Despite the fact that my husband adores gumbo and orders it frequently in restaurants, I had never made it myself until yesterday. I can’t imagine what I was waiting for.

I followed three different recipes simultaneously, all from James Villas’ Glory of Southern Cooking, a used copy of which we recently acquired. He includes one seafood gumbo thickened with roux and okra, one with boiled chicken, sausage, roux and file powder, and another with seared chicken and some remarkably overcooked seafood but no roux at all. I wanted to include chicken, andouille sausage and prawns, and I had okra but no file powder, so I sort of combined them all.

First of all, I fried chopped bacon and sliced raw andouille sausage together, then scooped them out into a bowl, leaving the spicy fat behind. Then I fried pieces of boneless chicken thigh meat in the pork fat, taking it out when just cooked through. When the chicken was cooled enough, I shredded it and put it aside with the bacon and sausage. Then I added a quarter cup of white flour to the fat to make a roux, and cooked that for a while on low heat. Chopped onion, celery and bell pepper were mixed into the roux, then a bag of frozen okra. After all that had cooked for a bit, I put in chopped parsley (and a few celery leaves, since I had them), dried thyme, a bay leaf, a quart of chicken stock, and two cans of tomatoes. I let that simmer for about an hour, then put the meaty bits back into the pot. After another 30-45 minutes, we put on rice to cook, then added a pound of raw peeled shrimp to the gumbo and let it simmer quietly until the rice was done. I served the gumbo ladled over heaps of hot rice.

It tasted exactly like gumbo, and a really, really good one, too. This may have just taken up permanent residence in our cooking repertoire.

When you buy squid or shrimp in the grocery store around here (even at the fish market), it’s usually bagged frozen stuff that the shop has just thawed that day. This is why we usually buy big bags of it ourselves, so we can thaw it out in small quantities as we want it. We never have any lack of ideas for the shrimp, but somehow the squid wasn’t getting used very quickly. I spent some time hunting out recipes for pre-cut rings and tentacles, especially Chinese, which I thought would be particularly well-suited. I found surprisingly few Chinese recipes for squid, but lots for clams, and it occurred to me that if clams in black bean sauce was such a fixture, why not squid in black bean sauce? Why not on noodles? And a dinner concept was born.

So far I’ve been making it up as I go along each time, but maybe at some point I’ll settle on a particular recipe – or maybe not. I tend to cook by the “spoonful of this, spoonful of that” method in any case. If you have squid in the house, and you can remember to thaw it in time, this is a fantastic, blazingly-fast weeknight dinner – certainly no more than half an hour from start to finish, if you prep while the noodles are cooking. And you could use considerably less chile than I do, if you don’t happen to like having your sinuses cleared by your dinner. But what I really love is the contrast of texture between the squid and the noodles, and the saltiness of the black beans. Everything else is flexible.

The way I’m doing this at the moment (subject to change as I experiment, but this is way tasty): first I cook and drain the noodles – we’re really liking udon with this, but any kind of slithery noodle would work – and toss them in a large bowl with some of the sludge from our homemade hot chile oil and a splash of soy sauce. Then I get all my condiments, squid and vegetables ready to go, as none of this takes any time at all to cook. I heat peanut oil in the wok, and toss in chopped garlic and scallions. As those sizzle, I add a spoonful of chile-garlic sauce and a spoonful of fermented black beans. Then I add the squid and start stir-frying briskly, adding a splash of rice wine. As soon as the squid turns opaque (perhaps a minute), I turn it out into the bowl of noodles. Then I put the wok back over the heat and toss in a bunch of chopped greens, like bok choi or beet greens, and stirfry with a bit of soy sauce until wilted, then scrape those into the noodles as well. Serve hot. Slurp.

As I mentioned over on my Facebook page, I’ve been feeling a bit uninspired lately. This is mainly due to the fact that we’re trying to lose a bit of weight – eating lots of vegetables, avoiding starch and alcohol, and getting more serious about running (we’re looking at another 5K in April, then our first 8K in May). We’re eating simple preparations of food for the most part: roasted vegetables, sauteed greens, lean protein, fizzy water and tea. Not much to talk about, really.

But yesterday was Brigid, also known as Imbolc, and we always have a little private celebration to observe the return of the light and what tends to feel much more like the start of a new year than “normal” New Year. I wanted a dinner that was light, non-starchy, but a little fancy and evocative of spring, and I found one in Nigella Lawson’s new book (I love Nigella, reading her is like eating potato chips for me). It’s a very simple supper for two consisting of pan-seared sea scallops and a puree of peas flavored with creme fraiche and Thai green curry paste (a take-off of British mushy peas, I assume). I added a side of roasted asparagus, which was perfect with the other flavors, and opened a bottle of rich, buttery California chardonnay.

