Lasagna Is Not an Appropriate Summer Dish

“Why are you making lasagna when it’s 9 billion degrees outside?” tweeted @amycrea, a tweeple who has become an IRL friend. (And who ought to know better than to ask.)

Why? Why?? What do you mean, “why?”

• I got a new blue Le Creuset earthenware pan for my birthday! Yay! Now I’m feeling adventurous!
• I read an article about lasagna on Slate.com in a series called “You’re Doing It Wrong.” Nothing pisses me off more than being told by Internet hipsters that I’m doing something wrong. Plus, for someone who’s telling everyone they’re doing it wrong, the author holds a rather shallow understanding of what makes a good tomato sauce. Rrr! Now I’m feeling vindictive!
• I have promised to bring dinner to my friends Deb and Sean, who are new parents. Now I’m feeling all protective.

So add it up: if you had the whole clear blue sky before you; and THEN you had to one-up someone; AND you could feed it to your loved ones—well, doesn’t that equal lasagna? Weather be damned!

Ridiculous, Ridiculous, Ridiculous
I followed Slate’s suggestion and made mushroom lasagna, except they don’t know what they’re doing so I fixed their recipe. They ARE right, however, about ingredients: get the best stuff you can find. There are three parts to the recipe: sauce, cheese filling, and assembly.

The ingredients PLUS a beadwork snail

Sauce

Olive oil
1 onion, chopped
½ head garlic, chopped
½ to 1 lb mushrooms, chopped
1-2 sage leaves 1 t dried rosemary
3 cans crushed tomatoes
1 can tomato paste
1 cup wine
1 big sprig basil, leaves plucked and torn
Salt and pepper to taste

I overfilled ol' Bluie again. Relax, though, it's a double recipe

 Heat the olive oil in a heavy pan. Sauté the onions and garlic for a few minutes until translucent. Add the mushrooms and continue sautéing until they release, then resorb, their juices. Add the sage and rosemary; then the wine, crushed tomatoes, and tomato paste. Simmer this while you do the next parts, and take your time; it would be best to simmer for an hour. Or more, even! Throw the basil in right at the end before assembly.

Cheese Filling
1 lb fresh spinach
1 lb ricotta cheese
8 oz shredded parmesan, pecorino, asiago, or other dry aged Italian cheese. Hey, shut up. No jokes about my grandma!
1 egg
A dash of freshly grated nutmeg
Salt and pepper to taste

Wash and steam the spinach. Drain it, turn it out onto a cutting board, and chop it. When it is cool enough, squeeze as much water out of it as you can.
Whisk the egg in a medium bowl. Dump in everything else and blend.

Giant mess

Assembly
1 lb lasagna noodles
Olive oil
1 lb mozzarella cheese (fresh or shredded, either is fine.)
Cook the noodles according to the package – I’d throw several tablespoons of salt into four or five quarts of water and boil them in that. Pull them out of the water and drain them, then toss them with a little olive oil to keep them from getting sticky.

Preheat the oven to 375°. (On this, Slate and I agree.) Grease your big old lasagna pan with olive oil, then coat the bottom with sauce. Put down a layer of noodles. Then spread another layer of sauce; drop half the cheese filling in little blobs all over the sauce and smooth it out into a layer as best you can. Put noodles atop this. Do sauce, cheese filling, noodles again. Top with a thin layer of sauce and then cover it up with mozzarella.

Just-a like-a that.

Bake the lasagna until it’s toasty on top and bubbly on the bottom. Watch it carefully, and if it is melted and bubbly but not toasty, you may want to run it under the broiler for a minute or three. Remove the lasagna from the oven and take the time to make a salad before slicing it and serving to acclaim.

Mangiamo!

Brown Study

For me, morels are from another world. Someone else knows them. Not me. Someone else from a morel family knows the secret: these seasonal markers, when the buds on this tree are just so, when these flowers bloom. Someone else takes a path, finds landmarks, turns here at this rock and arrives at this stump. In a town I don’t know, someone recognizes a man but will not greet him because, thirty years ago, his father came back alone to a place her father showed him.

I hope no one ever figures out how to cultivate them, either, because their mystery is part of their appeal. I hope they always stay scarce, ephemeral, and expensive. This forces a person to approach them with some gravity, mindfulness, and respect. For middle-class city dwellers, there are so few truly seasonal foods. Almost everything is attainable with a splurge or a search. It’s a comfort—to me, at least—to know that some things aren’t for sale because they truly can’t be bought at any price. Fresh morels, in any season but spring, are a thing like that.

