I like leftovers, and I’m not above eating them cold right out of the fridge.

Leftover pizza? I’ll snag it for breakfast.

I discovered a new cold leftover when making recipes for today’s Fourth of July feast story.
After making about 6 pounds of barbecued spareribs, I had plenty left over. I also had a fair amount of grilled potato salad and corn and tomato salad the next day when I opened the fridge looking for lunch.

Trying to reheat a rib with a big bone and relatively little meat didn’t sound like a good idea. It just seemed likely to take forever, dry out, turn leathery or all three.

So I simply cut the meat off the bone of a couple of ribs, tossed it on a plate with some of each salad and called it lunch.

And it was great.

The assertive flavor of the ribs is toned down a bit when they are chilled, but they still had plenty of flavor to mingle with the potatoes, corn and tomatoes on my plate.

It was kind of like the leftover salads I wrote about in a recent column. A little bit of flavorful meat can do wonders to a veggie-heavy healthy salad.

Later I had chunks of the deboned cold rib meat with cucumber salad and with cole slaw.

Delicious!

Wine is ideally stored in a cool, dark location to keep it from spoiling. A 75-degree store or room is certainly OK. A car that can reach temperatures well over 100 is not considered OK.

If you happen to leave a wine bottle in a hot car, a sure sign that it has been affected is in the cork.

Heat will make the contents expand and push on the cork. Enough heat and the cork will push out. I have never seen a bottle so exposed to heat that it completely uncorked the bottle. But if the cork is sticking out beyond the top rim of the bottle, it probably has been tainted by the heat.

But how tainted is it?

The common consensus is that if heat pushed that cork out even a little bit, you’re better off returning that wine to the store. It now has become “cooked” wine and is tainted.

Such heat damage will certainly change the wine, but it may not ruin it.

In fact, Robin Garr, who writes an e-newsletter called The 30-Second Wine Advisor for wineloverspage.com, conducted an interesting experiment to determine if cooked wine is actually ruined.

He took two bottles of a cabernet sauvignon, the 1998 Louis Martini, a wine he knows well. He stored one bottle indoors as he always does. He put the other in his car in direct sunlight with a thermometer on a hot day and left it there for eight hours.

With the air outside at 92, he said, the air in the car hit 120. And the cork in the hot bottle had pushed out ½ inch.

He then pushed the cork back, took the bottle indoors and waited a day or two to taste the wine. He tasted the cooked bottle with the uncooked one — blind, with his wife pouring the wine so he didn’t know which was which.

The funny thing is that he found the cooked wine more interesting. “The heated wine seemed muted at first,” he wrote, “but developed with a little air into something surprisingly like a more mature cabernet.”
In other words, the cooked wine was less tannic and more nuanced and complex than the same wine not exposed to extreme heat.

Of course, his experiment didn’t judge what happen to a heated wine that is drunk a month, a year or 10 years later. But he did conclude that exposure to extreme heat for a day isn’t necessarily ruined.

So now the next time you have a wine that’s a little tannic and too young to drink, just place it in a hot car for a few hours to mellow it out — if you dare.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved tuna salad.

I still like the classic version with canned tuna, mayo, celery and onion. But I have developed some grown-up tastes over the years, so sometimes I like a different kind of tuna salad.

For several summers now, I’ve enjoyed tuna salad the Italian way, with cooked, chilled white beans and a vinaigrette, often with capers.

I really like the tangy difference that a vinaigrette makes compared with the usual mayo.

Tuna salad also gets a big boost from fresh tuna, if you can afford it.

The following recipe, from the American Institute for Cancer Research, marinates fresh tuna overnight to better get the vinaigrette flavor into the fish.

Canned tuna wouldn’t really work here, because the cooked fish in cans wouldn’t be able to absorb the marinade as well.

But frozen raw tuna, which usually is a lot less expensive than fresh, certainly will work.

I don’t like to cook tuna as much as it directs in this recipe, but rare, well-done or in between, this makes for some flavorful tuna. It’s also a healthy, light meal perfect for a hot summer’s night.

