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…
Category: Vegetables
Christine’s Mom arrived this evening for the week, and I spent some of the day trying to get ahead of the Thanksgiving to-do list. I made barbecue sauce, blended it with 1% agar, and froze it so tomorrow it can go in the fridge to begin clarifying via syneresis (this is a method whereby a liquid is gravity-strained through a protein mesh in the fridge, thus making it clear but keeping all of the flavor;…
Christine had a girls night out tonight, but it started a little late, and outside it’s Witchtit, Wyoming cold, so I made a little extra food figuring that she would need an appetizer prior to going out. I had some fantastic ingredients to work with; yesterday I stopped off at my new source for ultra-fresh premium seafood and received around 10 pounds of various goodies, including a whole turbot skeleton and many fillets of cod,…
Last night’s lasagna was easily the best I have ever made, but it was not exactly light fare (eating some cold leftovers today, I noticed the unmistakably grainy texture of beef fat, and was reminded that decadence has a price.) So to give our arteries a bit of a break, but keep the comfort level high, I put some yellow-eye beans out to soak early in the morning. Very early. Around noon, I took a…
It’s been raining for days now, but when the sun breaks through the smell of wet leaves on the crisp breeze is as pungent a memory tonic as I know of; it transports me back to myriad times during my childhood and burnishes an inexpressible longing for the wide-open joy and freedom of that period. Fall has always been my favorite season, and that feeling only grows each year. All of this nostalgia has been…
On short notice, we went over the Chris & Sirkka’s place for dinner. Chris and the guys are recording, so we tried to time it for his return home. After some consultations about ingredients, we brought over a few things and all got to work while the kids played. I stuffed some of their crookneck squash with a mixture of sautéed squash necks, onion, garlic, and crabmeat, then covered them with breadcrumbs and parmigiano. Sirkka…
For the last few days it has been hot here. Really, really hot, and humid. The weather is supposed to break tonight, but for the moment it’s safe to say that if crotch sweat were crude oil, George Bush would be invading my shorts. Last night, I made good hot-weather food: Vietnamese Summer rolls with tofu and a zingy peanut sauce, plus sautéed escarole with copious garlic and a little BBQ chicken broth. Tonight, though,…
I went to a couple of stores, looking first for fish and second for other things to give me ideas; if I don’t have a clear idea in mind, the sight of good-looking ingredients gives me focus. So I found some excellent marlin, and decided I’d make hand rolls since we had some brown rice in the fridge. The hand rolls would need sriracha mayo (duh) so I got eggs and oil. I also broke…
Probably the single best thing about a garden in summer is that if there are even a couple of pantry staples in the house the question “what’s for dinner?” becomes a reason to smile rather than worry. In this case, with some leftover lentil soup and half a recipe of pie crust in the fridge, a sumptuous and exalted pot pie was brought into being on short notice. I took a little hunk of salt…
The spinach we planted in March is starting to bolt, so I took that as an opportunity to yank most of it up and do something fun with it. We loves us some spinach pie here, so I made it the center of a warm day dinner (though it does need the oven, it’s better eaten once it’s cooled off a bit.) The haul from the garden also included bolting arugula, some lettuces, and a…