Multi-tasking

Dinner last night was the fortuitous result of the fact that I had a surfeit of sweet potatoes taking up room in my pantry and the fact that I'm starting to do some menu planning and recipe testing in advance of (ahem) Christmas dinner. (What can I say? I plan ahead.) J-P has specifically requested, and I quote, "a non-traditional sweet potato dish." More than happy to comply with this request and to banish any and all holiday dishes involving the use of mini-marshmallows, I thought about trying sweet potato pancakes.

So I did a little research and decided to experiment with a few different sweet potato pancake options. I started with about 2 pounds of sweet potatoes, peeled. One pound I shredded raw and mixed with grated onion, grated nutmeg, a little honey, salt, an egg, and flour. The other pound I boiled until just tender, then shredded, and added grated onion, salt, pepper, thyme, an egg, and flour. So I ended had two different mixes -- a sweet/raw mix, and a savory/cooked mix.

Then, because I'm trying to figure out how to do as much Christmas cooking in advance as is humanly possible, I formed a few patties from each of the two mixes and threw them in the freezer, to test whether I can freeze the mix first and cook it later. (All indications point to -- uh, no, this isn't going to work well at all. But we'll see when I cook the frozen patties up one of these days for breakfast.)

As for the rest, I formed them into golf-ish size balls and pan fried them in a little canola oil in a hot cast iron skillet, about 3 minutes per side, squishing them down with a spatula as they cooked. (At this point, the sweet/raw pancakes totally looked better -- they had more of that shredded-potato look, while the savory/cooked pancakes were just mushy.) After I had cooked and drained the lot on paper towels, I threw most of them in the freezer to see how they'll fare if I freeze them at this stage of the game and just reheat them day-of.

Of course, I kept one pancake of each variety out of the freezer -- after all, a girl needs to eat! I sauteed up some lacinato kale to go along with, and topped it all with a poached egg. I can't take credit for this combo -- it's really just a deconstructed knock-off of Jen's lovely dinner from the other night, minus the chick peas.

And Jen never steers me wrong -- the combo was wonderful. As I expected, I preferred the flavor of the sweet pancakes to the savory pancakes. But, though I expected to like the pancakes made from cooked potato better, I definitely preferred the pancakes made from raw potato. This here, this is why it pays to try things out in advance!

(Oh, and in case you're wondering, the raw/sweet ones are on the left in the picture at the top.)

Nashville restaurant round-up: premiere edition

Some more local restaurant news, and a few mini-reviews to boot.

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Eric and Katie over at Nashville Restaurants must get their info from the same place I do. First, we reported nearly simultaneously about the closing of Most Wanted Pizza and the opening of its replacement, Padthai Kitchen. Then, just as I was about to post about the closing of Veggie Cafe in East Nashville, they beat me to the punch. Rumor has it that a diner will be opening in that space, run by the folks from the Pied Piper Creamery. My questions about this so-called diner are two-fold. First, is it going to be a true greasy spoon, the kind that serves gravy cheese fries and breakfast at midnight, or will it be more of a "diner" (note the quotation marks) that serves higher-end spins on comfort food classics? I really hope it's the former, because there's nothing I love more than a good greasy spoon. Second, and this is perhaps the more important point, will it be open late? Because to qualify for true diner status, it's got to be open late. Midnight on weekends, and 10 on weekdays, at a bare minimum. (A 24 hour diner would be ideal, but methinks that's asking a little too much of Nashville.)

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I had the vaunted PM burger for lunch a week or so ago. This is the burger that the Nashville Scene named the best burger in Nashville. And it was good. Very very good. I ordered mine rare, and it came rare indeed. (And I am very picky about my burgers being cooked to order.) The exterior was brushed with a sweet glaze -- I guessed worcestershire or soy, it turns out it's a mix of Thai chili sauce and pineapple juice. I had mine with cheddar cheese and the complimentary lettuce, onion, and tomato, along with a smear of wasabi mayonnaise and a side of fries. The glaze was a nice touch, although there was a little too much of it for my taste -- I really want the taste of the burger itself to stand out. The wasabi mayo was a nice complement, giving a little zing to the whole production. And the fries that came with were hot, crispy, and salty. I'm not sure I would go so far as to say it's the best burger in Nashville -- I'm still partial to Rotier's grilled cheeseburger (not the one on French bread that everyone raves about), as well as the Edgefield's burger, bacon blue cheese or otherwise. I'd like to give both of those another spin before passing final judgment on the PM burger. (Also, for the record, I consider Fat Mo's one of Nashville's best, but that's more of a fast-food style burger, so I'm not going to compare it for these purposes.) Regardless though, the PM burger was very good, and hit the burger craving right in the kisser.

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Also this week, I had a work-related lunch at Sambuca. Previously, I had only been there for drinks, and the place seemed a little too much of a trendy scene for my taste -- the kind of place where the drinks are too weak for what you pay, and the food too blah for what you pay. And that may well be the case at dinner time, but the lunch menu features a soup-and-salad option as well as a soup-salad-half-sandwich option that give you lots of choices and quite a bang for your buck (at least as far as sit-down restaurants go). I had the shrimp and crab bisque (creamy and tasty, with lots of chunks of shellfish swimming around), the house salad (greens with tomatoes, feta, and cukes), and half of the chicken salad sandwich (big chunks of chicken, walnuts, and dried cherries, on toasty thick-sliced wheat). And with four salads, two soups, and five sandwiches to choose from, that adds up to lots of options.

