There’s nothing like a bowl of cold savory soup in hot weather, and until the day we do a post on jellied madrilene, this Chilled Garlic Scape and Buttermilk Soup will have to stand in. It’s a wrinkle on vichyssoise, close enough to feel familiar, but with a few turns you might not have expected, like scapes and buttermilk.
Tart, garlicky, cool–you’re going to love it on a sweltering night.
Pickled Eggs 3 Ways is the final and most colorful installment in our recent trilogy of egg recipes. We made two batches of each of these eggs, a week apart, both to test the recipes and so I could photograph the process from pickling juice to finished eggs. As I write this the first batch of three dozen eggs is nearly gone–in case you’re wondering if kids will eat pickled eggs, the answer is Yes, they will. Who can resist wedges of a saffron and purple egg, child or adult? These eggs are tart, but not completely sour (note the sugar in the recipes), which makes them a flexible dining companion. Of course pickled eggs are the ultimate picnic food–festive, not prone to spoilage, and given to pairing nicely with other preserved items like cheese, smoked fish–and great beer. They stand out with mixed greens–and when combined with with wasabi mayonnaise make a killer egg salad
We’re on an egg roll these days. Last week zabaglione, this week Poached Chicken Breasts with DIY Mayonnaise–and next week… well, you’ll just have to check back next week. One hint, picnic. And no, I’m not talking about deviled eggs.
As a younger–and thinner–man, I used to make mayonnaise a lot. I also used to eat chicken breasts. Then the original “white meat” took over the world as the healthy convenient food of choice and I just walked away in search of tastier pastures. I can’t explain why I stopped making mayonnaise, except to say that after I got involved in the restaurant biz, we just drifted apart. So here we were, decades later, bumping up against each other. Can you ever really go home again? I wanted to find out.
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.
Spaghetti and Clams with Toasted Bread Crumbs takes its inspiration from two dishes–spaghetti alla vongole, a dish of string pasta with clams popular in Naples, Rome, wider Campania and farther north along the Italian coastline; and pasta con il pangrattato, pasta with breadcrumbs, a very basic dish of la cucina povera, the cooking of the poor. At its most elemental the latter contains no more than pasta, breadcrumbs, oil, salt and a bit of garlic. Variations include raisins, cauliflower, anchovies and olives, which is to say that a little stale bread, some pasta and oil is all you need for dinner–if you have anything else you can dine in the lap of luxury.
Perhaps it’s a sign of the times that local farm-grown strawberries please me almost as wild ones. They’re back now, at least in Massachusetts, which is what makes Strawberries with Marsala Zabaglione finally possible.
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.
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 …
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.
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.
The Garum Factory 