We're winding down to the end of October, which in Alabama means the trees are just reluctantly beginning to turn, the temperature is like a tricky faucet that runs variously a few degrees too cool or too hot, and although the tall boots and sweaters are everywhere you look, and the specter of Halloween and pumpkins and hay bales looms (not to mention the retailers already stocking Christmas foofaraw), it's pretty still decidedly late summer in the Deep South.

Or at least that's what I'm telling myself.

Because I decided, apropos of pretty much nothing, that a great idea would be to make for dinner last night that most classic of summer sandwiches: the lobster roll.

Except I don't like lobster.

So shrimp roll, it is! A few days prior I invested in a bag of frozen shrimp with which to make spicy shrimp and peanut noodles—Instagrammed here:

just put the shrimp in the chili oil and let the magic happen! 🍤🍜 #dinnertonight

A photo posted by onthewoodside (@onthewoodside) on Oct 10, 2014 at 5:13pm PDT

and I just knew that once that bag was open those little leftover guys were going to go freezer-burned pretty quickly if I didn't find good uses for them.

I was a little skeptical about the frozen shrimp; I don't as a rule have anywhere near the patience required to properly thaw things, and I've tried quick-thawing with mixed results. (See above re: patience.) But these were petite shrimp, so they defrosted fairly quickly, and it was pretty great to have them already peeled and deveined for my lazy pleasure.

I will make no bones here: This is simplicity in sandwich form. I sautéed the shrimp in chili oil to have a hint of heat in the background, but it's not necessary; you can add a little more black pepper or even a few dashes of hot sauce to the dressing, if you like. Use whatever fat you choose sparingly in any case, because a drier pan will help you achieve a nice brown crust on the outside of the shrimp.

Any bread of your choice will work here. I picked a wheat grinder roll, cut the top off, and scooped out the middle to make room for the good stuff. Wheat is by no means a game-changer; my mama always told me wheat > white, and old habits die hard even when I know "wheat" on the bag of bread means just about nothing nutritionally anymore.

In today's Do As I Say, Not As I Do lesson, mix up the shrimp salad before adding the lemon juice. Depending on the moisture from the shrimp and the tomatoes, too much juice can make the mixture a little watery. If you achieve the consistence you like and want more tart lemoniness, stir in a little zest.

The celery leaves were an abstract idea I had noodling around in my head; I wasn't sure I wanted the texture of the celery stalk itself, but I liked the idea of the flavor, and of course the fresh green color for garnish. In the end it turned out to really change the character of the dish in a remarkable and lovely way. I would by no means advocate thinking that buying an entire bunch of celery (seriously, why must I purchase so much at a time?) is necessary for this dish, but if you have some lapsing in your refrigerator, as I did, this is a terrific way to use it.

Enjoy!

Late-summer Shrimp Rolls

1 teaspoon chili oil
16 (41-50 count) frozen peeled and deveined shrimp, thawed
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
½ medium tomato, finely chopped
½ shallot, minced
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 to 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
2 grinder or sub rolls, tops and insides removed
4 Bibb lettuce leaves
Celery leaves (optional)

1. Heat oil in a medium skillet over medium heat; add shrimp, and cook 2 minutes on one side or until golden brown. Flip shrimp, and cook 1 more minute or until golden brown on second side; remove from pan to cool slightly. When cooled, chop each shrimp into 4 even pieces.

2. Stir together mayonnaise and next 3 ingredients; gently fold in shrimp. Stir in lemon juice until desired consistency. Chill 15 minutes.

3. Line each roll with 2 pieces Bibb lettuce. Top with shrimp salad and celery leaves, if desired. Makes 2 servings.

  

You know that warm, contented, even feeling you get when you do something for someone else? It can be anything—offering a ride to the airport, taking care of a pet, loaning your wedges when someone has nothing to wear with her new pants—but by far the fastest and easiest way to get there is by cooking. By and large, people love to have someone make a meal for them. It's comforting and stress-relieving and generous, and those are all wonderful feelings to both give and receive.

