I’m going to be preoccupied with basil for a while. Take a peak:

Allow me to introduce you, dear friends, to my buddy, my kitchen cohort-du-jour, Basil. It’s that time of year again, when Trader Joe’s is the proprietor of fresh, potted basil, a plant that will feed my culinary imaginings for weeks to come. Brian picked it up for me on Mother’s Day, rather than flowers (does this man know me or what?) and I’ve been admiring it all week. I’m enamored of its gracious leafiness, of its silky sheen that convinces any who look upon it that I more or less know what I’m doing.

Fresh herbs are my ace in the hole, my sure thing. My raison d’être, even, because if it weren’t for fresh herbs, I may not be here at all, culinarily speaking. My cooking got a whole lot better once I learned that if you throw in some chopped of this and a few leaves of that – at the right times and in all the right places – you effect that sensation we know as flavor.

One of the items on my life list is to grow an herb garden, and I swear I’ll do it, some future day (just trying to keep it real, to project myself through a dreamy portal just east of pragmatic – an herb garden being a far more realistic goal for me to achieve than, say, growing summer squash or green beans). I’ve made a number of efforts to sprout things in pots, and it always comes down to a severe talent deficit, an almost unjust lack of intuition. That, and I’m hard pressed to find appropriate light in my house, and the poor shoots, when I get any, whither and fade if I place them outside in our miserable heat, even in the early morning. But as I understand it, basil is supposed to enjoy heat, leaving me to conclude, then, that the problem can only be me.

If anyone out there (anyone? anyone?) would care to enlighten me, to instruct me somewhat in the care and growing of herbs, I’d be grateful. And in the meantime, I’ll share my favorite hot weather things to do with basil. What are yours?

• Chopped and mixed in a cold salad of just-tender peas, crumbled chèvre and mint

• Scattered over a pasta salad with lemon zest and shrimp

• Stirred into couscous just before serving

• Whole leaves in panini with fat slices of tomato and buffalo mozzarella

• Sprinkled into a frittata

• Boiled in a simple syrup and swirled into lemonade

• Sliced, chiffonade-style, and then spread over a grilled pizza topped with roasted corn and tomatoes

• In a vinaigrette with orange zest, orange and lemon juices and walnut oil (this was last night’s concoction, drizzled over sautéed scallops atop baby greens, avocado and orange segments)

Recipe: Banana Oat Nut Bread

I recently brought my radio into my kitchen. It was part experiment, part research for a magazine story assignment: Cook while listening to public radio (could I accomplish the dual mental exercise of actively listening and following a recipe?). Does anyone else do that?

I’m an ardent fan of public radio programming, and I often listen to snatches of mostly National Public Radio shows in the car. But working on my article, I found what a pleasant, productive pairing listening and cooking can be.

As part of my research, I got to have a conversation with Nikki Silva of NPR’s The Kitchen Sisters, to get her take on the confluence of cooking and listening. “When I’m cooking I just love to listen,” she says. “I feel a little like I’m on a vacation anyway with either of those activities. It’s very relaxing to me, it’s being transported.”

Silva shared her dad’s banana bread recipe with me, which is found in the pages of “Hidden Kitchens: Stories, Recipes and More from NPR’s The Kitchen Sisters.” It’s not listed in the table of contents or even the index. Instead it’s almost buried as an illustrative element, so you might miss it if you don’t know what to look for: a photocopy of a scratched out by hand recipe, with instructions that are casual and implied, the way handed-down recipes usually are. I’m running that one in the magazine, but it made me want to rifle through my files for my own banana bread recipe, because it’s been way too long.

I made Silva’s father’s version the same afternoon I made mine, and the two contain roughly the same amounts of banana and sugar, but diverge there. I’m partial to banana bread (or any bread for that matter) that’s nutty and hearty with whole wheat and flax. Silva’s is not quite so self-conscious. It’s the kind you’d bake and then walk over to the neighbors’, cradled in the loose wrapping of a tea towel, still hot and moist, a prime afternoon snack.

Banana Oat Nut Bread

I decided this would be the perfect banana bread recipe for Not Quite Nigella’s Banana Bread Bake-Off! It’s a great breakfast banana bread, sweet but with staying power. We enjoy it the day after baking lightly toasted with a smear of peanut butter.

