Previously not on my radar, the books suddenly appeared everywhere, including my kitchen counter. Josie had her nose in book 3 last night while I worked on dinner, pausing just long enough to explain their appeal:

So, he’s like a hundred years old, but he looks like a teenage guy, and he loves this girl at school.

They live in the Northwest and there’s a lot of woods around them. He belongs to this vampire family that doesn’t eat people.

Eat people?

Well – suck blood from people.

Then what do they eat?

They suck animals.

Animals.

Uh-huh. They suck the blood from deer and stuff in the forest. They think it’s morally wrong to bite and drink from humans.

His vampire family calls themselves vegetarians, because they don’t eat people. Just animals.

And they don’t eat people.

No – his dad vampire is even a surgeon who works on humans.

Doesn’t he get excited by the blood?

No. He has a lot of control. And he helps young vampires who still need people’s blood.

Gotcha. Vampire surgeon. Doesn’t drink blood.

Not a drop.

Um, okay. So – he loves a human girl, right? A teenager.

Right – it is so cool. He loves her but he won’t suck her blood. He watches her sleep but he won’t make her a vampire. Then she kind of loves this werewolf guy, too.

She loves a vampire and a werewolf.

Yeah – and werewolves can kill vampires, but they don’t. They have a treaty. It is won-der-ful. It is soooo amazing.

Okay! In other news, I made some delightful meatballs.

Turkey-Ricotta Meatballs

4 slices white bread, crusts removed and cut into 1/2-inch dice
1 1/2 pounds lean ground turkey
3 ounces cooked ham, chopped
3 large eggs, lightly beaten
2/3 cup ricotta cheese (5 ounces)
1/2 cup freshly grated Pecorino Romano cheese
1/4 cup finely chopped fresh spinach
2 tablespoons finely shredded fresh basil
2 teaspoons dried oregano, crumbled
1/2 teaspoon fennel seeds, crushed
1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper
sea salt and freshly ground pepper

Preheat the oven to 400°.

Use a food processor to pulse the bread to fine crumbs. Remove the crumbs from the processor bowl, and replace it with the ham, spinach, and basil. Process until fine. Place the crumbs and ham-spinach mixture in a large bowl and add the turkey, eggs, ricotta, Pecorino Romano, oregano, fennel seeds, crushed red pepper and 2 teaspoons of sea salt. Grind a few generous turns of black pepper over ingredients, and mix well. Shape into 12-13 jumbo meatballs, or approximately 24 smaller meatballs. Transfer the meatballs to a lightly oiled sheet pan or roasting pan.

On very low heat, simmer several cups of homemade or good-quality jarred marinara sauce. Place meatballs in the oven and bake for about 30 minutes, or until firm and just beginning to brown. Remove from oven and use a spatula to loosen each meatball from the pan. Add meatballs to simmering marinara on stove and adjust sauce seasoning, if necessary, with salt, ground pepper, and oregano. Cover and simmer on low heat for about 15-30 minutes, until meatballs are tender and coated in sauce.

While meatballs and sauce are on stove, cook the pasta of your choice (I like spaghettini, fine spaghetti) and drain, tossing lightly with olive oil. Serve meatballs and sauce, topped by grated pecorino romano and more chopped basil, over pasta.

Serves 4-5

Know your meatball crowd! Double as necessary.

adapted from a Food & Wine recipe by A16′s Nate Appleman

When Josie was little I catered from home, often baking through the night while she slept. We had central air but the space was tiny – room for me, an oven, and a dozen hot pans. Mixing cakes alone at two a.m., I figured what the hell, and worked in my secret summer uniform – a sports bra and Gap shorts. Why not? It was just me and the cake pans and Nick at Nite, and Nick wasn’t looking. There was a big kitchen window, but not much to see: just a girl in lobster-print boxers and oven mitts, whisking and dancing to Ricky Ricardo’s drums.

