There are certain dinners we make for ourselves that maybe shouldn’t be shared in public.
It’s one thing to share a recipe for a roast chicken, for example; everyone gets that, everyone wants that. But the next day, when that chicken’s cold and wrapped in aluminum foil in your refrigerator and you have a few stray carrots and some yogurt and some raisins and some eggs, and you make a dinner with those things? People may not want to hear about that. So if you’re one of those people, look away! Everyone else, here’s a dinner I made for myself last week.
First, I made a yogurt sauce by chopping two cloves of garlic and some preserved lemons I bought from Cookbook in Echo Park:
Then I added a big spoonful of Greek yogurt:
And thinned it out with lemon juice, seasoning with a little salt and pepper:
With the sauce made, I set about making a carrot salad. That was easy: I grated 3 or 4 large carrots on the big holes of a box grater. I put them in a bowl and then riffed on Dorie Greenspan’s mustard bottle vinaigrette, using an almost empty mustard bottle and adding honey, white balsamic, olive oil, a pinch of salt and pepper and shaking until it emulsified.
I poured that over the carrots, sprinkling with raisins and some Feta. That was my carrot salad.
Finally, after cutting the meat off the cold chicken carcass, I boiled two eggs because, earlier that day, I’d purchased Piment d’Espelette (a pricey, beloved, spicy red pepper from France) at Atwater Village Farm and wanted to give it a taste. I thought hard-boiled eggs would be the perfect vehicle, and they were!
So there you have it: a cold dinner of delectable foods that paired very nicely with chilled white wine.
Is it a dinner we’d invite people over for? Definitely not. It’s just the kind of dinner you eat alone (Craig was in Seattle) and enjoy without thinking too much about it.
