Kitchen Yarns

by Ann Hood

  BETTER THAN A RESTAURANT CAPRESE SALAD

  Honestly, after making this at home, I don’t even order it in restaurants anymore—unless I’m in Italy and can’t resist the gorgeous tomatoes and fresh buffalo mozzarella. I like to mix up the sizes, shapes, and colors of the tomatoes. Although you can serve this as a salad, it also makes a delicious vegetarian sandwich: just put it in a good Italian roll with a little olive oil.

  Serves 4 to 6

  INGREDIENTS

  Arugula

  About 2 pounds of fresh tomatoes—cherry, plum, heirloom, large or small ones—halved or sliced, depending on size

  Good olive oil

  Salt and pepper

  1 ball fresh mozzarella, sliced

  1 ball smoked mozzarella, sliced

  A splash of balsamic vinegar

  A handful of chopped basil

  Make a bed of arugula on your favorite platter.

  Place the tomatoes on top and drizzle with olive oil, then season with salt and pepper.

  Layer on the sliced cheeses so that you basically have a tomato-cheese pattern.

  Drizzle more olive oil and a splash of balsamic vinegar, and again season with salt and pepper.

  Sprinkle the basil over everything.

  Variation

  Add sliced prosciutto di Parma to your pattern: tomato, cheese, prosciutto.

  Another Variation

  Drizzle pesto sauce on top, in place of the olive oil and basil. Pesto is so easy to make that I just whip it up in my food processor. You can too; if you don’t have lots of fresh basil on hand, you can use store-bought. Or just wait until summer.

  INGREDIENTS

  2 cups fresh basil

  3 garlic cloves, peeled

  1 cup pecans

  1 cup olive oil

  1½ cups of either Parmesan or Romano, or a mix of the two

  A big pinch of salt

  Freshly ground black pepper

  Chop the basil, garlic, and pecans in a food processor.

  With the motor running, add the olive oil in a steady stream.

  Pour the mixture into a bowl and stir in the cheese and salt and pepper.

  Taste and adjust the seasonings.

  Drizzle over the caprese salad.

  Put any leftover pesto in a mason jar and either freeze it, so that you can have a little bit of summer next winter, or use it on pasta tomorrow night.

  JILL’S TENDERLOIN AND ROASTED TOMATOES

  Anytime I see Jill, which isn’t often enough, I ask her to make both dishes. The last time was at her home in Wilmington, North Carolina, and they were as good as I’d remembered. When I asked her for the recipes, she said, “Both are so simple!” They are. And they make an elegant, unforgettable cocktail party dish.

  Serves 6 to 8

  For the tenderloin:

  INGREDIENTS

  Salt and pepper

  3 to 4 cloves garlic, crushed

  One 2- to 3-pound tenderloin, with the ends cut off and saved for some other dish, so that you just have a big center cut

  Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F.

  Make a paste with salt, pepper, and the garlic and spread it nice and thick all over the meat.

  Roast at 450 degrees for twenty minutes.

  Turn the oven down to 350 degrees and finish cooking. (Figure on about 10 to 15 minutes per pound.)

  Let the meat rest.

  Slice.

  From Jill: “Simple, right?”

  For the tomatoes:

  INGREDIENTS

  18 to 20 Roma tomatoes, cut in half; smaller ones work best

  Olive oil

  Sea salt

  Pepper

  Sugar

  Feta, sliced mozzarella, or a few shaves of good parmesan

  Preheat the oven to 250 degrees F.

  Place the tomatoes on a baking sheet lined with parchment.

  Drizzle a little olive oil over them.

  Sprinkle with sea salt, pepper, and a tiny bit of sugar.

  Bake for 2 to 2½ hours, until they are dried out.

  Serve at room temperature with the cheese mixed in.

  NOTE: I’m a big fan of feta with these, though you can try it every which way. Also, I add some sprigs of thyme to the tomatoes before I roast them.

  KIRSTY WARK’S BLOODY MARY TOMATOES

  The night before your cocktail party, pour a bottle of vodka over 2 or 3 pints of scored cherry tomatoes. The next evening, drain them and put them in a serving bowl, on a platter, with a ramekin of sea salt, a ramekin of coarsely ground pepper, and a ramekin of celery salt for rolling the tomatoes in. Use the tomato-infused vodka for Bloody Marys the next morning.