1 cup packed brown sugar

6 tbsp canola oil

¼ cup whole ground flaxseed meal

3 eggs

1 ½ cups mashed ripe banana (about 3 large)

1 cup regular oats

½ cup plain yogurt

1 tsp vanilla

1 cup white whole wheat flour

1 cup stone ground whole wheat flour

1 tbsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

½ tsp cinnamon

¼ cup chopped walnuts

Cooking spray

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Combine the first 4 ingredients in a large bowl; beat well with a mixer at medium speed. Add banana, oats, yogurt and vanilla to sugar mixture; beat well. Lightly spoon flour into measuring cups and level with a knife. In a medium bowl, combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and cinnamon; stir with a whisk. Add flour mixture to sugar and banana mixture; beat just until moist. Spoon batter into a large loaf pan coated with cooking spray. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes to 1 hour or until wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool 10 minutes in pan on a wire rack; remove from pan and cool completely.

Recipe: Chickpea and Tomato Sauce

Cooks (and particularly cooks who blog – you know who you are) are lousy with confessions, and here is one of mine: I’m horrible at sharing my kitchen. If you’re one of those chummy folk who consider the kitchen a communal space, a little oasis of gathering and working together, well, I’m sure there’s a musical out there for you somewhere.

My kitchen does fit the particular cliché that says it’s the room where everyone tends to congregate, even though the really comfy seats are just steps away. But it’s not having other people close by that gets in the way; it’s people cooking with me when I’m trying to cook. When it comes to divvying up kitchen responsibilities, I’m kind of stingy.

It’s enough for me to attempt to wrap my head around a recipe, to figure out what it is I’m supposed to be doing to the salmon, let alone to try and delegate. I’m a little too accomplished at grumbling at Brian when he shows up and tries, graciously, to help get dinner on the table (imagine grumbling at your husband under those circumstances! What kind of ingrate am I? I’m trying to mend my ways).

I have my excuses. For one, my kitchen isn’t exactly designed for more than a single cook at work. It’s not galley small, it’s suburban moderate, but the layout isn’t really conducive to two people standing side by side snapping the ends off the asparagus. And then I suppose my aversion stems also from the kitchen-as-sanctuary concept I hold so dear. But, I’m trying to do better at handing off the chopping knife to other, willing individuals, because, honestly, I’m not that sacrificial, and besides, cooking with another person is supposed to be a bonding experience, right?

Case in point: My sister came to visit last week – my sister who loves cooking every bit as much as I and who is therefore worthy to hold court in the kitchen right alongside me. So I had to let her in the kitchen, just had to. I couldn’t very well keep her out, couldn’t pretend to be cleaning the tile grout or some such thing when all over my very counters was evidence that I was indeed engaging in the act of preparing food.

So I decided I would suck it up and share, the way sisters are supposed to do. I’ve never had a problem sharing with her in other areas. Skirts and flip flops and my 90s music collection have all been fair game, and she has reciprocated, letting me borrow a hoodie when I visited her and forgot to pack a sweater, or making me countless copies of mp3s. Not to mention that she always cedes her bedroom to me and Brian and our overwhelming suitcases.

Gracious attitude at the ready, I planned a menu of recipes we could prepare together: handmade pasta (our first time! See? Bonding at work here!) with chickpea sauce (which we both found absurdly tasty – more bonding!); an improvised black bean spread with cilantro and lime for a Southwestern-style pizza; chicken and chutney lettuce wraps. And then there were the cookies we threw together from our elementary school cookbook. All told, she was here for a week, offering me a week’s worth of meals in reform. I don’t think I elbowed her once.

Chickpea and Tomato Sauce

Adapted from Gourmet

This sauce is hearty and versatile. We ate it with homemade orechiette, which cradled the chickpeas perfectly. There were tons of leftovers, which I tossed with some cooked bulgur and a handful of torn basil leaves a couple of nights later.

