Slice it and add toppings. (We chose turkey, parrano cheese, mustard, and arugula.):

Pre-heat the grill to high:

Grease the outside of the bread. (We opted for a light spray of olive oil.) Place the sandwich on the grill:

Now, this is apparently where regional differences come into play. If you are a restaurateur in D.C., you will close the lid only until faint lines appear on the bread. At this point you will serve the sandwich.

If, however, you are from someplace civilized, you will know that panini are cooked sandwiches and, therefore, the sandwich should not be removed from the grill until the contents are heated:

If you wait the extra few minutes that it takes to actually melt your cheese, you will end up with the perfect cooked sandwich:

Delicious!

[This is cross-posted at spritewrites.net.]

This months ingredients are:

• Pasta
• Chevre
• Beets
• Peanut buttter

On first glance, these aren't exactly ingredients that scream "delicious when mixed together," but I saw it as a unique opportunity to make a fusion dish, combining Asian influences (pasta and peanut sauce) with French sensibilities (beets and chevre). In some respects, it's a layperson's "wannabe Vietnamese," and I'm fine with that.

Cross-Cultural Vermicelli

Ingredients:

• 2 tbs chunky peanut butter
• 8 tbs lite coconut milk
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 1 spring onion, finely sliced
• 1 cayenne pepper, minced
• 1/2 package Vietnamese wheat vermicelli
• 1 large handful of fall greens (I used spinach, arugula and mustard greens), rinsed and torn
• 1 small beet (any color)
• 3 oz. chevre, crumbled
• sea salt

Directions:

1. Peel and cut beet into 1 inch cubes. Line cookie sheet with foil, spray with olive oil, and place beet cubes on sheet. Spray with oil and coat with sea salt. Roast at 375 degrees until heated through and tender, about 25 minutes. When finished, remove to cool.
2. Cook pasta to package directions. Rinse and set aside to cool.
3. Combine peanut butter, coconut milk, garlic, onion and cayenne pepper in microwave-safe container. Heat incrementally on high power for 1 minute bursts until ingredients become fluid. Use fork or whisk to combine, then heat for an extra minute to allow flavors to combine.
4. Steam greens in covered pot until done (2-3 minutes). Remove from heat and drain.
5. Once beets have cooled, dice them into a fine cube (around 5 mm per side).
6. In large bowl, combine pasta and peanut sauce, mixing thoroughly to ensure complete coating of pasta with sauce. Place portions in serving bowls.
7. Place greens atop pasta with sauce. Crumble beets and chevre on top.

Serves four

I've not been good with upkeep - given that the most recent post prior to this one is from one year ago, it makes sense.

Sort of.

But I have ideas about where to take it, so it may rise from the digital bit bucket.

Stay tuned....

This week is Restaurant Week here in DC, so sprite and I have sampled the wares of two local eateries, neither of which we’d visited before.

On Wednesday night, we dined at Zola, located above the International Spy Museum. The restaurant is very modern, with dark lighting and warm wood and burgundy highlights throughout. The service was attentive, and the food was very, very good.

For my appetizer, I enjoyed a tuna tartare, served in with a finely-diced cucumber salad atop the tuna, which was infused with lime juice. Taro chips were used as the serving medium, and the taste was extraordinary. My entrée was a grilled, sugar-glazed monkfish fillet, served over glazed yams and garlic spinach, with applewood-smoked bacon garnish. This was a most unusual melding of tastes, but it worked well. Monkfish is usually served as “poor man’s lobster,” and this dish dispensed of such stigma. My dessert was a “flight” of three homemade butterscotches made with 12-year, 15-year and 21-year-old scotch. It was divine: a lovely flavor that was more intense and succulent as the whisky got older.

sprite enjoyed a roasted beet appetizer, a main course of what can best be summed up as a “polenta cheeseburger”: two spiced polenta cakes that sandwiched a mushroom cap, some eggplant strips and mozzerella cheese. There was also a sauce involved, and it tasted very, very good (the polenta, itself, was a bit bland, but the other ingredients brought it to life). Her dessert was a peanut butter trifle that was most yummy.

After Zola, we were both stuffed, so our post-dinner activities involved a lot of digestion.

