recipes
On Christmas day, I received a totally unexpected and mind-boggling gift: an email alerting me that my 2001 cookbook A New Way to Cook
is included on the Guardian’s “The Best Food Books of the Decade” list. It is such an honor; please bear with me for tooting horns and telling a tale. From UK foodwriter Richard Ehrlich:
“This is the intelligent person’s guide to healthy cooking. The New York based Schneider has rethought the culinary use of fats, sugar etc from the ground up, and this vast book is all about how to go on using them but using a bit less by deploying techniques that maximise their impact. One of the few truly original cookbooks of the last decade; I wish it had made more of a splash on this side of the pond.”
A New Way to Cook is where I first starting testing the idea of writing recipes that encouraged readers to improvise (with some sometimes radical techniques I’d improvised for cooking healthfully); it took nine years to bring to publication (a long story)… The theme of improvisational cooking resonated so strongly with people that
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12.27.09 |
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in food, paths + processes, recipes, resources books + zines, sightings, tools |
Sally Schneider
Yikes! Christmas is on Friday?!!! With New Year’s soon on it’s heels…
If you are as unprepared as I am, here’s an annotated list of some past posts from ‘the improvised life’ to help with the holiday crush… from recipes and gifts to strategies, and decorations… read more…
12.21.09 |
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Ellen Silverman
Shards of chocolate embedded with surprising flavors and crunchy elements make terrific gifts for much less $ than pricey “artisan-made’ chocolates. Here’s an easy, step-by-step method – and a couple of tricks – for making unfussy homemade chocolates: a thin sheet of fine chocolate into which you’ve embedded surprising and delicious elements, like chopped Marcona almonds with a dusting of Pimenton de la Vera; or curry powder and sea salt; or dried cherries and lavender, or roasted pistachios and candied orange zest; the possible improvisations are endless.
Once the sheet of chocolate hardens, you break it into shards and pack it as a gift (and keep some back to serve at your own dinner parties, or as a restorative when your spirits are flagging).
Essential Homemade Chocolates for Improvising in words and pictures follows the jump. (And be sure to check out ‘the improvised life’s take on Holiday Food Gifts at The Splendid Table. You can listen to the show, and download the recipe for Alt-Malted Milk Balls, an improvisation on this homemade chocolate theme.)
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12.11.09 |
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in copy this!, family + friends, food, gifts, recipes, share |
Ellen Silverman
This weekend on public radio stations across the country, The Splendid Table, Lynne Rosetto Kasper’s wonderful food radio show, will be airing an interview with Sally about ‘the improvised life’ approach to Homemade Holiday Food Gifts. Check out Splendid Table’s website for show times in your area, download podcasts or stream the show. You’ll find Sally’s recipes for Dried Apricots in Cardamom Syrup, Roasted Dried Apricots with Cardamom, and Alt-Malted Milk Balls. Holidays with the Splendid Table has loads of resources for entertaining and gift-giving.
This weekend ‘the improvised life’ will feature Homemade Chocolates for Improvising, another great food gift and staple for holiday parties.
12.11.09 |
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in family + friends, food, gifts, recipes, resources, resources blogs + sites |
Marjorie Winslow/Erik Blegvad
One of my favorite recipes is called Fried Water:
Melt one ice cube in a skillet by placing it in the sun. When melted, add 1 cup water and saute slowly — until water is transparent. Serve small portions, because this dish is rich as well as mouth-watering.
It’s from a book I had as a kid called Mud Pies and Other Recipes by Marjorie Winslow. “This is an outdoor cookbook,” reads the Foreword, “The market place, then, will be a forest or a sand dune or your own back yard.” It’s a cookbook for a kid’s world outdoors, even if the kid, like me, never actually acted out the recipes. Like the best children’s books, it fueled my imagination and painted a world rich with possibilities: read more…
12.07.09 |
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in gifts, kids, nature, projects + play, recipes, resources blogs + sites |
Maria Robledo
Occasionally, I retreat to a friend’s cabin in the West Virginia Appalachians to rest and cook with what is there: a rudimentary kitchen and what the local store offers me. These constraints are a pleasing challenge that deconstruct my city self. I’ve improvised roasting pans out of tin foil, and made a soufflé with local cheese in a cast iron skillet. I’ve used that same skillet to smoke trout using dried twigs from a nearby apple tree and steel forks as a rack, and picked local dandelions to dress with bacon fat and cider vinegar.
Hankering for pancakes one morning, I decided to wing it and see if I could make them out of my basic corn bread formula, which I keep in my head. I mixed up the recipe with a slightly greater proportion of corn meal, an additional egg, and enough milk mixed with plain yogurt to simulate buttermilk, to make a batter. I fried bacon in my one skillet, both for crisp strips to accompany the cakes and for the fat to flavor them. Local maple syrup dressed the barely sweet, corny cakes: perfect.
Here was a lesson in essential formulas being a good basis for improvisation: corn bread became cornmeal cakes. In addition to making fine breakfasts or brunches, these cornmeal cakes have many savory applications. read more…
12.02.09 |
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in family + friends, food, recipes, strategies |
Maria Robledo
Years ago my family stopped being nuclear and evolved into an extended and very eclectic family of friends. My Thanksgiving dinners have evolved too, from the traditional menu of my childhood to the wondrous offerings of many cooks who come together yearly, each bringing a different dish, to form a collective feast.
