I may be able to cook and type again, but that doesn’t mean my head is entirely back in the game. Case in point: Santa Maria has been doing the marketing from our ongoing shopping list, but I haven’t been doing the planning. She’s bought things we’ve run out of, not things we need. So yesterday, I was faced with the task of making dinner without any fresh protein.

Luckily, I had some frozen bay scallops on hand, and I knew they could be the centerpiece of a meal. The scallops were from Henry & Lisa’s, and they’re not bad. They’re nothing like fresh bay scallops, of course, but fresh bay scallops are hardly available anymore. These scallops came from Argentina, according to the stamp on the bag. In the eighties, as a student, I worked in a retail fish market for years, and back then you could eat them raw out of the case like they were penny candy. That’s how sweet they were. Henry and Lisa’s work just fine, although I throw out the Japanese glaze that comes with the package.

I first thought of pairing the scallops with frozen peas and some rice, but that was way too boring. I had a bag of spinach on hand and figured I could combine that with some garlic and pasta and have a, more or less, one-pot meal.

• 18 0z frozen scallops
• 3 cloves garlic, sliced
• 1 shake of crushed red peppers (or to taste)
• olive oil
• linguine, or other long pasta

Boil the water for the pasta. Salt the water. Cook the pasta.
Heat a large frying pan until it is smoking, add olive oil
toss in scallops so they are in one layer. do not move.
allow scallops to cook almost all the way through on one side to assure a carmelized edge
toss scallops with a spatula to complete their cooking
Remove to a bowl.
saute  garlic in the same frying pan
add pepper
add spinach
cook until it wilts (add some pasta water if need be)

by this time the pasta should be finished. Drain and toss with spinach and the cooked scallops.

Enjoy

After breaking a bone in my hand last month (a long story better told at another time), I’ve healed enough to start cooking again. And, more importantly, typing again.

What a relief. The past few weeks have been very hard on my devoted spouse Santa Maria, though they’ve been good for the coffers of Fresh Direct, one of the greatest innovations of the past half century. Also, I could not have made it through without the very considerate and thoughtful assistance of my brother Tom, who came over on a number of occasions to chop vegetables and otherwise fill in for me in the kitchen.

When Tom wasn’t around, Santa Maria bravely stepped into the breach and handled much of the cooking. It wasn’t a task she reveled, to say the least. The roast chicken we (she) made the other night really freaked her out.

These are just a few of the books I’ve found extremely useful. For some reason (could it be the lack of sleep? or a lack of natural intelligence?), I almost always have to consult the recipe for a given dish no matter how many times I’ve made it.

It’s not that I don’t remember how to make the dish, it’s that I’ll forget some key detail, some particular measurement or the like. At least I know that I don’t know.

Which is why I love these books. That said, many of the recipes are marked in the margins to change them to my tastes. I expect you will do the same recipes you read about, in these books or on this site.

• Mark Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything.” I’ve yet to get the revised version, which came out in October of 2008, but I might need to do so soon. My current version is falling apart from use.
• “Food and Wine Magazine’s 2001 Cookbook.” It was a wedding present. Some of the recipes are more complicated than I like, but others are beyond fantastic.
• “Joy of Cooking.” If only for the recipe for pancakes. If you’ve never had them immediately off the grill, you don’t know what you are missing. I cook them one serving at a time.
• “Tasty: Get Great Food on the Table Everyday,” by Roy Finamore, gives solid advice about living up to its title.
• “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking,” by Marcella Hazan. Seems like every guy who likes to cook swears by this volume. A classic.

I use other cookbooks, and when I have more time I’ll include them here. My other source for recipes is the New York Times dining section. They should publish a book. Who knows, maybe they have already.

I worked late on Tuesday night, and I hadn’t prepared anything to eat for dinner. Santa Maria satisfied herself with a grilled cheese and tomato before I came home. She offered to make one for me, too, but that would never have been enough for me. So I looked in the refrigerator to see what I could come up with. We had yet to shop for the week, and there was little to chose from. I spotted some leftover cooked spaghetti and wondered what might make it tasty. I turned to the freezer, where I found some D’Artagnan chicken sausages with truffles (always a sure bet) and some frozen peas. There, I had it. Not a meal for the ages, but one that met my basic criteria of a protein, a starch, and a vegetable.

I defrosted two sausages under running tap water, sliced them into nickels and set them to saute with a bit of garlic. I par cooked the peas, and tossed them into the frying pan along with the cold spaghetti. I added olive oil and some pine nuts as an afterthought. Dinner was done in about ten minutes. And it wasn’t too bad. In fact, Santa Maria coveted it—those are her hands in the picture sampling the dish.