The peas turned out really, really well – the texture was silky, and the curry paste came through very lightly, with the occasional hit of lemongrass or hot chile. If we make it again, we’ll either leave out the creme fraiche or go much lighter on it, as it was richer than it needed to be, I think. And apart from the creme fraiche, it’s an incredibly quick pantry meal – frozen peas, jarred curry paste? Easy. It could also easily be mixed with a little broth and served as a soup, or as a sauce over white fish.

The scallops were also lovely, and very simple – I mixed a little butter and oil in a pan, seared the scallops  until barely done, then deglazed the pan with lime juice and poured the resulting lime butter over the scallops, dusting them with a bit of chopped cilantro. I’ve never tried this flavor approach with scallops before, but it was fantastic. I’m definitely doing this one again.

We lit all the candles in the house, turned on the fire, and felt that spring might be here soon.

Peas with Thai Curry

From Nigella Kitchen: Recipes from the Heart of the Home by Nigella Lawson

• 1 lb frozen peas
• 1/3 cup creme fraiche or sour cream
• 1-2 Tbsp Thai green curry paste, or to taste
• salt

Cook the peas in boiling salted water until done. Put them in a blender with the other ingredients and puree until smooth. Taste for seasoning, adjust as necessary. Serve warm.

This was dinner last night: Chilean sea bass* in a sour orange beurre blanc, potatoes and sweet potatoes roasted in olive oil, and sauteed cabbage. The cabbage was actually a slaw left over from our shrimp tacos the previous night, marinated in lime juice and serrano chiles, but tossed in a hot wok it was really delicious, especially with the beurre blanc.

This was my first time making beurre blanc, and I didn’t even realize that’s what I was doing until I was halfway through it. I was following a recipe in Moro East and wasn’t quite sure if it was working correctly, so I referred to James Peterson’s Sauces and saw that I was basically approaching it the right way, just with some unusual seasonings. The recipe uses Seville oranges, but allows substituting a mix of lemon and orange juice if you can’t get them. I combined the juices in a small pan, added a bay leaf, some thyme, finely grated orange zest and a sprinkle of cinnamon, heated it all to a simmer, and whisked in an improbable amount of butter. The sauce wasn’t particularly thick, but it didn’t break, and it had a wonderful tart orange flavor that went gorgeously with the fish and cabbage and sweet potatoes. Not an every day sort of sauce, but nice to know how to do.

*Yes, I realize Chilean sea bass is not the best choice, as it’s been red-listed by sustainable seafood advocates. I have bought it maybe twice in my life, both times from a local family-owned fish market that primarily sells only their own catch. But the Moro recipe specifically called for sea bass and I wanted to see what it was like (and it was, in fact, wonderful). As Rob DeBorde says in Fish on a First-Name Basis, “if the darn thing didn’t taste so good, we wouldn’t have to fret over eating it. Stupid fish.”

I would probably never have thought of making this if it weren’t for the “Tom’s Big Breakfast” at Lola in Seattle. A happy plateful of eggs, potatoes, peppers and octopus, I found it surprisingly delicious. So when we left Gretchen’s the other night with a container of leftover boiled potatoes and steamed baby octopus, I knew that we were going to have octopus hash for breakfast.

Since the leftovers were all cooked, all I needed to do was roughly chop the potatoes and toss them into a nonstick pan with a little butter and oil, letting them get good and crusty, then stir in the chopped octopus near the end to heat through. With fried eggs on top and a dab of mayonnaise mixed with habañero sauce, the result was extremely good. And very filling.

We gave the octopus heads to the cats. They all thought we were trying to poison them except Mickey, who scarfed everything we gave him. He has excellent taste.

So when we were at The Swinery the other day we just couldn’t resist buying a piece of dry chorizo. There was no question as to what we would do with it – Portuguese clams and sausage!

I had a little trouble finding a recipe for clams and chorizo, to my surprise – it’s a fairly common restaurant dish, but it wasn’t in any of my Portuguese or Spanish cookbooks. When I did finally find one (in Bruce Aidells’ Book of Pork) I ended up mostly ignoring it, but I did follow his general idea. I chopped some garlic and sauteed it in olive oil, then added the diced chorizo. I cut up a rather spicy little pepper that I picked from one of my plants and tossed that in along with a good handful of fresh tomatoes (mostly Stupice, with a few Sungold and Sweet Million). Some chopped parsley and a sprig of thyme, also from my garden, then a half glass of white wine and some chicken stock to make a nice broth.

When all that had come to a good sprightly bubble, I put in the clams and let them open, stirring gently to make sure they all came in contact with the other flavors. It was particularly charming how the clamshells collected little piles of sausage and pepper and tiny tomatoes. With a few pieces of Breadfarm potato bread to soak up the broth and a glass of chilled Verdejo, this was a dinner I’d be delighted to eat in any restaurant.

