A Salad Interlude

Forgive me, loyal readers, as I’m about to slip something quite virtuous into your mouths.  The treat I promised you yesterday will have to wait until next week.  But the good news is twofold: today I will give you two recipes and they are both so quick and so easy that you’ll have time to play outside before and after dinner.  That is my kind of cooking!

I’m on a green vegetable kick these days, mostly in the form of baby spinach and crisp leaves of Romaine lettuce.  I love a good salad for dinner, one that’s piled high and deep with vegetables and goodies like freshly made croutons, cheese, roasted potatoes, or even some well-chosen fruit.  A main-dish salad is cooking in its most primal form—simple, pure, satisfying, delicious.  I imagine if I had a garden, I’d feel even more strongly about dinner salad nights because then I could start them with a stroll through the rows, checking on this lettuce plant and that set of herbs.  But for now, my salad leaves come from a supermarket, and I’m willing to pedal across town for a good bunch of Romaine.  It is my favorite lettuce and when it’s added to the ingredients of another favorite salad, the results are worthy of your dinner fork.

Hidden inside that jumble of Romaine lettuce are thin slices of fennel and green apple.  Everything is moistened with a splash of olive oil and a good spritz of fresh lemon juice.  And then—THEN!—the whole thing is topped with paper-thin peels of Parmesan cheese.  It’s a salad where savory meets sweet meets sour, and everything is fresh fresh fresh for maximum crunch and juiciness.  In a dish like this, all the pressure is on the ingredients, which means that as long as the grocery store pickings are good, then I’m off the hook.  And that’s exactly where I want to be on a Friday night after a long week.

Wait, I’m not done yet.  Before you make your salad, I must tell you about cheese on cheese bread.  My neighborhood Albertson’s sells a very tasty loaf of Asiago cheese bread, which I often tuck into my bag before heading home.  The cheese flavor is infused into the whole loaf, which is otherwise a white bread with a velvety soft but sturdy crumb.  By itself this Asiago cheese bread is pretty good—I like a few slices alongside a big bowl of soup for lunch—but when topped with some cheddar and slices of Granny Smith apple and baked until the cheese is melted and a little bubbly, this bread becomes an irresistible toast.  It goes perfectly with the salad above—the salad all cool and crunchy, the toast warm and gooey with oven-crisped edges.  I always want another slice of this cheese bread toast, no matter how big a salad I’m eating alongside it.  Cheese and bread goes down a little too easily, but I’m not going to let stop me from keeping a loaf of cheese bread on hand for the next dinner salad night.

Cheese on Cheese Bread: Asiago Cheese Toasts with Melted Cheddar and Green Apple Slices

As though cheese plus cheese were not incentive enough to make these toasts, I have one more thing to add.  While these are baking, the apples will get a little soft and the fragrance of baked apples will waft out of the oven, reminding you of apple pie but with a tiny fraction of the work needed.  And if you are a fan of apple pies with cheddar (and oh my, you should be!), then you will love these toasts.

Serves 1

2 slices of Asiago cheese bread bought from a bakery or a grocery store’s bakery

A generous handful of shredded cheddar cheese (I use a mild cheddar here so as not to overwhelm the other flavors)

6 thin slices of Granny Smith apple

1)  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

2)  Place the slices of bread on a cookie sheet.  Top with the shredded cheddar.  Place 3 slices of Granny Smith apple on each piece of bread.

3)  Bake the toasts for 5-10 minutes, or until the cheese has melted and the apples have softened and become fragrant.  Serve immediately, preferably alongside the salad below.  

Main Dish Salad with Romaine Lettuce, Fennel, and Green Apple

Serves 1

2-3 large, perfect leaves of Romaine lettuce

A handful of very thin slices of fresh fennel

A quarter of a large Granny Smith apple, thinly sliced (but not peeled)

Extra-virgin olive oil, to taste

Fresh lemon juice, to taste

Salt, to taste

A wedge of Parmesan cheese

1)  Wash and dry the Romaine lettuce leaves, then tear them into bite-sized pieces.  Place them in a small mixing bowl along with the fennel and apple slices.

2)  Pour some olive oil over the Romaine mixture and toss to distribute it thoroughly.  Spritz some lemon juice over the salad and a tiny bit of salt.  Taste and adjust the seasonings.  Finally, use a vegetable peeler to slice 3-4 pieces of Parmesan cheese over the salad.  Serve.  I like to eat this salad straight out of my mixing bowl, so I use this pretty yellow mixing bowl to make it.  I love this bowl, a gift from my sister-in-law and her family.

