Tonight we went out for Turkish food and I had a dish that featured the tiniest okra ever. They were very small. Super small. Incredibly small! They were also delicious. And tiny.

UPDATE! I think perhaps they might have been this stuff: dried okra. After all, it's a Turkish ingredient, and that would explain how on earth you could count on getting a reliable source of teensy okra for your Cleveland restaurant. This is very exciting. Apparently dried okra are sold at Kalustyans, so I'll be adding them to my next order, and soon enough I will be able to find out for myself.

It turned out that we liked the braised cabbage so much we had it all over again tonight. And by then the camera battery had plenty of time to recharge.

Glamorous, isn't it?

Good, though.

I didn't take a picture of what it looked like after we polished it off. Suffice it to say that we both affirmed our qualifications for membership in the Clean Plate Club with admirable celerity.

Braised cabbage isn't most people's idea of a perfect midsummer meal. But I bought a few of these adorable little fellows at the farmer's market the weekend before last, and then we had out of town guests from early last week until this morning. So there was lots of eating elsewhere, plenty of staying up late and drinking liberally and getting up early, and very little grocery shopping, until this evening we found ourselves with curiously little fresh food and a strong desire to eat something simple and wholesome.

(That's Snark's hand gripping the innocent little cabbage. It all looks extremely dramatic, doesn't it?)

Combining my feebleness with the contents of my fridge, I cut the little cabbages into wedges and gave them a quick hot sear on each cut side until well flecked with crispy dark brown bits (I love the way cabbage tastes when subjected to this kind of browning). Then they went at the bottom of a heavy pan with a lid and were sprinkled with salt. Over top I scattered a medium onion and a large carrot, both cut into 1/4" slices, and poured about a third of a cup of white wine and three tablespoons of olive oil over all. On went the lid and the heat on medium high until the sound of boiling could be heard from within. Heat down as low as it would go and everything left alone, while I sat quietly in a corner doing not much, until the cabbage was exceedingly tender, in this case about an hour. I very gently flipped the cabbage over about halfway through. Then the lid came off and I turned the heat back up until the liquid had boiled away and the cabbage started to brown again.

We had it in bowls, topped with a fried egg apiece and plenty of freshly ground pepper, plus an extra sprinkle of salt on top.

I don't have pictures of the finished dish, not because it wasn't pretty -- although it wasn't, except in the way that things that are ugly but delicious are pretty -- but because my camera's batteries ran out at the crucial moment. You can probably imagine it, though. Braising and wine both do delicious things to cabbage; I highly recommend the combination of the two. I'm sure the fact that these were gorgeous local cabbages didn't hurt, but one of the wonderful things about cabbage is that it keeps beautifully. You surely would get almost as great results with any old cabbage. (Savoy is nicer than the not-crinkly kind, though, in my opinion.) I mean, hell, we bought these a week and a half ago and they absolutely read as amazingly squeaky-fresh. Cabbage! It's a winner.

Inspired by this Ask Metafilter thread and the sandwich combining avocado with honey mustard that was described therein, tonight I made some avocado sandwiches of my own. We ate them standing up in the kitchen, making adjustments as we went: open-faced, because when you use as much avocado as we wanted to, closed-face versions just slide around; an extra sprinkle of salt; slivered red onions to gild the lily.

Like salads, most sandwiches don't really call for recipes, just descriptions. To make these, take a baguette and split it lengthwise, parallel to the table. Cut the resulting halves into pieces of whatever size suits you. Next, generously butter the cut sides of the bread with nice, soft salted butter. Now apply a good helping of avocado, mashing it slightly into the bread. Because the base of your sandwich is all crust, it will stand up to the pressure with no trouble. Sprinkle a little salt over the avocado and then add a generous (a theme with this sandwich) coating of honey mustard, which you have made by mixing equalish quanities of dijon mustard and honey.

This is very good as it is. But after we'd tried it, Snark said, "Is there any one ingredient that would make this even better?" That is how we wound up adding red onions, and also how I wound up eating quite a bit more than I had planned. In fact, if we hadn't used up all of our ripe avocado I would be eating even more right this minute.

