A bout of summery weather coincided this week with the beginning of summer vacation. (Pinch me: I now have a kindergartener and a third-grader.) It was like a doing a canon ball straight into the deep end of summertime fun: hikes, picnics, porch suppers and socializing.

All of which gets in the way of making dinner.

I learned my lesson over the school year to plan ahead. So, while I sipped my second cup of morning coffee, I put a some brown rice on the stove. This single pot of rice saved my whole day. Seriously, I would have kissed it and given it a good long back rub if I could.

How? Because it was nearly 7 p.m. by the time we got home–and still felt like the middle of the day here in the Pacific Northwest (one of the reasons, I think, I never left). And within 10 minutes, I’d made a stir-fry of Asian greens from my CSA box, leftover steak, snow peas and scallions.

You probably know my penchant for Asian food, but that pot of rice could have become so many other meals, depending on what I had on hand, like:

• Greek rice salad with cherry tomato, kalamata olives, cucumbers and feta with lemon vinaigrette
• French salad with tuna, corn kernels, tomato and avocado with red wine vinaigrette
• Spinach-rice patties with parmesan cheese bound with egg and fried in olive oil
• Fried rice with tofu, scallions, egg, shredded carrot seasoned with tamari and sesame oil
• Topped with sauteed garlicky greens and an egg over easy

It also goes without saying that my rice could be your cooked quinoa, barley, wheat berries, millet, farro… (Gee, it’s pretty clear that I could never, ever go paleo.)

Now for all of my grains, I use the free boiling method because it’s a no brainer. I don’t measure the water, but add 1/2 teaspoon sea salt for every cup of grains. It’s just like boiling pasta, only it takes longer depending on the grain. When the grain is just tender to the bite, I strain it, return it to the pot, cover and let steam until I’m ready to cook.

Sometimes I’ll use my pressure cooker, but since I live at high elevation, it’s hard to get the timing right. I should buy a rice cooker, but after my first one broke with only a few uses, I’m resistant.

No matter the method, the point is having that pre-made rice waiting, just waiting, for me. And that makes all the difference in enjoying (or not) the long summer evenings now and to come.

I have a fetish for wild foods. But the truth of the matter is that I’ve dreamed and written about them far more than I’ve actually foraged. More spring morel seasons have come and gone before I set boot in the damp, piney woods than I like to acknowledge. And that’s just one species of mushroom plus berries, edible plants and even roots available near my home. After 12 years in the Oregon mountains I am still largely a wannabe wildcrafter.

Like deer, coyotes and even cougars, the wild often comes to us. And so it was when I weeded my garden beds for a new year of planting last week I was lucky enough to confront a standing army of wicked-looking leaves: Stinging nettles, native plants known to be ultra nutritious–if they don’t get you first with their prickle-inducing hairs.(The sting is not dangerous, only mildly uncomfortable.)

I rolled down my sleeves, gripped a pruner firmly with my gloves and snipped them off low at each stem. Gathered together, the long dark-green stalks made a perfect bouquet for the wedding of a fairy tale witch.

Not one myself, I planned to cook and eat them instead. Still, I admired the nettles’s papery toothed leaves as I prepared them for the pot. A dip into boiling water was all they needed to become tame. How quickly they subdued into limp, inoculated leaves ready for picking and any number of cooked dishes.As I plucked the leaves from the stem, I regretted composting those fibrous stalks and remembered an ethnobotany class from years before when I learned that native tribes used these fibers to make a most sturdy twine.

I did save the green-tinged water and sipped this nettle tea. I expected some bitterness but it was so mild and tasty, I drank it unsweetened. (Later I steeped it with Assam black tea and added honey to make vitamin-packed iced tea. Amazing to think it all came from what is, essentially, a weed.)

Many people compare nettles with spinach. Sure, you can use this dark, leafy green in place of cooked spinach in any recipe–from risotto and ravioli to omelets and soup. (Don’t try it in salad!), But it doesn’t taste like spinach, at least not to me. Earthier, milder with a rougher texture, nettles, like all wild foods I’ve tried, have an alluring complexity and depth…something wild.