Late Morning Edition

Pictured above is my favorite seat in the house.  It’s my window to the outside world, my prime blogging location, my lifeline.  It is my home internet connection.

I find so much inspiration out there on the interwebs.  Though I joke about how much time I waste on the computer, it’s hard for me to embrace the notion that it really is wasted time.  It’s kind of perfect for a learning sponge like me, always eager to soak up new ideas.  And I would be terribly lonely down here were it not for the social connections that my computer enables.  It is a vital part of my communication with the outside world.

This week I’ve been thinking about some advice that Gretchen Rubin offered her Happiness Project people: Aim higher.  Gretchen offered this tip in relation to work, but I’ve been thinking about how I can use it to improve the non-work parts of my life.  Or rather, how I can use it to inspire the non-work parts of my life.

Despite dismantling my life in order to move to Texas six months ago, I’d like to think I have a good life outside of work.  I cook my own meals, I write this blog, I read voraciously, I get lots of exercise on my own two feet, and I am very slowly making new friends here.  Most nights I get enough sleep and my energy levels are good.  But I often feel like I do all of these things because I have been doing them, and I should just keep doing them.  My excitement about doing them is no longer tangible to me, and I miss it.  I’m reaping the benefits of doing these things without feeling as much joy as I would like.  But I don’t think it has to be that way.

Aim higher.  The truth is, I think I already aim pretty high in many areas of my life, so the idea of aiming higher is scary.  It means I might fail.  When I consider my fear against all that I already do, I realize that what I really want is a nudge to do a leeeetle bit more.  My life does not need an overhaul; I just need a few sparks of excitement.  The best way I can think to accomplish this goal is to try new things and push myself a few steps outside of my comfort zone.

Right now there is a chocolate cake baking in the oven.  Normally I’d think that I’m too tired to bake on Saturday morning, or that I have chores or errands to do, but not today.  Today the cake will be accompanying me to a pool party that my boss and his wife are hosting for their two labs.  I’ve never made this cake before, so I’ve got my fingers and toes crossed that it turns out nicely.  If the batter is any indication of taste, then this cake is going to be hard to resist.  It’s the Black Mocha Cake from the Moosewood Restaurant Book of Desserts, and it just came out of the oven.

It’s really hard to beat the fragrance of a freshly baked chocolate cake.  The smell alone is enough to make me happy.  It’s better living through chocolate cake!

The other area of my life where I’ve been embracing the aim higher philosophy is yoga.  I’ve been doing yoga for a long time now.  I really fell in love with it from the beginning, and it’s become routine for me.  My back tends to be sore and tight; all my walking and running doesn’t help matters.  Yoga works out the tightness all over my body but especially in my back.  Lately I’ve been trying to add variety to my yoga routine by sampling the different classes offered by yogadownload.com: Baptiste power yoga, hatha yoga, yoga for weight-loss, yoga for runners.  The free twenty-minute classes are perfect: long enough to be engaging but short enough to do at night before I go to bed.  The two selections that I keep coming back to are Dave Farmar’s Baptiste power yoga and hatha yoga.  Dave Farmar is hilarious and he teaches such a good class.  The pace is perfect and I’ve been able to try new poses like inversions and plow pose just following his instructions and easing into the unfamiliar positions.

Hatha yoga has surprised me.  I was initially drawn by the word “gentle” in the class name: “Gentle Hatha Yoga #1” or “Gentle Hatha Yoga #2.”  These classes are indeed gentle, but they are more than just gentle.  They stretch me and calm me, then I go to bed and wake up feeling incredibly refreshed and ready for my day.  There is something about these hatha yoga classes that gives me something I need—peace of mind and body, perhaps?  They’re so deceptively slow and maybe that’s their real trick.  You don’t push in hatha yoga. You relax into it.  It’s wonderful.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you a little more about aiming higher in an edible way.  For now, I wish you a beautiful Saturday with plenty of fresh air, relaxation, and, if you like, homemade chocolate cake.  Make your day a great one!

We Can Give It Away

This post is part of a series of tandem posts that my friend Ammie and I are writing together.  The theme for this installment is long-distance friendship.  Ammie’s post can be found here.  Enjoy!

Few things can change a friendship as dramatically as distance.  For me, it feels a little like pulling the petals off of a flower and flinging them into the wind, then watching as they float away from each other, once part of a whole and now forced to fend for themselves.  It is heartbreaking when a short-distance friendship becomes a long-distance one.

