Goldy's Kitchen Cookbook Read online

  ¾ cup finely chopped fresh cilantro

  ¼ cup Simple Vinaigrette (recipe follows), or more to taste

  Salt and freshly ground black pepper

  1. In a large pot of boiling spring water, cook the pasta until al dente. Drain it (but do not rinse it) and allow it to cool to room temperature, stirring gently from time to time to keep it from sticking.

  2. In a large serving bowl, mix the pasta with the tomatoes, daikon, scallions, and cilantro. Add enough vinaigrette to lightly dress (but not slather) every ingredient. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Chill. This salad is best served within 4 to 6 hours of being prepared.

  Makes 4 servings

  Simple Vinaigrette

  ¼ cup best-quality red wine vinegar

  1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

  ¾ to 1 teaspoon sugar

  ½ teaspoon salt

  ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

  1 cup extra-virgin olive oil

  In a glass jar with a screw-top lid, combine the vinegar, mustard, ¾ teaspoon sugar, salt, and pepper. Put on the lid and shake vigorously. Remove the lid, add the oil, screw the lid back on, and shake vigorously again to make an emulsion. Taste, and if you wish, whisk in the extra ¼ teaspoon sugar. Keep refrigerated. If the dressing congeals while in the refrigerator, allow it to come to room temperature before shaking the jar again before using.

  Stylish Strawberry Salad

  —SWEET REVENGE—

  Who can say no to strawberries with avocado slices?

  1 head baby romaine

  3 tablespoons best-quality sherry vinegar

  1½ teaspoons Dijon mustard

  1½ teaspoons shallots, peeled and minced

  2 tablespoons sugar

  ¼ to ½ teaspoon kosher salt to taste, plus more for sprinkling

  ¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, plus more for sprinkling

  6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

  2 avocados

  2 cups halved strawberries

  1. Carefully separate the lettuce into leaves, wash, and pat or spin dry. Wrap it in a kitchen towel. Refrigerate until serving time.

  2. In a glass jar with a screw-top lid, combine the vinegar, mustard, shallots, sugar, ¼ teaspoon salt, and pepper. Put on the lid and shake vigorously. Remove the lid, add the oil, screw the lid back on, and shake vigorously again until the mixture emulsifies. Taste and add the additional salt if desired. Set the vinaigrette aside.

  3. Just before serving time, peel, pit, and slice the avocados.

  4. To serve, divide the lettuce among 4 plates. Arrange the strawberries and avocado slices (each person gets ½ avocado’s worth of slices) on top of the leaves. Shake or whisk the vinaigrette and ladle a few spoonfuls onto each salad. If desired, sprinkle a tiny amount of salt onto each salad, then follow with a few grinds of black pepper. Serve immediately.

  Makes 4 servings

  Heirloom Tomato Salad

  —FATALLY FLAKY—

  When Jim and I were newlyweds, one of the first salads I made that wasn’t iceberg lettuce dabbed with mayonnaise was Tomatoes Vinaigrette. We both loved it, although I learned the hard way not to mix it and allow it to marinate in a metal pan. If you are having company (or even if you aren’t), prepare and serve this salad in a pretty glass or crystal bowl. The Camembert gives the dish a certain cachet, and if your kids will eat any cheese with a rind, you’re in luck.

  1 pound fresh heirloom or vine-ripened tomatoes

  2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil plus 4 large leaves, divided

  2 teaspoons fresh garlic crushed through a press (2 to 3 cloves)

  ½ pound Camembert cheese

  ½ cup pear vinegar (available online) or red wine vinegar

  1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

  ½ teaspoon sugar

  Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

  1 cup extra-virgin olive oil

  1. Cut the stems and cores out of the tomatoes. Holding them, one at a time, over the sink, gently squeeze until most of the seeds come out. Place them on a cutting board and cut each tomato into fourths if they are small, or eighths if they are large. Place in a large glass bowl.

  2. Sprinkle the tomatoes with the chopped basil. Sprinkle the pressed garlic on top of the basil. Using a sharp serrated knife, trim most of the rind from the cheese. Slice it into 16 equal wedges, and place these on top of the garlic.