Marinated Fresh Tuna Salad
2 large garlic cloves
½ teaspoon salt
1½ teaspoons ground cumin
1 teaspoon paprika
¼ teaspoon freshly ground pepper
3 teaspoon extra virgin olive oil, divided
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
¾ cup fat free, reduced-sodium chicken broth
¾ pound fresh tuna steak
¾ pound unpeeled new potatoes
6 cups romaine lettuce, cut crosswise into 1/2-inch strips
Thin wedges of tomato (for garnish)

1. Peel and coarsely chop the garlic. Add the salt. Continue chopping until the garlic is finely minced and the salt has been fully incorporated, 2 to 3 minutes. Place the garlic in a small bowl and add the cumin, paprika, pepper and 2 teaspoons of oil. Mix in the vinegar and broth. Set the marinade aside.
2. Rub the fish on both sides with the remaining oil. Heat a nonstick skillet over medium-high heat and sear the fish for 1 minute on each side. Transfer the tuna to a plate.
3. Pour the marinade into the pan and bring to a boil. (For food safety reasons, make sure the marinade is brought to a full boil.) Add the seared fish. Reduce the heat to a simmer, so liquid barely bubbles. Cook the fish until no longer red in center, about 8 to 10 minutes. Transfer the fish and the marinade from the pan to a container. Cover and refrigerate at least 6 hours before using.
4. Shortly before serving the salad, boil the potatoes in water until tender. Drain and cool the potatoes and cut them into quarters.
5. Meanwhile, cut the marinated fish diagonally into bite-size pieces. Divide the lettuce among four plates and arrange 1/4 of the potatoes and fish on each plate. Spoon some marinade over the top of each serving. Add the tomato to garnish and serve.
Makes 4 servings.
Nutrition information for one serving: 210 calories, 5 g total fat (<1 g saturated fat), 18 g carbohydrates, 23 g protein, 4 g dietary fiber, 420 mg sodium.

(Photo courtesy of American Institute for Cancer Research)

I love the way the tomato cooks ever so slightly between the bread and cheese, its juiciness and acidity offering a perfect counterpoint to the starchy bread and the rich, oozing cheese.

If you haven’t seen the recipe for tomato and grilled cheese in the Desperation Dinners column today (June 18), check it out by clicking here. Authors Beverly Mills and Alicia Ross call it a bruschetta, because it’s open-faced and baked in the oven, but it’s basically a grilled-cheese sandwich with tomato.

The cool part of their sandwich recipe is that they dip the bread slices into a small amount of Italian salad dressing. Making this on the stove, I did things a little differently, simply pouring a smidgeon of dressing over the tomato while assembling the sandwich.

The vinaigrette, though, adds a really nice touch, with its tang of vinegar and flavor of garlic and herbs.

Next time you’re making grilled cheese, add a slice or two of tomato and maybe some Italian dressing and let me know what you think.

That second reason is even more important now that grocery prices are increasing so much.

I have always grown an assortment of fresh herbs. This year, I have a new one: bay leaf.

Fresh bay leaf put those dull dried specimens to shame. The fresh leaves have a refreshing, piney, resinous flavor all but obliterated when the leaves are dried.

Bay leaves are actually from a bay laurel tree, which is native to Asia Minor. We’re talking Turkey, literally.

As you might expect with a tree, it’s a perennial. It’s also an evergreen, so in theory you can pick fresh bay leaf while it’s snowing in February if you want.

Notice that I said “in theory.” In fact, I was told when I bought it that it would not survive the winter. The person who sold it to me recommended keeping it in a pot and moving it indoors in the winter.

Then I happened to be in Reynolda Gardens not long ago, when the staff pointed out its bay laurel tree.

Mine is a spindly little thing about 12 inches high.

Reynolda’s is a comparative mountain of bay leaves, about eight feet high and four or more feet wide.

In short, Reynolda’s bay laurel has about a lifetime supply of bay leaves for a family of 12. In contrast, I could completely defoliate my plant with about a dozen soups or stews.

David Bare, the Journal’s gardening columnist who also works at Reynolda Gardens, told me that Old Salem used to have a bay leaf that it moved in and out like I was told to do. Then one winter the staff left it outdoors and it did just fine.

