Some friends came to visit on their way home from Maine the other day, bringing lobsters. The timing was perfect, because a friend who lives in Maine had messaged me the day before telling me that it’s a good time to eat lobster since there’s a glut on the market and prices are low. We boiled them–sadly not availing ourselves of this awesome technique for anesthetizing them first, but clove oil is on my shopping list–and had local sweet corn as well, with frisée aux lardons and 63˚C eggs as a starter. But what I did with them the next day was the real story.
cookblog Posts
The burger is an archetypal American food, and it’s even more prominent in the warmer months. In my ongoing and intermittent series of from-scratch sandwich adventures, here’s a very good burger made entirely from scratch (though, as Milo pointed out, we did not in fact raise the cow).
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.
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.
Today was hot, so dinner needed to be something on the lighter side, but the day was also strenuous; our various exertions of summer camp, rehearsals, and gardening called for serious sustenance. Besides the garden, my sweat-inducing activities included errand running, among which grocery procurement, so I bought two small pieces of fish: tuna and bluefish, thinking to do two different things with them.
Recently we went to visit some old friends at their weekend house down in Sullivan county. We hadn’t seen them in ages, so it was good to catch up.
Last week I got a gift from my friends at Dorsch Gallery in Miami. They have a huge and prolific mango tree next to the gallery, and summer is their season. These three fat beauties arrived in three distinct stages of ripeness: firm, just shy of ripe, and ready to eat, so I got to admire them on the counter for a few days until they were all just where I wanted them. Then I used them to make a pretty terrific chutney. To celebrate their foreignness (and compensate for it), I used nothing but homegrown or homemade ingredients for the rest of it.
As regular readers know, I’m a fan of from-scratch standards (often sandwiches, for some reason) as an ideal format for drilling down into the essence of food while following it up the supply chain as far as possible. It helps me understand cooking better. More often than not it also tastes really fucking good, so there’s also that. In this instance, to celebrate the ninth anniversary of our fun summer wedding (we had the legal one the previous December while my Mother was still alive), I prepared what was by any measure a simple meal. But it technically took seven months to make it.
In the July Chronogram I profile Eminence Road Farm Winery, which I have mentioned already a few times in recent posts. If you live in the region, their wines are well worth searching out. Anyone interested in natural wines could do worse than to read Alice Feiring’s Naked Wine and Jonathan Nossiter’s Liquid Memory, both of which I enjoyed and found highly informative.
More photos after the jump.
I used to eat a lot of fish tacos when I lived in Oakland. My friends lived up in a much less dangerous neighborhood, so we’d get together to play basketball and then get tacos or burritos at one or another of our favorite spots nearby. When I moved to Chicago a year later, I was delighted at all the Mexican food in my new neighborhood but I never had a fish taco as good as the ones in California.