More on Sunday suppers

         

Smashed potatoes

   If you’ve followed my blogs at all, you know Sunday supper has been a big deal for me and my family for many years. It’s a time for the family to come together, share our week past and our hopes for the coming week. All over food, which I truly believe binds people together almost as much as prayer.

I’m also a fan of the almost daily email column from Sam Sifton, food editor at the New York Times. So I was delighted to find that Sifton has a new cookbook, out this week: See You on Sunday. Sifton believes, as I do, that people want a sense of belonging, and where better to find it than at the table. When people show up, he advises, feed them.

His book is a guide to preparing meals for a group larger than the average American family of four. (I used to feed about 15 on a Sunday night when my kids were in high school.) Pushing it on the TODAY show, Sifton fried chicken. The recipes seem chosen for the average cook, a refreshing change from a man whose recipes often call for dukkah, za’atar, harissa and houlamie. Certainly the table of contents is reassuringly familiar, with chapters on pasta and pizza, big meats, big pots, birds, and salads.

In the chapter on seafood, for instance, there are directions for roast fish, grilled fish, fish chowder, fish cakes, and so on. Your basics. A chapter on rice and beans offers discussions of white, brown, and wild rice, followed by a recipe for pilaf and then goes for the gold with paella. And red beans and rice, of course.

One of my weaknesses is that I copy or print recipes that sound wonderful but are so complicated that I know I’ll never fix them, cooking as I do on a hot plate and or in toaster oven. One such I recently found was for cabbage rolls stuffed not with beef and rice but with a chicken mixture and in a velvety cream sauce instead of the traditional red. I’m quite sure Sifton’s book doesn’t offer me those temptations.

But here’s what I did last Sunday night:

Salmon filet

1 lb. salmon

Olive oil

Minced parsley

Chopped garlic

Grated Parmesan

            Slather the filet with oil. Top with parsley, garlic, and cheese. Wrap in non-stick foil and bake at 400^o for 15 minutes. My family thought it underdone, and we put it back for another five minutes, but I like my salmon closer to underdone than overdone. With this I served smashed potatoes. The fish was delicious and the potatoes good but not as crisp as I’d like.



Smashed potatoes

12 small potatoes (new red potatoes work but I used Yukon gold, about the size of a golf ball)

1 Tbsp. olive oil

Salt and pepper

3 Tbsp. butter, melted

I have seen far more complicated directions, with herbs and a complex sauce, but I went for simplicity and am glad I did. Boil potatoes until you can put a fork through them, but they are still firm, not mushy. Grease a glass baking dish with the olive oil. Put the potatoes in the dish and use a potato masher to smash each one individually. Paint the potatoes with olive oil, using a pastry brush. Salt and pepper to taste and pour butter over them. Bake 40 minutes at 350^o.

I think too much butter prevented them from crisping up. My daughter put leftovers in a toaster oven, and they got crisp. You might try a higher temperature or a quick broil at the end of cooking time.

And here’s what I did with a tiny bit of leftover salmon: added one chopped green onion, about four slices cucumber, peeled and diced, juice of half a lemon, and enough mayonnaise to bind. Don’t make soup by adding too much mayo.

Happy Sunday dinner. Now I have to figure out what we’ll have this coming Sunday. Wish I already had Sifton’s book.