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.
Category: Baking
Sloppy Joes are usually a pretty lowbrow punt of a dinner, but they can hit the spot. And when they’re made like this, they become a different sort of animal altogether.
So far this winter I have made four separate arrangements with a babysitter so we could go out and enjoy ourselves like people with lives and social skills are wont to do, and I have had to cancel four out of four times due to illness of child. It’s frustrating, to say the least, so I’m giving up hope of going out and doing anything fun other than by myself until summer rolls around.
For the last entry in this here contest, I received a bag of clams (already cooked and eaten here) and some ground lamb. Half the ground lamb became the kofta from a few posts ago, and the rest was the basis for this extremely gratifying dinner: 100% homemade gyros.
Last year, Milo told me that instead of a birthday cake he wanted an Eiffel tower made of éclairs. So I made one. It was lopsided and barely held together with bamboo skewers and ganache, but it killed; the 7-year olds in attendance were blown away and laid gleeful waste to it. This time around, I was informed that instead of cake he wanted his name spelled out in homemade doughnuts. So I made them.
The heavy, humid heat has made me eager for fall to arrive. I do not love the jungly mugginess. So when it broke the other day, I was eager to fire up the oven and make pizza.
The burger is an archetypal American food, and it’s even more prominent in the warmer months. In my ongoing and intermittent series of from-scratch sandwich adventures, here’s a very good burger made entirely from scratch (though, as Milo pointed out, we did not in fact raise the cow).
One of the very best ways to feature choice morsels from the garden is on a tangy sourdough crust. I used my standard recipe, but with dried yeast added and a good hard kneading since it was a same-day affair. The one above had asparagus, garlic scapes, and bacon, which I sautéed well before topping it.
I was so busy posting fraudulent nonsense on Sunday that I forgot to mention that the new Chronogram is out and in it I profile Café Le Perche, an excellent bakery in Hudson where they’re making some seriously pedigreed bread at a high level using local, organic flour. I also have two pieces in the new issue of Edible Hudson Valley: one about my homemade Camembert and a sidebar about uses for all the whey…
