I was away all weekend, so this here was dinner from last Thursday. The night after all the lovely sashimi we had Phase II of the post-Mitsuwa feast. I had bought a small tray of domestic Wagyu-style beef, sliced super-thin for shabu-shabu, and that was the jumping-off point for the meal. We had dashi left in the fridge, flavored with the black radishes I had pressure-cooked in it, and to that I added all the…
Category: Beef
On Martin Luther King Jr. day we went to a splendid dinner party with the crew. The main dish was Leanne’s fish stew, which I helped prep for, and which then evolved into a collaborative effort. The base was fish broth, to which she had added shrimp (shell on) monkfish, and scallops, plus lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, ginger, garlic, and a bunch of other things, but she still wasn’t happy. John and I stood there…
I had planned to make the black cod with miso tonight, with some rice and greens probably, when I get a call and before you know it I’ve got three sides of beautiful fresh black cod to work with. Most of it will get a smoke for the party on Saturday, but I cut off two nice pieces and upgraded my dinner plans to compensate. Milo is going through a not-loving-the-fish phase, just in time…
I have to say at the outset that we are lucky; despite our recent travails with the heat (and the panic, the vomit) we got off easy with this last storm. While people all over the Northeast have no power, I’m basking in the glow of the internets. We ended up just South of the freeze for most of it, and the ice turned to plain old rain, though in Biblical quantity. Last night, because…
I spent most of the day preparing for Thursday. In no particular order, I trimmed a deboned lamb neck, seasoned it with ras-el-hanout, sprinkled it with activa, rolled it up, gave the outside a good rub with a sage-rosemary-garlic paste, and vacuum-sealed it to set it in a nice torchon. I made a chanterelle-apricot sauce with cream for the lamb. I made chicken broth from last night’s carcass. I made the custard for the barely-sweetened…
The show is not up, but the hard part (painting the wall piece, building the frames for and framing the drawings) is done. I don’t love hanging shows on the day of the opening, but that is often the way it works out happening. I missed out on the big town Halloween event, but it was worth it, and I ended up making dinner too- two whole days earlier than I thought would be possible.…
One of the great joys of parenting is that it’s like having a VIP preview to all of the season’s latest must-have microbes. Milo got a cold on Friday, and of course inevitably I got it a couple of days later. Since it was just the two of us this weekend, I made a big vat of minestrone with a chicken carcass, lots of roots and herbs from the garden, alphabet pasta, and heirloom cranberry…
We spent the long weekend in Vermont, and Sirkka and Nissa joined us for a couple of nights. Though the last two days were crystalline late-summer perfection, the beginning of our stay was gray and a little muggy- though it didn’t actually rain more than a few drops. So we let the kids do their thing, and between what we brought from home and what we picked up at the farmers’ market, we did all…
A return to the source of the mighty boletes resulted instead in a bag of gorgeous wild oyster mushrooms, variety being the spice of life and all. And there were also beautiful organic NY strip steaks. And there were ideas. I couldn’t find a winner among the competing ideas, so I declared a tie, and decided to trim and cut each steak into three pieces, then give each one its own sauce. But first, because…
Though it looks like an excess of consecutive red meat consumption around here, there was actually a day in between- my last day of solitude- wherein not much interesting was et. This meal honored the return of my family, who actually really missed me and were pretty excited to be home again. I defrosted a butterflied piece of lamb leg and gave it a quick rub with Moroccan-type flavors. While it rested, I made a…