Now I’m a little nervous about losing my investment to winter frost. But I have visions of this megatron bay leaf growing in my yard. I just need to find a big enough space to put it.

When a vendor at the Dixie Classic Farmers Market told me a couple of weeks ago that she had blueberries from North Carolina, I didn’t quite believe her at first. It was way too early in the Piedmont for blueberries, which usually ripen just in time for July Fourth.

But then she told me she got them from Elizabeth City, in the far eastern part of the state.

Everything ripens in warmer Eastern North Carolina. And I later confirmed that indeed, the blueberry harvest had begun in the warmest parts of the state.

The N.C. Department of Agriculture & Consumer Sciences predicts that 30 million pounds of the berries will be harvested this year. That’s a far cry from last year, when a devastating freeze damaged half of the state’s blueberry crop, not to mention many apple and peach orchards, vineyards and more.

I have a good feeling about this being a good summer for produce. It’s just a hunch, maybe wishful thinking, but my garden really looks great. I also think that this cool and decently moist spring will help plants get a good start for what may be some grueling heat in the months ahead.

The N.C. harvest began May 10. Most N.C. blueberries come from the southeastern part of the state, around Bladen County.

The Piedmont has its share, though. I even planted a few bushes myself this year. Here’s one of them, small and young, but nice and healthy.

My bushes won’t produce much of anything for a while, but I’m anxiously awaiting the day when I can walk out in the yard and eat a few right off the bush.

The report says that Hershey’s, Wrigley’s and Cadbury are all working on sweet products with a good-for-you claim. It turns out that it isn’t so much candy they are developing, but gum, and in one case, mints.

Functional candy is of course nothing new. Just about every over-the-counter oral child’s medicine is some mix of sugar or syrup mixed with medicine.

And even adults soothe a sore throat or mediate a cough with sweet throat drops. The report also mentioned BestSweet, based in Mooresville, and its Bee M.D. honey throat lozenges.

And many candy manufacturers have marketed dark chocolate in recent years as a quasi-preventative for aging, because of its natural antioxidant content.

Don’t be surprised, though, to see more candy touting health claims, with all kinds of vitamins and other nutrients mixed in to give it a double appeal, to the health-conscious consumer with a sweet tooth.

Chocolate-covered dinner mints with echinacea to fight off a cold? Gummy bears with Vitamin C to keep kids happy and healthy? Or chewy caramels that may rot your teeth but have loads of calcium to ward off osteoporosis?

As the popular song from Mary Poppins says, “Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”

A trip to France got in the way. Then, I came back. For some reason I was poking around on Elkin Creek’s website - probably looking for their phone number, or directions to the little winery (down a gravel road, and through a rusty farm gate. There’s a teepee near the winery and restaurant proper, and some signs welcoming you in Spanish, and maybe Chinese? - it’s truly a charming place). In any case, the chef’s profile was noticeably missing. It turns out Jesse Williams and Elkin Creek parted ways sometime in April (that’s according to Jesse). So, Susan Gilmor, my wise relish editor, put the kibosh on an Elkin Creek review, at least for the time being. It wouldn’t have been fair to the restaurant. It wouldn’t have been fair to you.

I just got out my notes from my last meal at Elkin Creek. It was sometime in late March. I remember a salad of pear, Gorgonzola, charred croutons and red leaf and romaine lettuces infused with the smoky taste of the kitchen’s wood oven. I remember the best rendition of oysters Rockefeller that I have ever had. Spaghetti with chorizo, fennel, tomato and clams. These weren’t wild dishes, but oh, did they taste good.

To be fair, I also remember some weird touches, such as the fake votive candles flickering their orange light, and bread served with a shallow dish of olive oil so light it was nearly yellow. “If anything, would like to see something more extraordinary, more innovative. Push boundaries more. Have seen this place do better,” the last lines of my scrawl read.

I read about saffron macaroni and cheese gratin, and crab and coddled egg salad with fennel when I was scouting out Elkin Creek. I saw the menus for the beer dinners the restaurant once held with Spencer Davis of City Beverage, and squealed in my seat about a shucked oyster shooter with lemon sorbet; braised pork belly with apple strudel; and clever twists on sandwiches such as duck pastrami and cherry chutney, and a club made with foie gras, apple chutney and bacon. Nice, but too tame, is what I thought as I drove home after that dinner in March.