  3. In a glass screw-top jar with a lid, combine the vinegar, mustard, sugar, and salt and pepper to taste. Screw the lid onto the jar and shake well. Remove the lid, add the olive oil, screw the lid back on, and shake vigorously, or until the dressing is completely emulsified.

  4. Pour the dressing over the ingredients in the bowl and gently toss the salad. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and chill the salad for at least 4 hours and up to 24 hours.

  5. When you are ready to serve the salad, place it in a pretty bowl, sprinkle lightly with a bit more salt and a grating of black pepper. Garnish with the whole basil leaves.

  Makes 8 servings

  Chilled Curried Chicken Salad

  —FATALLY FLAKY—

  Clearly, there is no way you can make this dish vegetarian. But I’ve included it here becasue it is, after all, a salad, and it is good to make ahead as a main dish for a ladies’ luncheon (or a gentlemen and ladies’ luncheon!). It also works for a cold summer dinner. I developed this recipe because so many people order curried chicken salad in restaurants.

  3 large or 4 medium bone-in, skin-on chicken breast halves

  Extra-virgin olive oil

  Sea salt or kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

  Contents of three 15-ounce cans mandarin oranges, drained

  Contents of one 20-ounce can pineapple tidbits, drained

  ½ cup raisins, or more to taste

  ¾ cup finely chopped red onion

  1½ cups mayonnaise

  1 tablespoon curry powder, or more to taste

  2 tablespoons chutney, plus more for serving

  2 tablespoons regular or light sour cream

  2 tablespoons fresh lime juice

  Whole salted peanuts, for serving

  1. Preheat the oven to 400˚F. Line a large rimmed baking sheet with a silicone baking mat.

  2. Place the chicken breasts on the baking sheet and rub oil onto the pieces. Sprinkle them with salt and pepper.

  3. Bake the chicken for 25 to 40 minutes, or until it is thoroughly cooked and a meat thermometer inserted in the chicken reads 160˚F. Check for doneness by slicing into one of the pieces, all the way to the bone. All the meat should have turned completely white, with no trace of pink. Do not overcook the chicken. Remove the pan from the oven and allow the chicken to cool completely.

  4. When the chicken is cool, remove the skin and bones and discard them. Tear the meat into bite-size pieces. Measure it; you should have 4 cups. Reserve any remainder for another use.

  5. In a large glass serving bowl, combine the chicken, oranges, pineapple, raisins, and red onion.

  6. In a food processor, combine the mayonnaise, curry powder, chutney, ¾ teaspoon salt, sour cream, and lime juice and process until almost completely smooth. You may have to turn the processor off and scrape down the sides one or two times with a spatula. This should not take more than 2 minutes. Taste and add more curry powder if desired.

  7. Pour the dressing over the ingredients in the serving bowl and stir gently but well, until all the ingredients are evenly distributed. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and chill the salad for at least 24 hours.

  8. Serve with a large bowl of peanuts and another bowl of chutney, if desired, for people to use to garnish their own salads.

  Makes 4 to 6 servings

  Goldy’s Caprese Salad

  —CRUNCH TIME—

  This recipe is living proof that two palates can be better than one. Once again, I developed this recipe after having something similar in a restaurant. Before tasting this particular one, I’d steered clear of caprese salads, b
ecause they usually consisted of wedges of tasteless tomato alternating with thick, chalky slices of equally tasteless mozzarella. Then a longtime friend, Carole Kornreich, and I had lunch in Denver. She ordered a dish similar to this and offered me a bite. I thought I’d gone to heaven. Ciliegine are manageable bites of mozzarella that are creamy rather than chalky. With organic tomatoes, they are luscious. My only problem was that the restaurant menu said the dressing was made with “extra-virgin olive oil.” No matter how hard I tried, I could not replicate the results at home. So Carole and I trekked back to the restaurant, where we both ordered the dish. This is when I discovered that those folks who write menus sometimes lie. Before we went inside, I insisted to Carole that the dressing on the restaurant’s caprese was not olive oil and vinegar, as the menu claimed. Carole took a couple of tiny bites, and suggested that the restaurant might be using basil oil. Right away, I suspected she was correct. After lunch, I raced home and ordered basil-infused oil from Boyajian. When it came, I whisked together the dressing and realized we were home. So I want to give full credit to my fellow foodie for figuring this out. (Carole and I went to sixth and seventh grades together back in Chevy Chase, Maryland; we were in the same Girl Scout troop. I always maintained that she was the smartest kid in the entire Montgomery County School District. And guess what? I was right. She became an M.D. I was ecstatic when we rediscovered each other in Denver.)

