Gone South for the winter
It’s true that I’m a born and bred salty New Englander of hearty Polish and pilgrim stock. I am generally unphased by extreme weather conditions, from snowbanks to scorchers, I can take it, bring it on! And so here we are, one long month into the three (plus…) month stretch of the winter doldrums, accumulating … Read more
Oh, solo me-o: The dish I can’t stop eating
Carbonara. Well, carbonara-ish, minus the bacon…not that I don’t love a good hit of pork product whenever I can get it. When left to fend for myself on these brisk late-fall evenings, carbonara is the answer. Home alone for a couple of quiet hours, I want to kick back, relax and have a nice warm bowl of creamy, peppery noodles. And a glass of red wine. And an episode of Law and Order: SVU.
A chicken in every pot, and other weekend culinary ventures
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about food over the past few days, and helping a friend plan what promises to be a lush seasonal dinner party menu has kicked me into gear to put thought into action and get cookin’…Slow-braising a big ol’ piece of meat into luscious, rich submission. Coaxing out those deep, rustic flavors with wine and roots and herbs. Oh yes! And what the heck, maybe a roast chicken while I’m at it.
Sure, my pizza is a cliche. A delicious, delicious cliche…and other food musing from the weekend
The crisp edge in the air is also a pretty good excuse to crank up the oven, as I have begun to over the past week or so. Knowing that I’d stashed a Whole Foods whole wheat/multigrain pizza dough in the freezer, I was inspired to give in to my desire for a basket of luscious fresh figs to put together an arugula, fig, prosciutto and buffalo mozzarella pizza.
Bean + green soup: a go-to recipe without actually being a recipe
While one of the best things about making soup is the affordance of stretching a little into a lot, the quintessential peasant food, a soup may be as refined as it is rustic.
Working from the bottom (drawer) up
But me, well, I’m all too often guided by my fixations and fancies (I wish I could say that this particular character trait was relegated to things culinary, but…) and the items that I’d bought during an astute, all-business shopping trip on Saturday sit languishing in that graveyard of a crisper drawer while I whip up a spontaneous meyer-lemon curd and almond-thyme financier tart* on Thursday.
A Personal Best
I think I’ve more or less nailed chicken and pork (more on my other holy grail: the perfect roast chicken, later), I confited my first duck this winter, and even whipped some chicken livers into delicious submission as pate recently. But beef, or more specifically steak, well, I just couldn’t get it right, at least to my expectations. Since experiments need to be backed up by a hypothesis (sometimes more than one hypothesis, really), I set out to exhaustively research how to cook a steak.
Dethroned…
Eating becomes a function, a necessary evil, even, as Craigslist, coffee and a multivitamin becomes your breakfast and you aspire to ingest a lunch that maybe, just maybe contains something green- gummy bears notwithstanding- that costs less than $10.
Curry Worry
I think I have only made one successful curry. Ever. It was just a few months ago, and it gave me confidence to continue on, feeling like I had finally nailed it. I had finally uncovered the secret to an authentic, flavorful, tasty curry.