In this way Thanksgiving has become the ultimate pot luck dinner, a fabulous array of the “best of” each cook. We enjoy innovations of the traditional themes – stuffing, cranberry sauce, side dishes, pies – that always seem to embody the originality and generosity of the makers. Favorite dishes are requested the following Thanksgiving, to become a newly time-honored custom.
Purees using the season’s produce – chestnuts, winter squashes, and root vegetables like celery root and turnips - make appealing plays on the classic Thanksgiving mashed potatoes. Their velvety texture and rich, spicy flavors seems to unify the other elements of the feast. read more…
11.19.09 |
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in family + friends, food, recipes |
MarS via Flickr*
A rich chestnut puree, fragrant with bay leaf and fennel seed, is a wonderful alternative to mashed potatoes in the traditional Thanksgiving feast. But roasting enough chestnuts to make a puree for ten or twelve is laborious work. Instead I often use bottled vacuum-packed chestnuts (available in gourmet shops and many supermarkets), or frozen peeled chestnuts, both of which are excellent for cooking (very different from mushy canned chestnuts in water). When I find great chestnuts at the market, I oven-roast them to serve as-is, right out of the pan, for a surprising hors d’oeuvre. Years ago I figured out a way to make peeling easy: read more…
11.19.09 |
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Sally Schneider
When asked to contribute to Burt Wolf”s pot-luck dinner, my boyfriend, a relatively new cook and homemaker, offered to make the Celery-Root and Apple Puree he mastered from The Improvisational Cook
. “Don’t forget the double-boiler so you can heat it up at Burt’s” I said.
He sounded perplexed. “How do you think I should transport the puree?”
“Well, you need to make sure it won’t spill in the car…maybe just put the puree in plastic containers with tight lids and then dump it into the double boiler when you get there.”
That evening he arrived with the whole double boiler assembled, with the puree inside, and the lid battened down with duct tape. read more…
11.13.09 |
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Ellen Silverman
I’ve been so busy with ‘the improvised life’ that I can’t seem to see my way to giving a dinner party. A solution was proposed recently by my friend Burt Wolf, who has his hands full with a television show, hosting boat tours in Europe and a small child. “Let’s do dinner, pot luck”, said Burt.
Pot luck is an age old tradition: each person brings a dish to forge a meal. If everyone pitches in, the burden falls on no one. The better the cooks, the better the fare will be. But just about everyone has one great dish in their repertoire.
The secret of pot lucks is that they work best if you plan them a bit, so you’re assured of getting a complete and satisfying meal. The ever-brilliant Burt emailed my boyfriend David and me the number of a free conference call service; just punch in the code and we’d find each other. read more…
11.13.09 |
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Maria Robledo
Throughout fall and winter, one of my favorite improvisational “base” preparations is Roasted Pears. These are pears that are roasted with a bit of sugar, lemon juice, butter and a split vanilla bean or even herbs, until they become tender and caramelized, with a concentrated pear flavor. Roasted Pears are one of those miraculous recipes that are easy to make and have endless applications, both sweet and savory, a jumping-off-point from which to improvise, with delicious and often surprising results. read more…
10.29.09 |
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Ellen Silverman
Hardware stores and art supply stores are great places to inspire your improvisational leanings, using a variation of the children’s game “inventing”: think of uses for things you may not be familiar with.
The other day, as I was browsing through bins of bolts, screws, hunks of pipe and gaskets in my local hardware store, I suddenly flashed on “egg cups!” as I played with a rather moderne-looking 2-inch length of threaded brass pipe. The idea of improvising an egg cup using found stuff became a lens through which I scanned the store. It turns out that egg cups are everywhere, just waiting to be discovered by lovers of perfect soft-boiled eggs (see recipe below). read more…
10.28.09 |
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Maria Robledo
One of my favorite cooking strategies is to a make a big batch of a mutable “base” with which I can improvise appealing dishes, in tandem with whatever is on hand. In fall and winter, that base is often Wild Mushroom Ragù, a rich, hearty, meaty (but meatless), stew-like sauce made with whatever cultivated “wild” mushrooms are available, such as shiitake, cremini, oyster, and portobello. It’s ideal for meals where you need to serve both carnivores and vegetarians. Because you can make it ahead and freeze it, it allows you to forge wonderful dishes even when life gets wild and you don’t have a moment to spare.
For dinner parties, I’ll use the ragù to make big pasta casseroles layered with shaved ricotta salata or fresh mozzarella cheese and baked until gratineed; my friend’s ancient Italian grandmother calls it “the Big Macaroni”. I can assemble it ahead and bake it at the last minute. And on nights home alone, the warmed ragu is wonderful scooped up with thick store-bought rosemary potato chips. Over the years, I’ve served the ragu in many ways… read more…
10.15.09 |
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I started viewing coriander seed as Instant Flavor Enhancer one day when I was testing a recipe and had a lot of cracked coriander left over. I tasted it on whatever came to mind to discover its slightly lemony-orange peel-herbal flavor and bit of crackle is wonderful on all sorts of foods, sprinkled on before serving, like pepper. It provides the perfect little alt-note on everything from smoked salmon to rice pudding to a cracker spread with crunchy peanut butter). My all-time favorite is on crushed new potatoes with crème fraiche and chives. (See the list and recipe farther down)
I was snooping around the internet hoping to find a coriander photo when I stumbled on this image and the big idea behind it: read more…
10.01.09 |
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in eating, food, housewares, recipes, repurpose, strategies |