One other surprising contrast: unlike spinach, these greens did not reduce in volume dramatically when cooked. So, after I made a big batch of nettle-kopita– nettles with sauteed onion, chopped kalamata olives and feta wrapped into filo triangles–I had extra nettles for storing in the freezer.

The way I think of it, that’s a cache of something wild right at my fingertips.

Right after college, I moved to NYC and lived with two roommates in an apartment in Chelsea. We were all working in magazines earning pitiful salaries. Pre-1990, this downtown Manhattan neighborhood was still rough around the edges, and we lived across the street from a major shipping center, waking up at 5 a.m. to air brakes reverberating off the brick building. But, oh, the glory of it!

On the rare nights we were all at home, we three sprawled out on a futon and listened endlessly to Ladies of the Canyon. I hardly remember eating much more than bags of Smartfood in that spare apartment. But I recently received evidence to the contrary: a single hand-written recipe for vinaigrette on magazine letterhead.

My friend Jim has kept it for over 20 years and told me that he uses it all the time. There it is in my twenty-something script, a time capsule from another life. 

In celebration of the abundance of greens–are you indulging in all the green smoothies you can stand?–I made this dressing once again. Handily, I had a fresh bottle of walnut oil.

It certainly did not taste familiar to me or cast me back to that time when I wore only black, rode the subway to work and went clubbing.

But, when I served it for dinner with a friend, he said, “What is this dressing? It’s so light!”

It certainly did accentuate the lovely mix of Backyard Gardens salad greens in my bowl without masking the individual flavors of kale, mustard, romaine, spinach and beet greens.

I stare and stare at that recipe and can’t recall where I got it. As a recipe writer, I’m very sensitive to crediting everything I use to the original author. (“S + P” is salt and pepper, but you probably knew that.)

So I pass this one on as “anonymous.” Use it as you enjoy a long springtime of salads and make it your own.

Happy, happy springtime!

Yesterday, Cece turned 5. I turned on my email auto-responder to spend the day immersed in her world.

This is the last year she’ll be at home alone with me on a Wednesday. I wanted to make the day special for her. I also needed to mark the day for myself, to recollect the dramatic morning of her birth. With 3 inches of snow on the ground, Benjamin raced past cars on Main Street to make it to the hospital on time. I’m still amazed she wasn’t born in the car. She’s been ready to rock ever since.

Now, I see her quickly turning the corner from her youngest mommy-centered self and catch glimpses of the big girl she is becoming. It makes me want to sit and rock her and read her stories, which she would do all day long given the option. Magic Tree House, Mercy Watson, Fancy Nancy, you name it.

But, for me, staying present was hard. On a typical Wednesday when she’s not at preschool, we “work” together; me at my laptop and she at her writing, crafts and playdoh. We bake together. I read her a story in between doing the dishes and sweeping the floor while I drink a cup of coffee. She plays in the sandbox while I make lunch.

Yesterday, I kept my laptop firmly closed, but I couldn’t fully disconnect from my professional anxieties and mental to-dos. I worried about a current story-in-process that’s important to me and the editor and I don’t see eye to eye. My agent called with suggestions for a book proposal.  I thought about Friday when I’ll juggle Cece’s afternoon birthday party with a dinner party I’m cooking for 9.

In the afternoon sun, I simply sat and watched Cece play. I admired her ease in herself and her activities, moving from the swing set to the woods. She pumped herself to the swing’s fullest arc. She drummed sticks on a stump and tried to turn a long branch into stilts. In all of this, she strived. She succeeded and she failed, and it flowed. It was all part of her play, the joys and the efforts of doing.

She wasn’t ever trying too hard.

Unlike me.

(The pictured lemon raspberry cake is from Dorie Greenspan’s Baking From My Home to Yours, and it is the best butter cream I have ever made.)

