recipes
Sally Schneider
Since it’s high cherry season, we thought we’d reprise last years recipe for Warm Fresh Cherries (with Leaves), in honor of the Fourth of July. Too lazy to pit and stem some fresh cherries, a friend and I tried quickly sauteeing them as-is with butter and sugar, to discover the the stems and leaves provided unexpected delights:
“You picked a cherry up by the stem with your fingers, dunked it in crème fraiche and popped it in your mouth, working the fragrant flesh off the pit and stem; we dropped the spent leaves, pits and stems into little bowls set around the table, as you would olives pits or mussel shells. We ate the sublimely messy, almost primal dessert like children, savoring the cherries one-by-one and licking our fingers.”
It is the perfect dessert for however-many-people you may have to serve: easy to make, with a summery hang-out-and-spit-cherry-(or watermelon)-pit thing going on. Here’s the recipe, with our wishes for a wonderful Fourth of July:
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07.03.10 |
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MOOk/Flickr
I was playing around with with rhubarb and strawberries which are in season now and discovered two delicious “base materials” for improvising. Simmering strawberries and rhubarb briefly in a sauterne-like white wine syrup released their flavor to make an intensely-flavored “juice”. When I strained it, I discovered that I had not only made strawberry-rhubarb syrup, but the leftover solids were in fact a delectable cross between a sauce and a compote – a velvety confit. Each inspired other improvisations… read more…
05.28.10 |
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Maria Robledo
Although we’d tasted many wondrous dishes in restaurant-going lives, there is only one that we felt compelled to order three times during the same meal, eating it as appetizer, main course, dessert. Fresh fava beans, dressed with extra-virgin olive oil and a fine dice of young Pecorino cheese, were offered as a “special appetizer” one warm spring night at a Tuscan-style restaurant in New York City. We knew that such a dish is a rarity on restaurant menus because fava beans are work to prepare in quantity; they require both shucking and peeling.”We’ll start with the favas” we said, “and then figure out the rest.”
We were stunned by that first simple dish of beans with their buttery, slightly bitter, “green” pea-like taste. So we ordered it for the next course, and then the next, without restraint or care for propriety. THAT was the dinner we needed. (When we returned the following evening hungering for more, we were told by our waiter that the favas were no longer available: “They were a losing proposition; the staff kept eating them…”)
This is the season for favas and it’s worth the effort to mine yourself and your loved ones a plateful. A fine solution to their laborious-in-quantity prep is read more…
05.20.10 |
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Christopher Hirsheimer
It is peak pea season and we can’t think of a better, easier, more delightful way to eat them than this simple recipe from Canal House Cooking Vol. 3 
“The idea is to pull the peas out of the pods with your teeth, just as you would eat an artichoke leaf. The charred bits of the pod and the salt sticks to your lips, flavoring the tender peas.”
Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton got the recipe from Niloufer Ichaporia King, who wrote My Bombay Kitchen: Traditional and Modern Parsi Home Cooking
. We’re thinking Niloufer’s down-and-dirty approach would work just great with fresh green chickpeas as well.
Serves 2 to 4
Extra-virgin olive oil
1 pound English peas in their pod (preferably organic)
Maldon or other coarse, flaky salt
Pour a little extra-virgin olive oil in a large cast iron pan. Wipe the pan out with a paper towel, leaving the thinnest film of oil. Heat the pan over high heat. When it’s very hot, add the peas in their pods in a single layer, turning them with a spatula until they turn from bright green to a blistery blackened olive color. Work in batches. Transfer to a plate, sprinkle with salt and serve right away.
Related post: Canal House Cooking: Home Cooks as Indie Publisher
With thanks to our friends at Canal House Cooking!
05.13.10 |
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The other day, Maria Robledo sent over some cookbooks with a note: “2 women are doing this lovely diary type home cooking book and one is CHRISTOPHER HIRSHEIMER.”
Maria and I both worked with Christopher years ago when she was the food editor of Metropolitan Home and then Saveur. Christopher is famous for having become a superb photographer, with no formal training, just…like…that! having been a highly regarded editor and writer. (How she did it is a story in itself which we’ll post later.)
Christopher, along with her friend and colleague Melissa Hamilton, has again defied the usual notions of how things work and created an ongoing series of utterly charming, absolutely usable cookbooks without a mainstream publisher. It’s called Canal House Cooking.