1 15-oz can chickpeas

¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil

4 garlic cloves, chopped

1 medium onion, finely chopped

3 medium carrots, finely chopped

¼ to ½ teaspoon dried red pepper flakes

Kosher salt

1 28-ounce can chopped or diced tomatoes

1 cup water

1/3 cup finely chopped flat-leaf (Italian) parsley

Heat oil in a large, heavy saucepan over medium heat. Add onion, garlic, carrots and red pepper flakes (red pepper can be omitted and added later at the table if you are feeding heat-sensitive people) and ½ teaspoon salt and cook until softened, stirring occasionally. Add chickpeas, tomatoes, water and ½ teaspoon and simmer, uncovered, until carrots are tender and sauce is slightly thickened, about five minutes. Stir in parsley and salt to taste.

Serve over small pasta, such as shells or orechiette, or stir into cooked grains.

]]> http://thezest.wordpress.com/2008/05/08/learning-to-play-nice/feed/ Trisha http://thezest.wordpress.com/2008/05/05/tending-the-pot/ http://thezest.wordpress.com/2008/05/05/tending-the-pot/#comments Tue, 06 May 2008 01:52:39 +0000 Trisha http://thezest.wordpress.com/?p=198

You know the thing about there being two types of people: energy givers and energy suckers? The idea is that you want to spend your time with energy givers, people who have the ability to make you feel revitalized, enthusiastic about life (those energy suckers, on the other hand, sometimes just have to get kicked to the curb).

That’s more or less my approach to cooking. I’m all about the recipes that are energy givers, not the ones that make you feel like a stove slave. And I mean this on a couple of levels. For one thing, I’m into recipes that provide energy because they’re nutritionally solid. But I’m also into preparing dishes where the very preparation makes me feel refreshed and rejuvenated. This dish I made the other night – Pearled Barley with Peas & Mint, Risotto Style – fits that bill exactly.

I haven’t had the chance here yet to wax lovingly about risotto, to tell you how very much I adore the dish. I think it just might be my favorite food in all the world. At the very least, it’s way up there on the list. And it just might be my favorite food in the world to make.

It’s a soothing, comforting preparation that makes me feel like a real cook, and like I’m tending to my family at the same time I’m doing something for me. It’s standing, feet planted firmly in front of the stove, deliberately but gently coaxing hot broth into smooth grains of Arborio, urging them toward their creamy potential with soft, counter-clockwise strokes of the spoon. It’s giving those grains your undivided attention, knowing they’ll reward you for your vigilance (a little like raising kids, don’t you think?).

I know, it sounds like an energy sucker, but, for me at least, it’s the other way around. Making risotto is a cinch, but it does require almost constant tending of the pot. There’s something about the process, about being required to focus on the rice, that dials it all back for me, puts my cares into perspective, allows reflection on the day. And the whole time I’m making dinner.

But while making it does wonders for my mental health, risotto is otherwise not the healthiest of choices. I’m kind of a stickler for whole grains, and those Arborio grains are pretty little things, shiny and pearl-like – which means they’ve been pretty well stripped of all their good-for-you properties.

So, inspired by a long-ago post from Heidi on pearled barley “risotto,” and using one of my favorite risotto recipes from Giada De Laurentiis, I came up with this version. The grains I used still had a brown mottled look to them, meaning they hadn’t been polished too much, and so perhaps retain more nutritional qualities. I also just discovered First Blush juices, and wanted to try them as a wine substitute (I know, I’m breaking rules all over the place here). I was impressed by their nuanced, dry taste. And the resulting risotto-style dish was, while not as creamy and indulgent as the traditional stuff, extremely satisfying in its own right – both in the making, and the eating.

Pearled Barley with Peas & Mint, Risotto Style

Serves 4

6 cups low-sodium chicken stock

1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

1 medium finely chopped onion

1 ½ cups pearled barley

½ cup First Blush Cabernet juice or dry red wine

1 cup frozen peas, thawed

½ cup freshly grated parmesan

¼ cup each chopped fresh mint and Italian parsley

Salt and freshly ground pepper

Bring the broth to a simmer over medium-high heat; don’t allow it to boil. Keep warm and softly simmering at just under medium heat.

Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Saute the onion until soft and translucent, about 5 to 8 minutes. Add barley to pan and stir, toasting until fragrant, about 2 minutes. Add juice or wine, stirring until liquid is absorbed. Add two ladlefuls of hot stock, stirring continually until absorbed (it’s ok to step away momentarily step away to pour your kid a glass of milk or something — just not too long or the barley will stick and potentially burn). Add another ladleful of stock, stirring continually until liquid is absorbed. Repeat this process two or three more times, then check barley for doneness. Add peas, then continue to add stock until barley is just tender, but not mushy (you may have leftover broth).

Stir in parmesan, mint, parsley, salt and pepper to taste. Add more parmesan for a creamier consistency. Serve immediately.

I’m a fan of kitchen time – this you know. And, like many of you other fantastic cooks out there, I also love to read about cooking, about who’s cooking what and how they’re doing it.

That’s part of why I started writing here, because I’m an ardent reader of other people’s cooking blogs. They’re my favorite kind of blog to read (other than that of my friend, Tiff, because she’s so super smart). So, naturally, I get all excited when I find my very own little blog is included in lists of blogs other people read and enjoy. And that, my readers, of course leads to my discovery of even more cooking blogs I want to catch up with on a regular basis. And so the circle continues.

Anyway, I just wanted to share a new resource I found with a list of blogs that are great reads (and I’m on it!). It’s called Great Cooks. Jill McKeever, who’s in charge over there, told me in an e-mail, “Your blog is absolutely entertaining and informative. I’m thrilled to have it on the Great Cooks Blogroll.” What a day-maker, that Jill! Pop on over to her site and find a new recipe, make a new friend. That’s what this whole thing’s all about, right? Enjoy.

I’d like to debunk a couple of myths circulating out there in Mommyland. Myth Number One: if you raise kids on so-called grown-up foods, they won’t complain. They’ll always eat what you put in front of them. They’ll dig in with gusto.

Myth Number Two: If you let kids cook with you, if they’re involved in making what they’re going to be served, they will eat it gladly.

Yeah, right, I huff, I, the mother of Quinn, who has perfected the sport of pushing plates of unwanted dinners across the table. She’s working on besting her own record, the speed with which her plate reaches the other end of the table and goes crashing to the floor, untouched food and all. There we have it: in-my-face evidence that the myths are just that.

Take any given night, and you’ll find me bemused, at best, trying to shake it off, to refuse to be offended by my five-year-old. The other day, in fact, she was five-for-five, five nights in a row of absolutely refusing to try even a bite of the dinner I’d made for her, dinners that she contributed to making.

I believe she may have grasped her fork at one point, but I’m fairly positive its willing prongs never came within stabbing proximity of any of the dishes presented this past week, including soba noodles with carrots, chicken with couscous and corn, and tonight’s offering of lentils with more carrots, mint and goat cheese. Not exactly chicken nuggets posing suspiciously as T-Rexes, but then my kid’s never so much as gazed upon such an undesirable feat of processed protein (do they even make those anymore?).

It’s not that she’s been starving herself. If bread is part of the meal, she will reach hungrily for a portion. And she did in fact eat a slice of ham off her panino from two nights ago, a panino she insisted on making herself and to her exacting specifications, which meant dismissing its turn in the panini press. Which rendered it more plain ham and cheese on a par-baked roll. But perhaps she meant the bread and the cheddar to act as aromatics, imparting a few moist crumbs and a bit of salty agey-ness to the ham slice in the few moments the three were joined together before she whisked the floppy piece of meat from its nesting place. What remained was a cold, dry and rejected sandwich alone on her plastic flower-shaped plate.

At any rate, I’m contemplating tonight’s pasta plan, and wondering why I, of all parents, have a picky eater. They say that if you give children so-called grown-up food from the get-go, that will set their palates accordingly. I’ve duly followed that doctrine. I don’t dumb down food for my kids. So if Quinn’s been eating this way her whole life, what is behind this sudden rash of dinnertime revolts?

