Don’t call it a crumbback Hi all, if you’re still getting alerts to new posts here I’d love for you to come over to my new joint, Things on Bread. After a long and fertile hiatus from blogging, I’ve moved the cooking journal slash food blog slash DIY culinary odyssey to Substack. I just started a couple of weeks ago, and it’s off to a promising start. Take a look, please subscribe, and stay tuned…
cookblog Posts
I’m doing a bunch of teaching and related things in the coming months, so here’s a list in case you’re interested in any of the following:
The cuisine of Southwestern France ranks among the most iconic and delicious in the whole country. What would you say to an eight-day culinary tour of this incredible region, living at a gorgeous retreat with a big pool? What if we also had a yoga teacher on site, so we could all eat and drink guilt-free?
There’s a longer post on the subject at the link up top of the homepage, including photos of some of the rooms, but I wanted to share the exciting schedule we’ve worked out so far (still subject to change, but it should give you a good idea what to expect).
For someone as passionate about fermentation as I am, it’s surprising that I never made any alcohol until recently. The reason was largely that I figured I’d never be able to replicate anything close to the wines I like, and even if I did the quantity would be too small to warrant the effort. But there’s more to drink than wine, and four years in the new garden is producing a lot more fruit than it used to. And since lactic and acetic acid fermentations (including with koji) are pretty second nature to me, I wanted to try something new.
We finally got the spring issue of Fish & Game Quarterly out, and it’s all about Vermont, a state very dear to both Zak and me. We have some excellent writing in the form of three longer pieces that overlap in appealing ways, and a spring recipe from one of the state’s best chefs. Enjoy.
Also, the culinary tour of Umbria is filling up fast. Click that link for details, and don’t dawdle—space is limited.
Italy taught me to cook. When I moved to Rome at 20, I had rudimentary kitchen skills. Over the course of the next couple of years, when I went out to eat I savored every bite, trying to understand how seemingly simple food contained so much flavor, and then I’d try to reverse-engineer those dishes back in the kitchen. Daily shopping in Campo dei Fiori taught me the central answer: the quality of ingredients, grown nearby, is key. Practice (and lots of what I called “research eating”) taught me the techniques I needed. The rest is history; in the ensuing years I’ve built on that knowledge and turned it into a career as a food writer, photographer, teacher, and gardener. Now I get to share this passionate connection to one of the world’s great cuisines with you as I lead a ten-day cooking class in Umbria this fall.
Okay, as promised I rushed upstairs as soon as I got home from Albany so I could get this up for you all. (I did not take this picture today; we got more snow than this. This one is from a couple snows ago.) Alas, I don’t have a picture of today’s pesto because I left the jar at the WAMC studio so the nice people there could enjoy it with the bread.
It’s sugaring season, and Tuesday marked the second boil over at Danny’s place. Sunny and mild, the day couldn’t have been better suited to the occasion. Per normal, he started the fire and filled the pan early in the morning and I rolled in later to stoke the furnace and monitor progress while he did some work in the studio. Also per normal, I brought food to cook.
I haven’t used the wok for a while, so the other night I was thinking about some sort of Sichuan stir-fried situation for dinner using the napa cabbage and fennel I had in the fridge. There was also a package of goat stew meat, which enjoys those highly aromatic spices, so perfect, right? But because these goat chunks had some fat and connective tissue on them, they weren’t great candidates for quick cooking; those things tend to be pretty chewy or worse unless they’re cooked long and low and I didn’t feel like trimming them all and ending up with a pile of stringy scraps fit only for stock. So I came up with a sort of hybrid, using slow-roasted goat in an otherwise speedy stir-fry.