kitchen
“But how did you stand the winters?”
Anyone who’s lived in Maine year round and now doesn’t will be familiar with this question. There are lots of good answers but right now all I can think of is Northern shrimp, Pandalus borealis, the glory of the Maine winter, sweet, tender and buttery.
Like the wild mushrooms of the warmer months, Maine shrimp are a gift of place. If you’re near the coast, they’re everywhere, especially in a good season. Never mind fishmarkets and grocery stores. Trucks! By the side of the road. Two or three dollars a pound. Or you can be part of community supported fishing (CSF), pay in advance and be confident of the freshest and best every week.
Typical size is 40 or 50 per pound (headless)
The farther they must travel, the more they cost. But even at the 8.00/pound I recently paid in Manhattan out of a giant fit of homesickness, they’re a bargain. And talk about easy to cook!
Read More…
Ok, not the original, but the traditional until recently and when you stop to think about the custom of saving the top layer to eat on your first anniversary, fruitcake does sound like the best bet, especially in the days before freezers.
Bleeding heart and hosta; no flowers necessary
The picture is to say Spring is Coming. It has nothing to do with wedding cake but I don’t have any of the fruitcake; I don’t know anybody who’s getting married and I owe Colleen the recipe, having promised it to her over three months ago. If you don’t have a wedding on tap either, there’s always the bookmark option. If spring is coming, can Christmas be far behind? Read More…
Politics got you down? Dispirited by a landscape of straw, grey brown, dull green and dirty snow? Feeling slightly guilty because you didn’t happen to make your sweetie a chocolate cream pie for Valentine’s Day?
Time for a batch of rugelach, one of the world’s more wonderful cookies – being as they are right next door to pie while being a great deal easier to make ( and a great deal more durable since they never get soggy).
plum, chocolate and apricot rugelach
Read More…
If you are of a saving disposition, you know how satisfying it is to be going through old storage boxes looking for, say, a potato ricer and among the hoarded tools find a great saucepan you’d completely forgotten you had.
You also know what’s coming next; the find was a recipe. I was searching for a pre-computer Good Food column about 3 Day Black Fruitcake (requested by Colleen back on Halloween – eek!). This involved pawing through many boxes of ancient clippings. And there among them was a guide to herring with the recipe for Ilse’s Salad, the great converter of herring haters into passionate fans.
Ilse's Salad, with beets, potatoes, apples and onions - and herring
When the piece came out in 1985, the things that herring had going for it included great taste, moderate price and lots of health-promoting fatty acids. Now we can add: less endangered than most of the fish you’d actually like to eat and less well-seasoned with toxic pollutants than most other fatty fish.
I’m speaking here of pickled herring, a dependable staple available almost everywhere. Fresh herring, one of the world’s tastier foodstuffs, more or less doesn’t exist because it has a shelf life of about 5 minutes. Like mackerel, bluefish and similar delights, it gets disagreeably fishy so fast only those who’ve eaten it right off the boat know how delicious it can be, and it’s almost never sold in U.S. fishmarkets. Of course we never used to see edible fresh sardines, either, so maybe eventually…
where was I? Oh, the recipe Read More…
In most cases homemade chocolates lack the suave texture and slick appearance of deluxe commercial versions, even though they’re just as flavorful. But chocolate bark – which is nothing more than melted chocolate mixed with tasty lumps and spread thin – is an exception. It’s every bit as glossy as boughten (on one side, anyway), and it’s usually even better because you have no reason to be stingy with the lumps.
white chocolate bark, lumpy and smooth sides
‘Nough said. Valentine’s day is roaring at us at an unseemly pace and if you have to order the chocolate, for instance from chocosphere, it would be best to get going.
Singapore Bark – white chocolate with ginger and pistachios
Read More…
The thermometer hit 1 below this morning, but it’s not the weather that brings freezing to mind; it’s the seed orders. That and the pre-surgery maps I made so Bill could understand my filing system. He puts up a lot of the food we freeze but I’m the one who moves it around so the tomatoes and corn are on the right in the big chest freezer and the soup assortment is on the 2rd shelf down in the upright.
that’s venison on top
Somewhere on that shelf are, according to Bill: ” 2 cream of tomato, 3 curried corn, 1 squash and tomato, 1 cream of wild mushroom, 2 wild mushroom and duck, 2 summer squash and corn, 1 cream of morel.” The minestrone is behind the first row of packets, so he didn’t count it.