I suppose it’s typical of motherhood that my efforts to ply my children with flavor and variety would fall flat in certain stages. Maybe it’s a call to humility, a reproof from the Spirits of the United Motherhood. Because last month I cast a mental rolling of the eyes in the direction of a certain mom at gymnastics when I overheard her give dinner instructions to her husband regarding their toddler- and preschool-aged girls. “I don’t know what they want yet. I might call you to put something in the oven,” she said. As it was nearing 6 p.m. and her two had just exhausted themselves with an hour of somersaults and trampoline jumping, her “something in the oven” could only mean something frozen and shrink wrapped.

And I almost felt my eyebrows visibly arch in disapproval when a couple of weeks later another fellow gymnastics mom told her husband that “we have snacks, didja get my message? We’re not gonna have a full-fledged dinner but you have plenty of fro-yo and whatever else if ya feel like it.” I had planned ahead and had all the trappings of a full-fledged dinner waiting to be pieced together when we got home from gymnastics and yes, I felt smug about it.

So while I suppose Quinn is just acting her age in exerting picky-ness at her pleasure, her decidedly non-diplomatic way of pushing plates across the table has brought me back to earth a little – to an earth populated by busy kids driving their moms to look for easy meal solutions. To an earth where little ones handily refuse to eat a food for reasons that seem completely random, despite our best efforts to school their delicate taste buds from infancy.

But I’m not caving. Weary gymnastics moms and their frozen stashes, Quinn and her untouched fork and flying plates be darned. Around here, there’s no such thing as “kid food.”

]]> http://thezest.wordpress.com/2008/04/23/when-plates-fly/feed/ Trisha http://thezest.wordpress.com/2008/04/16/the-heart-grows-fonder/ http://thezest.wordpress.com/2008/04/16/the-heart-grows-fonder/#comments Wed, 16 Apr 2008 23:54:11 +0000 Trisha http://thezest.wordpress.com/?p=190

Oh, my big ideas. I am triumphantly not Martha, and I swear I wasn’t trying to be. I wasn’t even trying to emulate her. But she — or her celestial conglomerate, that is — wouldn’t put all those recipes out there into the cosmos if they weren’t intended for regular people to attempt, would she? Or is it all there just to trip us up, to put us in our place, my place definitely not being the land of candy making. A candy maker I’m not. A candy lover, yeah, that describes me. But I’m not a maker, a producer, a fashioner of fine confections. I probably shouldn’t apologize for this particular lack of talent, but there it is anyhow: the trace of failure, the shadow of self-inflicted guilt.

They looked deceptively simple, those truffles. The ganache method sounded facile enough, chopped bittersweet and heavy cream joined together, a smooth, melting pool that beckons one to just go ahead and dive in, head first. Then just toss in a stick of butter and let it sit in the fridge for a while. But later, trying to coerce gobs of the buttery chocolate mixture – pliable yes, willing, no – into perfect truffle shapes à la Martha, it hit me. How impossibly gauche am I that I can’t produce a truffle as lovely as those peering at me from the web page?

But, never fear, today’s story is a success story, after all. Lucky for my ego (and lucky for my chocolate craving), I had a redemption plan, one involving more melted chocolate – but melted chocolate that doesn’t have to conform to picture-perfectness, chocolate that requires nothing but deft scooping and a shiny, happy bowl to look deserving of its deliciousness.

In the wake of the Great Truffle Frustration of 2008, I decided it wasn’t truffle season anyhow, but gelato season. I know, for many of you, it’s still hot chocolate season, but down in these sunny parts, we’ve approached the months of the air conditioner. It’s time, then, to give you all a head start on this tastiest of refreshments so that when you’re ready for it, you’ll know just where to turn.

We have gelaterias popping up all over the place, and their prevalence has turned us into gelato geeks. I grew up on lots of ice cream, but after tasting the Italian version, I now save myself almost exclusively for it. You can eat the smallest scoop and be satisfied because the flavors are so pure and because the concoction is so dense.

We loudly proclaim, to anyone who wants to listen, the authenticity of just one gelateria in town, the one whose gelato leaves me scraping – and scraping – the bowl with my little spoon. Arlecchino is this tiny outfit run by a couple from Trieste, Italy, and the flavors are true-to-form phenomenal, as they use no mixes or anything remotely fake (go figure). The strawberry tastes like strawberries, the banana like bananas, but ones that have undergone this fascinating, freezing metamorphosis. Needless to say, we are regular partakers of this proprietor, and there is one flavor they make only on weekends that I’m always hankering for come Friday. But as it’s a good twenty minutes from my house (a little distance in this case is actually a good thing) and this autentico stuff is pricey stuff, I decided I needed to try to make my own.

