From Rio to Rhode Island: A Crazy, Mixed Up Meal

Brazilian Cobb Salad (a la Whole Foods)

I lifted the better part of this recipes from the Whole Foods website (the original recipe is here.) My version is more or less the same, except that I didn't bother to write anything down before I went to the market, so I forgot that they include corn (which would have been good) and green pepper (which I was happy to do without.) I also couldn't for the life of me remember what they dressed the salad with, so instead of their weird, acid-less mechanical emulsion I used a very toothsome green goddess (my wife's favorite dressing, and a vehicle for the herb that James Beard said would allow him to eat human flesh--tarragon).

I really don't like to use mesclun as the base for composed salads, preferring a more uniform canvas of greens. Hence, the butter lettuce.

Finally, the Berkeley Bowl has ridiculously expensive fresh, fair trade Costa Rican hearts of palm that I used. Survey says: XXX. Don't do it. Go with the canned. The pasteurization of the canned product seems to tame some of the wildness of the fresh article. I ate a lot of palm hearts when I was in Argentina, although I can't be certain whether they came from a can. The texture of the fresh was crunchy and vibrant, more enjoyable than the squeeky, rubbery tooth-feel of the canned. But the $10 per pound sticker shock and the over-the-top fungal flavor of the fresh left me with a can-do attitude.

For the green goddess dressing:
3 cloves garlic, smashed and hacked into random pieces
1/4 C. fresh tarragon, picked clean of stems, packed
1 bunch fresh chives
1/2 C. sour cream
1/2 C. mayonnaise (make it from scratch, you lazy ass!)
1 to 1 1/2 limes, juiced and strained of seeds
salt and pepper to taste

In a food processor, pulse the garlic and herbs until they are chopped fine. Add the sour cream and mayonnaise and pulse to combine. Add the lime juice a little at a time, tasting for sharpness and pourable, dressing-y consistency. The finished product should have a fair amount of tang (especially on butter lettuce, which is very mild and smooth.) Add more juice if needs be. If you have enough acid but need a looser dressing, add a teaspoon or so of water. Correct the dressing's seasoning with salt and pepper. Refrigerate until ready to use.

Note: You are to be praised if you make this dressing by hand, but I am old and lazy, and I have people to wash the food processor. Note, though, that not all dressings agree with mechanization: Anything that contains extra virgin olive oil should be mixed only by hand, and then gently, lest the oil taste bitter. But for this one, the processor is fine--though a knife works as well. Chop and chop and chop the garlic and herbs together until nothing is recognizable. Mix the rest by hand with a spoon.

For the salad:
2 head butter lettuce, well washed and dried, torn in to bite-sized pieces
1/2 large sweet red onion, chopped
1 small can black beans, drained and well rinsed
1 large avocado, diced
1 medium red bell pepper, stemmed, seeded and chopped
2 ribs celery, chopped
1 can (or package of fresh, God Help you) hearts of palm, cut into coins
Roasted, salted cashews (as many as you can manage to not eat before serving)

Wash lettuce well in a couple change of cool water and dry thoroughly in a salad spinner. (No, there is no substitute for a salad spinner. It is an absolutely essentially kitchen tool. If you lose your salad spinner in a nuclear attack or other holocaust, you can put your washed lettuce in a pillow case, stand in the middle of the street, and spin the sack around your head like a maniac until you fall down. It doesn't work as well, but it's better than nothing.)

Toss the lettuce generously with the dressing. Mound in bowls. Arrange the remaining ingredients (apart from the cashews and limes) in neat, discrete radials atop the greens. Sprinkle cashews around. Throw on some lime sections.

Everybody samba! Feels like Carnaval, no? Well, I mean, without the giant pantomime heads, anonymous sex, and tremendous risk to life and limb. Afterwards you can give something up for Lent and listen to "The Girl from Ipanema."



Cherrystones Gratinéed with Bacon

1 dozen cherrystone clams, rinsed in cool water just before preparation
1 pint chopped surf clams (optional: see below)
4 rashers of good-quality bacon (I used the applewood-smoked product from Hobbs), blanched and chopped into 1/4" dice
3 garlic cloves, minced fine
1/2 yellow onion, minced fine
1 rib celery, minced fine
1/4 C. heavy cream
salt and pepper
1 box of coarse rock salt (If you want to do things right)
Fresh bread crumbs
Italian parsley, chopped
Lemon wedges

Preheat the oven to 500º F.