All of this is why you should keep an eye on Sanders Ridge Vineyards and Winery in Boonville, where Jesse has landed next. He’s a chef to watch out for. Sometime later this year, Williams will open Homeplace 1847. The winery and restaurant have been thrown off by off-again, on-again construction but Williams wants to open in September. He has ambitious plans to make the restaurant a homage to local food (in season, he’ll get a lot of his produce from Sanders Ridge’s organic farm), and a trendsetter across the state. He’s working on the menu right now, and when I talked to him earlier this week, he called it “nostalgic comfort food.”

What does this mean? Williams has got his eye on a grilled watermelon salad, for example, and shredded barbecued rabbit on sourdough. This past weekend, Williams says he made mint lemonade with watermelon foam for the non-drinkers at the Yadkin Valley Wine Festival. It’s comfort food, but probably like nothing you had in your momma’s kitchen.

Williams also wants to set up a farm stand at the restaurant, so after your barbecued rabbit sandwich and bottle of wine, you’ll drift through the fresh produce. You will become powerless as you reach for a tomato to take home. And remember what kind of economy he is doing this in. “People love good food,” he says.

I can’t wait to see if he’s right.

A lot of people were shocked in December when the Food Network ended production of new episodes of Emeril Lagasse’s Emeril Live!

The network didn’t dump Emeril altogether. It is happy to show reruns, and it is keeping his other show, The Essence of Emeril, in its afternoon lineup

Still, it was a surprising move to scrap new episodes to what had amounted to Food Network’s prime-time cash cow.

Sure, Lagasse owed the network for helping to make him a star. But Emeril was the centerpiece of a pool of talent that helped make the Food Network what it is today.

Looking at the network today, though, it’s clear how much it has changed. It has moved further away from cooking shows to those that present food as entertainment. Viewers who don’t like it have flocked to the “pure” cooking shows on PBS.

Of course, Emeril was always a hybrid — half cooking, half entertainment show. Remember his band?

I always felt a bit sorry for Emeril. On the one hand, his cooking on the show was sometimes sloppy — a fact often pointed out by other, more precise and less showy, chefs. On the other hand, I felt that he knew more than he sometimes appeared to know; in other words, the show was dumbed down, whether by design or chance.

If you like Emeril, you’ll be happy to know that Emeril Live! is coming back — but to the Fine Living Network. Beginning July 7, FLN will show Emeril Live! every night at 7. From July 7 to 11, the network will show all new episodes. Then beginning July 14, it will show a new episode on Mondays, and reruns the rest of the week.

So Emeril gets his revenge. Or as he might say to the Food Network execs, “Bam!”

This is great news. Basically a bunch of restaurants, many of them pricy and decidedly upscale, offer three-course, prix fixe menus for relative bargins. Big cities such as New York and Baltimore have long had restaurant weeks. Nice to see it happen in North Carolina, too, and especially in such a bustling and growing restaurant community as the Triangle. The list of restaurants doesn’t include the Triangle’s poshest places, but if you’re in Raleigh this week, you could make a reservation for a $25 dinner at Vivace, an Italian trattoria or - yeegads - a $15 three-course lunch at South, a Cotton Mill-like New Southern place (I’m reading the menu and sweet potato and Vidalia onion raviolis, or smoked chicken and egg noodles are making me hungry - though they not be an option on the prix fixe). When you think about how much an appetizer, an entree and a dessert add up, it can be a good value. It’s also a great way to try a new restaurant that you might have considered too rich for your blood. You won’t save money or be wowed by exotic ingredients at every participating restaurant (some of them just don’t have upscale or even particularly remarkable menus), but you can.

Triangle Restaurant Week runs through Sunday.

One thing I don’t get: it’s called “Triangle Restaurant Week,” yet the list of participating restaurants is limited to Raleigh. A post on Chowhound from one of the organizers indicated they wanted to start things small, but some of the Triangle’s best restaurants are in Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Durham and even little Hillsbourgh. And while I’m on my soap box, I think Triad Restaurant Week has a nice ring to it.