When the garden gets going, cooking becomes simpler. It becomes less of a process, and more of a brief intervention with a bit of heat or a nice bright vinaigrette to flatter the plants on their way from soil to plate.
cookblog Posts
Sloppy Joes are usually a pretty lowbrow punt of a dinner, but they can hit the spot. And when they’re made like this, they become a different sort of animal altogether.
It’s been all about the transitional meals around here lately: dishes that look like colder weather fare, but are actually perfect for the truly lovely weather we have had for the last few weeks. It’s been positively Californian, really; sunny and warm, but cool in the shade and a bit nippy at night. Only without all the Californians everywhere, obviously, which is nice.
This stuffed cabbage took advantage of several different leftovers, and the result was a lovely multicultural mashup of greens and umami. The making was absurdly simple, which only made them more enjoyable to eat. They looked like Eastern European comfort food gut bombs, but were delightfully light and springy.
I don’t normally cook pork loin, because it has no fat and is expensive. But I had a hankering recently to make lomo/lonzino, and when I saw a nice one for not too much I bought it.
Sorry, sourced it. I forgot myself there for a minute.
Most of it sat in a cure for a few days, and I’m going to hang it tomorrow. The rest of it became dinner, and I came up with a rather neat way to avoid overcooking a lean cut such as this, which can turn to cardboard misery in a matter of minutes if you’re not careful, wasting all that money you spent.
When I imagined this meal, it was rather a lot like the poulet fermier aux morilles I had back in Paris on the night I got plowed tasting Burgundies at the huge agricultural fair. While that meal was a perfect drunk-thirty chilly March comfort food home run, this iteration ended up being a pretty perfect conclusion to a rainy yet balmy May Saturday.
By the end of the last post, I had figured out that one of the prominent flavor notes in lovage is quite similar to fenugreek. If you cut some, or, better, tear it, your hands will become insistently perfumed with the persistent aroma of the plant. When people dismiss it with variations of the “it’s like celery” line, that’s a cop-out on par with the “tastes like chicken” descriptor so loosely applied to things as different as mushrooms and alligator. Lovage doesn’t taste like celery, though it approximates it visually, up to a point. It’s much closer to fenugreek, with a whiff of caraway and a citrusy tang.
The new Edible Manhattan is out, and in it is my reworked profile of Fish & Game in Hudson (where I’ll be dining this very evening, in fact) updated for spring and with some pictures of plated food. This is my first of what I hope will be many articles for them. If you live in the borough, pick up a copy since they only used one picture on their website.
This one was almost the cover (thanks to everyone who voted in the comments on their blog) and there’s another one I’m partial to after the jump.
Lovage is a new favorite of mine in the garden. Apart from the fact that it’s a perennial, roaring back in early spring for some of the first new domestic greens, it has a beguiling aroma that’s like celery and citrus and fenugreek all rolled into one. As it’s peaking right now, ready to flower, I cut some stalks thinking that since they’re so fat they might take well to being treated like a vegetable. Cutting them released their perfume, which combined with the scintillating sunlight and the parch in my throat to unleash a savage hankering for an icy gin-based beverage featuring lovage.
For Chronogram’s weekly podcast, this week I spoke with assistant editor Jennifer Gutman about the films I covered in my recent article, ramps, and how it’s possible that someone with a voice as sexy as mine is not already a media superstar. See those kittens up there? That’s some sterling new media savvy right there, and yet I labor in obscurity. They did use my ramp photo, though, so if you click and go listen you’ll…
For the May Chronogram, I wrote about three movies that deal with food in various ways. Two documentaries, one about hunger and the other about small farms under siege by the USDA, and a drama about a couple who forage mushrooms for restaurants in New York City. They are all well worth checking out.