When I can’t think of what to make for dinner, I troll for ideas online at magazine sites and the odd food blog. Many of the recipes start with chicken, which catches me by surprise. Most of our protein comes from our freezer of beef and pork and beans, and I forget how ubiquitous this white meat bird is for family meals.

As I’ve mentioned in this turkey post, I don’t typically cook chicken because I can’t abide by the industrially raised chickens from the supermarket. But, I keep my ears out for local chickens.

At a recent party, a friend was talking about offing her old hens. “I’m not going to eat them,” she said.

“I’ll take them,” I said, feeling a little bloodthirsty.

But, honestly, what are we all going to do with the hens when they’re no longer laying eggs?

Only days later, another friend called offering some of the chickens she raised for meat, and soon I had a whole bird at my disposal. Naturally, my first thought was roast chicken, When my world is still mostly frozen (hello, April?), a bird roasting in the oven is as warming as a fire in the hearth.

But a second thought came, an old-fashioned notion that’s somehow gone out of style: poaching.

It’s so simple and so out of the ordinary, this gentle simmering technique. It’s not flashy with flame or dramatic with sizzling and sear. It’s a quiet method that feels like coaxing the food into a state of being cooked.

Poached eggs are, for me, a special occasion. And poaching is ideal for salmon, vegetables, like asparagus or carrots, and yes, chicken, too, often served with a rich sauce, like hollandaise. But it’s far from fussy or difficult, nor is it only for dieters.

Poached Chicken Breast

Here’s how I do it: Put 1-3 bone-in chicken breasts in a saucepan. Add enough water just to barely cover them and bring the water to a simmer uncovered over medium heat. (Add a pinch of salt and a bay leaf, garlic clove or parsley or cilantro stems for more flavor.) Reduce the heat to low to maintain a simmer for 20 minutes. Turn off the heat and remove the pot from the heat to let the chicken stand in the water for 5 minutes. Transfer the breasts from the broth into a bowl until cool enough to handle. Skin, pull the meat from the bones and leave whole, chop, shred as desired.

The deal maker for me is that when you poach a chicken you get 3 for 1. And that makes Poaching capital P for Practical:

• warm meat for a dinner of chicken breasts to serve with some of the broth and wild rice or barley
• golden broth for homemade chicken noodle soup
• cold leftover meat for chicken salad, like this one

Vietnamese Chicken Salad with Cabbage and Peanuts

Serves 4

A very long time ago, I taught English as a Second Language in Bellingham, WA. One day a lovely young woman from Vietnam brought in this chicken salad, and I asked her for the recipe. After 20 years and I still have her original written in a neat and delicate, albeit faded, script so that I can share it with you.

2 teaspoons vegetable oil
2 large shallots, very thinly sliced
1 garlic clove, minced
1 pound poached chicken breast, finely shredded
4 cups (about 1/2 medium head) very finely chopped red or green cabbage
1 teaspoon granulated sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon fish sauce
juice of 1/2 lemon
black pepper
1/4 cup loosely packed mint leaves
1/2 cup loosely packed cilantro leaves
1/4 cup roasted peanuts

1. Heat 1 teaspoon of the oil over medium-high heat in a medium skillet. Add the shallot slices and cook, stirring now and then, until they are begin to brown on their edges, about 6 minutes. Transfer them to a large mixing bowl.
2. In the same skillet, heat the remaining 1 teaspoon oil over medium-high heat. Add the garlic and shredded chicken and cook until the garlic is fragrant and the chicken begins to turn drier and crisp in a few places, about 8 minutes. Set aside to cool to room temperature.
3. Add the cabbage, sugar, salt, fish sauce, lemon juice and black pepper to the bowl with the shallots. Toss well. Add the mint, cilantro and cooled chicken. Toss again and taste for salt, fish sauce and lemon juice, adding any more of those ingredients to taste. Chill until ready to serve.
4. Serve in bowls topped with peanuts and a side of hot sauce, if you like.

What’s to love about some old pot of beans?