But as it turns out, you can (and I would argue, ought to) achieve the same sense of happy, self-high-fiving bliss when you cook for one.

There are a lot of rules out there that are alleged to improve the lives of single people: Eat at a proper  table. Don't eat in front of the TV. Don't dip pretzels in the tub of cream cheese and call it dinner.

I break all of those rules. Stop judgin' me, Internet advice columns. I like my couch and my Big Bang Theory and my sleeves of saltines, and I shan't apologize for it.

But the truth is that there are a lot of perks to being the only one in the house who brings home the bacon, shall we say. No one else gets to say, "I don't like mushrooms" or "Do you have to put avocado on everything?" or "Sweetie, I love you and I love turkey sandwiches, but I think this is bordering on obsession and we might need to call in some medical professionals if you don't eat something else."

It also means that, because you aren't trying to please vast numbers of all manner of people, every now and again even your recession-strained budget will let you indulge a little.

So yes I did buy this $14 filet mignon on a Tuesday night. I ate half of it with this pretty little wedge of iceberg and then turned the other half into a steak salad for lunch the next day, which technically makes this a $7 steak dinner, which technically makes this worth every penny.

The steak is loosely based on Ina's method: hot pan, sear, roast, rest. Grills are great if that's your bag, but I'm unlikely to fire up some charcoal on a weeknight when I'm just cooking for me. (Or ever, really. Fire is hot and I am clumsy.)

When I decided to make this a Caprese steak, I forgot one teensy little detail: It's late October. I took a chance and got super lucky with what has to have been the absolute last of the good late-summer tomatoes. I didn't have high hopes for it given that it had lost some of that plump cheerfulness you like to see in an Alabama mater, but when I sliced into it it was absolutely perfect.

There's a decent chance I stood at the stovetop and seared the steak with one hand while I jammed slices of juicy tomato and cold fresh mozzarella into my mouth with the other.

Reducing the balsamic is just the easiest thing in the world to do; you leave it to bubble away in a pan and let your nose tell you when it's syrupy and thick. (Wait for things to smell sweet and smoky, but do keep a half an eye on the pan so it doesn't burn!) I could even have let it reduce a bit further in this case, but I was hungry. You can see that it cascaded off the hot, melty cheese, but pooled into a dark, sticky puddle around the steak. Ain't nothin' wrong with that.

I was lazy with my wedge salad, because that's exactly what a wedge salad allows you to be. A hunk of iceberg, a drizzle of dressing, and a smattering of store-bought bacon bits were all I needed. A proper wedge salad would benefit from thick chunks of blue cheese, crispy pieces of real bacon, and bits of chopped tomato, but I had piled so many layers of goodness onto my steak that I wanted to keep things simple.

A simple salad. A splurge on a steak topped with gooey, salty cheese and sweet, lightly roasted tomato. Big, bold flecks of freshly ground black pepper all over everything. Make it for you and yours some Tuesday soon! 

Or, better yet, wait until they're out of the house and make it all for you.

Enjoy!


Seared Filet with Tomato and Fresh Mozzarella

¼ cup balsamic vinegar

1 (10-ounce) filet mignon
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper

1 tomato slice

2 fresh mozzarella cheese slices

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Heat a grill pan or cast iron skillet over high heat 5 to 7 minutes or until very hot.

2. Meanwhile, pat steak dry with a paper towel, and sprinkle with kosher salt and black pepper on all sides. Cook steak about 2 minutes on all sides or until evenly seared (about 10 minutes total).

3. Top steak with tomato and mozzarella; place pan in oven, and cook until a thermometer inserted in thickest portion of the steak reaches 125 degrees (for medium-rare).

4. Remove steak from pan, cover loosely with aluminum foil, and let rest 10 minutes.

5. Place balsamic vinegar in a small saucepan over medium-low heat. Cook, stirring occasionally, until vinegar has reduced by half. Drizzle over steak before serving. Makes 1 serving.

