In an effort to share more of our very most every day meals, the ones I throw together with whatever’s left in the fridge, or the staples I can make with my eyes half closed at the end of a long day, I’ve started posting occasional short, simple posts just about these meals.  I call it vær så god, Norwegian for “bon appetit.”

There are few things more useful than an easy but delicious pasta recipe to have in your back pocket when you are strapped for time and ingredients, but tummies are growling and dinner needs to get made pronto.  Cacio e pepe is one of the very best recipes to suit just such a situation.

Cacio e pepe translates to cheese and pepper, and beyond pasta, that’s practically all you really need.  You toast your coarsely ground black pepper (a ton of it!) until it is absurdly fragrant and floral, then melt in some butter and oil.  In the meantime you put a pot of pasta on to boil and steal a cup of the pasta water when it has gotten nice and starchy.

Normally cacio e pepe is made with a thin pasta like spaghetti or buccatini, but I’ve become taken with fazzoletti, aka pasta handkerchiefs.  They’re incredibly easy to make yourself (I like this recipe), which we like to do, and barely make your dinner any less of a weeknight pantry clean-out than it would have been if you used dried pasta.  Of course, you can also break apart sheets of lasagne noodles to get the same effect, or you can just use spaghetti.

The pasta and pasta water get mixed with the pepper and a generous amount of cheese, merging into a sauce both rich and lively.  And you’re ready to go!  This week I added sauteed asparagus pieces to round out the meal because, hey! it’s asparagus season.  I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to have asparagus at least 2 out of 3 meals a day for the duration.

Cacio pepe isn’t exactly a healthy meal, but it’s wholesome in its own way.  It’s basically a glorified version of that cornerstone of the picky child’s diet, pasta with butter and cheese.  But, this is pasta with butter and cheese that has gone on a Roman holiday and come back exceptionally refined.  Well coiffed, designer shoes and handbag, the works.  It’s sophisticated but simple, and what more could you really want on a Wednesday evening when you’re really hungry?

Vær så god!

Hi guys!  Now, I know Julia Child said a hostess should never apologize, but since this isn’t a meal we’re talking about per se, I’d like to start off with an apology.  I don’t know to what extent you’ve noticed or been bothered by it – I’ve tried to fix or get fixed everything as quickly as possible, but quickly is never quick enough when you’re the harried one trying to make it happen! – but we’ve been dealing with some little (ok, and some big) glitches with the website over the past couple of weeks.

I loooove the new site, the look, the new functionality, everything, but we’ve been having some totally unanticipated (obviously!  If they’d been anticipated, we’d have done something preventive beforehand!) problems with the server host and with data usage issues, which have caused the site to crash three times now in, what? two weeks?  Ugh.  I’m sincerely sorry that this has happened at all, let alone more than once.  I’m mortified.  It hasn’t been anyone’s fault, just unexpected stuff that happens and has to be dealt with, and it’s been dealt with absolutely as fast as possible each of those times.  There’s a learning curve with this stuff, and sometimes I feel like I’ve gone shooting off the curve entirely (I’m telling you, I’m really bad with computers and internet things and technology.  So bad.).  I’m really sorry if you’ve been bothered by it, and we’ll keep doing our best to prevent future problems.

Can we still be friends?

Phew!

The other big news this week – besides the fact that my committee meeting actually went really well and I came back totally inspired and motivated to work harder than ever on my dissertation, and how often does that happen? -  is that we found out on Wednesday that we’re having a little boy!

This is SO exciting and cool.  And, me being me, it also sent me off into a major panic attack.  Of course.

Seeing the baby with everything developing healthily so far (YAY!!! Continuing to keep fingers crossed for the next 4 months…), and knowing it would be a boy, and working on registering for all the gear that we’re going to need, made everything seem really concrete and really intimidating.  I feel like a lot of pregnancy is like, “yay, babies!” and you have this little imaginary friend that you cary around with you, and you talk to it and feel it move around, and people are happy for you that you have an imaginary friend.  But then, you see, real imaginary friends don’t, after a number of months, suddenly come kicking and screaming into the world with wants and needs that you have to somehow figure out how to fulfill when, in fact, you know nothing about babies or children or parenting.

You can read all the books in the world, and get all the advice in the world, but there still is no way to actually know what you’re doing.  You’re dealing with an individual!  And, I’m a person who rather likes to know what she’s doing.  I like to be at least somewhat skilled at something before I start doing it in front of anyone at all, and that’s just not something that’s going to happen (with a baby, even if no one else is there, the baby is there, and totally counts, and is totally going to be judging, I just know it!).  I find that a little terrifying.

So my mind has been in a tizzy of, “oh my gosh. what am I doing? I don’t know how to do this. I’m going to drop it or smash it or lose it or not be able to understand what it needs or not be able to give it what it needs.”  And then, “what if I don’t like the baby? What if it’s just like this baby that’s sitting there and I don’t know what to do with it. What if I’m a terrible mother? I’m going to be a terrible mother!”  Those kinds of things.