Blessed with an abundance of fresh dill from Blue Heron Farm and huge prawns from the local fish market, I finally gave in and made Ina Garten’s shrimp salad. I used the excuse that I was making it for a food photo contest, but I wasn’t all that happy with my photos of the finished dish. Nevertheless, we cheerfully ate it all (to hide the evidence, don’t you know).

I suppose this might have worked better with smaller shrimp. The ones we used were awfully big, and although they tasted fabulous, the shrimp-to-dressing ratio was a bit off. And because we ate the salad stuffed into pita bread, we couldn’t fit very many shrimp into each sandwich and the chunks kept falling out. Ah, well. Life is hard.

The salad, I should mention, is super easy to make (you can find the recipe in Ina Garten’s book Parties!, or over at Leite’s Culinaria). You poach the shrimp briefly in lemon water, then chill it and mix it with mayonnaise, mustard, dill, vinegar and diced red onion and celery. She suggests taking it on picnics, but it’s not a bad thing to have waiting in the fridge on a hot summer afternoon, when you just want to snag a cold bite of something to tide you over until dinner. Assuming you have leftovers.

We discovered that we can get big bags of frozen pre-cleaned squid rings and tentacles at the local fish market, and are preparing to embark on some serious experimentation with it. I know how to clean a squid in theory, but I’d really rather not, so this stuff is great. The one thing I’ve cooked with it so far, based on a recipe in James Peterson’s Fish & Shellfish, was incredibly simple and very, very successful: I sauteed chopped garlic and red pepper flakes in olive oil, added the squid and sauteed for 1 minute, then added chopped parsley and cooked another 30 seconds or so, then scraped it all out onto a pile of Israeli couscous with some roasted asparagus on the side. The ultimate fast dinner, and tasty too.

Any suggestions for our next foray into squid cookery?

The theme for Casey Schanen and Tom Saunderson’s class at Gretchen’s last week was ostensibly Seafood with Wine Pairings. If you ask me, the real theme was Butter.

This was some of our mise en place – see that pile of butter pats on the plate? We used most of that over the course of the evening.

We put together an appetizer plate for the guests so they’d have something to nibble on right away. There were fresh radishes and turnips, Nell Thorn bread and rosemary crackers, all being dunked into an amazing dip of butter whipped with green olives. Yes, it looks like guacamole – but it ain’t. Caution is advised, as this stuff is addictive.

The first course was a seared scallop on a bed of sauteed endive and turnip greens, glazed with a mixture of butter and chestnut honey and topped with parmesan curls. Chestnut honey has an assertive flavor, and it worked surprisingly well here.

Next up was a piece of seared and baked halibut, served with fluffy spinach gnocchi topped with asparagus and leeks. Wait, was there no butter on this? There probably was. [Update: There was not butter. But there was cream. - ed.]

Then came salmon. Each piece was topped with a chunk of butter and baked, so the butter sank down into the fish.

The pieces were served with a saute of thinly sliced radishes and turnips and fresh peas, along with delicate ravioli stuffed with fresh peas and feta. A lemon beurre blanc went over the top. I was full when this plate was served, but it was far too wonderful to pass up.

All this great buttery stuff was paired with wine brought by Tom, all produced in coastal areas. They were excellent, and went so well with the food that I almost forgot to notice the wine.

I particularly loved the albariño, which was fabulous with the rich halibut. All the wines did a fine job of cutting through the butter and leaving the mouth clean for another bite.

After all that, there was dessert. I was completely unable to cope with it after inhaling those ravioli, but it was very nice: buttermilk panna cotta with berry sauce. I’m fairly certain there was no actual butter in this.

It was a good class. As always, with those two.

In the annals of putting fried eggs on top of things, this breakfast came very close to perfection. Here’s how to make it.

Take one Dungeness crab, cooked and cleaned.

Pick the meat out and set aside. Put the shell into a saucepan, cover with water, and simmer for about 10-15 minutes. Strain and keep warm.

Make risotto. A little onion in the base is nice, with a splash of white wine. Use the crab stock you just made, and stir in plenty of butter at the end. No cheese.

Stir in the crab at the very end.

Roast some asparagus with olive oil and salt. Not for too long, just until done but still crispy.

Serve the risotto and asparagus for dinner, with a good sprinkle of fresh chives.

The next morning, melt a little butter in a nonstick skillet and scrape the leftover risotto into it (you do have leftovers, don’t you?), chop up the leftover asparagus and press it into the risotto. Cook until you get a good golden crust.

Fry an egg, keeping the yolk good and runny, and serve over the crusty risotto with a sprinkle of coarse salt. Feel happy.

Think about buying another crab.