I’ve survived that transition at least three major times and countless minor times.  But I can’t say all my friendships have survived.  I suppose a certain amount of drift in friendship is not unusual, as interests and obligations pull us all in different directions.  Drift is the easy way out, the no-effort answer to a friendship that has suddenly become much more difficult to maintain.  But drift is lonely and sad and a little scary, too.  How am I to know the difference between giving someone their space and freedom versus letting them drift away without even so much as a good-bye?

I try to gauge my long-distance efforts by reciprocity.  I am willing to work for friendship because I know how precious those connections are.  I am not willing, however, to be a force of nature that carries the burden of friendship on my back.  I need my friends to call me back, write to me, tell me they want to see me whenever we can arrange a visit.  I need to know they are thinking about me and missing me.  I need to know they care.

All this neediness can make a person feel rather vulnerable, but I believe something that I came across a while ago: without vulnerability, there is no intimacy.  I cannot tell you how deeply this idea resonated with me when I first read it.  Without vulnerability, there is no intimacy.  In my world, friendship is an emotional intimacy with another person.  In the moments when I’ve been able to really embrace the scary process of opening up to someone, I could almost see our friendship blossoming.  It was such a powerful, exhilarating feeling—few feelings come even close to the magic of those moments.

But distance, while very challenging, is not as bad as it seems at first.  Distance is like a puzzle or an enigmatic poem whose meaning must be decoded.  Though I am, right now, in a phase of missing Matt more than I would like, the distance between us heightens the romance in our relationship.  It makes me more aware of his absence and his presence, and as a result, I am more grateful for both.

I’m also very grateful for all the efforts that Ammie has put into our long-distance friendship.  This is a woman who, in the recent past, has declared that she has too many friends.  Her social life is almost a full-time job to the point where she has to schedule time for herself to just chill, alone, at home.  So I know that when she makes time for me, it really is making time.  Our friendship resembles a little tiny bank where we both make deposits of love and time, hope and good cheer, knowing that the other will see these deposits and feel like she just opened a treasure chest.

I suppose that’s what it’s all about: treasuring what you have.  It’s the great irony of love that the only thing we can do with it is give it away.  Love cannot be saved, it can’t be bought or sold—it won’t even get you a free lunch.  But we can give it away, hearts eager and cell phones at the ready, arms open and plane tickets reserved.  Just like flower petals, I throw my heart into the wind and know that somewhere, a friend will catch it and we’ll be reminded all over again why we choose to stay in each other’s lives.  At any given moment, long distance is a temporary condition, and it’s only the love that we can try to make permanent.

Hard to Argue

Here’s a question: why am I so intrigued with making sauces these days?  What happened to the soups, the granolas, the salads, the cookies?

The answer is this: I love fresh produce.  So much so that it is becoming slightly painful for me to cook it.  That’s where the sauces enter the kitchen.

I have often lamented my inability to cook fresh fruit.  I love gorgeous photos of strawberry pie, baked pears, blueberry cobblers, but once those pints of berries are sitting in front of me, all I can do is move berries to mouth, hypnotized by the splendor of plump fragrant fruit.  This is my way of appreciating food, even as it shuts down my cooking and baking efforts.

But there’s no need to be sad about all this because even though no strawberries shall see the inside of an oven in my kitchen, they shall see the glory that is a pot of peanut butter fudge sauce.

I have wanted a peanut butter sauce recipe for a long time now.  What I really wanted was a sauce that not only tasted great but could also be stored in the fridge for a few days and still maintain a nice saucy texture without separating into weird clumps or oozing oil.  I think I’ve found my recipe.  By “my recipe,” I really mean a recipe that’s been adapted from Nigella Lawson and made friendlier to the health nuts among us (AHEM).  I love Nigella’s cookbooks and her gorgeous prose, but her recipes are harder for me to embrace.  I like my waistline and the way my pants fit, so all those Nigella recipes calling for sticks of butter and cups of heavy cream force me to ask myself this: is today an everyday cooking day or is today an indulgent cooking day?  Most of the time it’s the former, so I put away the Nigella cookbook and the heavy cream.  And it’s okay.

Last week, though, a photo of drippingly beautiful sundaes over at KERF had me reaching for Nigella Express, thumbing through the index for a recipe for peanut butter fudge sauce.  The time had come to get myself a recipe, followed by a pot of fudge sauce.  Oh yes.  There’s an old saying that when the student is ready, the teacher appears.  Likewise, I’d argue that when the cook is ready, the recipe appears.  I was ready.