For me, a ready-to-go pot of beans is so much more than it seems:

sustenance & comfort ~ preparedness & possibility ~ generosity & luxury

I spent 10 days living alone in Tuscany one rainy April. I felt like I was eating like a queen sampling dishes from la cocina povera–cheap peasant food–at a roadside restaurant every day at lunch. I learned there how a simple bowl of pasta and beans (pasta e fagiole) with a healthy dose of garlic can feel downright indulgent.

You can have your foie gras, capons, branzino and bone marrow. My protein of choice is the one I always have on hand. They decorate my pantry in mason jars: dried beans of every stripe, from lentil to fava.

During a week when I’ve been working to clean out my food stores in anticipation of a new growing season and thinking about those who live with so much less, I’m drawn to the practice of making do with what I have.

Truth be told, I get far more satisfaction coming up with something to make from what I already have on hand than having access to all the goodies at Zupan’s in Portland. (Naturally, a trip through such a wonderment of goods in said store does quicken my heart.)

It also seems apt to think about frugality in the days leading up to tax day, April 15th. But I’d eat pasta e fagiole even if I had all the money in the world.

Here are the basics for making your own bowl of plenty–pasta and beans for Dinner 911:

I try to make a habit of cooking up a pot of beans every week, which is like having a leg up on multiple dinners. I freeze leftovers in their bean water for quick defrosting. If you don’t have ready-to-go homemade beans, substitute drained and rinsed canned beans. Put them in a pot and cover them with vegetable broth, chicken broth or water. Add a bay leaf and a peeled clove of garlic and bring to a simmer until the garlic is softened. Mash the garlic and stir into the broth. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

• You are now ready to assemble your pasta and beans with some boiled wide ribbon pasta or egg noodles. (Hint: boil them in well-salted water.) For each serving, put a nest of noodles in the bottom of a large bowl, add a handful of stemmed spring spinach and ladle over it the steaming broth and beans. It will wilt the spinach just so.
• For the finishing touch, sprinkle over the bowl the best olive oil you have on hand to look like giant golden raindrops in the bowl. (My neighbor, Amy recently sent me a wonderful gift of MoonShadow Grove single varietal extra-virgin olive oils from California produced by her sister from an old-growth organic grove and I am expressly reserving it for salads and this soup.) Finally, use a vegetable peeler to shave off curls of parmesan cheese to crown it all.
• For kids, you can keep everything separate: noodles with olive oil and cheese, beans with some broth and raw spinach to eat with their fingers (that’s how my kids do it).
• For company, I add Italian pork sausage in the form of tiny meatballs.

Trust me: one serving of pasta e fagiole and you’ll feel incredibly rich.

In Portland, the blossoms may be bursting on the magnolia trees, the daffodils rising their faces to the sky and the farmers’ market beginning to bustle. But here we’re still waiting for rhubarb and chives, and I’ve been lucky to sample fresh greens after helping my friend Beth weed her greenhouse.

Spring in this community is calving and lambing, turning over the compost once it’s defrosted and waiting. The season of preparation.

My spring ritual is to use up as much of last year’s stored goods–in the pantry and freezer as I can. Not only to make room for the crop of new foodstuffs, but also because it’s a reminder of the bounty I, like most people, keep on hand and forget to use. But stored food–until it’s unusable or unappetizing–is just a waste. Trust me, there are pots of soup, stews, baked goods and desserts waiting to be created!

Today, when many bloggers are posting to raise awareness of childhood hunger in this country, food waste is one of the top issues on my mind. We live in such food abundance at restaurants, supermarkets and at home that as a nation we waste half of all the food produced, according to Wasted Food author Jonathan Bloom. It’s hard to appreciate the monumental costs of all this wasted food, from fossil fuels to your own hard-earned dollars.

Most troubling of all are the startling numbers of people, including 1 in 4 children, who go hungry amidst this bounty. Unthinkable and yet real.

