You know why I like
different seasons? Well, lots of reasons, but one of them is because different
seasons call for different food.
In the summer,
probably 80% of my evening meals are salads of one sort or another. Spinach,
Niçoise, Greek… That’s one of the reasons why I’ve got an entire cupboard shelf
of vinegars
and oils.
This year I added grilled
asparagus and steak salad, with mango on a bed of cress and a hoisin
vinaigrette, courtesy of Danger
Girl. Dear God, that sucker is wonderfully good, and because I live in
California, I’ve got access to some wonderful
produce. A couple of months ago, a farm market in Sunnyvale had the most
amazingly luscious mangos for $0.79 apiece.
You could smell their ripeness from across the parking lot.
(Okay, you can see
that I went a little wild with the mangos on this particular salad. But I admit
it—I’m a complete mango whore. I love them much more than is natural.)
But Autumn signals to
me that it’s time to make cottage pie.
You can stuff your
meatloaf—even if you put anchovies in it, or ground veal or whatever. And don’t
even get me started on mac and cheese—the very thought of it makes me gag. (And
that’s not hyperbole.)
No—my comfort food is
cottage pie. That’s shepherd’s pie, only with ground beef instead of ground
lamb, which is hard to come by in the Valley they call Silicon. And expensive
when you do.
Cottage pie has the
ground meat (or “mince”, as they call it in the UK), sautéed onion, carrots and
peas; and it’s topped off by a nice layer of mashed potatoes. All your
cold-weather go-tos in a single dish. You bake it until the potatoes are all
crispy-brown at the edges, and then break through the crust with your fork to
let all the steamy goodness out.
Just don’t try to eat
it too fast, because you’ll burn your tongue. Every time. Just like I do.
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