part of the learning process.
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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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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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Broccoli and Dill Wild Rice

I think dill is my new favorite herb, thanks to this bowl of rice and broccoli. When I started pulling things out of the refrigerator to make lunch, I had no idea I was going to love what came out of the pot in the end as much as I did. And it’s all because of the dill. Well, and the walnuts didn’t hurt. And I always love broccoli. And Worcestershire sauce adds a great kick to wild rice. So really, this was just the perfect combination of ingredients.
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Beef Stroganoff

I always thought of beef stroganoff as airline food, or cafeteria food. Something gloppy and lukewarm served in large buffet trays by people in uniforms. But a few years ago my dear friend Crystal requested that I make beef stroganoff for her birthday dinner, and I realized just how wrong I’d been. When done right, beef stroganoff is rich and tangy and elegant and it really makes me want to cook meat more often. Lately I’ve been craving it something fierce, so last night I decided to make it again. And I was practically swooning into my bowl, it was so delicious. If you, too, would like to swoon over dinner, give this a try.
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Update! Pierogi with Tomato Dill Sauce

As I near the three year anniversary of this here bloggity blog, I’ve been reading back over old posts. And I’m kind of embarrassed to admit how frequently I wrote things like, “This recipe wasn’t perfect, but I will definitely try to improve on it and let you know how that goes.” I’m embarrassed because I almost never actually tried to improve those recipes. When I first started learning how to cook, I had a real aversion to repeating recipes, and if something wasn’t memorably awesome the first time around, the chances of it getting another go were pretty slim.

Well, now that I know a little more in the ways of the kitchen, I’m starting to get more curious about those initially not-so-exciting recipes, and I think I’m finally ready to try to improve on them. I’ve decided that it’s finally time to start making good on all those promises, and I’ve started with this: Pierogi with Browned Onion, Tomatoes, and Dill.
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Johnny Machete? Johnny Marzetti? Just call it delicious.

If you’ve been around here long enough you’ve heard me mention Gilmore Girls, many times. It’s one of the only television shows I’ve ever become addicted to (for longer than a week), and I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve watched the entire seven-season series through not once, but twice. And yes, I own them all on DVD. I don’t really know what it is about those fast-talking, witty ladies, but I cannot get enough, and I’ve gotten more than one person (like, pretty much everyone I’ve ever lived with) hooked as well, so I know it’s not just me.

What, in the name of all that is good and holy, does this have to do with food? Well, other than the fact that those Girls eat a lot of it, there is one particular episode (in Season 3) in which a strange casserole is mentioned: Johnny Machete. Nothing is said except that it contains cream of mushroom soup, and come on now, every casserole worth its weight contains cream of mushroom soup. It’s not called casserole glue for nothin’.
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Chicken Braid? Yes, Chicken Braid.

My housemate, Hilary, gave me this recipe a few months ago, and I made it twice in three weeks. Those who know me know that I rarely repeat a recipe, no matter how good it is, so twice in three weeks is really saying something. Hilary says her mom got the recipe from Pampered Chef, but this recipe can be found all over the interwebs, with very little variation. I suspect it may originally have been one of those Pillsbury package recipes, as every version I’ve seen calls for packaged crescent rolls.

I did not use Pillsbury crescent rolls, though. I used puff pastry, and it turned out splendidly, perhaps, dare I say, even better? Key point, though: the first time I made it I used Trader Joe’s puff pastry, and the second time, Pepperidge Farm, and the Trader Joe’s was a far better choice. The sheet of pastry was a better size, it thawed more quickly, and the flavor was much more buttery and light. Just so you know.
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