 

Sometimes I think my brain is a little like a front-load washing machine—thoughts just kind of tumble around in there, and I never know which one is going to slam into the door like a red sock.

Which is to say that this was inspired by a lot of little things, something of a stream-of-consciousness dinner-planning process. (Scattered and nonsensical! Who, me?)

I don't cook with meat all that much on the Woodside, mostly because it's hard to use it all up before it goes bad if you're a party of one, and I have unhealthy levels of freezer fear. But occasionally I do have a craving, and I like to indulge it when there's something I know I really want. (In this case, chicken; the package I found at the store had five pieces in it, so look for this to be the week o' the bird.) I cooked it my favorite way, which is to say cutlets crusted in panko and pan-fried, a procedure I return to a lot because I find it to be foolproof.

And SPEAKING OF foolproof, I landed on making biscuits because I am a terrible baker and I know that I need practice/confidence, and I found this recipe over at Tracey's Culinary Adventure, and her biscuits are beautiful. Seriously, go look at them. I'll wait. (It's important to the narrative.)

Anything strike you as unusual, when you compare her biscuits to mine?

Yeah, I don't know what happened. I did follow the recipe to the letter, although when my biscuits neither rose nor browned, I thought maybe I'd just leave them in the oven a little longer.

Which was a mistake when I subsequently forgot they were in there and murdered them.

BUT these were a fail for me before I baked them into little hockey pucks, which returns me to my earlier assertion that I am just really very bad at baking.

Still, I live alone and I'm not made of money, so I shrugged off their density and dryness and soldiered on, with a green slaw (cabbage + green onion + jalapeños) and a nice, ripe tomato slice in honor of the shoulder season for Alabama tomatoes.

The slaw was delicious; I chopped up a second chicken breast and another tomato slice and stirred into the cabbage mixture for an at-work lunch today.


And this morning, before work, I layered a biscuit with Cheddar and tomato and fried egg and sopped up the yolk with the butter bomb and took a slightly strange-looking photo in the slightly strange-looking light of the Woodside kitchen. If you are a better baker than I (and you are, trust), give this one a go, and maybe tell me where you think I went wrong.

Enjoy!


Buttermilk Biscuit Chicken Sliders with Green Slaw

¼ small head green cabbage, thinly sliced
1 jalapeño, thinly sliced
2 green onions, chopped
3 tablespoons reduced-fat mayonnaise
2 teaspoons yellow mustard
2 teaspoons white wine vinegar
Salt, to taste
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
9 oz (about 2 cups) all-purpose flour
2½ teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
5 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into small cubes
¾ cup cold buttermilk
3 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons butter
5 chicken cutlets or chicken breast fillets
All-purpose flour
2 eggs, beaten
Panko
1 tomato, sliced

1. Combine first 3 ingredients in a small bowl. Whisk together mayonnaise and next 4 ingredients; add to cabbage mixture, and stir to combine. Chill until ready to serve. 

2. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

3. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Add butter cubes, and use a pastry cutter (or your fingertips) to cut in the butter until the pieces are no bigger than peas. (The mixture should resemble coarse meal.) Place bowl in refrigerator; chill 10 minutes.

4. Meanwhile, whisk together the buttermilk and honey in a measuring cup. Add to flour mixture, and stir gently just until  dry ingredients are moistened.

5. Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface, and knead gently 3 to 4 times to bring it together. (The dough may still be a little crumbly.) Roll dough into a 9- x 5-inch rectangle about ½ inch thick. Fold dough into thirds like a business letter. Roll dough again into a 9- x 5-inch rectangle about ½ inch thick, and again fold it into thirds like a letter. Roll dough out a third time to ¾ inch thick. Using a 1¾-inch round cutter, cut biscuits from dough, and place about 1 inch apart on prepared baking sheet.