Maybe all those hot kitchens fried my common sense – because if I want pot roast and it’s 97 in the shade, I’m still making the pot roast. At least this one tastes like the season – I had some lovely key limes and messed with Caribbean flavors. It seemed more…reasonable. The dish would cook for hours but it would be a tropical pot roast, right? Cuba Libres, white sands, ocean breezes?

Well…the mirage not so much, but it did taste great. The key limes really do a job on the meat; it’s a tangy, unusual roast that tastes even better the next day. We rounded dinner out with sauteed bananas and black beans with rice. I say if you can take the heat, stay in the kitchen – just long enough to squeeze limes, set a timer, slam the oven door and run.

Key Lime Pot Roast

one chuck arm roast, about 2.5 pounds

light brown sugar
salt and ground pepper
cayenne pepper

2 tablespoons olive oil

dried oregano
6-7 key limes
(if you can’t get true key limes, try adding a few dashes of red wine vinegar to regular limes)

A large Dutch-oven style pot with a tight-fitting lid works well for this recipe; you can also use a roasting pan, tightly covered with aluminum foil.

Preheat oven to 375 F.

Cut and juice the limes, removing any seeds. Keep both the juice and the empty lime halves.

Rub the meat with an evenly generous amount of: brown sugar, salt, ground pepper and cayenne pepper.

Warm the pot and heat the olive oil over medium-high, just to sizzling. Add the roast and sear both sides evenly, only turning once or twice, until both sides are browned to a dark, caramelized color.

Turn off heat. Add 3 cups of water to lime juice, then pour both juice and lime halves over the meat. Sprinkle the meat generously with oregano. Cover with lid (or tightly with foil) and transfer pot to preheated oven.

Bake for approximately 3 hours. Check once or twice while cooking; if juices have completely evaporated, add 2-3 cups of water, white wine or orange juice. When meat is fork-tender, remove from oven. Discard roasted lime halves (delicious, but not easy to eat) .

Cool meat until safe to handle, then remove roast from the pan. On a cutting board, shred meat roughly with a fork. Return shredded meat to pan and spoon juices over meat; cover and return to the oven for approximately 20 more minutes, until completely tender. Remove from oven and serve, with pan juices, over rice and beans.

Serves 3-4

For even stronger flavor, I prefer making this one day ahead and letting it steep, covered, in the refrigerator. Reheat and serve – or, if you’re like me, stand in the kitchen and eat it cold. It’s summer, right?

No, all my other crazies are intact. The most amazing thing? I found another way to enjoy eating peaches.

As previously noted in our little chat about cobbler, I’ve never been a peach lover. And in all these years of mush resistance, no one ever tipped me off that peaches are in fact delicious…

…if you just add meat!

Cook a few stray peaches with pork chops, and you seriously get the cover of Wholesome Midwest Living. Just look at that dinner up there! It’s like we’re extras in a Hidden Valley Ranch commercial.

So come on. Smooth your vintage apron, tie up your hair bow and let’s serve the menfolk some peachy pork chops.

This not what you do first. I regret that I didn’t photograph all the steps, but sometimes my family has little patience for blogging – imagine! – and is just ready for dinner.

First, dust some thick chops with flour, shaking off excess. Season chops with salt, ground pepper, and sage. Sizzle 2 tablespoons of butter in a pan, and brown both sides of the chops over high heat. “Real browning,” a chef of mine used to say, “not some wussy little tan marks.” Real browning. When really brown, remove chops from the pan and keep warm under foil.

Add chopped peaches to the pan at medium-high heat and cook, shaking and stirring, just until peaches are seared and begin to soften. Take the pan off the heat and throw in a good splash of sherry – add a sip for the cook, after five – and return to the stove.

Reduce the sherry a minute or so, then lower heat and stir in the remaining 2 tablespoons butter. Taste for seasoning; adjust with salt, ground pepper and sage as desired.

Return the pork chops to the pan and cook, uncovered with peaches, just until pork is no longer pink in the center and cooked through. Turn chops once or twice to coat in pan juices, and serve with peaches.