I know it’s quite normal to go through phases of panic before having a child – it says so in my books!  But it still feels bad to have them.  It feels like there must be something wrong with you when everyone else is so thrilled for you, but you’re feeling more scared than thrilled.  At least at that moment.

But that’s the good thing about it, that it’s all just moments.  And the moments of sheer terror pass and the moments of elation come again.  I started to calm back down yesterday afternoon and remember all the reasons why I was, and am, excited, how I’m not doing any of this alone, and how even if you could parent perfectly, it would probably be way less fun than muddling through and figuring out your own way.  Right?  (Please just say I’m right.)  After all, imperfection provides much better material for stories.

Also, for the first time ever I received flowers for mother’s day!  Including hydrangeas from Squid (the dog) and little baby boy (I’m hazarding a guess their dad had something to do with it).  That was awfully cool.  And, because I have, for several days, had a serious craving for rhubarb crumble cake, I made myself a mother’s day cake.

The universe was extremely obliging, and supplied a number of possible recipes to sate my craving, without my even directly asking.  I had the thought, and then rhubarb crumble cake and muffin recipes started popping up everywhere.  I’m sure this has nothing to do with it being rhubarb season.

I decided to take one from Food52, ever an inspiration, and adapt it to suit my, well let’s just call it a need.  This is a somewhat unusual cake in that it has no leavening apart from whole eggs, whipped like crazy into a creamy yellow fluff.  This, folded together with moderate amounts of sugar, butter, and flour, gives you a cake that has a richly moist, intensely buttery, soft and pillowy crumb.  Which is just exactly what I want in a simple fruit studded cake.  The richness and sweetness are perfectly cut by the tangy pieces of rhubarb, which melt into compote-like puddles dotting the cake.

I love rhubarb.  Love.  So, I added it in a quantity such that there are almost equivalent amounts of rhubarb and cake.  Don’t bury your rhubarb, strut it out, I say!  Then, the pebbly crumble on top adds a nice bit of sandy crunch to a cake that is in all other ways a big old softy.  You could serve this cake with yogurt for breakfast, by itself for coffee or tea, or with a bit of vanilla ice cream or whipped cream for dessert.

Do your mom proud, or yourself proud, or rhubarb proud, or all of the above.  Bake a cake!

Oh meatloaf.  I’m pretty sure meatloaf will never be glamorous or sexy.  Most every other comfort food has been high-browed over the past decade or so.  Restaurants have glammed up mac and cheese, chicken and waffles, grilled cheese, tater tots…you name it, it’s been turned into a glorified gastro version in a high-end bar or pub somewhere.

But, I’m pretty sure even if you doused it in shavings of white truffles, laced it with foie gras, and accompanied it with caviar, meat loaf still wouldn’t be glamorous.  After all, it’s called meat. loaf.  It doesn’t really stand a chance.

And that’s ok.

Because in all of its simple, unattractive  meaty loaf shape, meatloaf is there for you.  (If you eat meat.  If you don’t, can you make a lentil or tempeh loaf equivalent, or some such?  I feel like that would fill the same role.)  It is easy and it is delicious and it makes a fantastic leftover sandwich, an attribute that gives any particular meal at least 5 extra points in its favor.

This meatloaf, adapted from a funny blog called Lady and Pups that bills itself as “an angry food blog” (I find that very funny), is particularly delicious.  Like beyond.  For starters, it has finely chopped kimchi, which automatically meant that I was going to like it.  But, then it goes and explodes with all sorts of other savory flavors too.  All your favorite stir fry flavors packed into one humble meatloaf.  Ginger, garlic, sesame, soy sauce, gochujang, the works.  Like Korean tacos and ramen ravioli, it’s one of those works of fusion that actually works.  And makes you want to possibly never go back to your original version.

Seriously.  It’s like meatloaf has been taking flavor steroids.  Except, legal ones.  Like this particular meatloaf was born with really amazing genes and has been training at altitude.  Or something.

And did I even mention the glaze yet?  It combines spicy chili sauce with a bit of more traditional ketchup and mustard (don’t worry, it works!) and a sweet swirl of maple syrup plus some nutty toasted sesame oil.  You swipe it all over the meatloaf in two doses, once before baking and one more time shortly before it comes out of the oven.  This way you build up layers of flavor, with some bits cooking to a crackly sheen and others becoming thick and caramelized.

And like a more traditional meatloaf, it makes an excellent sandwich.  Try wedging a slice into a gooey grilled cheese – you’ll discover that meatloaf actually can get pretty dang close to glamorous.  Low-brow glamorous.

In an effort to share more of our very most every day meals, the ones I throw together with whatever’s left in the fridge, or the staples I can make with my eyes half closed at the end of a long day, I’ve started posting occasional short, simple posts just about these meals.  I call it vær så god, Norwegian for “bon appetit.”

How’s this for a little of my weeknight cooking madness for you?!  Even more than that, these flatbreads helped with a bit of refrigerator clean out before we took off for Maine and Boston for this week.  But, I swear there’s a method – maybe even a little magic – to this madness.  Sure, Joel and I both looked at our dinner when I put it on the table and said, “this is kind of weird.”  But, it was also all kinds of delicious.

