Saturday: lots of stuff

After a while without a real cooking day, yesterday somehow turned into one.

Lunch was sauteed gnocchi with garlic and dried chilis

Dinner was from the grill: grill bread (from Let the Flames Begin. As an experiment I skipped the olive oil in the dough. Probably it's better to leave the olive oil in), grilled long green peppers and spring onions (grilled and then chopped and tossed with olive oil and a tiny bit of cider vinegar), and steak (salted, peppered, and grilled). We also had a big green salad.

Our favorite fruit stand at the market had strawberries, so we needed to eat some of those as well. To go with them I picked up some rhubarb; from there it was just a matter of decided what to do. I was tempted to do a pie, but decided in the end that it was too much work, plus pies are somehow stressful. Andrea suggested shortcakes, but we just had those and I was worried we didn't have enough flour. Another thought was to repeat the gotterspeise recipe from Le Menu that was so good last year, but that would have required another trip to the store for zwieback. Finally I went with a hybrid. I made a modified version of the rhubarb compote from the gotterspeise recipe (500g rhubarb, 100g sugar, juice of one and half limes) and a batch of vanilla sauce from Bittman (2c milk, 4 egg yolks, 1/2c sugar, 1 vanilla bean). To serve I layered sliced strawberries, rhubarb, and the creme anglaise in glasses. Really nice combination of flavors.

Along the way I also did a batch of chicken stock and prepared (though we didn't eat yet) a bunch of white asparagus, probably the last of the season.