6. Bake 11 to 12 minutes, or until biscuits rise and tops are golden brown. Transfer to a wire rack to cool.

7. Heat butter and oil in a large, deep skillet over medium heat until butter melts. Meanwhile, sprinkle chicken with salt and pepper to taste. Dredge chicken in flour; dip in egg, and dredge in panko. Cook chicken in butter mixture 3 to 4 minutes on each side or until golden brown. Remove to paper towels to drain.

8. Cut chicken cutlets in half crosswise. Slice biscuits in half horizontally, and layer with chicken, slaw, and tomato slices. Makes 6 to 8 servings. 

 

It's a brilliantly cool August Saturday in Alabama (what?), and I'm sitting on the couch watching Ina make grilled cheese sandwiches. "I've got just a very simple Pullman loaf ... Good bakery loaf—not, like, the stuff from the grocery store."

She's the most cheerful snob I know.

I have always loved my neighborhood Winn-Dixie grocery store, thank you very much, but I have to admit that when it underwent a floor-to-ceiling overhaul about a year ago, I wasn't terribly thrilled. I didn't want to lose the great Asian food stocks, my treasured self-checkout lanes (no human interaction! my favorite!), and my beloved solitude (a theme develops). I was quite often, at any time of day, absolutely the only person in there, which may tell you a little something about why the powers that be at the W-D decided the place needed a spruce-up in the first place. Everyone was flocking to Publix, that vast wasteland of crowded produce sections and employees too intensely fascinated with WHAT ARE YOU MAKING WITH THIS?, and that was A-OK by me. More quiet browsing for me around the corner. The Winn-Dixie aisles became my hallowed library halls.

But when the store decided it just had to bring itself into this decade, I was nervous. Our relationship was going so well; why did things have to change??

Like any good stubborn person, I found that the results were just (SNIFF!) as I expected. The parking lot began to fill, nobody ever stocked the fish sauce, and why in the world was the bread aisle now frozen-section-adjacent?

But over time, I've come around. (And it only took a year! Who's flexible and easygoing?) For one thing, the self-checkout remains, so I didn't have to entertain a deal breaker. For another, I've recently discovered the benefits of having access to an honest-to-god bakery. (Yes, Ina, in my grocery store.)

If there's one thing you should know about me, besides that I can write six or seven paragraphs in praise of supermarkets, it's that I am not a person who should keep bread in the house. If I have bread, and I have cheese, and (god forbid) I have mayonnaise, things can go pretty chubby pretty fast.

My people are from the Midwest. Bread and cheese run through my veins. (Probably literally.)

But the terrific thing about the Winn-Dixie having a bakery is that I can purchase only the amount of bread a normal person should eat in one sitting at a time. This here is a Portuguese roll, and it cost (no lie) 39 cents.

It's been a little light on the meat around the Woodside here lately, which is just fine with me—eating vegetarian, even sort of accidentally, is healthy and cheap, and I am just not a person who misses the meat when there are beans and eggs and cheese to be had.

But every once in a while I do hear my body say BIG DOSE OF PROTEIN, PLEASE and it's insistent that tofu or quinoa is not the proper vehicle. In this case I used ground chicken, mostly because I wanted that cooked-through texture. I really wanted to bite into something meaty. The tomato is a little bit of an affront to the state of Alabama, but I may have chosen it too hastily. It was certainly not the valedictorian of the 2013 summer semester.

The whole shebang, though, is mostly about that chunky avocado-tomatillo sauce. It soaks into the toasty bread (please please toast the bread next to the burger as it finishes) and makes an ordinary weeknight chicken burger something to look forward to.

I got off work the night I made this at 7:45 and spent a happy little decompressing half hour or so in the kitchen putting this together—there's no rocket science here, just a lovely sandwich dinner that will help you forget you worked until 7:45.

The citrus in the sauce is the wild card here—you want the avocado and cilantro to give it good balance, so it's good to get a nice, big, ripe avocado and add the lime juice a bit at a time, tasting until it's as tangy as you like—tomatillos can be unpredictable. I like it on the creamier side, so if your avocado isn't pulling its weight you can stir in a glug of sour cream or (ahem) ranch dressing. (I won't tell.)