These wonky little flatbreads were partially inspired by a sandwich from Saltie, in New York.  They have a naan sandwich with hummus, bulgur, pickled vegetables, and yogurt.  I can’t eat hummus or bulgur, but when we happened to have a couple of leftover pieces of naan, plus some roasted sweet potato, and pickled taco veggies, I decided that a hummus-like smashed sweet potato spread might make for a nice stand-in topping.

This is a particularly speedy supper if you have already cooked sweet potato around, but even if you don’t, roasting one isn’t too terribly strenuous, and it gives you the chance to make some mellow roasted garlic alongside.  The sweet potato is mashed up with the roasted garlic along with a bit of fresh lemon juice and a spoonful of tahini to create the texture and basic flavor of hummus, enriched with the plush sweetness of the potato.  Spread this onto your naan (or other flatbread – homemade if you’re lucky) along with a little sprinkling of feta, and heat them in the oven until they’re toasty.  Then pile on whatever pickled vegetables you have (or have made for this purpose!) and a few slips of avocado.  Top it off with an herbed and spiced drizzle of yogurt and you’re ready for dinner.

Vær så god!

Ta-da!!!!!!  Here she is ladies and gents!  The new look for Five and Spice! Isn’t it stunning?!

I hope you love it as much as I do because I totally adore it!  Sure we’ll still be working out some little kinks and hiccups over the next few weeks be they little spacing issues or some lost subscriptions, but who cares?!  It’s here!  Yeehaw!

Melissa and Erin did just the most wonderful job working with my ideas and my confusing stream of consciousness feedback and answering my many, many anxious questions.  I can’t say enough about what a pleasure it is to work with them or how talented they are.  You ladies rock!

So now, take a look around and let me know what you think!  The recipes page should be more useful and easier to navigate (and prettier!); all the down to basics post are gathered in one place so you can find them; recipes from here on out (and maybe going back if I have time to fix them) have a nifty button to give you an easily printable version; there are social media buttons allowing you to discover that I have secretly been on pinterest and instagram and all those things this whole time, though I really only started figuring out how to actually use them in the last few months – my days of being a reticent social media hermit may be over, eh?  It’s pretty much the awesomest (that’s the scientific term).

So there you have it.  And now let’s celebrate with some ice cream, shall we?

At the start of my pregnancy, somehow I missed the memo that normal pregnant women crave ice cream.  I didn’t crave ice cream at all.  Or pickles for that matter.  But let’s focus on the ice cream.  I had virtually no interest in it for 3 or 3 and 1/2 months, which was a very odd feeling for me because normally I love anything creamy.

Then suddenly, overnight, an ice cream craving came on strong enough to make it seem as though it were trying hard to make up for lost time.  It was a very specific ice cream craving though.  All I wanted, pretty much in the whole world, was goat cheese and roasted cherry ice cream from Jeni’s, the acclaimed ice cream shop in Ohio.

I have no idea why I found myself craving this specific ice cream given that I had never even had it before.  But I knew I wanted it.  And I discovered that you can mail order from Jeni’s.  Big. Trouble.

I filled my virtual shopping cart with over 100 dollar’s worth of ice cream, and then I sat staring at it, trying, trying so hard, to convince myself that I should not press the “purchase” button.

Every rational fibre in my body knew it was a bad idea.  But the part of me that wanted ice cream didn’t give a flying rat’s hind quarters what my rational fibres thought.  Thankfully Joel walked in, stayed my clicking finger, and told me that it was a terrible idea.

But then Jeni told me it was a good idea!  Or, well, the clever marketing and social media people at Jeni’s tweeted to me it was a good idea.  In the end, though, Joel won the day because he pointed out to me that I own Jeni’s book on how to make her ice creams (oh, right.  That.), and that our ice cream maker was ready in the freezer, and we even had chevre.  The clever man whisked me to the grocery store to buy some frozen cherries, and the day was saved!

So, I made the goat cheese ice cream myself, and it was delicious.  And then I couldn’t stop making ice cream, so I followed it up with several more batches.  This one, though, this absurdly creamy coconut-scented one, flecked with toasty threads of coconut and ribboned with swirls and shards of dark chocolate, wins out over the others.  It is definitely our favorite so far.

If you dislike coconut, this is not the ice cream for you.  Its base is coconut milk – which keeps the ice cream perfectly scoopable for days (if it lasts that long) – and then more coconut is piled in, after first being toasted until golden and lightly crisp.  If you love coconut like we do, you must give it a try.  Must!

I’ve tried a variety of coconut ice creams and gelatos in my day, and now that I’ve had this one with the chocolate ribbons, I wonder why all coconut doesn’t come outfitted with stracciatella.  The hard crunch of the frozen chocolate that melts into silk as it warms is an ideal pairing for coconut.  It has a depth and mild bitterness that brings out the tropical, beachy nuances of coconut.  Each flavor makes you want the other, back and forth, back and forth, a positively reinforcing cycle if I ever saw one.