Fresh morel pilaf, pan-grilled trout, and sorrel sauce

The pilaf
¼ lb fresh morels, rinsed well (they’re gritty!) and chopped roughly
1 bunch ramps or green onions, sliced (white part only)
2-3 T butter or oil
1 cup basmati rice
2 cups water or stock
Salt and pepper to taste

Heat the stock in a small saucepan and keep it ready. Heat the butter or oil in a pan with a tight-fitting lid. Sauté the ramps and morels until the mushrooms release, then resorb, their juices. Toss the rice into the pan and sauté a few minutes more until the rice starts to turn golden brown. Add the hot stock and bring to a boil. Turn the heat down to simmering, cover the pan, and cook until the liquid is absorbed, about 20 minutes. Season to taste.

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The sauce
Make the sauce while you’re making the pilaf. Be sure it’s ready before you cook the fish. This one is modified from a recipe in Joy of Cooking.

1 carrot, chopped
2 sticks celery, chopped
1 medium onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic
6 springs flat-leaf parsley
½ c water
½ c dry white wine
4 T butter, cut in little pieces
1 bunch sorrel, washed and torn or cut into 1” pieces
Salt and pepper to taste

Put the carrot, celery, garlic, parsley, water, and wine in a small saucepan with a tight-fitting lid and cook for 20 minutes. Strain the liquid and put back in the pot. There should be a half cup.
Heat the stock and whisk in the butter. Stir in the sorrel and let it wilt. Season to taste. Set the sauce aside while you make the fish.

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Pan-grilled trout

A trout
A pan

Heat up the pan for a few minutes. The trick is for it to be very hot. Lay the trout in the pan and wait 5-6 minutes; check inside and see if the inside of the bottom fillet is starting to cook. When it is, then flip the trout over and cook for another 5-6 minutes. The skin will be attractively brown and blistered. How fantastic is that?!

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To serve: I think it is fun to make a little arrangement of the trout on a platter and show it to the diners. So dramatic! Why should the cook be the only one to enjoy the fun?

Next, slit the trout down the back and make a cut through the skin across the tail and across the body just behind the gills. Use a fork, the knife, a spatula, and a few muttered curse words to release the top fillet from the trout’s skeleton. Put this on a plate flesh side up and spoon on some of the sorrel sauce. Put a spoonful of mushroom pilaf on the plate and maybe some green frippery at the top.

Lift the head and tail. The skeleton should come off the second fillet, which you can then plate and sauce. So fancy. If you are not creeped out by the head, then don’t forget to pick out the tiny morsels of trout cheek under the gill plate just south of the eyes.

Bon appetit!

Wagon Scapes

I have never met my friend Kerry, and this recipe is for her.

Last summer I decided to try Twitter. One of the first people I found was one who blogs and tweets as Clue Wagon. We were both new to Twitter, and we quickly discovered that we really enjoy each other’s perspective on life. Go read her blog about genealogy. You’ll see; she’s a mensch.


Clue Wagon and I discovered garlic scapes at about the same time last year, I think. I remember sharing confusion and fascination with this absurdly curly vegetable. We swapped recipes. She sent me a nice pesto. I sent her a sauté of scapes and shrimp finished with white wine and served over cappellini. She told me she’s a vegetarian.

Damn it! I try so hard; I really do. I try to be open to the notion that not everyone will eat everything. I try not to assume. But it did not occur to me to wonder, much less ask, if Clue Wagon was into eating the not-kosher, not-halal, not-vegetable underwater bugs that shrimp essentially are. Crap!

I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Here’s the deal: cooked shrimp are a circle of savory yum. They meet the tooth with just the right amount of resistance. They are salty-sweet and meltingly delicious. I hate the thought of my friend missing out on an ingredient that creates this satisfying burst of flavor, but I’ll be damned if I can’t come up with something that isn’t a dead animal, too.

So, Kerry, please accept this recipe as my love song to vegetarians and food lovers everywhere. You’re at the top of the list.

Wagon Scapes
If you are a vegan, you could make these with gnocchi. It’s so gratifying to bite those. Rrrr!

Pan photo by Beth Berila


1 package cheese tortelloni (2-3 servings)
2-3 T olive oil
1 bunch (10 to 12) garlic scapes
1 bunch(6-8) green onions
½ lb crimini mushrooms
¼ to ½ c white wine, stock, or water
1 sprig each of sage, rosemary, parsley, and basil
Salt and pepper to taste

Set a pot of water to boil. Mince up the herbs. Cut the scapes into ½-inch pieces. Slice the white part of the onions and save the greens for some other use. Slice the mushrooms.

Pop dried tortelloni in the boiling water and give them a bit of a head start. If you’re using gnocchi and you are a multitasker, you can make them at the same time as the scapes. If you’re a one-track cook or you’re using fresh pasta, make them at the end.

Heat the oil in a sauté pan over medium-high heat. Throw in the onions and garlic scapes and stir them around for a minute or two. Throw in the mushrooms. Stir until they release their juices.


Splash some of your liquid into the pan. Keep stirring until reduced and the vegetables are tender. Remove from the heat. Finish your pasta, drain it, and put it in serving bowls. Spoon the vegetables on top. Sprinkle on the herbs and finish with salt and a grind of black pepper.

Mangiamo!