We’re still sick. It’s not too bad, really–just a cold. But the timing is not so good. I had big plans for this week, big plans. Now my plans consist mostly of making an increasingly impossible to-do list for next week. On the plus side, though, I get to drink rum whenever my throat hurts–day or night–so there’s that. I did manage to rally this afternoon and get some chicken stock going with frozen thighs,…
Category: Soup
Since writing about pappa al pomodoro a while back, I’ve been keen on it as an excellent way to eat up otherwise obdurate heels of homemade bread. It’s also well-suited to a brainlessly quick and easy lunch, and highly tweakable. In the case of yesterday’s lunch, it benefited from the homemade prosciutto and smoked chicken stock, two items which I venture to say come awfully close to being essentials. So I sizzled minced ham, garlic,…
Man, this time of year is fat with optimism. It’s on the leaner side with food, though the greens are coming along handsomely, and we’re lousy with wild foragables right now, so a good supplement can be found in my first-ever hunk of homemade prosciutto. It’s ready, because it’s only half a ham, and mostly skinless, so it dried quite quickly. It’s also bone-in, meaning it’s going to be tricky to slice it well into…
I was out of town for a few days, visiting Providence and Boston. Most interesting culinarily was a trip to a Burmese restaurant in Brighton (or Allston, maybe) right near where the greatest Vietnamese restaurant in Boston used to be back in the 80’s. Viet Huong (in Allston) had about 4 tables, seated 8-9 people at very most, and had a lovely old couple who did everything: she cooked, he served. It was freaking genius.…
I know that it looks like we eat a lot of meat around here, but it’s misleading. Very often I just make pasta or some sort of curried vegetable thing or some variation on rice and beans. But they’re not very innovative and/or photogenic, or they’re something that I’ve covered before, so I don’t write about them. The next few weeks are going to be pretty hectic, so it’s likely that posts will be on…
I have a bunch of posts to get to, but I hurt my back making bread–yep, disregard everything I said about it before, it’s DANGEROUS and should be avoided at all costs–and then managed to get a flu-ish thing at the same time, so it’s been a pretty lame week. Today I felt halfway normal. Last night I did make dinner, and it turned out remarkably well, probably because I wanted so badly for it…
The induction burner that I bought to cook on while I waited (with less and less patience) for the new stove has now transitioned from being the bootleg bachelor construction kitchen to being a useful appliance that now allows us to enjoy something I’ve been hankering to have for quite some time: shabu-shabu. Cooking at the table is fun, and customizing the doneness of every morsel makes for an excellent eating experience. Good broth is…
The kitchen is almost done. As I write this, I have one more day of serious work before it’s going to be fully operational, wanting only a day or two of cosmetic finish work (molding, trim, and paint). The new stove is like a Lamborghini; everything that used to take meaningful portions of an hour now takes mere minutes, countable on the hand without the spoon. It came in on time, and within acceptable budgetary parameters–meaning that various material/hardware expenses (and I went to the hardware store and/or lumber yard every day) didn’t exceed 5% of the total.
To celebrate, even though the island is still just covered in 3/4″ A/C plywood, we made a feast from some of the bounty acquired at Mitsuwa, where we stopped for lunch and a big shop on our way home from Newark airport. We got lots of Washugyu beef and Berkshire pork for future meals (see tomorrow) and tons of staples in the form of bottled and dried ingredients. And sake.
Last night’s dinner was in three courses, because I was energized by both the sight of the finish line and the quality of the new goodies. To begin, some luscious, artisanal tofu that I would tell you all about but for the fact that every single thing written on the label was in Japanese. Fresh, silken circles of delicate deliciousness, it was. I made a sauce using fresh sea urchin puréed with usukuchi (light soy sauce), rice vinegar, a tiny dab of smooth peanut butter (since I find that uni have a slightly peanutty flavor) and sake with the alcohol burned off. It made for a very pudding-like, seductive dish, especially for those members of the family (everyone but me) who do not love sea urchin. It’s funny, but “slimy orange invertebrate gonads” aren’t that much of a selling point. Go figure.
Tonight I’m going out, so I made a quick dinner for the family: a kind of variation on saag paneer using tofu in place of the cheese. To compensate, though, I cooked the chard (and the last spoon of pesto) along with half an onion and spices in about two cups of whey to add stealth cheesiness and play wonderfully with the similarly tangy taste of the tofu. I puréed the greens and then added…
There’s nothing quite so problem-solving as a chicken carcass in the fridge. Especially if it was spatchcocked, meaning the back is still raw and thus able to add extra collagen and unctch to the resulting stock. A few carrots (still those I dug before the freeze, though almost depleted), a piece of parsnip, half an onion, a dried shiitake, and some herbs made for a good base. I tossed in smashed garlic and ginger with…