So I do hope you try it.  And celebrate!

Before we get to risotto, I have a few little announcements to make, housekeeping style.  I trust the risotto can wait a couple moments, even though it is not known to be the most patient of rice dishes.  But anyway, as I mentioned a little bit ago, this here little blog is undergoing a spiffing up process.  It’s like Five and Spice is going on Project Makeover!  That’s not a real show is it.  Extreme Makeover?  Anyway, that’s beside the point.

The point is that some major, and (so!) exciting renovations are happening, led by the (brilliant) ladies of Wooden Spoons Kitchen.  In order to make it all work, starting sometime on the later end of tomorrow (Friday) the site will be down for a while.  It will stay down over the weekend while the magic happens in the background.  Then on Monday morning it’ll be back with its brand new look and also at a new URL.  Instead of being at wordpress.com the site address will be plain old fiveandspice.com (took me long enough to make the change, right?! Some weird Estonian company or something had snagged that URL, I think in hopes of getting me to buy it from them. But when their lease on it expired, I snapped it up.  Take that!).

I’ll have the old site set up to redirect, so old links will all still work and whatnot, but just know that henceforth you’ll be able to look for me at that new address. Now this is important (hence the bold typeface) if you subscribe by email, that should keep working without interruption (at least in theory.  Fingers crossed.) but if you subscribe via an rss feed/reader type of thing, you will have to resubscribe.  But, this should be easy enough, right?  You did it once!  I bet you can do it again.  (I, on the other hand, have no idea how to subscribe to an rss feed.  I am a luddite.  This is why other people are in charge of moving the site over, and holding my hand, and talking to me in reassuring voices the whole time.)

So, with that taken care of, let us turn to the risotto.

I’ve pretty much decided that risotto should always have lemon in it.  I keep having risotto without lemon (made by others, usually restaurants.  For example, I had a really lovely clam risotto with parsley the other day – I’ve been craving clams like crazy!) and they’re all really nice, but I keep thinking about each, “I bet this would have been better with lemon.”

I’d write this off as being related to my lemon addiction, except that Joel says the same thing.  And he doesn’t have a lemon addiction.  Thus, empirical proof that risotto should have lemon.  The loose and easy playful brightness of lemon is a champ at getting the stodgy starchiness of risotto to let down its hair and join the party.  A little squeeze of lemon balances out risotto like nothing else.

This risotto has basically a whole lemon, in preserved lemon form, chopped and stirred into it, which is probably why I am so very enamored of it.  That, and it’s also bursting at the seams with radishes and kale.  The rice can barely contain such a quantity of vegetables, and that, in my estimation, is a good thing.

And speaking of “a good thing,” where would the idea for this recipe have come from but from Martha Stewart.

I’ve never much followed Martha Stewart.  The only reason I know she said (says?) “and that’s a good thing,” is because I had a French teacher in high school who would always try to mimic Martha Stewart’s voice and say, “et ça, c’est une bonne chose.”  I haven’t much followed Martha Stewart, but I feel fondly toward her anyway.  So, when I was hanging out at a friend’s house a couple weeks ago sort-of dog-sitting (long story that I won’t bore you with now) I seized the opportunity to flip through stacks of Martha Stewart Living.

So many pretty things that I will never make or do in those magazines.  So many.  But, my eye was particularly drawn to a recipe for farro risotto with radishes, chard, and preserved lemon, and the idea stayed with me.

As luck would have it, a few days ago we had not much for cooking with in the house besides kale, radishes, and lemons.  And lo! there was risotto rice in the pantry (I used carnaroli, but arborio will work just as well).  And so I decided to make my own expression of Martha’s recipe.

I’m pretty sure this is one of those recipes where I try to recreate a dish and then completely change it in the process by misremembering the recipe.  But that is how wonderful discoveries are sometimes made, and I don’t think I’ll ever bother making the original recipe – if I find it – because I liked this version so very much.

As I mentioned before, lemon is Yin to risotto’s Yang, and preserved lemon adds something even more.  Preserved lemons take the flavor of lemon and somehow amplify and pacify it, adding bitter, briny, grassy, floral, and umami notes to the citrus you expect.  Then in every bite of the creamy risotto you find tender slips of sweet cooked radish and sturdy sprays of leafy kale.  Delicate quantities of cream and cheese bring the flavors and textures to their satisfying conclusion.

It’s light and filling, and a total keeper for spring.

P.S.  We’re also leaving tomorrow to be on the East Coast for a week for meetings.  But, I’ll of course check back in on Monday to celebrate the new site design.  Wee!

In an effort to share more of our very most every day meals, the ones I throw together with whatever’s left in the fridge, or the staples I can make with my eyes half closed at the end of a long day, I’ve started posting occasional short, simple posts just about these meals.  I call it vær så god, Norwegian for “bon appetit.”

This is about as typical of a weeknight supper as you get in our house.  Roasted fish plus roasted veggies.  Bam! Done! Thank you very much.  Of course, the ways you can change this up are infinite with different spice rubs or sauces, different types of fish or veggies.  We eat salmon most often, caught by our friend Dave who fishes commercially in Alaska.  But, this time I had some cod.

