We had a real doozy of a windstorm this past week, which pretty much took care of the remaining leaves on the trees. The styrax in the back yard just has a few left, and the seed pods have all blown off.
It’s starting to look like winter.
I adore pizza. My parents made it at home when I was a kid, and it was classic homemade pizza - thick, soft, bready crust, lots of toppings, needed to be eaten with a fork. We sometimes went out to Godfather’s, which was a pretty standard American chain pizza. Then when I was in college I invented my own pizza using available materials: a whole wheat crust, sundried tomatoes, mozzarella and falafel. It was amazingly good (but I was starved for meat and fat that year - not the most discerning palate). I went to Italy and ate some very good and some very bad pizza (spinach with an egg on top, yum. Potatoes and salt - what was I thinking?) Then after I was married, we discovered takeout chicken alfredo pizza and stuck to that for a while. (more…)
We got our cow!
Every so often we buy a side of beef from a friend who regularly raises cattle to keep the grass in his pastures down. The first time we did this, the cow in question was a rather energetic and troublesome character, one of a duo named Mary-Kate and Ashley (I’m not sure which one we got). The last two have not had names, as far as I know. The meat gets processed at a local butcher shop, packaged, labeled and hard frozen, so we can pick it up, toss it in the trunk and take it home to our chest freezer. It’s a great feeling to have a freezer-full of local, pasture-raised beef - we just have to think ahead a bit to make sure it’s defrosted in time for dinner.
Hamburger, anyone?
This little book is a powerhouse of Indian cooking. It’s small, it doesn’t lie flat, it has no pictures (except a few line drawings), and it’s far from comprehensive, but this one book revolutionized Indian food for us. Not right away, though.
It was a gift from a friend many years ago, after I had already given J a copy of Yamuna Devi’s Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking, and we felt (rather smugly) that we had everything we needed for cooking Indian food. But if you’ve ever used the Devi book, you may have noticed that her ingredient lists are enormous, her instructions are tiresomely exact, and she puts a somewhat intimidating weight on the history and context of the food. We had the book, but I mostly used it to make flatbread and hot yogurt drinks to go with our Patak’s Curry Paste concoctions. Spice Kitchen sat on our shelf, unappreciated.
Then one day we opened it. (more…)
I’ve been waiting all fall for the Brussels sprouts at the store to get good looking and cheap. I finally decided it was time, so I bought a big bag of sprouts and a fresh pork tenderloin and dug out the delicata squash from the fruit bowl. This is a notable dinner because it consists of two different vegetables I absolutely loathed when I was young.
J was in charge of the pork. He seasoned it with salt, pepper and thyme, seared it whole in a cast iron pan and put it in the oven for 20 minutes or so. Then he made an absolutely fabulous pan sauce with chicken stock and some reduced apple cider. Mmmmm. It had a wonderful intense, savory apple flavor. (more…)
Last week we helped out with a wine tasting that featured moderately priced wines from California’s central coast region, chosen by Tom Saunderson of Young’s Columbia. As usual, it was a great selection - there really was something for everyone.
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Artemisia is a great plant, it stays relentlessly fluffy and silver all autumn and winter. Then in the early spring I cut it down to a stump and it looks terrible, but by then there are other compensations.This one is called Powis Castle. It sits directly under a coralbark Japanese maple, which has been busily dropping all of its leaves.
I’ve always liked roast chicken fairly well, although for a long time the main reason I made it was to be able to make chicken stock afterwards. The chicken itself didn’t seem all that exciting. Then I bought the Zuni Cafe Cookbook by Judy Rodgers (ostensibly as a present for J, but really of course for myself) and was enticed by her roast chicken recipe. I don’t have a wood burning oven like she does, and I find it difficult to find chickens small enough (the first time I tried it I had somehow found a two-pound chicken and it was ambrosial), but it still makes a chicken that’s downright exciting to eat.
The keys to the method are: salting the bird thoroughly at least a day ahead of time, earlier if it’s a bigger bird; stuffing herbs under the skin - I like fresh bay leaves best; and roasting at very high heat. (more…)
This soup was a concept that kept changing. First I thought I’d make lentil soup with sausage and kale. But we were out of lentils, and I thought white beans would be even better. Then when we went to Dunbar Gardens to buy vegetables, there wasn’t any kale -so we got broccoli rabe instead. As it turns out, there’s a recipe for this exact soup in Barbara Kafka’s Soup cookbook. I glanced at her approach, then built the soup my usual way.
One of our tried-and-true, easy to make, yummy weeknight dinners. Both the meatballs and the sauce are inspired by recipes out of Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, and are basically just vehicles for garlic. And an excuse to drink red wine.
J almost always makes the meatballs in this house - here’s how he did these. He started with two pounds of ground beef, almost the last of our local half-a-cow that we bought last year. The beef was mixed with 1/2 cup each of bread crumbs and milk, two eggs, salt and pepper, and a head (yes, a head!) of chopped garlic. The original Bittman recipe called for onion, but the first time J made it we were out. He substituted garlic (which we grow ourselves), and we liked it so much it stuck. The meatballs get baked for about 20 minutes in a 375° oven. We generally use parchment paper, it helps tremendously for cleanup. (more…)
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