In honor of Food Bloggers Against Hunger, I have a challenge for you in the style of a Chopped cooking competition with a call to action:

Go into your freezer and select 3 items to make a single meal. Post your comment describing what you made and your plan for reducing waste in your own home for the chance to win this Wusthof boning knife. (For extra credit post a photo on my Pure Beef Cookbook page.) Contest ends on midnight Friday, April 12th and the winner will be announced.  is Erin Donovan who posted via Facebook on 4/10!

If you do nothing else…

1. Make a pledge to reduce your own food waste by planning meals, using leftovers (we always have leftover night at our house) and only buying what you need.
2. Send this letter to your congressman urging them to protect funding for federal nutrition programs, including SNAP (formerly food stamps), WIC, a program for women and children, and reduced and free school meals.
3. See A Place at the Table, a new documentary about how we can band together to solve the immense problem of hunger in America (available on demand from Amazon and iTunes)

Here are more organizations to lend your support:

• The Giving Table
• Share Our Strength
• Farmers Ending Hunger

Here are my 3 favorite recipe ideas for using leftovers:

• Strata: a baked bread and cheese casserole
• Twice-Baked Potato: didn’t you forget how much you loved them?
• Rice Noodle Bowl: with vermicelli rice noodles, anything’s possible–and quick

It’s spring break, and we are on vacation deep in a Ponderosa Pine forest surrounded by volcanoes known as Oregon’s Central Cascades. We’ve packed books and sleeping bags, stuffed animal friends and ski gear for the entire week. And a full supply of popcorn.

Popcorn for parties. Popcorn for movie night. Popcorn for after-school snack. Popcorn is all purpose. The four of us can really pack it away in one sitting around the table or the fire.

But have you really thought about popcorn? I hadn’t ever contemplated where popcorn comes from, never mind that you can grow your own, until Benjamin’s cousin, Ken, sent us some of his homegrown popcorn. The kernels were smaller than anything I’ve ever bought, and their pastel shades were something to behold. Popped, they were less poofy and more fresh and corny tasting.

Browsing through my seed catalog last week, I found popcorn seed for sale to grow our own. But I’ll have to find a friend with a plot at lower elevations than our garden to grow any. If you live in a place where corn grows to maturity, you can grow popcorn, then dry and pry it from the cobs for storing.

Or, you can order ready to pop varieties, like ruby red, calico and blue. How fun is that? Almost as fun as vacation!

Here are a few of my favorite popcorn recipes to try whenever you’re hanging out at home, having kids over for play date or want a novel snack for cocktail hours:

• Our favorite: lightly tossed with olive oil and sea salt then unabashed amounts of brewer’s yeast (as in the photo).
• Kettle corn: when you want something sweet and salty, this is a breeze.
• Peanut butter popcorn: this recipe yields tender kernels lightly coated with peanut butter that adults love, too.
• Caramel popcorn: irresistible, but learn from my mistakes and hunt out any unpopped kernels before tossing with the caramel.

PS: We can’t live without our Whirley Pop stovetop popper. If you’re looking for a healthier substitute to microwave popcorn, this popper is fast and foolproof.

My dear friend Jane has always been an enthusiastic (if painstakingly slow) eater, but did not see herself as a cook, per se. Once she had a family and didn’t have her all-consuming dot.com job, she applied herself the same way I witnessed her approach graduate school. This time, her course of study involved subscribing to one of the first Seattle CSAs, recipe researching and trying new things–all in the name of making yummy and good-for-you meals.

Jane doesn’t do fussy, but her meals are as personal as her signature fashion sense. She loves comfort foods, like stew and pot roast and will serve them with crudites in place of a salad. She strives for “healthy” without being earnest, and she makes sweet potato oven fries. I think that they strike that balance between scrumptious and nutritious as perfectly as middle “C.”

I’ve been playing around a fair amount with my own sweet potato oven fries to get them crisper. Mind you, they will never have the crunchy shell with fluffy interior of russets even when deep-fried. Sweet potatoes have too much moisture and too little starch for that.