I roasted it very simply, but then fancied it up by adding a pistachio and herb pesto – which was nothing but my way of saving the wilting ends of a couple bunches of herbs and the remnants of a bag of pistachios.  Roasting a lemon or two with the carrots not only lends flavor to the carrots, but it also emboldens and rounds out the juices of the lemon.  The arugula I tossed in at the last minute, to lightly wilt it.  Easy peasy lemon squeezey (literally in this case, ha!).

Vær så god!

I’ve started thinking a lot about love lately.  To be more specific, I’ve thinking about love in the face of an uncertain, sometimes scary world.

That sounds dour, doesn’t it.  I can’t help it for the moment.  Adjusting to this new idea and identity of becoming a parent coupled with feeling that uncertainty acutely, especially because of the madness of the weather and current events and all that stuff, it leaves me really wondering how I’ll do.  I struggle with love, you see, because I can be, well, an anxious person sometimes.  I’ve been strongly affected by watching loss and sadness ever since I was very small, and somewhere along the way I just stopped trusting that there was benevolence in the universe.

And when you don’t trust, you armor yourself, guarding yourself against strong attachments because of the fear that something will happen, and you’ll be left bereft.  But then (thankfully!) there are people in my life who mean so much to me, Joel, my family and community, Squid (so she’s a fur person not a person-person, but she counts), that my love for them handily bursts through any shields I have raised to try to protect myself.  This is wonderful, but it’s also frightening.

I’m sure that baby, when he or she comes, will be the same.  Except better/worse.  I mean, let’s face it, I love our darn dog so insanely much I feel like I would be destroyed if something happened to her.  How the heck am I going to handle the amount of love that comes with having a baby????

This little one makes my day

Because the world is uncertain, and mostly out of our control.  We can set up all the plans and safeguards we can imagine, but we still can’t protect ourselves or others from absolutely everything.  And dwelling on that sort of thing, my friends, is how you make yourself anxious (you know, in case you were wondering).

In the past 5 or so years, after I had noticed myself stuck in this sort of pattern of thinking, I started trying to work on it.  Meditate or pray, I’ve been told.  Journal.  Develop the habit of thinking of yourself as lovable; this allows you to love others.  Make note of things that you are grateful for, new things every day.

And this has helped a lot.  But, some part of me could never be transformed because it always rejected all this work as a sort of Pollyana-ish wishful thinking.  I would hear of disaster and violence, I would sit stuck in an unprecedented heat wave knowing that crops were dying and nothing was really being done about it, and I would try to feel grateful for something, but it just really, really felt like this was trying to plug my ears and shut my eyes and sing a little “I am grateful tralalala” to myself, like it was trying to pretend the sorrow and suffering, the badness, just wasn’t there or at least wouldn’t really affect me.

I felt this way on Monday, after learning of the bombing.  I felt this way on Tuesday and on Wednesday too, what with more and more sad and infuriating events piling up in the reports on the radio.  Being woken at 5 this morning by an alert (I still get all the Tufts alerts, even though I am working remotely now) that all MBTA transit was shut down and instructions to stay locked in doors didn’t exactly help.  But, on one of my walks with the dog, just as a flock of cedar waxwings suddenly settled in every branch of the tree we were standing by, I felt grateful, and I was hit with  a realization with the force of a load of bricks, one that had occurred to me before but that I had clearly never realized per se, one so perfectly obvious that obviously it would take me this long to get it.

Focusing on love and on all the things you are grateful for is not an attempt to say that there isn’t pain and grief in the world.  And it’s not saying that there aren’t things to be afraid of, nor that you shouldn’t be wise and cautious when that is called for, nor that you shouldn’t work tirelessly to change those things that you actually are able to change.  It’s saying that there are also amazingly wonderful things in the world, millions of examples of love and grace, infinite things to be grateful for.  And what I suddenly finally understood was that all those things are just. as. real.  It’s not wishful thinking when you’re thinking about something that’s real.

When you choose to focus your attention on the good, you’re not denying that evil is there or that horrifying things happen, but you’re denying them the power to control you and your life.  It may mean vulnerability and the possibility of loss and anguish, but choosing love over fear, trying to choose it everyday, means choosing life.  That’s a pretty powerful thing to be able to choose.  I just got that.  And it actually makes me pretty hopeful.

All this has virtually nothing to do with a warm potato and artichoke salad.  I just felt the need to share a little of where my thinking has gone this week.  But, I also very much want to share with you these potatoes.  It is still snowing out here.  No joke.  Something to do with the melting ice caps and changes in the jet stream causing weather patterns to loop more.  This new phenomenon is something I find actually quite interesting.  Less interesting?  Shoveling the sidewalk for the 10th time in as many days.