If you’re concerned about undercooked pork, you can always use a meat thermometer and check for the recommended internal temperature of 160 – but overcooking these chops a wee bit won’t hurt.

Who knew? The peaches and pork worked so well together it was like they’d been reunited – and believe me, it took all my strength to not name this post “Peaches and Herb.” Ooh, now you’ll have the song all day. But please, enjoy the chops.

Peachy Pork Chops

4 thick-cut loin pork chops
flour, for dusting
salt, ground pepper, and dried ground sage
2 ripe peaches, peeled and roughly chopped
sherry, about a cup (not counting the dash for the cook) *
4 tablespoons butter, divided

Follow instructions above. Enjoy wholesome, porky, peachy dinner.

* ‘cooking sherry’ has added salt. Always keep a bottle of the real thing around for great sauces.

Still, we keep going back for more, even with mixed feelings about Parisians. They run from “Thank you for letting us co-exist with you for this brief time, and for being the keeper of life’s delicious mysteries,” to “Screw you. I am putting ketchup on this burger right now.”

Love them or hate them, they have everything I want – except deep dish pizza.

Back in 2000, we visited for a second time when Josie was almost-four. I recall that trip as the last gasp for our umbrella stroller, which we dumped before the flight home. Every day we’d walk for miles, and when Josie wouldn’t walk, we’d pop her in the stroller. She was (and is) a great traveler, cheerfully running through metro stations and security gates and sculpture gardens, but she was small, and Paris was huge.

After one crabby afternoon she collapsed in the stroller and we pushed her, snoozing, into a little restaurant near the Eiffel Tower. The Champ de Mars neighborhood is unspeakably charming in a way that makes it seem bitterly unfair to live anywhere else, and as the stars came out I peeked into tiny lit apartments above cheese shops, and briefly planned to abandon my family for whomever lived upstairs. Instead I pushed my sleeping toddler into a nearby bistro, Chez L’Ami Jean, and hoped for the best.

Inside there were little wooden tables, a row of banquettes, chalked specials and Basque pelote bric-a-brac on the walls. A middle-aged woman in an apron ran out from the kitchen, looked at my sleeping kid, and I thought, this is it. We are about to be booted to Le McDonald’s. But she swooped down at the stroller, quietly kissing each sleeping cheek, cooing over eyelashes and retying her gym shoes. Oh, thank you, thank you for the international language of sympathy.

She pushed Josie’s stroller right up to the table and insisted we not wake her up. Things were going swimmingly while she slept, but as we drank our red wine her eyes began to flutter, and I felt like a seismologist – it could be a tremor, or it could be a disaster. Should I order her something? The maman appeared again with a plate, and at the moment Josie’s brown eyes snapped open, she put it down in front of her.

Without asking, they had made her a fluffy yellow omelette with gruyere cheese and a little green salad with bacon. The woman set cold orange juice and a soft brioche in front of my child, and waited. Josie stared soundlessly at the food, reached her round toddler hand out, and began eating like she’d never eaten before. The woman beamed, and we all breathed. Later there were sweets; a tender profiterole, a little chocolate for her pockets – and as we left, she buckled Josie into her stroller, zipped her red jacket and smooched her face.

How often are we the recipients of unabashed acts of intuition and kindness? Even now when I turn a yellow omelette I think of the Parisians. They are not all that way, but they have what everyone wants and they know what everyone wants in a richly supernatural way. When they don’t want to share, you’ll know it, but when they do – well, I am headed back to Paris. With any luck, I will be tired, and my feet will hurt, and someone will bring me eggs and cheese and red wine without asking. And also that the exchange rate will improve, and chocolate and croissants will suddenly have no carbs.

Look at it all day.

How about eating seafood all day?

At one restaurant job, I dipped peanut butter truffles for chocolate-peanut butter tortes every day. My favorite server would burst in the kitchen at truffle time and fly toward me with open hands, yelling “I’m on the SEAFOOD diet! I SEE food, I gotta EAT it!” I would double over laughing every time, and the staff could not believe what a total dork the baker was, every time.

