recipes
Today we got a Comment from a reader about a riff she did on our Roasted Chestnut How-To from last year’s Thanksgiving. OMG, we thought, it’s next week!. If you’re still mulling over what to make – or bring – for your Thanksgiving day…here are are our greatest hits.
As for the inspired chestnut riff, it’s here:
“Well, nearly a year later and I’ve finally tried smoking chestnuts. I scored them sort of randomly (wherever I could get a purchase on the skin- some on the flat side, some on the round, always a crisscross), soaked them, and smoked them on the stove top over apple wood chips and a few dried sage leaves. It took about 45 minutes before the skin peeled back. They’re delicious!”
(To rig a stove-top smoker, read more…
11.16.11 |
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in celebrations, family + friends, food, recipes |
Eric Michael Johnson for The New York Times
As we were writing about Occupy Wall Street and We Are the 99 Percent, Cara de Silva sent us a compelling and very timely story she spotted in the New York Times. “Back to the Land, Reluctantly” by Susan Gregory Thomas
, is about how the 42 year-old Brooklyn mother of three, having found herself divorced, flat-broke, with a dwindling livelihood, figured out how to “live off the land” from her urban garden and kitchen. “Luckily, my late father hammered into me that grit was more important than talent…I figured, if peasants in 11th-century Sicily did all this, how hard could it be?”
It was survival, not any particular love of artisan cheese or the notion of self-sufficiency, that motivated her to learn how to raise chickens, grow vegetables and herbs, make her own granola, bread, perfume and cleaning products, harvest edible weeds, and stretch a single piece of cheap meat into a week’s worth of dinners, until she discovered she could and her family could live on $100 a week.
IT is a lot of work. You have to be organized and able to improvise on your feet. But, frankly, it’s awesome. read more…
10.11.11 |
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in cheap + great, copy this!, family + friends, how-to, outside, paths + processes, people, recipes, reimagine, resources, resources blogs + sites, solutions, strategies |
photo: sally schneider
We were poking around food editor and writer Jane Lear‘s website, when we came across a trove of great articles, including one of her pieces for Gourmet Magazine, where she was its Senior Articles Editor for many years. Called Transformers, the premise is that with 3 eggs and two lemons on hand, you can make 5 terrific desserts. Right up our alley. The recipe that caught our eye was a Dutch Baby with Lemon Sugar, basically a giant popover with pancake overtones cooked in an iron skillet, onto which you sprinkle lemon sugar for a bit of crackle at the last minute. It’s GREAT, easy and made with ordinary ingredients, our favorite combo. (On our second try, we monkeyed with the recipe slightly; see the Note below).
As we were gobbling it, we thought: Couldn’t this also be great savory instead of sweet? We imagined it baked with grated Parmigiano Reggiano, to make something akin to a giant gougere, an eggy, crispy cheese puff usually made in bite-size portions. We we tried our idea out then-and-there. read more…
09.30.11 |
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in food, how-to, recipes, resources blogs + sites, strategies |
photo: maria robledo
My fondness for French fries is ruled by an idiosyncratic logic that, for a while, made them mostly off-limits. It goes something like this: perfectly-fried French fries are rare even in restaurants. At home they are daunting: hours of fry-o-lator air lingering in the apartment, and a quart or two of hot fat to discard. Because they are deep-fried and fattening, they must be really superb to be worth eating….
Those constraints sent me on a mission to find a way to achieve the divine effect and flavor of REAL French fries without either the mess, ‘fry’-ladened air, or the dietary wallop. Even if they weren’t more healthful, I’d take my fries, made in the oven, over most of the fries I find in restaurants any day.
It took me a while to figure out just how to push my oven fries beyond just-okay, half-too-crisp, half-limp ersatz fries that many recipes yield. The secret: Roast them in a hot oven for most of the time, then turn the oven down to dry the interiors out just enough to be truly fry-like. Use the right potato. And the right fat. That’ll give you a truly fry-like fry, perfect alongside a roast chicken or steak, or to dunk in a soft-cooked egg for breakfast.