I couldn’t handle the idea of roast or mashed potatoes because it felt far too wintery.  A warm potato salad, on the other hand, is a nod to spring and hopefulness.  I got in my mind to pair little spring potatoes with artichokes, a certain harbinger of spring.  Something about the light green flavor of artichokes makes me think of the sea, an odd association for sure, but I was certain it would contrast well against the grounded earth tones of potatoes.  I also stirred in a giant spoonful of capers to amplify any hint of tang from the artichokes with bold brine.

Something about the potatoes and capers made me think of sauce gribiche, which is where the idea to chop,  stir, and douse with what can only be called a butt-load of herbs came from.  It’s like a collaboration between gribiche and salsa verde, and it felt perfectly tailored to the personalities of all other players be they green or creamy.  Because of that vaguely gribiche-y character, I’m sure this would be good with hardboiled eggs chopped and mixed in, or with a fried egg atop.  I served it with a small, crisply roast chicken and it was wonderful.

Warm Potato Salad with Artichokes and Herb Dressing (serves 4-6)

• 1 1/2 lbs. small potatoes (like red potatoes or fingerlings)
• either about 4 artichokes, trimmed, steamed and quartered (use this tutorial on prepping artichokes, if you need), or 1, 14-oz can of artichoke hearts, drained and quartered (this is the simpler option, obviously)
•  2 Tbs. capers (drained if in brine, rinsed if salt-packed)
• 1 cup flat leaf parsley
• 1/2 cup fresh mint leaves
• 2 Tbs. chopped chives
• 2 Tbs. tarragon leaves (the chives and tarragon are optional. Parsley and mint are the most critical.)
• 1 clove of garlic, peeled
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 1 Tbs. lemon juice

1. Halve or quarter the potatoes, depending on their size, so that they’re in about 1 1/2 inch chunks.  Put them in a pot and add enough water to cover them by at least an inch.  Throw in a very large pinch of salt.  Bring the pot to a boil, then turn it down to a simmer and cook, covered, until the potatoes are tender, about 15 minutes.
2. While the potatoes cook, combine the herbs, and garlic in a food processor along with a pinch of salt and chop them together.  (You can also do this by hand or use a mortar and pestle.)  With the food processor running, pour the olive oil in in a stream to blend it in and emulsify the herb dressing.  When it’s blended to an emerald colored, still a bit chunky  sauce, stop and transfer it to a large serving bowl.  Taste and adjust the salt to your taste, then stir in the lemon juice and capers.
3. When the potatoes are done, drain them.  Immediately toss them in the bowl with the dressing and caper and toss well to mix.  Add the artichoke quarters and toss again.  Serve warm.

I wrote this post yesterday, before the horrifying explosions in Boston, and I’m posting it anyway as it is, but I cannot not start by saying that my heart is sobbing for Boston.  For the past seven years until this year, every marathon Monday I have either been cheering near the finish or running the marathon, and so many people I care for were nearby today, though they are all safe as far as I have been able to discover.  The Boston Marathon is such a joyful pageant, a show of camaraderie and of the amazing strength of the human body.  It is tragic, it is unbearable as always, to see such goodness attacked.  That’s the very essence of an act of terrorism, I guess, to attack something good and meaningful to try to frighten people out of participating in the goodness life has to offer.  I often don’t actually feel strong enough to keep hoping and living joyfully in the face of such uncertainty, pain, and cruelty.  I am overcome with sorrow.  I pray for strength for Boston, and for all of us.

I’m in the process of working on a redesign of this site (and it will in a couple weeks be moved, finally, to fiveandspice.com, woohoo!).  And when I say I’m working on it, I really mean that the wonderful and talented Melissa and Erin of Wooden Spoons Kitchen are doing the heavy lifting, and I’m pelting them with questions and thoughts, and they’re helping me and making sense of it all admirably.  I can’t wait until it’s ready and you all can see it!

In the redesign process, I’ve had to spend a lot of time thinking about what this site is about and what makes it unique, while also spending lots of time looking at other beautiful blogs to guide the redesign and show what I like and don’t like in a look, and voice, and so on.  This, I’m sorry to say, sent me into a nice little bout of comparison, which is a worthless way to spend your time.  Comparison is the thief of creativity, and yet is nonetheless something that I am horribly prone to.  When I go down the road of comparison, I forget that I exist as anything except as how I stack myself up against others (and I never ever stack myself favorably).

There are so many cooking blogs, I wailed to myself.  So many are so gorgeous, clever, unique, thoughtful, creative, have well-tested recipes. What am I even doing trying to participate?  Am I just adding to the clutter of an already crowded space?  Just adding noise to the din of the argument about what and how we should eat?  I’ll never be the best (wah)!  What’s the point?

I worked myself into quite a sad, sorry state of worthlessness.  And then of course I ran into some nicely lettered quote on pinterest that said something like, “The forest would be a quiet place if only the very best songbirds sang.”  Which was totally annoying to see in that moment because I wanted nothing to do with sage advice, or with the truth, or with being reasonable at all.  I didn’t want to be an adult!  I wanted to wallow!!!!  I wanted to fester, to poke at my (self-inflicted) bruise!

