When Jody and I signed up for the cycling fund-raiser the PanMass Challenge last year we stepped up our game when it came to exercise. Speaking exclusively for my Falstaffian self, I thought it might not be a bad idea to drop a few pounds ahead of the actual 200-mile 2-day ride. That’s how we ended up making dishes like Steel-Cut Oats with Eggs, Preserved Lemon and Olives.
But it was a journey to get there.
I learned to clean fish when I was nine-years old, taught by my father, practicing on the sunnies, perch and bass my brothers and I caught in rural Michigan. Cleaning fish is a tripartite affair–scraping the scales off while grasping a slippery tail, gutting and removing the viscera, and cutting out the gills and fins, …
Few recipes are as simple to execute and as difficult to explain as risotto. Yet nothing will give your culinary confidence a shot in the arm like learning to make one well. With a little Arborio or Carnaroli rice, an onion and some stock you can set off in a hundred different directions. If you’re …
After ten days of culinary heavy lifting we thought it was time to lighten things up and make a meal that takes less than 30 minutes to put together–that’s prep and cooking, 30 minutes. Allow me to introduce Chicken Curry with Carrots and Ginger. Recyclable shopping bag to table in 30 minutes. …
This is not a post about stuffed peppers cooked in a pressure cooker. This week’s recipe of Stuffed Peppers with Porcini and Aged Gouda is prepared the conventional way–in the oven. Dried porcini and their deeply infused soaking liquid meet regular mushrooms (we used cremini), spinach, tomatoes, brown rice and smoky, buttery aged Gouda in …
You’d think I’d be able to pin down the first time I ate squid. Note that I said squid, not calamari. Squid is the in your face cephalopod that says Eat me if you dare. Calamari, by contrast, is Italian for “tasty bit of something fried in a batter by a female relative.” I mean, …
I happened to have five bunches of kale in the fridge that I stripped and began cooking last Friday evening for no reason other than the obvious one that it needed to be cooked. Then our son Oliver and four friends rolled through the door from New York. Hi hi hug hug. Got anything …
Liver. Old skewl, as my daughter Roxanne would say, wrinkling her nose and shaking her head, very old skewl. Strange old people food. Writing about liver’s a challenge. No other common food pairs exquisite flavor with such dreadful PR. (I said common, so kidneys and brains don’t count.) Do you try to drag chicken liver’s …
This post had so many potential titles–Deep Purple, Heart of Darkness, Purple Monster–all inspired by this week’s recipe of Simple Eggplant Parmesan, and the challenge of photographing dark eggplants. My favorite was from the great American writer Annie Proulx, who once depicted a character’s nocturnal torment as a “descent into an aubergine nightmare.” An aubergine nightmare. …
When you’re young and stupid and starting out and you don’t have much money (all accurate descriptors of myself at 22) you generally have two choices in stove-top hardware – thin aluminum or cast iron. I made the wrong choice. I bought aluminum, and then could never figure out why my efforts to reproduce the sautéed …
The Garum Factory 