Monthly Archives: May 2012

Sweet Pea Bruschetta with Lime Toast

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I prefer to worship at the altar of hospitality, rather than entertaining.  Entertaining parses your life into into realms.  The private realm is marked by gruel, dog food and the odd can of water chestnuts.  The entertaining realm features sourdough loaves fashioned from home-grown wheat, spit-roasted French game birds and Pakistani mango tiramisu.  You pull out and dust off this fancy life for visiting poobahs.  As far as your guests can tell, your life is a moveable feast.  Hospitality doesn’t make these distinctions.  It simply invites you into my life.  And this is where bruschetta and crostini come in.*  They’re anti-poobah food.

Garlic Love – Skordalia with Parsley Salad

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  In my personal desert island larder (you know, What would you take if you had to choose only a dozen or so dishes or ingredients  on a desert island for the rest of your life?) Skordalia with Parsley Salad would surely rate shelf space.*  And not because it includes potatoes.  But because it includes …

Sardines with Feta and Salmoriglio

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Photographing Sardines with Feta and Salmoriglio this past week reminded me of a fancy dinner where Jody and I found ourselves sitting across the table from Stephen Hawking’s literary agent, who told a story about A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME.  The original manuscript, we learned, had been an overlong demanding text several times the size of the slender volume that was eventually published.  The agent revealed how he convinced Hawking how to pare it down.  “I explained to him that every time he used a mathematical formula in his book he was going to lose half his readers.”

Hawking must have taken his advice to heart.  There’s nary a single formula in the entire story.

Friends have suggested a similar axion holds for food bloggers.  Every time you publish a photo of a fish with its head on you’re going to lose half your readers.  

Rhubarb and Rose Upside-Down Cake

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We haven’t made a cake for awhile and Rhubarb and Rose Upside-Down Cake seemed like a no-brainer. Some pale pink rhubarb for spring, a note of the exotic in the rosewater, the whole thing delivered in as folksy and unpretentious American a package as one could imagine–an upside-down cake.

Nothing is ever as simple as it seems.