  1½ pounds organic heirloom tomatoes, chopped if large, or you can use organic grape or cherry tomatoes, halved

  ½ pound ciliegine (cherry-size fresh mozzarella balls), drained

  12 fresh basil leaves, finely chopped

  3 cups baby field greens (mesclun or mâche), gently rinsed and spun dry

  Dressing:

  ¼ cup best-quality white wine vinegar

  2 teaspoons Dijon mustard

  ¼ teaspoon sugar

  ½ teaspoon kosher salt

  ¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

  ⅔ cup best-quality basil oil (infused with basil, not with dried basil leaves in it)

  In a medium glass bowl, combine the tomatoes, ciliegine, and basil. Place the dry greens in an attractive glass or crystal salad bowl. Set aside.

  For the dressing:

  1. In a glass screw-top jar with a lid, combine the vinegar, mustard, sugar, salt, and pepper. Screw the lid on tightly and shake to combine well. Take off the lid, pour in the basil oil, screw the lid back on tightly, and shake very well to combine.

  2. Place the tomato mixture on top of the greens. Shake the dressing again, and pour on ¼ to ½ cup dressing. Taste carefully. Depending on the sweetness of the tomatoes, you may need a bit more sugar. (Do not use too much dressing. Store the remainder, still in its covered jar, in the refrigerator.)

  3. Toss the salad and serve immediately.

  Makes 4 to 6 servings

  Love Potion Salad

  —CRUNCH TIME—

  I no longer remember where Jim and I tasted a salad that we both adored. I only remember that it contained mayonnaise in the vinaigrette. But since Jim’s default dressing is bottled ranch (insert heartfelt sigh here), I resolved to figure out how to make one he would like. He thought it was marvelous, and came up with the title for the recipe.

  1 ounce pine nuts (¼ cup)

  4 cups baby field greens (mesclun or mâche), gently rinsed and spun dry

  1 pound grape tomatoes, halved

  About ¼ cup Love Potion Salad Dressing (recipe follows)

  ½ cup blue cheese crumbles, or to taste

  1. In a large skillet, toast the pine nuts over low heat, stirring constantly, until they are lightly browned and emitting a nutty scent, about 4 minutes. Turn out on a paper towel to cool.

  2. Place the greens and tomatoes in an attractive salad bowl. Toss with about ¼ cup dressing and taste. (You may need to add more dressing, but do not overdress the salad.) Sprinkle the blue cheese crumbles and pine nuts on top of the salad and toss again. Serve immediately.

  Makes 4 servings

  Love Potion Salad Dressing

  3 tablespoons best-quality aged balsamic vinegar

  2 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan cheese

  1 tablespoon mayonnaise

  1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

  1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh basil

  2 teaspoons minced shallot

  1 teaspoon minced garlic

  Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

  1 cup extra-virgin olive oil

  1. In a blender jar, combine everything but the oil and blend to purée. Stop the blender twice to scrape down the sides of the jar. When the mixture is a uniform color, remove the small filler cap, and with the blender running, very slowly drizzle in the olive oil. (With your free hand, you may want to hold a paper towel over the filler cap opening between drizzling operations, to prevent spattering.) When the mixture is completely emulsified (less than a minute), stop the blender and pour the dressing into a pint jar or pitcher.

  2. Use right away or cover the jar or pitcher tightly and refrigerate. Bring the dressing to room temperature before using. When it is at room temperature, use a whisk and quickly stir the dressing, so it can re-emulsify.

  Chapter 4

  Meat, Poultry, and Fish or The Heart of the Matter

  Sometimes you are just driving merrily along, minding your own business—or running carpool—and you hear a report on the radio that almost lands you in a ditch. But it doesn’t, and you think, Wow, that’s what my next book is about. This has actually only happened to me twice, with Dying for Chocolate and Crunch Time. With the latter, it was my friend Jasmine Cresswell who heard an episode of The Diane Rehm Show and told me I needed to write about stalking, which ended up being central to Crunch Time.