A lot of the time, I buy more of a given ingredient than gets used up in a single dinner for two. That's fine -- we like leftovers, and also I've finally noticed that it's a good idea to cook a lot of foods from the same culture, or inspired by the same cookbook, in a given week or two. After I made the salad pictured below, we still had more ripe avocados, more radicchio, and more cilantro and onions and serrano peppers. So last night I made a sort of black bean tostada arrangement, but where crispy tortilla would go, we had grilled (broiled, actually) radicchio. It was great, and while it was in the same taste family as the salad, it was different enough to keep things lively.

Any meal with this much radicchio really is only for those who like the taste of bitter things. But the black beans are mild and creamy, as of course is the avocado, so there is considerable balance for that bitterness. The arrangement was a bed of freshly cooked radicchio; then black beans heated through with some salt, olive oil, and cumin; then lots of sliced avocado; then the same vinegared onion as last time; then a minced mixture of cilantro, serrano pepper, and a small clove of garlic; then feta cheese and a drizzle of oil.

For the radicchio, I turned the broiler on and oiled a baking dish. Then I cut the radicchio into substantial chunks -- eighths, maybe? -- and put them in the dish, letting the pieces fall apart where they liked. I gave them a sprinkle of salt and a quick brush of olive oil, and popped them under the broiler for what turned out to be 7 minutes, until the outer leaves were getting brown and crispy, while the inner parts of each piece were still warmed through and juicy.

As the weather gets warmer, I am naturally drawn more and more to suppers that are not so much cooked as assembled. Composed salads are nice for this, as they allow plenty of range for imaginative combinations of ingredients, and have a little bit more gravitas as a main dish than a simple tossed salad does. I made this one with some leftover "vegan popcorn chicken" from Whole Foods -- sort of a shameful thing to buy, and place to buy it, but it sure is good, and the salad I made from it was really, really good. If you eat real meat, leftover roast chicken would of course work perfectly in the same kind of composition.

This dinner also reminded me to tell you that I always buy my avocados in a state of rock-hard unripeness. They will ripen just fine on your counter, and no one but you will have a chance to prod and poke and bother and bruise them as they get riper and more vulnerable. (Once they're ripe, you can move them to the fridge if they are ready too soon for you.) I think Mark Bittman wrote a "Bitten" entry about his same realization, so this is no doubt old news to you, but this habit has made my avocado eating adventures infinitely more pleasant and consistent, so I want to proselytize.

Bottom layer: a ring of delicate tender pale green lettuce, surrounding chiffonaded radicchio
On top of that: "chicken"
Then: sliced avocado
And: red onion that had been chopped and left to sit for about half an hour with vinegar and a pinch of salt
Topped with: Cilantro and serrano pepper minced together
Drizzled with: Olive oil and vinegar (the vinegar from the onion isn't enough -- you want plenty of acidic sparkle)
Plus: A sprinkling of salt and some coarsely ground black pepper.

Radicchio adds a nice bitter bite that complements the richness of the avocado and the acid of the vinegar, though I'm sure the salad would still be good without it. Chopped endive would be a good (if less colorful) substitute. If you reheat your chicken or "chicken", heap it in the center of the plate so it rests on the radicchio, wilting it slightly.

I am a big believer in not refrigerating things that ought not to be refrigerated, which means that I often have a cake or some cheese or a frittata or bread or something that I want to keep on the counter for a day or few as we polish it off. As a result, for a long time I'd been wishing for a glass dome of the right size and shape to plonk over such items. For some reason, I believed that this would be impossibly difficult to find, or very expensive, or at the very least always sold with a pedestal cake stand. But this weekend I was re-inspired to look into it (because I baked a WONDERFUL, glorious cake, and I say this as someone who is distinctly cake impaired, and I'll tell all three of you remaining readers about it shortly), and lo! I found just the thing. Yes, it's a Nigella Lawson product, which seems a little bit silly, but it's just what I had in mind: simple, twelve inches across, suitable for putting directly on the counter or on its own nice low ceramic plate base, and with straight sides high enough to accommodate a decently sized cake. I find this very satisfying.