  How to Smoke Salmon

  My son, Sam, and I stand side by side in our tiny backyard in Providence, shivering. It’s late afternoon on New Year’s Eve, the sky a battleship gray and snowflakes falling furiously around us. I have to squint up all six feet, five inches of Sam when I talk to him. At seventeen, although he is man-sized, he still has a round baby face and the final hurrah of blond in his darkening hair.

  “Do we just stand here?” I ask Sam.

  “We have to tend it,” he says.

  It is the smoker I got for Christmas, and Sam and I are smoking all kinds of pork—loin, ribs, chops—for a New Year’s Eve supper. When I watched him start to put the smoker together, with the instructions still in the box, I couldn’t help but remember all the Transformers and Legos he used to construct without ever referring to the directions. Some things never change, I think as he adjusts air vents and reads the temperature dials. And other things, I think with a pang in my heart, change a lot. Like: the piles of college applications on the desk upstairs, the SAT study guide beside Sam’s bed, the schedule of auditions hanging on the kitchen bulletin board.

  Soon, theater programs around the country will be sending Sam their decisions. Which means that in the not-so-distant future, Sam will go away to college in Pittsburgh or Chicago or Ithaca. I swear, yesterday he had to stand on a stool to layer the sliced apples in the pan for Apple Crisp. I used to lift him into the grocery cart with one swoop, and teach him how to choose a ripe avocado.

  Now he regularly makes polenta for dinner, bakes bûche de Noël, feeds us almost daily.

  “Needs more water,” Sam announces. He is blurry in the snow, moving back inside to refill the jug.

  Eleven hours. That’s how long it took for that meat to smoke perfectly. At a certain point, I went back into the house, to the warmth of the fire in the kitchen fireplace. But Sam stayed out there, the snow becoming an official blizzard, the wind increasing. He learned how to use that smoker that night, and for months afterward he smoked clams and oysters, tomatoes and garlic for salsa, briskets and more ribs.

  Spring came, and with it those college acceptances. I watched Sam’s face light up whenever an e-mail dropped into his box with good news. He had wanted to be an actor since he was eight, and now he was on his way to a BFA program six hours from our home in Providence. For his own going-away party, Sam smoked pork tenderloins. I looked out the kitchen window at him tending the smoker. It was a mystery to me how it worked; I just let Sam be the smoke master. Around me, his half-packed duffel bags lay on the floor. A box of books. Linens for his dorm room bed. The next day, with our bellies full, we drove him to college.

  The sadness that comes from your first child leaving home is, of course, not the saddest thing of all. But the ache, the sense that something is missing, the way you keep looking up, expecting him to burst through the door in his size 13 shoes—that is real. In an instant, family dinner changes, shrinks, quiets considerably. The smoker sits, alone and untended, amid the falling leaves. Then another winter, another snowstorm. But this time the smoker remains unused, half-hidden by snow.

  Oh, Sam comes home, a whirling dervish of laundry and anecdotes about college and dates to see old friends.

  “Maybe we could smoke some ribs?” I suggest, like a girl asking a boy to a prom.

  “Great ide
a,” Sam says as he runs out the door to meet up with someone from high school.

  “You hardly ever saw that kid when you went to school with him,” I grumble. But Sam doesn’t hear me. He’s a blur of denim disappearing around the corner.

  The smoker and I endure a lonely spring, the azaleas blooming fuchsia around us as I stand side by side with the smoker in the yard, missing Sam. But I imagine a summer of smoked pork and seafood. A summer of Sam home.

  “I got cast with the Missoula Children’s Theatre!” Sam shouts into the phone across the three hundred miles that separate us.

  “Missoula?” I gulp. “Montana?”

  “I start Memorial Day,” he says, and he is so excited that all I can do is be happy for him.

  July. Sam is not home, as I had imagined; he is out west, touring in Cinderella. Sometimes he sends me pictures of him hamming for the camera. The baby fat is gone. His face is all angles and planes now. There is the shadow of a beard across his cheeks and chin. I show the pictures to my friends Mark and Heather. We are on their roof deck in Portland, Oregon, nibbling cheese and olives and fruit and smoked salmon that Mark smoked himself the day before.