Here’s the thinking behind, and a recipe for, crisp, deeply satisfying oven fries with lots of opportunities for improvising: read more…
09.23.11 |
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in food, health, kids, recipes |
photo: sally schneider
Our friend Anthony Giglio is a journalist, sommelier, and the author of many acclaimed books on wine and cocktails, including the Food & Wine Magazine’s Wine Guide 2011
. He travels around the country leading wine tastings and helping people navigate the vast world of wine, cocktails, and “what goes with what”. He does all of this with a sense of humor that borders on irreverent, often shocking connoisseurs with his candor. A great cook, he is also one of the best dinner party hosts we know – invitations to his parties are coveted! – largely due to his ability to put himself in his guest’s shoes and think of ways to delight them from the moment they walk in the door. (He taught us Mama Lucia’s Insalata di Pomodoro, THE best approach to real summer tomatoes, which he’s dishing out in the photo above.)
We’ve been so impressed by his smart, simple strategies for entertaining that we’ve asked him to guest blog for ‘the improvised life’, starting with read more…
08.29.11 |
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in community, eating, family + friends, food, how-to, people, recipes, strategies |
Maria Robledo
In a recent interview on Nowness’ FB page, superstar chef Mario Batali was asked what olive oils he “swears by”. The answer:
“Da Vero from Healdsburg, Primo Olio from Sicilia, Castello di Ama and Capezzana from Toscana.”
We’ve tasted three of the oils he mentioned and they ARE stunning, as well as pricey and not easy to come by, although worth every penny. A good olive oil can MAKE a dish, literally. Along with salt, it can be the only seasoning you need to turn say, a bowl of steamed wax beans from the farmer’s market, or a tomato or a slice of mozzarella, or a piece of grilled or slow-roasted fish into a perfect, ‘complete’ dish.
The world of olive oils is vast. Flavors range from pepper to grassy to herbal and on. A fine place to start learning about them is through Zingerman’s, a mail-order company who offers a wide range of carefully chosen oils, that you know will be in perfect shape. (We have tasted many an esoteric olive oil that was rancid from having been stored improperly.) Zingerman’s Guide to Good Eating: How to Choose the Best Bread, Cheeses, Olive Oil, Pasta, Chocolate, and Much More
is a reliable primer.
The problem for many folks we know is that these oils are just too expensive. What to do then? How to find a well-flavored economical olive oil for everyday use? read more…
08.18.11 |
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in cheap + great, d-i-y, food, gifts, recipes, strategies |
Maria Robledo sent us this iPhone photo of a recipe she’d made by improvising with one of Sally’s and marrying it one a friend taught her. The Sally recipe is a endlessly mutable Brown Sugar Butter Cookie dough made with so much butter that it is SHORT, that is, it melts in your mouth. Maria pressed it into a tart tin and baked it until it was golden. Then she cut up some strawberries she’d bought at the farmer’s market – small, sweet REAL summer berries. She put some in a pan with a bit of sugar, a tad of fine tapoica for thickening, lemon juice and water over low heat to “melt them”. Then she mixed the warm, slightly thickened berry mixture into raw berries. She sliced her tart shell into slices, and spooned the berries on top. Voila, a perfect freeform tart. read more…
08.05.11 |
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in d-i-y, family + friends, food, recipes |
We’ve written many times before about the fantastic Canal House Cookbook series, but this summer Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton took their work to a new level by hosting the first annual Smallholding Festival in Ottsville, Pennsylvania. The festival featured a number of skill-shares and do-it-yourself exhibitions including cheese-making, beekeeping, canning, bread-baking, and spit-roasting. Also on-hand was Margo True, the author of The One-Block Feast: An Adventure in Food from Yard to Table
, which is worth checking out if you’re an aspiring urban farmer/gardener/d-i-y-er/beekeeper
Even though we’re telling you about this event after it’s happened, you can actually bring a few of the exhibitions directly to your own home. The Smallholding Festival website features four free pdfs with step-by-step instructions for read more…
08.03.11 |
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in celebrations, cheap + great, community, d-i-y, food, garden, gifts, how-to, outside, projects + play, recipes, resources, resources books + zines, strategies |
This unattributed image posted on You Are the River recently was accompanied by the words “I’m so hungry.” Yeah we are too. It reminds us of the endless possibilities for making fried eggs into a compelling meal any time of day – breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, or a late supper.