The first thing you should know about this recipe is that it has a very nice peanut buttery flavor.  It is most definitely a PEANUT BUTTER fudge sauce.  The peanut butter comes first.  But I think the chocolate could easily be amped up if you’d like more of a CHOCOLATE peanut butter fudge sauce.  The second thing you should know is that the recipe I present to you today is a much more reasonable version than Nigella’s.  I use milk (2%, to be specific) instead of heavy cream, which means that although my sauce may be slightly less delicious, it also contains about a zillion fewer calories and fat grams.  And if you, like me, enjoy standing by the stove and eating fudge sauce straight out of the pot, a reasonable recipe is a very good thing.  The final thing I want to mention is that this sauce stores well in the fridge.  The texture will look a little nubbly, but in the mouth it stays rather smooth, so you can whip up a batch one night and spoon it over your oatmeal the next day while rubbing the sleep out of your eyes.  It’s hard to argue with a fudge sauce that wants to join you for breakfast.

Peanut Butter Fudge Sauce

Adapted from Nigella Express by Nigella Lawson

Makes a little pot of sauce—enough for a few people to share

A confession: I ran out of chocolate chips when I was making this, so I only used about a third of a cup.  I wanted to use half a cup, so I’ll do that next time and report back to you in the comments.  With a smaller amount of chocolate, the peanut butter flavor is front and center.  But don’t be misled: the chocolate is still there; it’s just more subtle.  I feel like this is just perfect for topping oatmeal or as a dip for strawberries or bananas.  Or for eating by the spoonful when the mood strikes.

3/4 cup milk (I used 2% cow’s milk)

1/3 to 1/2 cup chocolate chips, bittersweet and/or semisweet

1/2 cup smooth peanut butter

2 tbsp. maple syrup, or to taste

1)  Put all the ingredients in small pot and heat over medium heat.  Stir frequently until the peanut butter and chocolate have melted into a smooth dark sauce.  Taste and adjust the sweetness level if you like.  I like mine a little sweet but not tooth-achingly so.  Remove from the heat and eat immediately or store the leftovers in the fridge.  This sauce will keep for at least five days if refrigerated in a sealed container.

All Shall be Well

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.  Juliana of Norwich

It’s raining in great sloppy gushes of water, streaming off my roof and splashing on my patio.  This is how it usually rains here in College Station, Texas: hard, desperate, unrelenting.  It’s the kind of rain that makes me reconsider my plans for the morning, mentally reconfiguring my day to avoid stepping out into such a downpour.  There’s thunder too, which sounds almost gentle compared to the rivers of rain.  There’s something about morning rain that makes the kitchen seem like the right place to be for the rest of the day, though I haven’t the faintest idea of what I want to cook.  Breakfast, however, was just right.

They say that it’s not a good idea to try to shop your way out of a bad mood, but on Thursday, that’s just what I did.  I sauntered over to the store to pick up dinner ingredients, and I found organic strawberries.  Fresh, beautiful organic strawberries!  I thought for sure that they’d be something like six bucks a pint, but at only three dollars a pint, they were a steal.  I’m heading back today and hoping they’ll have more for me.

With fresh strawberries on hand, it’s hard not to include them in every meal.  This morning, I made oatmeal (using my standard formula, minus the maple syrup) and topped it with sliced strawberries, a scattering of Optimum Blueberry Cinnamon cereal for crunch, and two spoonfuls of homemade peanut butter fudge sauce.  It was the kind of breakfast that says, “Hello, Saturday!  How wonderful to see you again.  Care for some peanut butter fudge sauce?”

It’s been a strange week or two for me.  Workwise, I’ve been in a lull of sorts, a trough of activity in between two peaks of busy-ness.  To keep myself feeling productive and happy, I’ve been focusing on the homefront and all my hobbies.  I made a half-batch of this Spanish-style dish of chickpeas and spinach and a whole batch of Jess’s Tomato Lentil Soup, both of which were fabulous.  I highly recommend the parsley in Jess’s soup; it adds a nice green herbal note to the dish.  I’m working on biscuit-making, which I hope to tell you about sooner rather than later.  Then, of course, there was the peanut butter fudge sauce, which I really think I have to tell you about right away.  My kitchen has been a bustling little corner of my home, and I couldn’t be happier about it.