“We are home cooks writing about home cooking for other home cooks…Everyday we cook. Starting in the morning we tell each other what we made for dinner the night before. Midday, we stop our work, set the table simply with paper napkins, and have lunch. We cook seasonally because that’s what makes sense. So it came naturally to write down what we cook…”
The books are so compelling and such a pleasure, and so beautifully produced, that I called Christopher up to find out the story behind them (which I want to know whenever someone does something amazing, in a completely unexpected way). read more…
05.12.10 |
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lauriesmithphoto.com
This weekend, I will take a few days off to go down to West Virginia to the Ramp Supper in Helvetia, West Virginia, a feast served family style in the community hall by the Farm Women’s Association – ham, beans, cornbread, slaw, applesauce, hash browns, ramps raw and cooked. Depending on the weather, the raw ramps – like a lily of the valley with a scallion bulb - could range from fiercely peppery to sweetly pungent riffs on garlic-leek-shallot-chive. Fried with rendered bacon in an iron skillet, they melt into garlicy greens, their flavors deeply mellowed. The supper is followed at dusk by a square dance that rocks the hall for hours with fiddle music whose wild strains reverberate throughout the valley. These people mean it. The yearly ramp supper is in celebration of the first living thing to poke through the ground in spring and the end of a long, harsh winter. read more…
04.22.10 |
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Andrew Nixon
Of late we are smitten with a rather homely blog whose content is so good, and its straightforwardness so compelling, that it overcomes its strangely distracting design and ads for cutting down belly fat. Hunter Angler Gardener Cook is Hank Shaw‘s site about being just that:
“I fish. I dig earth, raise plants, live for food and kill wild animals…But most of all I think daily about new ways to cook and eat anything that walks, flies, swims, crawls, skitters, jumps – or grows…Honest food is what I’m seeking…I am especially interested in those meats and veggies that people don’t eat much any more, like pigeons or shad or cardoons.”
Shaw blogs his “wanderings in the edible world” and explorations of foods that strike his fancy – explorations that invariably lead to improvising and figuring things out himself. The blog is a good place for learning about what’s REALLY in season, and what to do with foods you’ve foraged one way or another, or have just wondered about. We like his step-by-step instructions (with photos) of how to break down a (game) bird, and make bottarga (salt-cured fish roe), and are impressed with his thoughts on Wild Game Fat and Flavor, which we haven’t seen written about elsewhere. And even though we can’t get with his use of garlic powder and Instacure No.2 (sodium nitrite) in what looks like an otherwise fine recipe for Lardo, we love his original voice and take and insights into the process of sussing out a new ingredient; the guy is game to learn and get his hands dirty.
The blog is a fine reminder of what is out there, from acorns and borage, to elderflower and shad: all the fabulous possibilities for eating in the natural world… read more…
04.20.10 |
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Maria Robledo
One of my favorite house gifts (to give or to get) is an of-the-season treasure from a good local market, like perfect cherries in early summer, or a bunches of lemon verbena for tea in August, or Meyer Lemons in late winter… These gifts require an eye on the market and a bit of luck, which is part of their great charm to people who like to cook. Recently, I discovered an unlikely treasure in Whole Foods’ normally risk-averse produce section: fresh chickpeas, for a few bucks a pound. They look like a cross between a fat, blunted pea and an edamame (soybean in its shell). Standing in the aisle, I shucked one and ate it, to discover its vegetal pea-like flavor and crunchy texture. I realized that I never considered what the fresh form of a dried chickpea might be.
I scooped some into a bag and took them to a friends’ dinner party. read more…
04.15.10 |
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Maria Robledo
Dana Joy Altman of Real Food Rehab blog emailed asking for a couple of recipes she’d heard Sally mention on public radio’s The Splendid Table recently when she was talking about ways to improvise with miso. We’ve come to view recipes as notations of ideas, examples of ways to use an ingredient or a techniques that can inspire other improvisations…And since we only posted two miso recipes, we thought it couldn’t hurt to post the ones Dana Joy requested, to help give a sense of the possibilities in this wonderful long-keeping staple. So here are: Roasted Almond Miso Spread and Orange Hazelnut (or Walnut) Vinaigrette. Both started as improvisations on the idea of using this traditional Japanese ingredient in a more Western mode… read more…
04.13.10 |
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Maria Robledo
Miso is most well-known for being the base of the miso soup served in Japanese restaurants (although it is also fabulous transformer of fatty fish…One day, I decided to try taking making a miso soup using a classic flavor mix of western cooking: caramelized shallots, Madeira and dried porcini mushrooms. The result was a rich broth that seemed more like a veal or beef broth than miso.