  “That’s Sam?” Heather says, her blue eyes wide. “I remember when he was only this tall.”

  “So do I,” I say, staring down at the photo of the young man who is my son. Four and a half pounds when he was born, so tiny he fit in his father’s hand. I can still feel him pressed against me in his Snugli, my stalwart companion.

  The smoky-sweet flavor of the salmon fills my mouth, and I think of my own smoker, abandoned in the backyard. I realize that I have felt abandoned too, by Sam, by all the years racing past. But here I am on a beautiful summer day, eating with friends. I have raised a happy kid and he hasn’t abandoned me; he’s simply growing up.

  “How did you make this?” I ask Mark.

  He gives me his recipe, but I’m only half-listening. My mind is back in Providence, finding those never-read instructions and stoking up that smoker, learning how to monitor the temperature, when to add water, how to adjust the vents to allow the smoke to stay alive.

  And that is what I do when I get back home. I unearth the directions and read them carefully. Then I light the coals, fill the bottom with water, lay the salmon that I’ve brined for two days on top of the grill, and cover it all. Smoke escapes from beneath the lid. It’s working, I marvel. I stand there under the hot July sun and tend the smoker. Like most things in life, smoking salmon requires your attention. It takes time and care. When I lift the lid, a perfect piece of pink smoked salmon waits for me. Unexpectedly, my eyes tear up.

  That night I tell Sam over the phone how I smoked salmon.

  “The fire went out too fast,” I admit.

  “You probably cut the oxygen off by closing the vents,” he says.

  “I’ll remember that for next time,” I say.

  “I’ve got to go,” Sam says. “I love you, Mom.”

  Before I can answer him, he’s gone, on his way to his big, bright future. Out the window, the last of the smoke floats above the sunflowers, into the blue summer sky. I open the recipe book that came with the smoker, the one Sam never took out of the box. Chicken. Trout. Beef tenderloin. I will try them all, I decide. I will savor every bit.

  SMOKED SALMON INSPIRED BY MARK AND HEATHER

  INGREDIENTS

  1 cup kosher salt

  ½ cup white sugar

  ½ cup brown sugar

  2 tablespoons crushed black peppercorns

  Two 2-pound salmon fillets or sides, pin bones removed

  Olive oil

  Salt

  Pepper

  Lemon

  Orange marmalade

  Cucumbers, sour cream, capers, small toasts

  Assemble the smoker according to its directions—unless, like Sam, you know how to do it without reading them. Cedar or alderwood chips work best with salmon.

  Two days before you plan to smoke the salmon, make a dry brine. In a bowl, mix together the salt, sugar, brown sugar, and peppercorns. Roll out a sheet of extra-wide aluminum foil a little longer than the length of the fish and top with an equally long layer of plastic wrap. Sprinkle ⅓ of the rub on the plastic. Lay one filet on the rub, skin side down. Sprinkle ⅓ of the rub over the flesh side of the salmon. Place the second salmon fillet, flesh side down, on the first fillet. Use the remaining rub to cover the skin on the top piece. Fold the plastic over to cover, then close the edges of foil together and crimp tightly around the fish.

  Place the wrapped fish on a plank or sheet pan and top with another plank or pan. Weight with a heavy phone book or a brick or two and refrigerate for 12 to 24 hours. Flip the fish over and refrigerate for another 12 hours. Some juice will leak out during the process, so make sure there’s a place for the runoff to gather.

  Unwrap the fish and rinse off the cure with cold water. Pat the salmon with paper towels, then place in a cool, dry place (not the refrigerator) until the surface of the fish is dry and matte-like; this will take 1 to 3 hours, depending on the humidity. A fan may be used to speed the process.

  Place each fillet on foil. Brush with olive oil and season with salt and pepper to taste, then add a squirt of lemon juice.

  Smoke the fish over smoldering hardwood chips or sawdust, keeping the temperature inside the smoker between 150 degrees and 160 degrees F until the thickest part of the fish registers 150 degrees, about 20 minutes.