And then I had to laugh at myself.  Because as soon as I could admit that my ego really just wanted to throw my own little pity party with me as guest of honor, I could see the pointlessness of that behavior, and how utterly true that “annoying” quote was.  We exist totally separately from how we compare to others.  We each exist in our own remarkable uniqueness.  We each have our own voice, and adding that voice to the chorus, if we are singing true, will never be adding clutter.

There are most definitely other blogs that have more impressive photography, more eloquent writing, or more creative recipes, ones that are more soul-baring, or giggle-coaxing.  But this isn’t a contest.  I don’t come to this space to be the best, and I don’t come to be most popular, or to get the most likes on Facebook (heck – I don’t even have a Facebook page!  Which only just occurred to me last week.).  I come because it makes me feel alive.  Cooking and then sharing the food, whether in person or through words and photographs, is intensely meaningful to me.  I love, love, love, love, to share with you lovely people, but I’d probably do this even if I were only sharing with the blank abyss of an empty interwebs.

And, more than anything else, I come to this space because I care about cooking, and I want people to want to cook real food.  I want people to feel like cooking at home belongs and deserves respect in their lives.  I want them to try new recipes, and get comfortable cooking without recipes.  I don’t care if those are my recipes (goodness knows my cooking isn’t always the easiest to follow since I frequently don’t measure anything and I almost never write a recipe down until a couple hours later, which isn’t exactly a precise cookbook-y way of doing things.  But that, I think, is the openness of cooking as a creative activity instead of a hard science, something that is a thrill to learn through practice.), as long as they try something.

Thinking about this and about my tagline, “fitting real food into real life,” made me realize that a great many of our most “real” meals, the meals I concoct when I have nothing but a 3/4s bare fridge for inspiration, or the meals that are go-tos that I can make when I’m tired after a long day, those staples often don’t make it onto the blog because I think of them as too simple and it doesn’t occur to me to share them, or, even more often, because those are the days I also don’t have the energy (or daylight) left to grab my camera and document.  But that’s real life, and those are some of our tastiest meals.  They deserve attention.

So, I want to try to document those ever-so-ordinary or bottom-of-the-fridge meals better, in case it is helpful to anyone for the days when they too are feeling tired.  These posts may not have as many photos or very many creative thoughts with them, but I still want to offer them up.  I’m calling this idea “vær så god.”  This is the Norwegian phrase for “here you go,” what you say when you offer someone something, and also what you say to begin a meal when the food is on the table and you are ready to eat.  (Interestingly, it is also the phrase for “you’re welcome.”)

Here, therefore, is our most recent very everyday supper (well, besides the enchiladas I made last night out of leftover chili!).  Though we are craving spring, it has been snowing for about the last week here in Northern Minnesota, heavy wet snow being blown by fierce winds.  I think we’ve gotten somewhere close to 13 or more inches over the last several days, sloppy as wet dog kisses and far less welcome.  One day I just gave up and pretended it was actually summer by making a panzanella salad with toasted bread cubes, hoop house tomatoes from Wisconsin, torn burrata, and thinly sliced basil.  But, the next day it was so very cold and stormy, only comfort food would do.

We nearly always have sausages in the freezer from our local smokehouse, and very often I plain old fry it up and serve it with some roasted vegetables, but that day I decided to go extra hearty and whip up a quick batter of milk, eggs, flour, thyme, and mustard to pour over them to make Toad in the Hole, classic British pub fare.  What you get is browned, sizzling sausages surrounded by what is basically a giant popover, all crusty edges and soft eggy center.  To balance out the heaviness of this main dish, I served it with this simple kale salad (kale was the only green we had anyway, and we had one sorry apple for our fruit supply).  It was a perfect way to bring warmth within the gloomy weather.

Toad in the Hole (serves 4) (adapted from Simply Recipes)

•  4 mildly flavored sausages (or about 1 lb. worth, if they’re small sausages) – theoretically you should use bangers, but we can’t find those around here so I use brats, and it’s awesome
• 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. fresh thyme (dried will also work fine)
• 3 large eggs
• 1 1/2 cups milk
• 1 Tbs. grainy mustard
• 2 Tbs. melted butter
• butter, lard, or peanut oil for cooking

1. Heat your oven to 425F.  Put a heavy duty baking dish large enough to fit the sausages with at least a half-inch between each of them (about 9X9″) into the oven to heat along with it (using a hot pan is key to helping the batter pouf up around the sausages).
2. In a medium bowl, stir together the flour, salt, and thyme, plus a grind of black pepper if you wish.  Make a well in the center and add the eggs.  Whisk them up a bit with your stirring spoon without incorporating them into the flour, then add the milk, mustard, and melted butter, and stir everything together until you have a smooth batter.  Let this rest for 30 minutes (which is about how long it seems to take my oven to heat to 425 – how lucky!).
3. While the batter rests and the oven heats, heat a frying pan to medium-high heat and add the sausages.  Brown the sausages well on their sides.  They don’t need to get fully cooked through, though, as they’ll finish cooking in the oven.
4. Add enough butter/lard/oil to the hot baking pan to coat it and shut it back in the oven until it is smoking hot.  Pull it out and put the sausages in it.  Then pour the batter over the sausages and return the pan to the oven.  (I actually used the same pan I fried the sausages in to bake the whole dish since it was oven safe.  I made sure to get it very, very hot while I was cooking the sausages.  Doing this saves you a dish, but the batter may not be quite as puffy.)  Bake 25-30 minutes until the batter is puffy and golden on top and crisp around the edges.  Don’t crack open the oven to check until it’s been at least 20 minutes because, like with a popover, the batter can be a little testy and deflate if you hover and check on it too soon.
5. Serve the toad in the hole warm accompanied by a salad.  If you want to get seriously British about it, you can also serve it with a gravy of caramelized onion that has been made saucy with some stock and Worcestershire sauce, but I never bother.