In between all the new recipes, I finished reading Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert, in whose pages the prayer above was found.  I wasn’t sure what to think about this book before I started reading it.  I was intrigued that Gilbert actually wrote an entire manuscript and then, unhappy with her draft, she trashed it to start over again.  Talk about dedication to the craft!  I was impressed.  And the book she ended up publishing—I am impressed with that as well.  A thoughtful and moving account of marriage, this book made me laugh and it made me mad.  Gilbert is a wonderfully engaging writer, and I think that she did a beautiful job trying to explain how marriage has been, historically, a shelter and a prison for women, and how, even now, the intimacy of marriage can free us while it binds us to our spouses.  Some reviewers have complained that the format of Committed doesn’t work for the reader: Gilbert starts each chapter with an update on her current whereabouts and the latest news about her relationship before delving into some aspect of marriage, such as expectations, history, or autonomy.  I liked the format a lot.  I thought it was a good story-telling technique to use with a book like this, and it keeps the book from being too centered on the idiosyncracies of Gilbert’s own story.  It’s a good balance between marriage as an entity and Gilbert’s own relationship with marriage.

In other reading news, this article in Salon was fascinating to me: hipsters on food stamps!  Whoa.  If you feel strongly about either taxes or food, this article may rile you up a bit.  Then, after you’ve read that, check out the response from one of the hipsters featured in that article.  I don’t have any hard and fast answers to our current economic climate, though I am left feeling more grateful than ever that I can afford to buy organic strawberries if that’s what I want to eat.

All shall be well, sweet readers.  Happy weekend and happy spring!

Like Butterflies

I rarely have brilliant insights when I’m put on the spot.  I’m more of a meditative thinker, the kind who stirs her thoughts slowly, like a soup simmering on the stove.  It’s no wonder that I didn’t enjoy being forced to write impromptu essays in grade school.  I actually hated it, even though I have always loved to write.  My bad memories of impromptu writing have left a strong dislike for any sort of prompted writing.  I suppose I’m a bit of a free spirit that way.  I want to write about what I want to write about.  Wah!  May I have some cheese with my whine, please?

I surprised myself, then, when my friend Ammie and I decided to start writing tandem posts on our blogs.  The idea was this: we would either write posts inspired by the same prompt (like tonight’s posts) or we would trade topics: I would write about something that she normally writes about, and vice versa.  It sounded so fun!  Ammie is a terrific writer, and I knew I’d be even more excited to read her blog if we were inspiring each other to write, hopefully in some fresh, new ways.

Tonight’s topic is this: the things we cook without recipes.  I invite you to click on over to Ammie’s post here, which I will be reading after I’m done with my own (I don’t want to be tempted by her delicious writing just yet!).  And if you have a blog or something similar, and you’d like to join us in these tandem posts, please jump right in!  Let us know by leaving a comment on either of our blogs.  I’d love to hear what you think or read what you’ve written.

* * *

I have a serious conundrum to discuss with you, and that is this: more than half of my cooking these days is happening without the gentle oversight of a recipe.  And what’s more is that I’m loving it—the freedom, the joy, the excitement of flying by the seat of my pants in the kitchen.  It’s all so invigorating!  It’s also a serious problem.

It wouldn’t be much of a problem if I weren’t trying to keep up a weekly stream of recipes on Life, Love, and Food.  In my experience, it’s the cooks who don’t use recipes who make the best food.  The two people who come to mind immediately are Matt and Daine.  For example, the last time Matt and I were together, it was New Year’s weekend and we made good use of my kitchen.  He arrived just in time for lunch, and just in time to stop me from following my recipes exactly as written.  I had made a batch of Jess’s amazing tomato soup, but it wasn’t quite finished.  Matt, who is always willing to help but does not always do as he is told, was put in charge of adding half a cup of milk to the soup and then blending it smooth lushness.  He took the milk container from me and then—with no measuring cup!—just poured in some milk.  Like, “What’s with the measuring cup?”

I’d be lying if I said that this sort of behavior doesn’t faze me.  It is, one could argue, a result of Matt’s confidence, something that makes him nearly irresistible.  He is the most confident person I know, except for maybe my friend Daine.  The two of them have a lot in common, and I wonder now which came first: the cooking mastery or the utter confidence?  Having not known either of them for more than a handful of years, I cannot answer that question.  But it does seem to me that there is something really powerful about being able to feed yourself and others with only the instructions in your memory, mind and muscle combined.

