This soup described an interesting trajectory over the course of a week, culminating in a pretty spectacular finale the other night.
cookblog Posts
I just got back from a few days in Vermont, where I did some noteworthy cooking. There’s a soup I want to talk about, but first this duck.
For the August Chronogram, following on the heels of the beekeeping article, I profiled a new meadery up near Albany. Helderberg Meadworks, a tiny operation, could be the beginning of a renaissance of the ancient craft the way distilling and hard cider have both exploded into major new sectors of the agricultural economy. Those are oak barrel staves that Peter Voelker puts in the fermentation tanks to impart the flavors his Norse ancestors would have…
Here’s a piece about Phyllis Feder of Clinton Vineyards that I wrote for the current issue of Edible Hudson Valley. I just sent off another piece about local wine that should be in the fall issue, so stay tuned for that.
It has been hot as balls around here, which will not be news to you if you live on the East Coast. While outside, though hot, there has been a breeze and thus in the shade it is not too too bad, inside without air conditioning is a wretched sauna of hatred, trickling sweat, and fetid stench. Also, the other night a skunk got spooked right outside the front door and sprayed all over a corner of the house, so with no rain in sight for weeks the air is seductively perfumed with a sulfurous reek redolent of nothing so much as a smoldering corpse wrapped in plastic that you forgot about in the trunk of your ’79 Chevy in the Nevada desert while you attended Burning Man. Good times.
Today—after what felt like at least a month of fetid, slug-covered, swelteringly humid torpor, interrupted by days of rain that only augmented the ambient moisture—dawned dry, clear, and breezy. I wasted no time, rushing out to attend to the neglected garden, mustering hours of energy despite a shitty, insomnia-dented night of inadequate sleep. There’s a lot going on, not least of which is the full arrival of what I like to call the “round food.” No longer are leaves the bulk of each day’s harvest; they’re shrinking into the minority as the roots and fruits gain girth by the day. Yesterday saw the first new potatoes of the year, roasted along with a spatchcocked chicken, taking advantage of a cooler evening to use the oven (and bake some much-needed bread). Today, thanks to a basket piled high with the various thinnings, cullings, and eager grabbings that attended my earnest horticultural ministrations, dinner comprised a perfect, seamless conclusion to the most pleasant summer day of the year so far.
Beef stew in July? Counter-intuitive, maybe, and possibly insane, this meal nonetheless satisfied on a number of levels.
For the July Chronogram, I visited Hudson Valley Bee Supply in Kingston. It was a lovely day, and the photography gods were kind to me. Check out the slideshow they put up; it’s a big glossy magazine and for those of you outside of the distribution area it offers a handsome way to look at big pictures. Sadly, they did not use this picture, but that just gives me an excuse to show it here.
I made some pretty good chicken pho last night. Muggy heat notwithstanding, the Kid wanted chicken noodle soup because he wasn’t feeling well. So I dutifully trudged off to the weekly market, procured a bunch of chicken wings, and trudged home. Wings make good stock. Normally, I make, you know, wings with them, saving the tips, and then cook the cooked second and third segments with the raw tips to make a wonderfully flavored but still gelatinous stock later on. This time there was no time, so in the pot they went, whole and unjointed, with all the pho-requisite flavors.