Enjoy!


Chicken Burgers with Avocado-Tomatillo Sauce

1 pound ground chicken
1 teaspoon garlic salt
¾ teaspoon black pepper
4 Portuguese rolls, kaiser rolls, or hamburger buns, halved
4 tomato slices
4 red onion slices
Avocado-Tomatillo Sauce (recipe below)

1. Combine chicken, garlic salt, and black pepper in a medium bowl. Divide mixture into four equal portions, and form into thin patties.

2. Cook chicken patties in a greased grill pan over medium heat 6 to 8 minutes on each side or until completely cooked through. During last minute of cooking, place rolls, cut sides down, on grill pan to toast.

3. Top toasted rolls with tomato slices, onion slices, and Avocado-Tomatillo Sauce. Makes 4 servings.

Avocado-Tomatillo Sauce

5 medium tomatillos, husks removed and scrubbed
¼ small red onion, chopped
1 garlic clove
1 jalapeño, seeded and chopped
½ cup fresh cilantro
1 tablespoon fresh lime juice
1 large avocado, chopped
¾ teaspoon kosher salt

1. Chop tomatillos, and place in a food processor. Add red onion and next 4 ingredients; pulse until coarsely chopped.

2. Add avocado and salt; pulse until smooth. Makes 1½ cups.

 

A couple of weeks ago I cleaned out the condiments in my refrigerator door. Well that's not entirely true; I weeded out just the salad dressings because I am only one woman and I certainly do not have the time to wade through every sticky bottle of mustard, curry paste, fish sauce, mayonnaise, soy sauce, and heaven only knows what else in a single evening.

I should note that of the eight bottles of salad dressing in my refrigerator, only one passed the expiration date test. One that ended up in the bin had not even been opened.

Shame. I feel shame.

The good news is that now I can just indiscriminately sweep the whole lot into the garbage, because come a-summertime, this raw tomato sauce is the only condiment I need.

All of the ingredients go into the food processor, which means that it takes 4 minutes to make. I've been eating it on EVERYTHING this week. Breakfast is crostini cut from a whole-grain baguette topped with melty mozzarella and scrambled eggs. Know what tastes great slathered all over that? This sauce.


Noodles sprinkled with fresh basil and topped with a beautiful, sunny 6-minute egg. Know what tastes great with that? This sauce.

The last time I made this sauce it was as an accompaniment to meatloaf, but none of the sauce actually made it to the table, because my family couldn't keep their focaccia-dipping fingers out of it. 

A long slab of crusty bread, a hunk of Parmesan, and this sauce will make you the most popular person at your next potluck.


It's very close to what Giada de Laurentiis taught me is "checca sauce," although naturally I had to make some adjustments for my own taste and the quantities available in my market.

Garlic is a heavy-hitter here, so I'd start with 1 or 2 cloves and then taste to see if it's to your liking. (Personally I like my raw garlic levels somewhere around vampire-killing potency, but that's not for everyone.) Throw in a little dried crushed red pepper if you want things spicy, but even I of the five-alarm taste buds didn't need it here.

Please do try a 6-minute egg when you can. It's the perfect marriage of sunny-side up and hardboiled, although my hardboiled eggs don't turn out this beautifully. (Thank you, Rachael Ray.) The whites are totally cooked, but the yolk stays velvety and runny.

I feel the need to point out that when you are a single lady with a dozen eggs, you are going to find yourself putting eggs on top of a lot of foodstuffs. (You are also going to find yourself opening your spaghetti canister to find that it only has soba noodles in it, but that's another story for another day.) I promise this won't become the Egg on Top Chronicles forever.

Use all those beautiful, perfect, late-summer tomatoes while you can!

Enjoy!