I don’t sleep well if I don’t have a freezer full of Bolognese sauce. Yesterday I ate the last frozen container of it, so this morning I got up and made a new batch. I’m going to my brother’s wedding over the weekend and I know I won’t have time to cook. When we return on Sunday night, we might very well want to have Bolognese for dinner. Certainly we will sometime later that week. With the wedding approaching, we have a lot to do. This morning was no exception. I can’t really telll you what we have to do, but it feels like a lot. Shine our shoes? Pick out the right tie? Oh, get all the clothes ready for the kids. I forgot about that. In any event, I didn’t have long to make the Bolognese this morning. Fortunately, it doesn’t take long to make (that is, if you don’t count the three hours or so it takes to cook down). One of the things that makes it easy, is the hand-held immersion blender we have. It was a gift of my father-in-law a few years ago. I can puree three cans of peeled plum tomatoes in seconds. The sauce only took about a half hour of active labor. The quinoa salad my wife wanted was another story. I didn’t manage to finish that before I had to run out the door for work. And I can’t manage to give the recipe for the quinoa salad right now as I have to run out the door to get home. I hope I sleep well tonight.

I didn’t do any cooking today. I did a bunch of defrosting. Santa Maria was working all day (she had a documentary shoot) and I had responsibility for the kids. I took them to the daycare in my building. On my own. On the subway. There was no time for me to cook anything. I wasn’t concerned, though. In the freezer I had chicken soup and bolognese. The soup became their lunch. The bolognese their dinner (mostly because I knew that I could eat it too, and I like it more than chicken soup).

The day went well. We had good subway karma. The elevators worked where they were supposed to and the trains weren’t all that slow or crowded. No one melted down until we were almost home, when we got out of the train at Pacific Street for the twenty minute walk (it’s the the only station near our house with an elevator). Nina wanted pizza. The last three times I took the kids to the daycare we capped the day with pizza out. Those nights Santa Maria was with us, though. Tonight I was on my own, and I felt like they’d eat better and it would be easier on me to give them bolognese at home.

Nina did not agree, and she let me know. She howled and cried and squirmed the whole way home from the subway, even though we stopped at a local toy store, LuLu’s, for helium balloons. Oh, I forgot to mention that Nina didn’t really eat much chicken soup and she refused a snack on the way home. She was very upset that we weren’t having pizza.

As temper tantrums go, I would only give it a three (the perfect ten in my mind goes to my nephew Michael, who when he was about Nina’s age was in the habit of throwing himself down on the ground and banging his head on it. Watching him do that on a Brooklyn sidewalk during a holiday visit was almost too much to bear. How many IQ points did each slam cost him?). But because Nina is not usually in the habit of throwing temper tantrums, I found it tough to bear. It was late and I realized that it would be easier to give them pizza, but there was no way that I could with her tossing such a fit.

We headed home. She screamed and cried up the four flights to our apartment. Pinta, her younger sister, got into the act. We had a symphony of tears. The pasta cooked quickly and the sauce was as delicious as usual. Santa Maria made it home in time to eat with us. I opened a new bottle of wine, one of my recent birthday gifts from her. We ended up having what I think of as a Sunday supper in the middle of the week. And the wine, a sublimely tasty Paravizzini Sogno di Casanova Nero  D’Avola, from 2005, certainly helped me defrost.

We buy most, if not all, of our groceries at the Park Slope Food Coop, one of the nation’s largest and oldest food coops. A few years ago, after much discussion (which, at the coop, is the norm), the coop started selling meat. Chicken, lamb, beef, rabbit, and other meats are now featured items. They come from as close as upstate New York, and as far away as New Zealand. Most of the products they sell are clearly labeled. Where they come from is never as much a question as what to do with them (I have yet to try the buffalo). Finding out where your meat and produce comes from at other stores, though, can be a challenge. This should change on September 30th. That’s the date supermarkets and other large retailers will have to start telling you where much of what they sell comes from. Today’s Wall Street Journal has the details.

Yesterday’s Parade magazine had an insightful article by Leslie Bennetts on the state of marriage in the U. S. The magazine surveyed more than a thousand married Americans, and among the holy trinity of common disagreements—money, sex, and housework—I noticed an interesting result.

Many other surveys have shown money and sex to be the most common issues that couples fight about, and finances topped the list for our respondents as well, with 43% reporting that they squabble about money. Household chores and sex ranked second and third, respectively, as causes of contention.

More people argue about housework than sex. The full survey describes household chores as “dishes and garbage.” But what about cooking? I wondered what the results would be for families in which the dads prepared the food. So I did my own survey, of one couple. The results were very positive: arguments about chores diminished and disagreements about sex vanished. Now if only there was a way to get the same agreement on financial matters.