I’m growing ever more comfortable with making custards, and it’s a threshold I’m relieved to finally cross. I cobbled together ingredients from two recipes in trying to replicate my favorite chocolate-hazelnut-orange flavor, and froze it in my Rival ice cream maker. It was, as I said earlier, a success (yay!) on all the necessary levels involving texture and flavor. I won’t be making this enough to skip our now-and-again stops for the real stuff, but this has to be a close second.

Chocolate-Hazelnut Gelato with Orange

Adapted from Food Network and Epicurious.com

2 oz. bittersweet chocolate

2 ¼ C whole milk

1/3 C heavy cream

¾ C minus 2 tbsp granulated sugar

1 C unsweetened cocoa powder

4 large egg yolks

½ tsp vanilla extract

½ C Nutella chocolate-hazelnut spread

Orange oil

Coarsely chop chocolate. In medium heavy saucepan, bring milk, cream and half of sugar just to a simmer, stirring until sugar is dissolved. Remove pan from heat and add cocoa powder and chocolate, whisking until chocolate is melted and mixture is smooth.

Prepare an ice bath (large bowl of ice and cold water). Beat yolks and remaining sugar with an electric mixer until thick and pale. Add chocolate mixture in a slow stream, whisking the entire time, and pour into a saucepan. Cook custard over moderately low heat, stirring constantly, until it becomes thick enough to coat the back of a wooden spoon, about 7 to 10 minutes. Pour custard through a sieve into a bowl set in the ice bath. Stir in the vanilla, Nutella, and the tiniest drop of orange oil (a little goes a very long way). Continue stirring until Nutella dissolves. Chill custard in the refrigerator completely.

Freeze custard in an ice-cream maker, following manufacturer’s instructions.

My intentions had been really, really good. They’d bordered on festive, even. And now – I shake my head that it’s come to this – but I don’t want to even so much as glance in the direction of my kitchen. I don’t want to look at the lying-through-their-pages cookbooks, at the KitchenAid that’s not living up to its promise, at the flour-doused countertops (it’s such a practical joke, isn’t it? Trying to clean up flour).

It’s supposed to be pizza night. Pizza and the college championship basketball game, because the two are old buddies, regular BFFs. We hold pizza night regularly around here, and always it’s a gleeful hit. We make our own dough, roll it into several individual circles (who can resist the precious factor of a mini, personalized pizza?), prep an astounding array of toppings that make for countless combinations (ham and olive! Olive and roasted pepper! Roasted pepper and carmelized onion and chèvre!). The kids go to town. They’re happy, we’re happy. Happy, happy, joy, joy.

Only on this day I had to get ambitious, had to decide today of all days to try a brand new pizza dough recipe. Or maybe it’s that I got reverse-ambitious, because my old standby recipe, while it is tasty, requires somewhat more attention and handling than this new one. It’s Mark Bittman that got me, I say through gritted teeth. It’s the way he’s all, “You won’t believe how simple it is…” blah, blah, about his pizza dough recipe. So of course I let him, with his hand-waving-away-doubt rhetoric, convince me to give it a go. Admittedly, on paper, his recipe sounds a whole lot easier than my usual: Three cups of flour, a couple teaspoons each of yeast and kosher salt, a cup or so of water, all mixed together in a food processor.

Don’t get me wrong: I love Mark Bittman and his recipes and his methods and, usually, his emboldening way. Really I do. I’m sure this is all my fault, sure that this sticky, spready dough is the result of some error on my part, but I can’t figure out where I went wrong. The whole thing seemed like the easy road to triumph.

But the flour and water, etc., are not coalescing into that tidy little ball promised by the cookbook, so I add tablespoon upon tablespoon of flour (just as the recipe recommends). Many plural tablespoons later, I’m about ready to start dumping flour by the cupful into the KitchenAid bowl. Without even using a spoon to lift the flour in order to prevent packing. Go ahead, call me rash, call me irresponsible, I don’t give a fig right now.

