It has no doubt become tiresome for you all to hear me plaint repeatedly about the lack of time each evening affords me to whip the grub together. So I won’t. But it did(n’t). A trip to the market made for some good fixins: ground beef, romanesco, blue potatoes, a leek. The sky, ostensibly, was the limit, though ironically was itself limited by the hour flat I had to make something happen. Iron Chef maybe…
Category: Wine
Lateness often confounds my grand schemes and forces me to scramble, resulting in dinners that are far from my original intention but serviceable nonetheless. As always, freezer, pantry, and leftovers provide the difference between decent and awful. In this instance, I grabbed some boudin noir from the freezer. While they were thawing, I threw some scarlet runner beans in the pressure cooker with leeks, onions, garlic, burdock, carrot, herbs, and some smoked chicken stock. Once…
So I got a deli slicer for my birthday. Which I sort of asked for, in that not-exactly-asking-but-making-it-pretty-obvious-way that my expert wife has figured out over the years. It was a tough call, since I really want a new juicer (the old one suffered a child-related mishap, rendering it useless) but the one I want is three times more money than the slicer. So I got a slicer. It was win/win, really, since she knew that the minute I opened it I’d rush out and buy hunks of meat to cure, hang, and then slice into glistening tissues of salty splendor for us all to enjoy.
And that is pretty much exactly what happened.
First, some things cassoulet is not. Fussy. Difficult. Complicated. Intimidating. Very good for you. Some things it is? Very good to eat. Peasant food. Food for people who really should have spent most of the day chopping wood with their bare hands in order to work up a need for the caloriffic ordnance that this dish also happily happens to be. Cassoulet- notwithstanding the sputtering, indignant protestations of traditionalists- is beans slow-cooked with a shitload…
For the last two Thanksgivings I have thrown down 11-course extravaganzas (links here and here; menu for second link here) which took days to make and hours to eat. This time around, we were to have the meal in Vermont, and I just couldn’t deal with having to bring lots of components and more than a few tools, gadgets, and plates to do it there. So I just did a straight-up all-on-the-plate at once dinner,…
We’re still having the most gorgeous warm weather, and it has been energizing me in and out of the kitchen. I found a couple of lamb steaks in the freezer, and while they were thawing I pulled some roots. Thinking old-school bistro, and with enough time to do it properly, I made mayonnaise with mustard and yuzu juice, then used that along with yogurt, capers, cornichons, kimchi juice, and herbs to make rémoulade. I tossed…
Sunday and Monday I did a heap o’ cookin’ for the November article, and Jen the photographer was scheduled to come Monday evening to shoot the results. The article will be a Thanksgiving thing, showing some ways to make the preparation easier and flavor richer than the normal version without going completely off the reservation (as it were). And John was around. Like waterboarding Dick Cheney, it was a no-brainer. Jen came early, and shot…
I’ve been lax about blogging, obviously, but not about cooking; I just can’t find time to do any writing. I even busted out a pretty nice 6-course dinner for a couple of friends up from the city last Friday, but the only picture I took was a repeat of the gravlax with corn-avocado ice cream and pickle sauce. Other courses were grilled chicken-miso soup, a sort of frisée aux lardons- curly endive tossed with a…
I was in Vermont on Friday going through the cellar and giving at least half of it to someone from an auction house. On the plus side, it’s one of the few assets we own that has actually- and significantly- appreciated in value, so it’s going to make us some much-needed cash. On the minus side, I parted with some special bottles of Bordeaux, some of which I’ve had for 15 years. Back during the…
After a week of epic frustration, it’s been pure luxury to have a day off, reveling in the clarity, aroma, and Proustian recall of early fall. I dug a good variety of the annual herbs, potting and soaking them well in advance of their imminent repair to the dining room where they’ll sit basking in the waning sun shining through the big windows. The only hitch is that the radiator under the windows dries them…