It makes a wonderful brothy base for impromptu composed soups. Simply heat the broth and float in any precooked ingredients you like, pastas like ravioli or tortellini; cooked dried beans; or roasted or steamed root vegetables, with some shredded pork or chicken. In Spring, steamed baby turnips, carrots, beets, potatoes and parsnips are particularly lovely along with a few tablespoons chopped fresh herbs, like flat-leaf parsley, chives, or chervil.
(I”ll be talking about ways to improvise with Miso this weekend on national public radio’s The Splendid Table. We’ll send an update about how to listen to the show later today.) read more…
04.09.10 |
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clayirving/Flickr via Creative Commons*
The produce section of my local supermarket is so lackluster that it generally discourages me from buying of any fresh vegetable except onions or bananas. Wandering through on my way to buy ice cream yesterday, I spotted a trove of Meyer lemons – six for $2 – and knew that these fabulous citrus had finally made their way from “gourmet” to mass market. Although Meyer lemon season usually starts winding down in March, the lemons were in good shape. When I scratched the skin of one, its unique perfume was released: like lemon and tangerine with floral undertones. read more…
03.16.10 |
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Right after news of Gourmet Magazine’s demise hit the food world like a missile, Lydia Wills sent us an article written by Stefany Ann Golberg, an artist, musician, and founding member of the art collective Flux Factory. She writes really smart, thoughtful, acute articles for The Smart Set and is worth following. Buried within her article about Gourmet and the American way of eating, is a perfectly-contained piece about M.F.K. Fisher, perhaps America’s greatest food writer. In writing about food, Fisher wrote about love, hunger, and real life with an stunningly original voice. In two paragraphs Golberg GOT what Fisher was doing, and why she resonates so strongly today. (And why she’s been a major influence on ‘the improvised life’.) read more…
03.09.10 |
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Sally Schneider
I was about to make my tried-and-true Essential Chocolate Cake for an impromptu birthday dinner when I discovered two big problems. First, I remembered that the birthday girl, who loved chocolate, often made this very same recipe and did it really well. And second, I only had ingredients for half a recipe. What could I do to make a chocolate dessert special enough for the day, that my dear friend wouldn’t find ordinary?
Desperate, I searched my larder for an interesting way to transform the cake, mulling malted milk powder, currants, pistachios…nothing seemed right…until a jar of applewood smoked bacon fat in the fridge spurred a plan of action. read more…
02.10.10 |
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Ellen Silverman
Late in the evening, I often find myself wandering into the kitchen like some sort of hungry bear or raccoon or a snuffling truffle pig, looking for a sweet to eat: not fruit, but something more powerfully dessert-like in effect. That’s when I devise odd, curiously delicious and satisfying concoctions that are the products of serious constraints: a pantry and fridge with a hodge-podge of offerings due to my aversion to buying a bona fide dessert, coupled with my refusal to bake or spend much time cooking, or get dressed and go out to buy ice cream.
The occasional sweets I do keep in the house, like amaretti cookies, are invariably too austere and chaste to be truly satisfying – my attempt at NOT keeping anything really fattening around. Amaretti are perfectly honorable Italian cookies made from egg whites, sugar and bitter almonds, but my wild hunger one night craved extremes of cream puff and gateau. I think what possessed me to stack amaretti with crème fraiche into a miniature leaning tower, was a faint, sudden memory of the classic ice box cake of my childhood: thin “bought” Famous chocolate wafers layered with whipped cream, left to soften for a couple of hours into a cake.
I ate one crème fraiche-smeared amaretti to tide me over while I waited for the other six to meld into an alternately chewy -crunchy- creamy confection that quelled my hunger perfectly: my personal seven-layer cake for one. read more…
01.21.10 |
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Maria Robledo
After discovering the unlikely and delicious combination of leftover mousse of foie gras smeared onto potato chips (we were out of toast), I started making mental notes of the delectable combinations you could make with this ordinary ingredient. Good potato chips – cut slightly thick, fried in olive oil, and seasoned with sea salt – are easy to find many supermarkets these days, so I’ve found myself breaking my rather unrealistic assumption that I should make everything myself. I buy them instead.
And then I imagine what they’d be good with, that is, just about anything that goes with fried potatoes, which opens up a vast world of possibilities. Many of these combos would make a perfect hors d’oeuvre to serve with cocktails or champagne, for New Year’s Eve, let’s say…Just fill the cavity of the chip and serve or let people do it themselves.
Here are some of recent potato chip improvisations: read more…
12.30.09 |
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