I have neither Matt’s confidence level nor Daine’s intuition level in the kitchen.  What I do have, though, is a desire to feel free of the burden of following directions.  I want to feel that I always have the ability to cook something decent for myself and and a friend.  I want food to be enjoyed during the making and the eating.

But I also want to make recipes that I can share with you, dear reader.  Like my fried rice dish topped with a tasty drizzle of peanut sauce, or the creamy cauliflower pasta I made on Sunday night.  The dishes I cook without recipes are like butterflies, floating on the wind, just out of reach of words and measurements.  I fear that when I try to catch them, they won’t taste as good or that something will be lost in translation from my hands to your mouth.  I even worry that by just trying to catch them, these dishes will lose their appeal.  Certainly some of my affection for them comes from their spontaneity and the heightened anticipation of not even knowing what they should taste like.

I hope you’ll bear with me, friends, while I try to figure out where this cooking-without-recipes business is heading.  In the meantime, I’ve been seeking solace in my cookbook shelves, hoping that some recipe will gracefully volunteer to be the next feature on this blog.  I think I’ve got a few, but only if I can restrain myself enough to give you an accurate report of what I did in the kitchen.  As an index card on my desk says, “We may drift far from shore.”  But I’ll keep a map on hand so that we always know how to get home again.

Where We Should All Be

These days, I am being pulled outside like a magnet is drawn to a refrigerator.  I can’t control it.  I want to be outside more than anything else—more than food, more than sleep.  When Matt comes to visit me in a few weeks, the only way he will see me is if he follows me out the door, so I’m planning poolside chats and a walk in the park for us.  I just want to feel the sunshine and the warm breeze of a Texas spring on my skin.  I’d also like to feel his hand in mine, palms together and fingers entwined.

As you might imagine, this insatiable need to be outside is starting to get in the way of other important things.  My kitchen time is taking a real hit, along with my desire to cook.  My desire to eat remains pretty much intact.  Last week, I wrote an e-mail to Matt, telling him, “I fear I may be a little plumper the next time you see me, as I feel I could be content making meals out of cheese, peanut butter, and apples.”  That’s still true, but I’d like to add carrots and tahini sauce to the list.

This tahini sauce comes to us from Nigel Slater and his kitchen diaries, a book that I’ve had on loan from the library for several months.  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I love this book.  Inspiring, beautiful, and funny, it is a book that could make itself very much at home on my cookbook shelves.  As fortune would have it, I have the book on loan for a whole year—crazy!—so I don’t have to decide to buy my own copy for a while.  But the decision is looming because there is much cooking to be done from its pages.

I’ve made the tahini sauce at least half a dozen times now.  It is delicious—rich and a little tangy, with thyme flecked throughout and the deep flavor of tahini to intrigue the palate.  It’s perfect for dipping carrots into it, or for slathering a wrap filled with spiced chickpeas, cabbage, and shredded carrots.  All this flavor comes together with just five ingredients and one bowl, making it one of the easiest ways of dealing with the dinner question.  I imagine it would be fabulous as a topping for chickpea burgers—I can’t wait to try out that combination.  It is, of course, more work to make an honest-to-goodness meal with an entree and everything, so I’ll have to wait to eat my chickpea burgers until this spring fever settles down into a low-grade indoor apathy.  Or maybe, just maybe, Matt will convince me to stay inside so we can cook dinner together and then I’ll drag him outside with me to look at the stars.  When the weather is as beautiful as this, outside is where we should all be.

Tahini Sauce

Adapted from the kitchen diaries by Nigel Slater

Makes about 1/4 cup

Nigel calls for fresh thyme in his tahini sauce, but I hardly ever have fresh thyme on hand, so I use dried instead.  He serves it with roasted eggplant, but really, this is a great all-purpose sauce in a size that’s just right when you are cooking for one or two people.  If your crowd is larger, I don’t see any reason why this recipe couldn’t be doubled or even tripled.  So have at it!

2 tbsp. plain yogurt, preferably whole-milk yogurt

1 tbsp. tahini

1 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil

1/4 tsp. dried thyme leaves

1/8 tsp. salt, or to taste

1)  In a small bowl, whisk together the yogurt, tahini, and olive oil until smooth.  Crumble the thyme leaves between your fingers as you sprinkle them into the bowl.  Add the salt.  Mix everything together.  Taste and add more salt if you like.  Serve or store in the refrigerator until serving time.