Grilled pizza

Anna and I are lucky to have a grill in our backyard. Let that soak in for a minute: A backyard. In Manhattan. Pretty great stuff. In any event, pizza made on that grill turned out to be easy, fast, and really, really great.

Here's the trick: Emphasize what you do well, and accept help with the rest. In my case, that meant buying dough and fresh mozzarella and then tossing a few choice ingredients (homemade tomato sauce and fresh pesto) on top. This is not meant to be an exhaustive explanation of how to make pizza on the grill. Instead, I'll just pass on the single most important lesson: Make sure that grill is hot as can be.

Fennel and orange salad with olives

​Sometimes you just tire of greens, and tonight was one of those times. This salad looks great but takes no more than five minutes to put together.

Ingredients​

1/2 cup​ pitted kalamata olives

1/2 bulb fennel, very thinly sliced​ crosswise

1 shallot, thinly sliced​

2 oranges, skin and pith removed and cut crosswise​

Quick vinaigrette

Fennel fronds for garnish​

How to​

Begin by dealing with the oranges. Cut off both top and bottom so that you can see some of the flesh peeking through on each end. Sit one o the flattened ends down on the cutting board and remove​ vertical slices of the skin. Allow your knife to hug the shape of the orange. Once you've made it around the orange's full circumference (this should require about a half dozen vertical cuts), lie the orange on its side and cut it into half-inch thick round slices. Lie these slices flat in a shallow bowl.

​Scatter the shallots, fennel and olives on top of the oranges. Whisk together a quick vinaigrette -- a tablespoon of red or white wine vingar, some salt, and a third of a cup of olive oil -- and pour it over the salad. Garnish with fennel fronds and fresh ground pepper.

Fresh pea soup

Sunday night after a weekend in Philadelphia (read: Dalessandro's)​ requires a sort of detox dinner. Bread, salad, and something fresh to make you feel fully human again. Enter fresh peas.

The gold standard for me is a bowl of pea soup I had at Mercer Kitchen ​a year ago. It was perfectly smooth, vibrantly green, and tasted like ten thousand peas had be juiced and reduced to a single bowl. The key here is not to skimp on the peas -- they're delicate and so you need a lot of them to get that really intense spring flavor.

Ingredients​

2 cups leeks, sliced​

​3 cups fresh peas, shelled

3 tbsp butter​

5 cups water​

Fresh herbs for garnish (thyme, mint, tarragon, ​chervil or chives all work)

How to​

Melt the butter in a saucepan and add the leeks, stirring to coat. Allow the leeks to cook for about ​five minutes, by which time they will have significantly reduced. Add the water and bring to a boil. Toss in the peas and allow them to simmer for no more than five minutes. Remove them from the heat and allow to cool to a reasonable temperature, and then puree in batches until smooth. Garnish with herbs and parmesan.

Udon, grilled chicken, peas, quick pickles, egg, scallions

Sometimes I get ideas. Often they aren't very good ideas, but as a matter of principle I tend to stubbornly pursue them until they prove to be really, truly bad.

Making my own ramen broth certainly appeared to be one of these bad ideas. It required a trip to the further-than-usual supermarket to track down "meaty pork bones." (I soon triumphantly returned holding aloft a bag containing 5 pounds of pig vertebrae.) It also required turning the oven to 400 degrees in the middle of a heat wave.

But this idea turned out to be a great one. Not only because I have woken every day since to an apartment that still smells of smoky pork goodness, but because the broth itself is mighty fine.

David Chang's Momofuku cookbook is not the sort of thing you'd want to cook from every day. It's one part cookbook, but also one part picture book, one part memoir, and eight parts vanity project. Many of the recipes explicitly make the point that they relate exactly how things are made in Chang's restaurants while also implicitly making the point that you can't cook them because you're not David Chang.

Nevertheless, this broth is great. It is certainly a time-consuming production, but in terms of real work and technical skill it is a breeze, mostly just throwing various meats into a pot and watching to make sure nothing boils over. I will direct you to a literal relating of the recipe here and note only that it requires four pounds of chicken, five pounds of the aforementioned meaty pork bones, a pound of pork belly, a few strips of seaweed and a handful of vegetables.

Ruth the cat came over to help me and Anna consume the broth. Usually she just eats milk for dinner but on special nights we serve her ramen.

A few notes on the other accoutrements:

Chicken was done quickly on high heat on the grill after an hour or so marinating in a combination of ginger, garlic, canola oil, soy sauce and fish sauce. Hard boiled eggs were, well, boiled. Fresh peas, which are perfectly in season right now, required no work other than shelling and were sweet as could be when thrown into the bowl raw. Scallions were sliced and tossed in. 

Quick pickles were also from Chang, and are simple enough: Slice the cucumbers thin. Toss with one part salt to three parts sugar until well coated, and leave for 15 minutes. If they taste a little too salty or sweet, rinse them in water. Otherwise, they're good to go.

Papardelle, creamy bacon corn pesto

This is one of my favorite recipes in a long, long time. It's easy. It's fresh. It's cheap. It's fantastic.

Roasted broccoli

​I will admit that I was more than a little puzzled by this article in the NY Times a couple months ago. In it Martha Rose Shulman writes: "I’d never thought of roasting broccoli, for instance, but now I’ll be roasting that vegetable as often as I steam it, for sure."