Two freezers for two people who don’t entertain very often might seem a bit excessive, and the truth is we could get along with one. But we couldn’t get along without one. It’s our ticket to eating magnificently – and locally – all year. Read More…
Every cookie recipe in creation, right? “…reverse the pans halfway through baking for even browning.” One of those little niceties that does make a difference, and I don’t know about you, but I’m very faithful about this – with cookies.
Never noticed it mattering too much with bread, however, until the big pre-surgery flurry of stocking up. (Bill’s a good cook; but he doesn’t bake.) Lesson learned: if you’re trying to find your oven’s hot spot, just pave the whole rack with pans of sticky buns.
sticky buns as hotspot finder
Clockwise from upper left: spritz, pfeffernüsse, sugar cookies, gingerbread springerle, more sugar cookies, fruit/nut/chocolate jumbles.
This post is appearing because the cookie recipe roundup (12/12) made me fear you might be thinking I don’t bake cookies very often or very many or very anything.
Very shaming and not very accurate, especially at the turn of the year when there’s no WAY I’m not crankin’ ’em out, though I don’t pretend to be in the same league as those indefatigable ladies who make hundreds of dozens and pride themselves – secretly or not – on the length of the recipient list. Read More…
For such terrific vegetable, Romanesco cauliflower is still far too rare, but it does seem to be headed in the right direction. After years of finding it only at farmstands, I saw it last month – more than once – at my favorite greengrocer. Gladdened my foodie little heart, even if it cost $3.50 a head and came so heavily swathed in plastic it looked a bit like King Tut.
Typical head of Romanesco, @ 9 inches tall and maybe 7 inches wide. approximate weight 1.5 pounds
So far, so good. But then just the other day I saw a basket of miniature Romanescos, heads about 3 inches tall, weighing perhaps 2 ounces, being sold for $4.00 each. This was in Manhattan, at Dean and DeLuca furthermore, but I think the sighting remains Eek worthy because those pricy little units were too big to be served beautifully whole and too wilted to be used in a massive flower arrangement which otherwise might have been way cool.
I will refrain from pious remarks about food stamps, but it does seem as though if you’re paying that much you ought to get value for money – even if it’s just snob value. Of course I didn’t buy any, so may be doing them an injustice. Maybe they have a different taste from full size Romanescos, the way Brussels Sprouts have virtues unknown to cabbages. And thus we pass to a happier topic,
Leafy Brussels Sprouts with Chestnuts
Read More…
Or to put it another way, 18 things to do with mashed winter squash that do not contain added sugar. ( I thought there were 25 for a while there, but there aren’t.)
Postwise, this is sort of backwards – choosing and storing (and growing) will be coming along shortly. But for the day after Thanksgiving, the thing to address is what to do when you are starting here:
Bowl of cooked squash = bowl of possibilities
(1)*Absolutely the easiest thing but really great: Butter a jellyroll pan. Spread on the room temperature squash in a layer not more than an inch thick. Put it about 4 inches under the broiler and cook until heated and well-flecked with brown and a burned spot or two is ok.
(2 – 6) SOUP: saute chopped onion in butter, season, add 1 part squash and 2 or 3 parts liquid, depending on original squash thickness.
*Southwestern – cumin, oregano, pinch of clove, powdered ancho chile (or some chopped chipotle in adobo), chicken broth, shredded cilantro on top at the end
*Indianish – garlic, garam masala, fenugreek, a little turmeric but not much, chicken broth, dollop of yogurt in the soup bowls
*Not Thai but nice – green curry paste, half chicken broth, half coconut milk, some thinly sliced scallions
*Cream of Coral – salt, white pepper, shredded orange zest, equal quantities squash and pureed canned tomatoes (not canned tomato puree, and if you have frozen tomatoes this is a good place to use them) milk
*Squash and Chestnut – thyme, nutmeg, 1 part crumbled roasted chestnuts to 2 parts of squash. Chicken broth. Chopped parsley on top at the end
(6 – 11) SAVORY SQUASH-CRUST PIES: Read More…