I’m on the see food diet, too – I want it, want to sear it and sauce it and talk about it in my sleep. But cooking it and putting it on paper are different matters. You know, baking is science – and when you get the science down, you move on to art. Cooking is technique, and when you get the technique down, you can do whatever you want. And when I am doing whatever I want there are no recipes. No recipes works fine in real life but not so much on a blog, where one likes to see recipes now and again.

With that in mind I give you a favorite, embarrassingly simple pre-summer dinner. I whistled a happy tune in the kitchen knowing this dish gave great color, great taste, and when blogged, would need no recipe.

We Midwesterners do love to put on red-checked bibs and squeeze lemons and pretend we’re by the shore – and here I’ve thrown in a little local corn to sweeten the pot. Potatoes, sausage, seafood, steamed. Not groundbreaking but oh-so-good. It is a meal with no ounces or cups, and very few words.

Easiest Shrimp Boil Ever

I wasn’t kidding about that no-recipe thing! Choose the right amounts for your crowd and enjoy.

small new potatoes, halved
fresh sweet corn, cut into sections
kielbasa, fully cooked and cut into chunks
large shrimp, shell-on
one bag Zatarain Shrimp & Crab boil
one bottle of beer (optional)

Bring a large stockpot full of water to a boil. Add the beer and Shrimp & Crab Boil seasoning bag, then add new potatoes and cook until almost soft and nearly done. Add kielbasa, then corn and shrimp. Lower heat and cover until corn is tender and shrimp are cooked through to pink. Drain entire pot, remove seasoning bag, and serve.

The kitchen performed beautifully – I’ve finally mastered its corners and burners, and the timing to yank the right drawer for the right tongs. This made me very, very happy.

We’ll look at dinner later this week (Tell Simmer on Monday, up first) but to preview, we ate: chicken with cherry-shallot sauce, steamed asparagus, and the highest calorie potatoes known to man. You heard right, chicken – asparagus – potatoes again. Only these mashed potatoes were loaded with herbed chevre, Canadian white cheddar – stay with me – golden Beemster and a pound of melted butter. Perhaps I should have tossed in a lobster and some Oreos to put it over the top?

We lingered over simple dessert – sponge cake with vanilla pastry cream and fresh fruit. Unfortunately, photographing dessert tends to keep me from eating dessert – these days I’m usually cooking with one hand and shooting with the other, an acrobatic and ridiculous sight. But last night one of my guests graciously grabbed the camera, allowing me to both finish dessert and pipe pastry cream on my tongue.

This too made me very happy – honestly, I’d forgotten I could work with two hands. Thanks, J & J, for a lovely evening and an extra hand. As promised, I give you credit for this sugared and tasty look:

Anyway, my idea of existentialicious – something delicious in the moment, but never seen again - is the best way to describe last night’s dinner.

Chicken, potatoes, asparagus – but the picture doesn’t tell the whole story.

The chicken was lightly floured, then crisped in olive oil with salt and pepper. We’d had some olive-feta salad from the fancy organic “olive bar” the day before, and when the chicken was nicely browned, I threw in the master stroke – leftover vinegar-feta-pepper mixture from the bottom of the container. Leftover liquid, people – never throw it out. As planned, the chicken sizzled with a giant Opa! sound, and then in a blinding oregano cloud I squeezed a lemon, tossed and fired a few seconds, and served.

Oh, my. I’m sure we can all agree that Tuesday night dinner is never a sure thing, but paired with bacony mashed potatoes and steamed local asparagus, it was. Crisp and peppered, tangy and biting, a river of lemon feta soaking under potatoes – I can use all the adjectives I want, but I’ll never see it again.

I’m bad that way. As an apprentice, they’d say “make the soup!” and I’d make the soup, chopping this carrot or that mushroom, and they’d say “make that soup again!” and aghast, I couldn’t.