Note the direction to blanch your bacon. This is important. If you fry the back without dunking it into boiling water, the smoke flavor in the finished dish will be very, very strong. The boiling takes it down a notch. As an alternative, you can use pancetta, which is unsmoked, or salt pork, which needs to be blanched as well but adds no smoke whatsoever to the dish. To blanch the bacon, just dip the whole rashers in boiling water for a few moments and rinse. Allow to cool and then dice as normal.

Just before you steam open the clams, rise them well under cold water. You can scrub them with a brush if you need to to remove sand. Don't do this much in advance, though. The fresh water will hasten the bivalves' demise, but it won't hasten it faster than a bath of boiling water. Rinsing just before steaming is ideal. Place you clams in a skillet or sautée pan with just a few tablespoons of water: enough to get the steam going but not enough to make the clam juice weak and diluted. Cover the pan and place over high heat. Depending on the tenacity with which your clams cling to life, it may take five or ten minuted for them to give up the ghost and loll open. When this happens, remove from the heat. Remove the clams from the pan to a clean colander and allow to cool. Return the clam juice to the heat and reduce by half (you should end up with about 1/4 to 1/2 cup). Set juice aside.

When the clam are cool to the touch, pull the meat from the shells. It should still be undercooked. Chop coarsely. Now comes a tough decision:

Cherrystones (a name that refers to a size of quahog or hard shell clam (Mercenaria mercenaria)) are 1.) not especially popular on the West Coast, 2.) as heavy as rocks, and 3.) pretty poor in meat-shell-ratio. Add these three things together, and this dish is pretty pricey if you use only live clams to prepare it. The live clams that are farmed on the West coast, the manila clam (Venerupis japonica), are so small that they turn this dish into a horrifying and tedious chore unless you find some REALLY big specimens. But raw, frozen chopped clam meat (coming from quahogs similar to the ones you've bought fresh, though a bit bigger, from a size grade called "chowders") that can meander out here in freezer truck is much cheaper way of getting the most for your hard-earned clams (ha, ha, ha!)

If you want combine fresh and frozen clams, separate the shell and reserve both halves. Then, add a pint of raw, chopped East Coast surf clams to the meat you steamed out of the shell. Once you prepare your bacon-y. creamy aromatic and mix them with the clams, you'll have enough mixture to fall both halves of the shells. If you use only live clams, reserve only one half of each shell.

In a small pan, cook your diced bacon over medium-low heat until it is thoroughly rendered and crisp. Drain away some of the bacon dripping and add the garlic, onion, and celery. Cook until the onion softens and turns translucent. Keep the heat low and keep things moving; you don't want to burn the garlic. Add the reserved clam juice and cream. Increase heat and reduce until thick. Taste the mixture. It will probably need no seasoning; the bacon and clam juice should provide ample savor. But correct the seasoning if you need to. Fold the clam meat into this mixture.

Rock salt? Well, yes, it's an idiotic expense just for a baking substrate. If you bake clams and oysters a lot, you can save and reuse your rock salt a number of times, which makes it less silly to use. Or you can save it and use it to deice your driveway, if you live somewhere cold. If you're clever, you can come up with something else that might work: The beans or pie weights you use to bake pie shells blind come to mind, and pennies might do the job if you have a lot of them laying around. Rice? The one thing that you'll probably regret is just laying the clams on a cookie sheet and hoping for the best. Salt, in the end, looks right. And it's just $4 a box, you cheapskate! Place a generous layer of the rock salt in a charismatic baking dish (I'm hot for the terra cotta ware you can pick up from The Spanish Table, but anything big enough will work.)

Arrange your clams in the salt (no, don't let the salt fall into the clam shells.) Carefully spoon the clam, bacon, and cream mixture into each shell. Use it all up if you can. Devour what you can't, sloppily and with your fingers, when no one is looking. Top each clam with a pinch of bread crumbs. Set into a hot oven until the cream mixture is bubbling and the bread crumbs are brown. (Your mileage may vary. This is a screaming-hot over, after all, and your margin of error between tasty clams and mollusan charcoal will be slim. Keep an eye on your clams, and be sure to pull the things if there is any sign of burning.)

Sprinkle the clams with the parsley. Serve right in the baking dish (remind your guests of the dangerous heat if you like them at all.) Pass lemon wedges (we actually used limes because they were already out--we were drinking mojitos!)