Pasta with Fresh Tomato Sauce and 6-Minute Egg

2 ounces spaghetti or other long pasta
1 egg, at room temperature
Kosher salt, to taste
½ cup Fresh Tomato Sauce (recipe below)
Garnish: fresh basil

1. Cook pasta according to package directions; drain and set aside.

2. Fill a large bowl two-thirds full with ice, and place in the freezer. Bring a medium saucepan half filled with water to a rolling boil over high heat; carefully lower egg into boiling water. Cook egg 6 minutes. With 1 minute remaining in egg cook time, remove bowl of ice from freezer and fill bowl with water. Transfer egg to ice bath with a slotted spoon, let cool, and carefully peel.

3. Transfer hot cooked noodles to a plate, and sprinkle with kosher salt and black pepper to taste. Top with Checca Sauce and egg. Sprinkle egg with additional kosher salt. Garnish, if desired. Makes 1 serving.

Fresh Tomato Sauce

1 pound tomatoes, coarsely chopped
1 bunch green onion (white and pale green parts only), coarsely chopped
2 to 4 garlic cloves, chopped
10 fresh basil leaves
3 tablespoons olive oil
Kosher salt, to taste

Black pepper, to taste

Place first 5 ingredients in a food processor; pulse until coarsely chopped. Stir in kosher salt and black pepper to taste. Makes 2 cups.

 

This is what I've been eating for breakfast this week, which is mostly notable because I'm actually willing to wake up earlier in the morning to prepare it.

Anyone who knows me knows it takes a forklift to get me out of bed on an average weekday morning, because I like to stay up late watching four (two-hour) episodes in a row of MasterChef while yelling at the TV about how much I am not enjoying watching MasterChef this season.

(It's a misnomer anyway, right? The premise is that these are home cooks? I don't think making very bad eclairs while Joe Bastianich raises his eyebrow at you really promotes you to the level of "master." Anyone competing on Top Chef Masters might agree with me.)

But! For this breakfast I am willing to make the sacrifice. The dog, however, stays firmly tucked into the covers until I crowbar his tiny butt out of bed, because don't nobody want to be outside, in August, in Alabama. It's slightly difficult to tell in the picture below, but those eggs are sweating like a whore in church. And I had to do quite a bit of work to these pictures to eliminate the curtain of fog that settled contentedly onto my camera lens.

A nice, hearty bread works best here, for the sopping up of lovely yolkiness. Cautionary tale, though: You would be wise to invest in full-fat Cheddar. I thought reduced-fat would make me somehow virtuous, but it came out slightly rubbery and flavorless. Do as I say, not as I do.

One thing I've learned along the way is that after the first day with your avocado, when you've put the remainder in the fridge, it's good to place the avocado on the bread and layer the cheese over it, so that the short toast in the oven takes the chill off. To season the avocado I use garlic salt with flecks of dried parsley in it for a little extra oomph, but regular s&p will do just fine—you don't all have to be as fancee as we are here on the Woodside.

I serve this up with a side of berries (because my mother tells me they'll keep me from dying) and curl into the couch in my robe while my hair dries, checking the weather forecast (dog in yard or in house?) and listening to Morning Edition.

So there you have it! Now you know how to make a fast and delicious breakfast sandwich, and way too many details about my mornings.

Enjoy! 


TEA (Tomato, Egg, and Avocado) Breakfast Sandwiches

4 slices whole wheat bread
4 slices Cheddar cheese
1 avocado, sliced
Garlic salt
1 tomato, sliced
Cooking spray
4 eggs

1. Preheat oven to 500 degrees. Place bread slices in a toaster oven and toast just until golden brown. Place toasted bread on a baking sheet, and top with cheese slices. Bake just until cheese melts.

2. Top cheese with avocado slices. Sprinkle with garlic salt, and top with tomato slices.

3. Cook eggs in a skillet coated with cooking spray until whites are set and yolk is still runny. Top tomato slices with eggs. Makes 4 servings.

 

True confession time? Cooking burgers makes me nervous.

This, my friends, is a truly "kitchen sink" sort of breakfast. Clearly I am of the opinion that when one sleeps in past the point of appropriateness even for your average college student, one deserves a portion size equal to breakfast and lunch jammed together.