Craig Claiborne, the late pioneer of food journalism for the New York Times once wrote a New Year’s Day column that included the line, “Blessed indeed is the household whose refrigerator contains an overlooked tin of caviar.” Yes, well. For most of us, caviar times may be gone, but that only means the return of our salad days. Substitute chickpeas for caviar and you’re halfway to Wilted Green Salad with Fresh Chickpeas, Feta and Greek Yogurt.
Category Archives: fast
Roasted Asparagus with Pistachio-Basil Pesto
We eat A LOT of asparagus. I see it on sale, buy an armful, steam it lightly, then use it to fill out other things–steel-cut oats and an egg, a lunch salad with cannelloni beans, a way to gussy up a croque monsieur so I don’t feel like Lonely Guy eating grilled cheese in an empty house. But Roasted Asparagus with Pistachio Pesto is something else altogether. You set this platter in front of friends who aren’t afraid of getting a little messy when everyone’s standing around in the kitchen with a beer (my preference with asparagus, by the way)* or glass of wine, carrying on while you cook. Serious finger food.
PC Adventures – Chicken Curry with Carrots and Ginger
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. …
Rated Mature: Sautéed chicken livers with bacon, pine nuts, currants and chicory salad
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 …
Simple Sauce, Simple Eggplant Parmesan
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. …
Cast Irony: Salt-Seared Skirt Steak with Kitchen Sink Steak Sauce
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 …
Ketchup of the gods
Welcome to the first post in our new blog, The Garum Factory. You can read all about garum, why we decided to name our blog after it, and what this blog is all about in About this, but for the sake of people in a hurry here’s a quick and dirty explanation. Garum was the …
The Garum Factory 