Then my KitchenAid becomes really hot, and consequently the dough – if you can indeed call it that – gets hot. And this worries me. Could the heat kill the yeast? Because I know they say that yeast doesn’t give up so easily, but this yeast has been through a fairly fatal-seeming spin. I think it might just be good and dead by now, which does not bode well for my dough. Or for my pizza. Or for my mood, for that matter.

In fact, as I scoop hot dough out onto the flour-flecked counter, half with a spatula, half with my hands, (I’m thinking I’ll just try and see if I can coerce it into a ball-like form), my mood is anything but optimistic. There’s more dough on my hands than there is on the counter. I’m a foul-mouthed, as-yet-undiscovered sea creature, what with my webbed, sticky hands. I’m hollering for Emmy to please come and get me a bowl from the bottom-most drawer for the dough, because I don’t want to inflict this dough on the drawer handles, on other bowls that might happen to be in the way.

I make my way over to where Emmy is, on the couch, in the family room, with my wad of dough stuck between my hands (will it have to be surgically removed?). She’s home with the flu today, and has just fallen asleep on the couch. I doubt she’s even going to want any pizza.

So, let’s start with irony: Just as every single magazine arriving in my mailbox is proclaiming April the official month of being green, things here in the desert are on their way to a discouraging shade of brown. Still, I can get into this whole save-the-earth thing. I can, I can.

A few years ago we pulled the light bulb switcheroo, then last year I discovered reusable bags, SIGG bottles and Wrap-N-Mats (the red-checked ones are like a picnic in a lunchbox!).

This year, I’m going boldly where I haven’t gone before: I’m swapping paper for cloth napkins, and not just because it might be better for the environment. I know it sounds recklessly inconvenient, this pairing of fabric napkins and sticky children. It’s true that paper napkins are handy, but they’re a little discordant with my whole food philosophy, anyway, that of my own personal backlash against convenience eating.

Truth is, I’ve had it scrutinizing the offerings in the disposable paper product aisles of Target, waiting for the paper napkin fairy to descend with the perfect paper napkin. I’m done spending money on packages upon packages of napkins and finding that, not only do we wipe and toss our way through them as though they grow on trees (ha! they kind of do, poor trees), but there is not a reasonably priced brand that lives up to its promise. There’s not a one that diligently does its duty, that stands up to fish taco drippings and jam overflow and soup-dribbled chins. Our post-dinnertime table whispers of too much napkin carnage, a scene of soiled, crumpled napkins left behind or dropped to the floor, hastily and carelessly abandoned without thanks.

Cloth, on the other hand, obliges the user to fold it, even if not in perfect neatness. Fabric brings a little civility to the dinner situation that otherwise consists of the five-year-old’s constant interruptions and the ten-year-old’s incessant, if inadvertent, feet swinging into my shins.

But fabric doesn’t mean formality. Oh, no (I will not ever wear pantyhose and you can’t make me!). My napkins, I willingly admit, are not the pressed kind. I’m strictly a dryer-to-table kind of girl. I don’t even care about the here-and-there stain. I believe that a stained napkin doesn’t have to be a compromised napkin.

Getting back to the whole environmental aspect, there’s actually some controversy riddling the whole paper/cloth thing, but I’ve done the reading, and I think, for our little family of four, cloth is actually a green choice, and an economic one. There are all sorts of calculations that can go into these decisions, and I know it’s worthwhile not to oversimplify. But in this case, I figure I’m not buying paper-napkin packaging that will contribute to a trash pile somewhere, and I know my modest stash of napkins will have a far longer lifecycle than those in a restaurant. We’ll use them repeatedly throughout the day and then they can be tossed in with any of the several loads of laundry I’m already doing during the week. And, like I said before, I will not be expending any extra energy making them look pretty. Those napkins are hardly for show, existing expressly for face-blotting and finger-wiping purposes.