Fried eggs are great on just about anything, providing a cheap, satisfying, easy-to-make hit of protein. They’re the reason Sally’s cookbook The Improvisational Cook
features Spaghetti with a Fried Egg and Parmigiano Reggiano on the cover (recipe here). Often finding herself tired, hungry and too crazed to cook, she’s riffed endlessly on the theme. A whole section of The Improvisational Cook is devoted to it, and includes oven-roasted peppers or sweet onions, mashed or hashed potatoes, ratatouille, polenta, warmed over risotto, fried bread, asparagus, spinach, potato chips… As a life strategy, she makes sure she’s got organic eggs on hand when the larder is low.
The best compendium we’ve found on the “fried egg with anything” theme is Hail the Mighty Egg read more…
07.22.11 |
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in food, how-to, recipes, resources, resources books + zines, strategies |
Kitchenbite.com
Lately, we’ve been whipping up quick batches of rhubarb using a recent improvisation/discovery: a thick stew of rhubarb, fragrant with honey and citrus zest, with bit of tart crunch. The trick: Throw chunks of rhubarb into a wide shallow pan slicked with a syrup of honey, white wine and lemon and orange zests. The rhubarb will cook into a fragrant, creamy mass of tender chunks (rather than dissolving completely, as happens when too much liquid is used). Thin slices of raw rhubarb stirred in at the last moment barely cook in the residual heat to add surprising bursts of flavor and texture.
We’d been gobbling this delicious rhubarb stew as is and with vanilla ice cream…Then it occurred to us that it would make a divine rhubarb shortcake, sandwiched with some whipped cream between the foolproof Cream Biscuits we posted a while back.
Rhubarb Shortcake is really the sum of three simple parts that you can prepare well in advance to assemble at the last minute: read more…
07.01.11 |
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in celebrations, family + friends, food, recipes |
Sally Schneider
This morning ‘the improvised life’s essential-to-its-being assistant Sarah* walked in with a surprise gift: a basket of warm cream biscuits that she’d baked herself and brought on the train from Brooklyn. Everything stopped! and we pulled out the French butter laced with fleur de sel and slathered it on… then we tried the biscuits with the Grapefruit and Smoked Salt Marmalade that Sarah also thought to bring, from Brooklyn-based Anarchy in a Jar (“the revolution starts in your mouth”).
The biscuits were airy, almost ethereal with the richness and flavor only butter and cream can give, and a slight crunch outside. read more…
05.27.11 |
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in d-i-y, family + friends, food, recipes |
One of our new favorite food sites is They Draw and Cook, where every recipe is illustrated, for totally appealing, graphical how-to’s. Some are done by professionals, and some are done by amateurs who submit their work to the site, but all are charming and one-of-a-kind. Somehow, having the recipes in this form loosens up the vibe into a more improvisational one. And it makes us want to DRAW what we cook, rather than just write a recipe.
You can search for recipes by ingredient, meal type, illustration style or even where in the world the artist is from, OR use the fun Dial-a-Dinner option for a great random menu…. read more…
05.24.11 |
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in family + friends, food, projects + play, recipes, resources blogs + sites, resources books + zines |
Ellen Silverman
It is high season for ramps, the pungent wild leeks that grow throughout the Appalachian and Catskill mountains. Ellen Silverman sent us photos of the sublime ramp butter she was given by a friend, with an utterly simple recipe that will keep you in ramp heaven for days. She wrote this in her email:
“Cyd McDowell is an amazing food stylist and lover of all things food. She picked the ramps on her property upstate she lives near Great Barrington. All she did was chop the ramps put them in the food processor with good salted butter (I think she used Plugra)… and process. She brought the butter to me when we met for a coffee; it was in a little glass bowl with a round of natural wax paper placed on the top.
We ate it on everything for three nights…on fish sauteed one night and panko-fried another, roasted chicken, steamed clams, bread, asparagus, potatoes; we licked the remains off of our fingers! Now, very regrettably, we have finished it…”
What a gift!!! We could imagine ramp butter in risottos, on pasta, on grilled meats, to cook scrambled or fried eggs in, and of course, on toast…
Here’s a rough little recipe that allows you to gauge the “rampiness” of the butter, and calibrate it as you wish: read more…
05.13.11 |
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