Category: Vegetables

July 16, 2012

Seoul Power

I make a lot of kimchi. I ferment other pickles–kosher dill pickles, giardinera, sauerkraut, green tea, and more–but kimchi is far and away my favorite. Other people love it, too; at a dinner party a while back I gave two friends each a pint to take home and they ate it all with forks right out of the jars as we talked. I do not pretend for a second to have any cultural attachment to this food, and I know that there are countless recipes and techniques for it. But I thought I’d share my method, since it’s easy and very good.

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July 13, 2012

Where There’s Smoke, There’s Dinner

Last weekend we went to Vermont to escape the heat and do some serious relaxing. We brought up a bunch of stuff from the garden and some meat from the freezer so we were well provisioned, though that did not stop us from hitting the Saturday market and getting more food. That evening I went to town on all the bounty, and this meal was the result.

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June 28, 2012

Music Of The Spheres

This Terry Winters-looking cluster of clusters was actually the inspiration for dinner, unlikely though that sounds when you consider that dinner was a rather Baroque heap of decadence. To witness the lavish feast and learn what these things are, see below.

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June 7, 2012

Something Wicked Pissa This Way Comes

The duck sushi I wrote about a few days ago used only one of the two halves of the breast. The other half became a little experiment; I took it, raw and unseasoned, and dry-aged it for a week in the fridge to see what effect this would have on the flavor and texture. I just put it on a little metal rack over a plate so the air could get to all sides of it and left it alone. This was inspired by a post of Shola’s where he took two carcasses and let them age for 60 days. I figured that for one measly breast a week would be enough to see a significant change, and besides there was dinner that needed making and I couldn’t keep my hands off it any longer.

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February 22, 2012

Gnocchturnal Emission

Last week I had a hankering for gnocchi. The remnants of last year’s potatoes are all sprouting, which is good for planting but not so much for eating, so I used a combination of store-bought red potatoes and a sweet potato. I’m about to plant a bunch of early greens outside, since it’s so mild, but these are the dark days for stored food as we run out of spuds and the jars of tomato sauce dwindle. Had I known how un-wintry this winter would be, I would have been much more serious about the hoop houses in the garden. Usually they get so buried in snow that I have to abandon them at a certain point since it’s too much work to get to them and dig them out. This year we could have had half the garden producing all winter.

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February 9, 2012

Sasquash

Look: another sighting of my dinner, rare as hen’s teeth these days. It’s been strange getting back into the regular cooking routine after so long out of it. It’s not the actual making of dinner, which I have not in fact forgotten how to do, but trying to reconcile all the wild flights of culinary fancy that my mind embarked upon while my hands held sandpaper and brushes (rather than knives and pan handles) with the quotidian realities of wandering into the kitchen at 5:30 and making good food from a cold start. So much of what I rely on to lift my meals up a level or two are the various time-intensive processes and ongoing experiments and just plain old leftovers that are in the fridge on any given evening, so it’s taking a little while for those secondary rhythms of production to catch up and I feel a little clumsy.

Bread-baking never stopped, although there were some hiccups. The vinegars are thriving. Cheesemaking is back under way, which is grand, so whey is in the mix, and of course there’s plenty of charcuterie about for mincing into soffriti to lend that lavish depth in an instant: salami, guanciale, duck prosciutto, bresaola, and lardo. And the freezer always has something worth eating in it. What galls me most at this time of year really is the dearth of good vegetables; there are still greens in the garden, sure, and a few roots, but I daydream about being able to walk outside and load up a basket with all the fat bounty that is still invisible over the horizon. This mild hardly winter isn’t helping, either; I keep feeling like I should plant stuff. The birds and spring bulbs are equally confused. I’m sure we’ll get some monster blizzard in a few weeks after everything is all budded out and lose it all.

Meantime, comfort food is still on the menu, though this example was leavened some with a couple of summery ingredients to symbolize my yearning for spring and the ephemerality of life, man.

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February 6, 2012

Better Late Than Never

With the show up and the opening last night done and dusted, I can now return with something like regularity to this food blogging thing.

Oh, sorry, “Internet Content Providing in the Culinary Sector.” Silly me. I get paid by the word, after all.

So the other night I was working, and the clock was ticking, and when it came time to make dinner I realized there was hiding to nothing on hand in the easy or even intermediate dinner categories. It has been a busy week. But then, as is so often the case, the freezer swooped in to the rescue, except in this case what it provided was not the sort of thing that one would normally associate with a quick save: two and a half pounds of local, grass-fed chuck of a size, shape, color, and frozen hardness most closely resembling a brick.

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October 13, 2011

Palate As Palette

As fall gets into full swing, I become suffused with the mixture of joy and nostalgia that makes this time of year so powerful. The samenesses of green all around have given way to an infinity of subtle gradients; where summer is bright, garish, major-key flowers on a green background, fall is a symphony of microtonal subtlety fading in inexorable diminuendo toward the minimal months ahead.

I had nothing at all planned for dinner the other night, and I can’t remember why. In any case, come time to wrangle of the grub, I was a little short. Fortunately, just like any normal person I had eight local duck legs in the fridge–confit is imminent–so I peeled off two and built a decent dinner around them. For bonus points, it was autumnal as all get-out, coloristically speaking, on account of I have a Master’s degree in that shit.

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October 5, 2011

No Joke

On Saturday I cooked dinner for about 80 people. It was a fundraiser, and it went pretty well. The food was well received, it seems, and in typical fashion I made way too much of it. So the fridge has been packed to the gills, brimming with giant, awkward vessels of chickpea tagine, braised cabbage, and polenta for a few days now, and I’ve been working through it as imaginatively as I can. Sunday night, for example, we had a couple of friends over (they’ve been cleaning out their flood-totalled house and clearly needed a home-cooked meal) and I grilled a hunk of lamb, reheating all of the above for sides and grilling the firm slabs of polenta for good measure. I also made a wonderful mash out of frisée, walnuts, garlic, and oil, plus again as much basil pesto that needed eating.

And it was good. But imaginative? Not so much. For whatever reason, though, today I had an idea that did qualify, and which enabled me to consolidate the cabbage into a much smaller container. The fridge is almost back to normal and we ate well.

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September 16, 2011

It’s The Joint

After making the terrines, I still had half the pork butt left over. And since it was Sunday and all, and the days have cooled noticeably lately, turning on the oven to roast it up seemed like a perfect idea.

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