  Let cool. Spread a light glaze of good orange marmalade on each fillet (this is what made my friend Mark’s so yummy), then serve with cucumber rounds, sour cream, capers, and small toasts.

  The Summer of Omelets

  Annabelle wants to learn how to make an omelet. She is twelve, and suspicious of most food. A few years ago, my mother taught her to make scrambled eggs, which is the only way Annabelle will have eggs. Except for hard-boiled, but then she removes the hard yolk and eats only the white part, with salt. Egg yolks are high on her list of things that are too disgusting to eat. When she eats berries, which she loves, she examines each one and sets aside any that are discolored, bruised, too soft, or too hard.

  When eating changed for her, I cannot pinpoint. At a birthday party when she was two, she sat primly to the side, delicately nibbling capers one by one. Next thing I knew, she liked only white food: pasta, chicken, rice, the white part of eggs. But the summer of the omelets, Annabelle and I are gypsies, living together in borrowed apartments and condos, B and Bs, and Airbnbs, across two continents. Her father and I are getting divorced, and housing is an issue. For reasons that have nothing to do with omelets, he is staying in the house where our family has lived for seventeen years, a 1792 red Colonial with a bright blue door where I raised my babies, and mourned the death of my daughter Grace, and wrote my books, and learned to knit. There is still glitter from Grace’s art projects in the cracks of the floorboards. Our dog Zuzu, now fifteen, has stained the kitchen floor with her worn-out bladder. The closet has pencil lines marking the growth of the kids. That house is, as Neruda said, “the shore of the heart where I have roots.” Leaving is hard; we know this. Leaving these fingerprints of a lifetime harder.

  But Annabelle and I have found a loft across the city, with soaring ceilings and big silver pipes and windows that let more sunlight than a person knows what to do with stream in. The only catch is securing a mortgage. Self-employed people are precarious financial risks, apparently. I spend a good part of this nomadic summer scanning documents—bank, car loan, retirement—and signing papers and writing letters about why I paid my Target credit card bill late in March 2011 and why I teach only sometimes and where exactly do I get the money my tax returns say I get. It’s exhausting, this scanning and signing, this packing of suitcases every week and lugging bags through lobbies and up stairs and in and out of the trunk of my Fiat. This summer of endings and new beginnings, it’s exhausting.

  Every morning, in whatever kitchen I find myself in, I make Annabelle breakfast. Pancakes with a side of perfect raspbe
rries. Toad in a hole with sliced strawberries (on their own plate, to be sure that the red of the strawberries does not touch the white of the egg or the toast). Once, chicken and stars soup, a dare to see if I would give her soup for breakfast. Once, a fat wedge of watermelon eaten straight off the rind. But the morning I make myself a ham and Swiss omelet, Annabelle studies me as I move through the steps—the beating of the eggs with a fork as butter waltzes in a frying pan, the way I gently lift the cooked egg to let the uncooked slide beneath it. “Teach me,” she says. “I want to make you an omelet every morning, and bring it to you in bed.”

  I recognize this need to care for me. All summer she’s been watching me for signs of distress. As Annabelle sorts out this new life we’re embarking on, she’s wondering how I will be in it, despite my promises that we will all be okay. Some mornings she jumps up, all bedhead and half-closed eyes, to make me coffee. One night when I complained I was hungry, she ran into the kitchen and made popcorn. We are taking care of each other this summer, from Aspen to Cape Cod, Paris to Ireland. Home, that red house with the blue door, is far away, a way station where we do laundry and pack and stay a night. Home. The word, once so solid and steadfast, floats above our heads, just out of our grasp.

  And so I teach her to make an omelet. I explain that the best omelets have three eggs, but since this kitchen in upstate New York has only a tiny frying pan, we will use two. I tell her that two tablespoons of butter are better than one because you can never have enough butter, and that you can fill an omelet with anything you have on hand. Today, garden-fresh tomatoes and crumbs of feta; tomorrow, the American cheese I use to make grilled cheese sandwiches. Omelets make the best of what they are given. I show her how to hold the spatula tenderly so as not to break the egg as it cooks but, rather, to gently lift until it is almost done and then how to sprinkle the filling—the tarragon and Gruyère or basil and fontina—and then the careful folding and finally turning it out of the pan onto the waiting plate.