Detox day
Last night I planned to just go out with my good friend Kelly (co-owner of the new Yapita organic baby food company) for an early dinner and a few drinks, but surprised myself and kept the night going at a cool party in the Mission with about one (or two or three) too many gin gimlets. Woke up with a pretty bad headache, though I still managed to make it to Pilates this morning and then totally overhauled our kitchen. I did a major deep clean (even pulled the stove out from the wall and cleaned a decade’s worth of grime off from its sides) and reorganized the pantry, the counter tops, the spice collection, and even the cabinet under the sink. Within an hour of cleaning it up, I dirtied it up again making dinner. Both were side dishes, but together they made for a light, summery, but satisfying combination.
The first dish was the zucchini carpaccio salad recipe from the fantastic site, Smitten Kitchen. I don’t have a mandolin slicer, which the recipe suggests for slicing the zucchini paper thin, so I carefully did it by hand — winding up with less-than-perfect-but-perfectly-acceptable zucchini slices. You salt the zucchini, then rinse it twenty minutes later and blot dry. The rest is simple: toss the zucchini with arugula, dress with oil (I used grapeseed) and fresh lemon, then grate a healthy amount of fresh Parmesan on top. It tastes like you’d expect it to — simple but fresh.
The real winner tonight was the summer corn salad from my favorite website, 101 Cookbooks. I really don’t think you could (or at least, would) make a dish with raw corn….but it’s amazing! I bought the corn at Trader Joe’s — just $0.39 each — and it is surprisingly sweet. I made half a recipe of the salad, using just three ears of corn instead of the six called for, and imagine I might be using up the remaining three on another batch of salad in a few days. The corn is the central part of the salad, but the two things that make all the difference are the dressing (just lemon juice, oil, and brown sugar ) and freshly toasted pepita seeds. The recipe actually calls for a mixture of pepita seeds (which are pumpkin seeds) and sunflower seeds, but since I had pepita seeds on hand already I didn’t bother spending extra money to buy sunflower. I’m sure the salad would be even better with the two types of seeds together. Really, this dish is very, very good. I admit I was skeptical — just corn, shallots and seeds? — but now that I’ve tasted it I feel an addiction coming on.
Chelsea and I wound up staying in to watch movies. We watched Blue Valentine first — devastating but beautiful and touching — and now we’re toggling back and forth between Beauty and the Beast, Miss Congeniality, and, now, the show Hoarders. We thought about venturing out for ice cream, but we ended up settling for chocolate almond milk, made with a combination of Nequick and real powdered cocoa (to cut down on the sweet) that I shook with ice cubes in a mason jar. Cold and chocolaty. It did the trick!