Last night, a couple of friends joined us for dinner at the Tabard Inn on N Street. The atmosphere at the Tabard is Old World cozy, with a touch of eclectic (wood-beam ceilings of old, with more modern artwork on the walls). It was definitely more intimate. The food was good, too, though not as good as Zola. I had another tuna appetizer - this time, a seared tuna strip with daikon and cilantro garnish and a ginger-miso dressing. T’was tasty. My entrée was a miso-glazed salmon filét, served over mushrooms, jasmine rice and baby bok choi. It wasn’t quite as good as the Zola meal, but it was quite filling. Dessert was a rum-infused pineapple upside-down cake, served with mango sorbét. The table shared a lovely bottle of shiraz, a Sonoma Valley wine of 2004 vintage.

sprite’s meal consisted of a “Thai chicken soup” that wasn’t quite as expected (there wasn’t much coconut in the broth, so it didn’t seem quite right to me). The entrée was a pasta dish that was a bit small in portion, with more onions than mushrooms (our fellow diner bought the same dish and ended up with the opposite issue). Dessert was a lemon mascarpone cheesecake, garnished with berries that was quite tasty (per sprite’s word).

Our other friend had an entrée of roasted duck that looked most delicious, and had a Godiva chocolate cake that was too wonderful for words.

The service at Tabard Inn was very good, too, and they are noted for their brunch, so we’ll head back sometime in the warmer months to sample their Sunday finest.

As a whole, it’s been a good Restaurant Week: a perfect sampling of restaurants we wouldn’t normally patronize, but will certainly recommend in the future.

Count me in as a big-time fan of this development. Corn syrup consumption has skyrocketed in recent years, and contributes to early-onset obesity, diabetes, and other health maladies. The real cane sugar, while hardly a "health food," is a much, much better option.

Kudos, Jones!

I've been remiss, as it was a fun summer in terms of food.

So I'll share my findings over the next few weeks, and will get moving with the flavors of autumn and the holiday season. There will be food, drink, gadgets, opinions, humor - and perhaps a few witty thoughts.

Stay tuned!

• red cabbage
• Chinese broccoli

Now i've had red cabbage before, but I've never cooked it myself - so this is something new, in a sense. And the Chinese broccoli is completely new to me, so that'll be fun.

Everyone knows the dandelion. It runs rampant everywhere, delighting children when it goes to seed and vexing gardeners and lawn-mowers alike. A member of the aster family, the dandelion goes beyond its decorative purpose and can be used as a food source. (If you use fertilizer on your lawn or have pets that use the backyard as a bathroom, I would not recommend picking your own; otherwise, go ahead.)

Dandelion flowers can be used to make wine. The iron-rich leaves can be used as a salad green, in a stir-fry, or in soup. Its roots are similar to chicory's and, when roasted, can be used as a coffee substitute for those who like the taste. Dandelion root is also sold as a diuretic in pharmacies in many countries, where it is drunk, I believe, as a tea. Finally (and in a non-culinary use), some people use the milky sap from the dandelion stem as either a mosquito repellent, a wart cure, or as a rubber substitute (the last using the Russian variety).

A confession here: I don't particularly like bitter foods. I have a sweet tooth. I enjoy salt. I like spicy and I like sour.

So it should not perhaps, come as a surprise, that when Rudi came up with a salad on the internet that was comprised of raw dandelion greens and tomato combined with a balsamic vinaigrette that it was not immediately going to wow me.

I wanted to like it. I did. I like the smell of dandelions and the greens taste almost exactly like the flowers smell. And it was palatable when I put some ranch dressing on top. But I would not intentionally choose to make a salad with dandelion greens on their own again because it was just really not that pleasant to eat.

It could be that our leaves were older ones and therefore more bitter than you would usually include in a salad. Or, perhaps, mixed with milder lettuces, like butter or romaine, dandelion could add some flavor to the combination. And we have yet to try it in a stir-fry, where bitter greens tend to work extremely well.

Monday: Rudi whipped up a stirfry for supper, combining marinated tofu and rice with local baby tat soi, broccoli, and sweet potato.

Tuesday: Rudi decided to make his own pasta sauce for the first time. He combined canned tomatoes with dried basil from last summer's plant, green garlic and garlic chives.

Wednesday: We had local greens and tomatoes on our tuna sandwiches for lunch. Also, the strawberries were beginning to look a little sad, so I trimmed them, added some sugar, and used them and some fresh whipped cream to top the leftover cake Gramma made for Easter. Yummy!

Thursday: Nettle soup

Friday: I had read that hardboiled egg both contrasts well color-wise and tastes good with the nettle soup. It also added a little hardiness to the soup that was nice. (Particularly right before an all-nighter.)

Saturday: I believe this would the day off for the week. I ate peanut butter balls sold by (and thus presumably made locally) the Howard County 4-H folks, but that might be pushing it to include them.

Sunday: Blueberry scones with local mascarpone and farm-fresh yogurt made for a quick, but tasty brunch right before a ballgame. And dinner was pasta with more of Rudi's homemade sauce.

We got to this week's farmers' market too late for rhubarb and there were no duck eggs (my back-up plan), so we came home with dandelion greens to make something with this week. We'll let you know how it goes!