  But long before that, with Dying for Chocolate, I was driving to pick up one of our children on Valentine’s Day, which turned out to be important, because an author was talking on the radio about her book on aphrodisiac foods. Hm, thought I, could Goldy ever be asked to provide an aphrodisiac feast?

  I’d sat in on enough booking appointments with my catering instructors to know that eccentric clients asked for all kinds of foods, and didn’t think twice about paying for them. Or maybe they did think twice about paying for them, but something else was going on.

  There was the bride who wanted her wedding reception buffet, which featured prime rib and lots of other expensive foods, to include frisée salad drenched with—wait for it—bottled ranch dressing, for which you have probably guessed I have no affection. Supposedly, the dressing had sentimental value for her and the groom. The caterer gently tried to persuade her to choose a lemon vinaigrette, but she was adamant, so that was what the catering team served.

  Another time, one of my instructors invited me to sit in on a meeting with a prospective groom and his parents. He warned me ahead of time, “Say nothing.” (It’s amazing how often people feel they have to tell me that.) As is traditional, these parents-of-the-groom wanted to pay for the rehearsal dinner. But they were only willing to shell out fifteen dollars per guest. They, too, asked for prime rib, to which the caterer said, “No problem.” The parents also wondered if they could have . . . lobster tail . . . and three vegetables . . . and dessert, within the fifteen-bucks-per-person ceiling. “Absolutely,” the caterer replied. Okay, then, the parents asked, how about some wine? The caterer said, “Sure, we can do two kinds of wine for fifteen dollars per person.”

  I took a deep breath. I’d mentally totaled the tab at a hundred dollars-plus per person . . . and this was over thirty years ago. Today, with set-up, servers, and gratuity, you’d be looking north of that.

  After the meeting, the caterer told me that the parents had grown up during the Depression and despite “having money,” did not want to spend it on so frivolous an event as a rehearsal dinner. The son was a recent arrival in our small town. He drove a Porsche and was a full-fledged participant in the go-go eighties. He was picking up the tab for whatever was in exce
ss of the fifteen bucks per person, but the parents were not to have a glimmer of this fact. And to my knowledge, they never did.

  But to get back to the Valentine’s Day radio story: In the Goldy books, people in Aspen Meadow seem to know each other, or at least, they’re aware of people within their social, ecclesiastical, athletic, or parental circle. Country club members know each other, as do members of different religious communities, as do mothers whose kids are the same age, and so on. Everyone knows everyone, or knows somebody who knows that person.

  The same used to be true in our town, as I learned when I began work on my second novel, Dying for Chocolate. Background: After Catering to Nobody sold in 1989, I decided to write a book featuring Goldy preparing aphrodisiac foods, which I’d heard about on the radio. I went to our wonderful local library to order books on the subject, available through interlibrary loan.

  I received the notice that my books had come in and hightailed it to the library. The librarian, who had known me well for years as the borrower of many Dr. Seuss books, slid the large pile across the counter. Here were titles like How to Get Your Man Back with Food, A to Z of Aphrodisia, Food and Love, and Food and Sex. The librarian lifted an eyebrow and asked, “How’s Jim?”

  (We will pause here as we imagine yours truly blushing furiously, checking out the books, and slithering out of the library.)

  So sometimes you get your idea from NPR. Other times, life gives you the idea, and it has mileage either because of the emotional energy or just because something happened that really, really pissed you off. This has also happened to me.

  Once our youngest son was three and could take skiing lessons, Jim and I used to take all three boys for a day on the slopes. When Jim had to work overtime on Saturdays, I would take the boys up to ski. (If you were a Colorado resident and bought coupon books sold by the Cub Scouts, skiing used to be cheap.) The Ski Patrol was omnipresent and performed well at maintaining order and helping skiers. This included everything from reviving someone having a heart attack to bringing a special stretcher for skiers who’d hurt themselves. The Patrol would also clip the lift ticket of skiers who skied too fast, got into fistfights (usually after having too many beers at lunch), did not yield to the downhill skier and caused an accident, or otherwise disobeyed the rules. (Our youngest son, once he graduated from ski school—still three years old—promptly tucked himself into the cool racing position he’d seen on TV, and skied away. No matter how many times I cajoled or scolded him, he did this. He had his ticket clipped more than once.)