A Dinner to Transition With the Season

About author / Amy Powell

World traveler; gourmet 30 minute meals; lover of exotic ingredients; winner on FoodTV's Chefs vs City; graduate French Culinary Institute. Her recipes will tantalize your taste buds.

With the weather making a gradual transition from winter to spring, so changes my cooking. The winter, though not particularly cold this year, was enough so to warrant those heartier dishes that stick to the ribs, warm the belly, and generally bulk up the body to protect against the cold.

This year I managed a host of these traditional winter foods. There was the beef bourguignon, simmered low and long until the sauce was an unctuous red-brown and the beef so tender it melted with the slightest touch of a fork. A serendipitous supermarket find led to an epic rabbit ragu, simmered for hours in a clay pot with tomatoes, finely chopped vegetables, rosemary and red wine until the meat fell off all the little rabbit bones. That sauce stretched over a month of winter meals coating hundreds of strands of linguine as I defrosted and reheated leftovers.

Now with wool giving way to cotton and heavy overcoats to lightweight jackets, it is time for dinner to lighten up too. This is the time for transition food.

What is transition food exactly? I think of it as the sort of dinners that could work for a warm winter night as well as a cool summer evening. It is like your favorite sweater that works through all four seasons.

Take beef short ribs, a classic winter food. When cut along the bone into individual ribs the beef cries out for a long braise in a pot with a rich sauce of wine and herbs. Served over a generous helping of mashed potatoes or polenta, all that decadent sauce is slurped right up along with fork tender meat.

Spring can still accommodate the slow cooked short ribs, but anyone hoping to look good in a light summer dress in a few months might switch to a slightly less heavy version of the short rib, one better suited to mild weather.

At the butcher I ask for flanken or cross cut ribs instead of individual. Cut thin in the Korean style- about ½ inch thick- the meat is tender enough to grill. Instead of a long cooking time to work in flavor, I’ll do a medium length marinade in a mixture of soy sauce, brown sugar, ginger, and garlic. This can go as little as a half and hour or as long as over night. After a quick grill for medium-rare, the meat needs some lettuce leaves, a scoop of rice, and some chili sauce and dinner is served.

Without totally overhauling the weekly shopping list, here are a few other seasonal switches worthy of warming weather. If you have a thing for pork, ditch the shoulder and look for tenderloin. Each one serves two to three people and cooks up in a hot oven in about 20 minutes. A whole roast chicken may be great for heating up the house, but come spring, try just split breasts, they’ll be done in half the time of a whole bird. Who doesn’t love a good cassoulet in the deep of winter complete with beans, sausage, and duck confit? To make confit a bit lighter, though still special, shred the duck and toss with friseé. Top that salad with a poached egg and you have one heck of a springtime supper.

Pulling out clothes you haven’t touched in months is one of the season’s great pleasures. Though you might spruce things up with a new pair of pants or swingy skirt, you don’t change your entire wardrobe. Likewise a spring dinner transition does not mean changing your whole routine, just tweaking it little- a different cut of meat, a quicker cooking method, lighter sauces- and you’ll have a meal sure to stay fashionably in season.

Serves/Makes: 4

• 1 cup soy sauce
• 2/3 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 1/4 cup rice wine vinegar
• 1 tablespoon fish sauce
• 2 bird's eye chiles, minced
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 piece (1-inch size) ginger, peeled and minced
• 1 teaspoon ground black pepper
• 2 pounds beef short ribs, cross cut in 1/2-inch thick slices
• Kosher salt
• butter lettuce leaves
• cooked white rice
• chili sauce