This doesn’t happen very often in baking, but it happens constantly at the stove, where you trade precision for a moment’s pleasure at the table. You’d be hard-pressed to recreate a dish made with leftover oils and bits of cheese, but so what? One mid-week existentialicious is better than any Saturday menu…

…because you never saw it coming, and it tastes like something else – surprise!

Until I see a scone. Then I am awake, and hungry.

See those Orange Chocolate Chip scones up there? Tomorrow we are going to make some, right here on this blog. That’s a preview, and if you’re not licking your screen, I’m not doing my job. There. That’s better.

Speaking of tired vs. hungry – around 9:30 last night, after we’d all settled in, Greg and Josie decided it was snack time. We’d eaten dinner just a few hours before – fried matzo with homemade strawberry syrup, unbelievably good in person, not so much in pictures – but the two of them acted like they’d never eaten at all.

This is what you get with an all-carb dinner – giant helpings of fried matzo do not an entree make.

Now I love carbs as much as the next girl, maybe more than the next girl, but a heavy-carb meal is like Chinese food – before you know what hit you, you’re hungry again. What hit my family was to head downstairs for turkey and swiss sandwiches. Upstairs I sat in bed, watching some quiet CNN with Cleo – she’s very concerned about those superdelegates – but downstairs I could hear fridge doors, mustard jars, a butter knife, then chewy silence. They returned ten minutes later, happy as clams.

Let’s take a look at the above: now I’m hungry for scones, fried matzo, strawberries, Chinese food, turkey sandwiches and maybe a few fried clams. I have got to stop writing this thing.

I play the same game, minus Audrey’s swell hair…and eyebrows…and Givenchy dress. Whatever.

For me cooking what’s available is an obsession, a challenge to produce a good meal without going to the store. This “something from nothing” zeal cracks Josie up, but what could be more annoying than running out for one tomato, or three eggs, or a carrot? What’s not around, I do without, and what is around, becomes dinner.

This means I’ve made breading from Special K, soup from three mushrooms, chicken without chicken. Last night I absolutely refused to go to the store, and flung open the fridge. Hmm…two cloves of marinated garlic…three kalamata olives…half a jar of marinara…four slices of genoa salami and a shred of parmesan.

A quick check in the pantry, and…yes! Spaghetti night.

Josie saw all the bits on the counter. “Dinner Impossible!”

“That’s what it is all right.” I was straining spaghetti, getting a pasta facial. “Ha! You know, that’s what we’ll call our show, right? Dinner Impossible.”

“Mom, that is a show.”

“It is?”

“On the Food Network. Dinner Impossible is a show.”

“Well, then, they can have it.”

If Puttanesca and Amatriciana had a love child, this sauce would be it. Be generous with the marinara and flexible with the rest. Let your taste be your guide – and if your taste cooks like mine, have breath mints ready.

Spaghetti Impossible Sauce

good jar of marinara sauce (Muir Glen Fire Roasted Tomato is my favorite)
marinated garlic cloves (available on “olive bars,” but fresh garlic is fine)
kalamata olives
genoa salami
salt, pepper, and dried oregano or basil

cooked spaghetti
spicy olive oil (if available)

Prep: thinly slice garlic cloves * pit and coarsely chop olives * cut salami into narrow strips or small chunks.

Warm a small amount of olive oil in a nonstick frying pan over medium-low heat. Saute garlic slices until just sizzling – not browned – then add salami and olives. Cook briefly, about 1-2 minutes, then lower heat and add marinara sauce. Simmer, stirring, over very low heat for about five minutes. Taste, then add salt, pepper, or other seasonings as desired.

Toss warm, cooked spaghetti with a little olive oil (I used remaining spicy oil from the marinated garlic, deliciously hot) plate and top with sauce. Grate parmesan cheese over the top, and serve.

I’m still learning the ropes over here – I bake dynamite rugelach, people, but I’m no web genius – so bear with me while I get things up and running. Let me know if anything looks odd, or funky, or delicious.

If I can figure out how to embed video – oh my god, I am speaking geekish – you’ll be able to see and hear the beauty of browning meatballs.

For now this will have to do.