I have been having an absolute love affair with raw fennel lately.  Every night and/or every time I’m at the market my little conversation with myself goes, “what kind of vegetable should we have with dinner?  Broccoli?  Nah.  Cabbage? Not today.  Kale?  Meh.  Ooh, how about a salad with shaved fennel.  Oh, yes that sounds perfect.”  And it keeps happening.  Over and over.  So what if I just ate a whole bulb?  More fennel please.

It could just be one of my recent cravings.  Or perhaps it’s because it’s the closest we’re getting to spring here right now.  Still.  (Not talking about the weather. I’m not talking about the weather.  I’ll just put on another sweater, and not mention the weather.)  But, on the whole, I’d say the jag started with this salad.

Fennel salad with burrata?  Sign me up, and then give me seconds!  Anything that includes buratta tends to be my dream meal.  But, the fennel, with its sleek coat of lemon and olive oil and the icy cool of mint leaves was no second fiddle to the burrata’s main act (or what I thought would be the main act, before I sat down to eat).

And, that, in sum, is why I can’t stop eating fennel.  I mean, a) I get to use my mandoline, which is always an exciting process because you flirt with losing your fingertips but then get parchment thin delicate sheets of fennel, all in a noodle-like tangle, out of the deal.  And then, b) the 15 minute waiting period where the fennel bathes in a lemony dressing ever so slightly softens its crunch and freshens its flavor with the brightness of the lemon – both in juice and zest form – bolstering the anise notes of the vegetable.  I fall for lemon-in-both-juice-and-zest-form’s show every time.

This salad, with grapefruit and curds of soft goat cheese is my most recent use of lemony fennel.  There is nothing new about combining fennel’s sweetness with the juicy bittersweet of grapefruit.  I feel like I have seen it in many a restaurant in past years at this very time of year, the transition time where we start picking up spring while still trailing a few threads of winter along with us.  (Once I even had it as a fennel grapefruit salad with pine nuts and chunks of salted brittle candy.  That was pretty tasty.)  But, look at the word “marinated” there.  Marinated makes it different!  And new!

Ok, well actually not very.  But as I already mentioned, the brief marinating period does make it extra delicious.  Plus, the tart grapefruit is, somewhat incongruously, slightly softened by the even tarter lemon.  And, grapefruit goes just as well with mint leaves as fennel does, if not better, so they make a tidy triad.

The goat cheese plopped here and there may seem a bit incongruous, at least as a foil for the grapefruit.  Or maybe it doesn’t.  The creamy, pleasantly chalky crumbles of goat cheese are stunningly different enough in taste – that lovely, goat-y, barnyard-y taste – and in texture, that it somehow pulls everything together.  Plus, it makes the salad a meal.  Or, if you’re hungry for a bit more, makes it a balanced side for simply prepared seafood or roast chicken.

You know what they say, if live gives you lemons, marinate a thinly sliced fennel bulb with them.  They say that, right?

Marinated Fennel and Grapefruit Salad (serves 2-4 depending on hunger level, and whether this is a side or main dish)

• 1 large fennel bulb with fronds
• 1 tsp. lemon zest
• 2 Tbs. lemon juice
• 2 Tbs. olive oil
• salt and pepper
• 1 ruby grapefruit
• 2-3 oz. soft young goat cheese (like chevre)
• 1/4 cup fresh mint leaves

1. Remove the stems from the fennel bulb.  Reserve 2 Tbs. of fennel fronds from the stems, and either discard or save the rest for another use (it makes a good bed for baking a fillet of fish on top of).  Halve and cut the core out of the fennel bulb, then slice the fennel extremely thinly with either a mandoline or a very sharp knife.
2. Toss the fennel with the lemon zest, juice, and olive oil, plus a couple pinches of salt and a couple grinds of black pepper.  Set the fennel aside to marinate at room temperature for 15-20 minutes.
3. While the fennel is marinating, cut the peel and pith off of the grapefruit and cut between the membranes to remove the segments.
4. When the fennel is done marinating, toss it gently with the grapefruit segments and spread them out on a serving platter or in a shallow serving bowl.  Crumble the goat cheese over the salad, and sprinkle the salad with the mint leaves and the fennel fronds.  If you wish, drizzle the salad with a bit more olive oil and additional salt and pepper before serving, and then go ahead and serve.