For worse or better, Florentine has come to mean a dish cooked with spinach. Worse are some of the gloppy dishes dubbed alla fiorentina in pseudo-Italian restaurants. Better is this elegant and old-skooly breakfast or lunch dish The cleaning of the spinach may seem a little fussy but it’s worth it. Flat leaf spinach with thin stems has enough body to stand...
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Summer means tomatoes and corn. It also means wax beans, stone fruits, lots of herbs, peppers of all kinds and eggplant. Wax beans in season are one of my summer favorites. I make them on their own and dress them with a mint pesto or put them into big salads like this one. I like to think of wax beans as the nice kind of folk-singing nun and green beans as...
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Makes 4 servings I did a version of this salad—years ago—for Today (aka ‘the Today Show’). The whole show was based in Asbury Park. Bruce was playing in the Convention Hall (of course he was) and I was highlighting Jersey’s best summer food. I did herbed bluefish on the grill, blueberry crisp and this salad. By 9 AM it was 100 degrees on the beach. This is...
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Adding warm anything to a salad, in this case flank steak to greens and herbs, softens up the greens and blend the flavors. This is pretty, easy and can be done mostly in advance. Feel free to skip the garlic chips altogether if you like. Makes 4 servings For the marinated steak 1 small (1 to 1 ¼-pound) flank steak 1 teaspoon salt ½ to 1 teaspoon crushed...
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Please feel free to make this without penne, just skip past all the penne instructions. When I make it without pasta, I prefer the soupier version and a fair amount of grated pecorino (on the left in the above photo). Leave the anchovies out if you don’t like them or if you’d like to make this a vegetarian dish. Makes 2 servings Kosher salt 1 small head...
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Garlic scapes are a true seasonal treat. Like ramps, no one has yet figured out a way to grown them 4,000 miles away and then ship them to us in the middle of December. Take advantage of them when they’re around (early June in these parts). If your farmers’ market is host to garlic growers they will sell scapes in early summer. The scapes are always cut...
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