Wait, what? You write a food column for the New York Times and you've never before thought to put broccoli in an oven? Damn it people, stop steaming your broccoli! Toss those little trees in the oven already.​ I swear, it couldn't be much easier.

Cut up a head of ​broccoli. Toss with salt, pepper, olive oil, and a few cloves of garlic -- the more the better, honestly. Slide a baking sheet with the broccoli into an over at 425 for 25 minutes, tossing once or twice to prevent burning. Squeeze some more lemon over the top and eat like popcorn.

Grilled vegetable ratatouille

2 tomatoes, halves​

2 red peppers, halved

2 ears of corn

2 zucchini, cut into quarter-inch rounds​

1 medium onion, sliced​

1 clove garlic, minced​

Basil, roughly torn​

How to

It was Alice Waters night in the Bartholomew-Pitoniak household. Alongside her grilled fish recipe I decided to try out ​grilled vegetable ratatouille from The Art of Simple Food.

First, pick your veggies. Go with what's fresh and looks good; don't be too particular about what follows here or in the Waters Bible. Tonight it was corn, tomatoes, zucchini, red peppers and onions. Trim them and toss with olive oil, salt and pepper.

In a vegetable grilling contraption over medium heat on the grill, I place the two halved tomatoes flat side down alongside the halved peppers. After they began to brown I added the zucchini and onions. The corn went on the grill still on the cob. There's very little to add here in terms of guidance -- just keep an eye on things, allow them to develop a nice char, and remove them. Strip the kernels from the ears of corn, cut the vegetables into half-inch pieces, and toss the whole thing with salt, pepper, olive oil, a clove or two of minced garlic and a few leaves of roughly torn basil. Anna even went into the backyard to pick the basil from our struggling little plant, a detail that made us feel like a couple of little Bay Area Alice Waters acolytes.

Striped bass, lemon, parsley, cilantro

Whole fish are terrifying. Look at that guy up there! Eyes like the Mona Lisa, following you wherever you go; mouth slightly agape as if shocked at his fate; fins and tail hacked off, somehow reminiscent of Sloth. But fear not, the beast can be tamed with relative ease, though I do owe a bit of thanks to Alice Waters's The Art of Simple Food.

(As an aside, I find entire sections of this cookbook to be of little use for about ten months out of the year in New York. Sure, simple food is great when you have fresh ingredients year round. But I'm with Tyler Cowen on this one -- in places like New York, where ingredients are not always at their freshest for many parts of the year, there is much to be said for process and ingenuity. We northeasterners don't have the luxury of simply letting the ingredients shine. Summer is the exception, though, so to Alice Waters we go.)

Pick a fish

First up is picking the fish. Assume between a half and three quarters of a pound of whole fish per person. Look for shiny fish with well-colored scales and clear, not cloudy, eyes. Ask the fishmonger to remove the scales, guts, fins, and tail. Alright, now you have a nice looking fish! From here things get easier.

How to

Generously season the inside and outside of the fish with salt and pepper. Layer some lemon slices inside, along with a handful of fresh herbs -- tonight it was cilantro and parsley. Tie that baby up with some twine, paint it with a little olive oil, and light a fire under the grill.

When the fire is nice and hot, rub some olive oil on the grate to prevent the fish from sticking. Toss the fish onto a section with medium heat, cover, and check periodically to make sure it doesn't stick. Plan on cooking the first for about ten minutes for each inch of thickness at the fish's thickest part. Then remove the fish from the grill, let it rest for a few minutes, show it off to the assembled onlookers, and filet it either tableside or back in the kitchen. Serve with a little salsa verde or wedges of lemon. (That salsa verde came in handy the next day on a leftover fish sandwich too.)

Soba, cabbage, chicken, pickled zucchini

Wednesday was Fourth of July, meaning a whole crowd of people joined us in our backyard for burgers, chicken, hot dogs, coleslaw, and a few beers. But what to do with all the leftovers? Easy -- cold soba noodles.

The cabbage was undressed, and leftover from the slaw. Chicken cutlets were simply marinated -- olive oil, salt, pepper, oregano, lemon juice, a little hot sauce -- and we just yanked them out of the fridge when the soba noodles were ready. The pickled zucchini were a result of having too much fresh zucchini left over; rather than let it rot, I tossed it into the brine of some pickles I'd made for the Wednesday party. Two days later they still had some snap.

The rest is easy. Boil the noodles. Dunk them in cold water. Toss them with a dressing of ginger and soy sauce (see this post from last month). Fast, resourceful, refreshing, tasty as hell.

Grilled hanger steak

1/4 cup soy sauce​

1/4 cup red wine vinegar​

1/4 cup olive oil​

1 tbsp honey​

2 cloves garlic, minced​

1 tbsp thyme, shopped​

1 tsp dried oregano​

1 tsp black pepper​

Hanger steak​

How to​

I owe this ​one to Whitewater Cooks at Home, which above all is an awesome summer cookbook here on the East Coast. Those West Coasters don't know how good they have it!

​Whisk together all of the above ingredients. Pour it over over the hanger steak in a bowl, and leave it in the fridge to marinate overnight. The next evening, toss it on the grill for ten minutes or so, let rest for ten more, and dig in. This is great served with some sort of acidic sauce -- sharp salsa verde, maybe a citrus aioli, or anything else that fits the bill.