It’s my last night in San Francisco and it’s hitting me that this is the first time in years I’ve gone anywhere besides New York and Chicago for an extended vacation (in the schedule of the working world, four full days is practically studying abroad). I serendipitously got to spend most of the weekend with my friend Mary and her sister Liz, who happened to be in Cali at the same time, and we had some delicious eats: lunch at Rose Pistola, where I had a truly memorable antipasti of seafood-stuffed grilled calamari surrounded by lentil salad and rosemary aioli: 

Liz bravely ordered the capponada salad without knowing what it was: it turned out to include tuna, bread, and that gorgeous farm egg floating on top. The pesto tasted unbelievably fresh.

Mary had the acclaimed pizza, made in a wood-burning stove, with artichoke and prosciutto and green olives. The artichokes were strangely a little bland, but the crust was excellent.

Liz and Mary, who spent months this past year living in Paris, fell in love with a little North Beach bakery called La Boulange. You can see why.

You know those days when you’re just hungry? Today was one of those for me, so I made a hearty, healthy dinner to satisfy my appetite and also to use up some odds and ends I had around the kitchen: a half-pound of sausage that was on sale yesterday at Whole Foods, a crisper drawer full of veggies, and goat cheese that I bought to make spanakopita. I always keep dried beans on hand, as they’re infinitely versatile and don’t take up much pantry space. 

Goat cheese crostini:

• 12 slices baguette or other similarly sized bread, about 3/4 inch thick (this is yeast-free herbed spelt bread, made yesterday)
• 1/2 cup goat cheese
• 1/2 cup parsley, chopped fine
• 3 garlic cloves, minced
• 3 tbsp olive oil
• 4 green olives, pitted and minced
• salt & pepper to taste

1. Brush each slice of bread lightly with olive oil and bake at 375 degrees for about 5 minutes per side, until crisp and golden.
2. Heat remaining olive oil in a saucepan and saute minced garlic over medium heat until lightly browned, about 5 minutes.
3. Meanwhile, mix together cheese, parsley and minced olives in a bowl. Add garlic with olive oil and mash together with a fork to make a paste.
4. Add salt & pepper to taste and spread cheese mixture on each crostini. Serve as is or, if desired, bake cheese-topped crostini for an additional four minutes before eating.

Sausage & lentil stew:

• 1 cup dried brown lentils
• 1 potato, chopped into eighths
• 1/2 lb raw sausage (I used turkey breakfast sausage)
• 1 tsbp olive oil
• 3 garlic cloves, minced
• 1/2 cup fresh parsley, chopped
• 2 carrots, diced
• 2 stalks celery, diced
• 1 head broccoli, chopped
• 1 can diced tomatoes
• 1 tbsp each basil, oregano and marjoram
• salt & pepper to taste

1. Soak dry lentils for several hours or overnight. Drain and rinse with cold water. Boil along with raw chopped potato, with enough water to cover, until lentils and potato are tender, about 30 minutes.
2. Meanwhile, heat oil in a large nonstick stockpot or dutch oven. Saute minced garlic until golden.
3. Chop sausage into bite-size pieces and add to stockpot with garlic. Saute until browned. Add carrots and celery and cook until beginning to be tender, about five minute. 
4. Add tomatoes with juice, parsley and other herbs to the sausage mixture.
5. Once lentils and potato are tender, add to sausage mixture. Simmer until ready to eat: 2-3 hours to give flavors time to combine.

One of the perks of staying with my parents is that my best friend from high school is also home in Evanston taking her gap year/funemployment, so we get to relive our glory years on a daily basis (okay, that’s a stretch, but yesterday we went to the mall and I bought flare jeans). In high school, Mary was a picky eater, but trips around the world and time abroad in Tanzania and France widened her worldview and her palate. She gets excited now about Himalayan pink sea salt the way she used to about pizza-flavored Goldfish. Also, she’s a fantastic cook: her mustard-broiled salmon recipe (coming up in the next post) is the only one I use, and she’ll turn out a honey&goat cheese pizza or chausson aux pommes like it’s no big deal. She’s also an artist, which means that she makes food not only for flavor but to create something beautiful: once I watched her delicately layer thin half-moons of apple in a tart pan for about an hour. While I tend towards a more ‘rustic’ aesthetic, we deeply appreciate each other’s cooking and we adore having the opportunity to cook for each other and trade ideas and techniques. Today I made Mary lunch, and she made me dinner.

Spelt bread:

• 1 cup + 1 tbsp spelt flour
• 1 cup milk or substitute (I mixed rice milk & coconut non-dairy creamer)
• pinch of salt
• 1 tsp molasses or barley malt
• 1/2 tsp baking soda

1. Preheat oven to 350.
2. Combine ingredients and mix well. Place in a 9x5 loaf pan.
3. Bake for about an hour and ten minutes, until golden.

The lentil dip is modified from this recipe: I used brown lentils instead of red, and I didn’t saute the spices. I also left out the oil, then added some tahini when the initial product seemed a bit too soupy.

Spicy lentil spread:

• 1 cup dried lentils
• 1 onion, diced
• 2 + 1/2 cups water
• 2 tsp curry powder
• 3/4 tsp cayenne
• 2 cloves crushed garlic
• 2 tbsp tahini
• salt

1. Boil the lentils and onion until tender, about 25 minutes, and drain.
2. Blend lentils, onion and remaining ingredients in a food processor and season to taste. Serve warm or cold.

To make these open-face sandwiches, I put a foil-wrapped sweet potato in the oven at the same time as the bread, then skinned it and sliced it to layer over the lentil spread on each piece of bread. Sprinkle a little rosemary or herbs de provence on top to finish.

When I started soaking a couple handfuls of dried brown lentils this morning, I was planning to make a vegetarian lentil loaf or some makeshift dal makhani. But, two days away and already homesick for New York, I found myself daydreaming of East Village ramen houses and bowls of soba noodles in thick, sweet broth. My mom doesn’t keep soba on hand, but I did find an impressive array of seaweed: kombu, wakame, arame, dulse, and kelp, not to mention organic tamari and white miso in the fridge (there might not be any milk or eggs in the house, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t well-stocked!) Along with green peas, red cabbage, beet greens, onion and the lentils, I used quinoa spaghetti for the noodles. It’s my absolute favorite and closer to the texture of regular white pasta than whole-wheat.