Besides, why should we try to make anything something it’s not? Sweet potatoes have their own great qualities–their striking color, their ability to turn melting inside a crispy skin, their compatability with a host of flavors and ability to go from dessert to appetizer and back again.

If you slick the pan with oil, give each wedge enough breathing room and blast them with heat (425 degrees F is just about right), their sugars will brown to sweet crispness and become irresistible for munching right off the pan. Finger food at its finest, either as a side dish or for serving with this peanut dipping sauce.

Peanut Dipping Sauce

Makes 1/2 cup

2 tablespoons organic peanut butter
1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon fresh lime juice
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon ketchup
1/2 teaspoon sriracha*, plus more to taste
pinch sugar
freshly ground black pepper

1. Combine the peanut butter, lime juice, soy sauce and ketchup with 1/4 cup water in a small saucepan. Bring to a simmer over low heat and whisk until combined.
2. Remove from the heat and add the sugar and pepper. Taste and add more sriracha to taste. On its own, the sauce will taste very tangy, but blend nicely with the sweet potato.

–Adapted from Home-Grown Harvest

*Sriracha is my stand in, lazy cook’s substitute whenever I read “1/2 red chile” in a recipe. I’m tempted to get the cookbook devoted to this red, all-purpose “Rooster Sauce.”

The Mom’s Network of Walla Walla invited me to talk about Family Meal Time, their initiative to re-prioritize dining together as a family. Last Saturday, I met a wonderful and inspiring group of women, had terrific support from Wine Country Culinary Institute and cooked with grassfed beef (from shaggy Highland cattle) from the Lostine Cattle Company.

Two nights after I returned from Walla Walla, I faced a full-fledged rebellion in my own kitchen. Both girls arrived at the table and before sitting down, rained complaints all over the dinner and me. Admittedly, I didn’t have it entirely together, but I’d made something different for each of them, something I thought they’d like (broccoli with cheese sauce for Cece and beet salad for Molly; squash soup for Benjamin and me).

The food was really beside the point. No matter what I serve, I don’t think it calls for shouted complaints and threats to never eat dinner again.

So, I left the girls to their shared unhappiness and with Benjamin and escaped the yelling frenzy. I went for an evening stroll around the neighborhood. Daylight savings made it nice and light and the air was pleasantly mild. No dogs even barked at me, and I cleared my head.

I thought about what I’d said to the Mom’s Network group: Dinner is hard. For everyone. Maybe it’s okay  just to accept that it’s hard.

I wish I’d taken it one step further to point out that it’s the most important things are the most challenging. Feeding those we love, including ourselves, day in day out is one of the most important things we do. Culturally, we want to push dinnertime aside to make time for all the other activities and priorities. We pine for 15- and 30-minute dinners. I am right there with speed and ease, but I do not want to sacrifice pleasure, or the few moments a day when we gather, all four of us, around the table. What, really, no matter what we’re eating, is more important than that?

Inspired by the women in Walla Walla, I decided to run a new series here on Rural Eating called Dinner 911. It’s the go-to meal when you don’t have a plan or your plans didn’t work out and you’ve worked late or are otherwise too distracted, frazzled or pre-occupied (maybe in a good way) to think.

My first suggestion is the rice bowl–simply prepared vegetables over a bed of steamed rice. Here’s what I love about it:

• jasmine rice steams in 20 minutes
• any type or quantity of vegetable you have on hand gets called in for duty
• use them raw (have the kids help peel carrots, cut zucchini, etc.), or
• quickly stir fry with garlic or soy sauce or toss with sesame oil and salt
• everyone gets to pick only what they like
• perfect for leftovers of salmon, beef, chicken or pork
• kids add soy sauce, sesame oil and sesame seeds to taste; adults add hot sauce

Dinner 911 doesn’t depend on a recipe. It’s a concrete concept to adapt to your time frame, state of mind and the contents of your fridge. I’ll include links to recipes wherever useful. In the case of this vegetarian bibimbap in the photo, I followed instructions for preparing the carrots, bean sprouts and zucchini from recipes here and here.

What’s your Dinner 911?