So, summing up with irony, then: My cloth napkins, cost-conscious, utilitarian, earth-kind as they are, are nevertheless poshing things up a bit around here. (But will the heightened levels of poshness encourage posh-loving Quinn to eat her dinner? Another post for another time…)

I’m not one for surprises, not even the good kind. I’m a planner, an anticipator. If you’re going to whisk me away to Paris for the weekend, I want to know about it, so that I can pack accordingly — so that I can check the forecast and lay out the five-piece mix-and-match wardrobe and shop for shoes, sensible but chic.

But there is a bi-weekly surprise I can’t help but sign myself up for: my local produce co-op. Surprises pertaining to fresh fruit and vegetables don’t hold quite the same stipulation for anxiety. It’s delightful really, that smidge of mystery, a hands-clapped-together case of expectation. (I must admit that if I could actually sign myself up for the Paris surprise, I would. Mais, tant pis, it’s just not an option.)

Some weeks I get giddy just thinking about it, about the possibilities of red leaf lettuce and avocados, the potential promise of haricot verts and nectarines. I never know what Brian will bring home early on co-op Saturday mornings, charcoal-grey recycled PET totes brimming. It’s serious inspiration for the cook in me: I sort through the produce and plan menus, ticking off in my head and on paper the things I can make. I rifle through cookbooks piled on my counter, my elbows propped, chin in hand, as I turn pages in search of a preparation that strikes me, mulling over the many ways to make asparagus anew (crudi this time in a salad? Or roasted and topped with an egg just poached?), or to find out what on earth one does with a bagful of fuyu persimmons.

There is this singular drawback: If I have a recipe in my file I’d really, really like to make, and it contains, say butternut squash, but the co-op isn’t offering squash at all that week, I just have to keep that recipe stashed for another time. But the economics of it all outweigh any disappointment.

This last basket threw me for a loop, though: Giant green chile-looking things, along with some smaller (inevitably hotter) ones. Were the large ones just green chile peppers? Were the smaller ones jalapenos or serranos (bingo!, that one)? I’ve eaten this stuff before, but I’ve never bought it, never prepared it myself. I had to Google images to learn that those outsized ones were poblanos: mild, I discovered, supposedly good roasted.

Enabled by my freshly repaired oven (jumping-up-and-down-hoooraay!!), I roasted the poblanos and the tomatillos and the serranos, then simmered it all (with onions, toasted pepitas, a showering of Mexican oregano) into a salsa complete with chopped cilantro and more than a slight suggestion of lime.

It’s been feeding us all week: plopped atop salmon, as a sort-of enchilada sauce, spread on toasted pitas. And the remaining roasted chiles have gone into a Mex-style macaroni and cheese, for starters. Yes, we’re feeling hot, hot, hot…

Cooked Tomatillo Salsa

(adapted from “How to Cook Everything Vegetarian,” by Mark Bittman)

This is a fairly mild salsa; Add more serranos or other hot chiles if you don’t have little naysayers at your table. The recipe requires some advanced prep work: toasting the pepitas and roasting the chiles.

10 to 12 tomatillos, husked and chopped

2 tbsp canola oil

2 large onions, diced

5 cloves garlic, minced

1 C green pumpkin seeds (pepitas), toasted in a dry skillet and finely chopped in a food processor

2 medium poblano chiles, roasted and cleaned (short on time, I stuck mine under the broiler for 20 minutes, turning after the first 10)

1 to 2 serrano or other hot green chiles, roasted and cleaned

1 tsp dried Mexican oregano (regular oregano is fine, too)

1 cup water

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

½ C chopped fresh cilantro

¼ C freshly squeezed lime juice

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Roast the tomatillos on a baking sheet until skins are lightly browned and blistered, about 20 minutes. When tomatillos have cooled, chop them finely, along with the chiles, in a food processor to conserve the juices.

While the tomatillos are cooling, heat the canola oil in a large skillet over easy medium heat. Add the onions and garlic and cook, stirring occasionally, until very soft and lightly browned, about 10 minutes. Add the tomatillos, pepitas, chiles, oregano, water and large pinches of salt and pepper. Stir and bring to a low simmer. Cook, stirring occasionally, until mixture is slightly thickened, about 10 to 15 minutes.

Finish with the cilantro and lime juice, adjusting to taste.