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For dinner recently, I went back to Wave Sushi Bar at Batter'd & Fried. I think Batter'd and Fried is wise in focusing the sushi menu on speciality rolls. The nigiri pieces they offer are fine, but nothing special. (Excellent nigiri can be found just across the river at Ichiban.) But B&F does a great job with its rolls, with more than a dozen creative choices. We shared a platter of their five most popular rolls, and were quite pleased with the selection. I couldn't pick a favorite, but the Wasabi Crunchy Shrimp roll and the Wave roll were both fantastic. My only gripe with the sushi menu at B&F is that so many of their specialty rolls feature shrimp or crab -- for those allergic to crustaceans, such as J-P, that renders the menu pretty limited. But for local, affordable, roll-centric sushi, I'm thrilled that B&F is so close by.

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Also on the B&F front, I haven't heard anything recently about Matt Charette's new place in Riverside Village (in the same strip that currently houses Sip Cafe, Mitchell Delicatessen, and Castrillo's Pizza). I hope all is proceeding as planned, Matt, can't wait to try your latest!

Restaurant Intel: Most Wanted Pizza Out, Thai In

Until it closed recently, our favorite neighborhood pizza take-out was a place down by the stadium called Nashville's Most Wanted Pizza. The pizza was nothing to write home about -- it certainly didn't compare to even the most mediocre pizza available in New York or New Jersey, and yes, I am a huge pizza snob if you didn't realize it already -- but it was decent for Nashville.

More than the pizza though, J-P and I found ourselves going back again and again because of the owners, Zach and Donna Mann. The first time we stopped in we had just finished a long run and decided to reward (or possibly thwart?) our efforts with take-out. Our pie wasn't ready when we got there, so we grabbed a seat. Zach immediately offered us a beer -- gratis -- and struck up a conversation. He told us that they ran a pizza place in a little mountain town in Colorado but moved to Nashville because they had a kid in the music industry. They ran the place almost all by themselves, taking orders, cooking up pies, waiting on patrons, you name it. And they seemed to love it.

Late this summer, though, they decided to pack it in and move back to Colorado. The story is that they were heading back West because of family obligations, although I wonder if perhaps the business never took off quite like they had hoped. Needless to say, though, we were sad to see them go.

When they put the business on the market, a friend of ours suggested that this might be our big opportunity to pursue my pipe dream of bringing an honest-to-goodness New York-style pizzeria to Nashville. And J-P and I thought about it seriously for about five minutes before we decided that we are just too clueless when it comes to (a) running a restaurant and (b) running a small business to make such a crazy leap of faith. So we passed.

The place didn't stay on the market for long, though. The last time I drove by, the Most Wanted sign had been replaced, and it seems that East Nash will soon be graced by a Thai place with the moniker "Padthai Kitchen." Rumor has it that the new place will be open in the next week or two. I'll have a report as soon as I get there to try it out. But seeing as the number of Thai restaurants in the neighborhood currently stands at exactly zero, the opening of this new place can't possibly be a bad thing.

What I've been up to

So, I introduce a new wine feature with such excitement and vigor, and then disappear for two weeks.

And so it goes.

Here’s just a little of what I’ve been up to in that time. Most notably, my first ever canning experiment! Exciting! (I live in Nashville, people. THIS COUNTS AS EXCITING.) I had a bounty of pears from Nicole's tree and, with Sarah's help, turned them into pear butter. For the most part, I followed these instructions. Now I’m just crossing my fingers that everything worked the way it’s supposed to and we don’t all end up with botulism.


I also made Ina Garten's lemon bars to take to a debate watching party. These were tart and fabulous, although I made them with Ina’s original proportions (which results in a lemon bar that's about 2 part lemon to 1 part crust) rather than Deb's modified version (which results in a 1 to 1 lemon to crust ratio). Maybe I'll try Deb’s version next time. Also, a quick recipe note -- it calls for you to build a 1/2 inch edge of crust around the sides of the pan, but the filling runs over the top of this anyway. I wouldn't bother with the 1/2 inch edge of crust the next time.

But anyway, aren’t they pretty?



Then, for dinner one night over the weekend, I picked up a piece of halibut at Whole Foods. Now, halibut currently resides on The List, but I'm still trying to keep an open mind, especially since the halibut came on recommendation from Fishmonger Jeff. I coated the fish with ground up pecans and cooked it using a technique similar to the one Bittman recommended recently. First I seared the halibut, skin side down, in a skillet on the stove top, than transferred the whole thing to a hot oven to cook for another ten minutes or so. No flipping, no messing around with it. The pecans stayed intact and looked lovely, and the skin turned nice and crispy. Bittman, you've done it again! Kudos!


I served the halibut with some sauteed arugula and mashed red-skinned potatoes. But even though it looked great, my feeling about the halibut was just...eh. It was a little dry. Not overcooked, mind you, but just denser and meatier than I like. Maybe preparing some kind of pan sauce to go with it would help, or maybe it's just a personal taste kind of thing, and I should stick to lighter, flakier fish.

Finally, I took Luisa's stuffed tomato recipe out for a spin last week, on Molly's advice. These were so delicious that they somehow disappeared in the five seconds it took me to remember to grab my camera. But they’ll be back again, with photographic evidence.