Author Archives: Shannon

How to Pretend to be Tamar Adler (Part I)

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tamar sandwichFrequent readers of the blog already know about my obsession with Tamar Adler and her book. An Everlasting Meal is not a cookbook exactly; it’s more a string of philosophies about how to treat food. Now take whatever you’re imagining and make it not pretentious or insufferable, and you’ll pretty much have it. Anyway, I was so in the thrall of this book that I decided to try to be Tamar for a few days (we’re on a first name basis, obviously), focusing mostly on her chapter on vegetables, “How to Stride Ahead.” Here are the results:

Attempt 1: The Agony and the Ecstasy of Vegetable Retrieval
Tamar is a big proponent of buying a ton of vegetables on one day of the week and cooking them all at once. That way, you’re already a step ahead for the rest of the week’s cooking. This sounded lovely and elegant, and since we had a big ol’ shipment of CSA vegetables coming one Saturday, I thought I had this locked down.

Our winter CSA is a little different than the regular season. Instead of picking it up every week, you get a gigantic box of stored vegetables and fruit once a month. It’s great, except that Jason and I have somehow messed it up every single time: we’re out of town or we’re busy, and we have to impose upon friends and neighbors and bribe them with vegetables to make it happen. This time, though, we were ready. We went to visit some friends and their new baby, not too far from our place, with plans to pick up the box on the way home. But then the baby was supernaturally cute, and we were running late. And then, even though we’ve both lived in NYC for too long, we managed to get lost on the walk to the subway. And then the next train was delayed. And then Jason ran up the stairs to get in a cab and rescue the vegetables, but since I wasn’t sure if he would be successful, I stayed on the train and sprinted a dozen blocks in snow boots to try to get them, too. But there he was, vegetables saved in the nick of time.

I was so exhausted after this debacle that I decided not to cook the vegetables that day, and instead got drunk and ate nachos at 11 p.m. Jason says we should get a high score for effort, but I know the truth.
Tamar Score: 2 out of a possible 10

Attempt 2: No Sandwich is a Bad Sandwich Continue reading →

Too Sexy for My Lettuce: Aphrodisiac Puzzle

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In Greek mythology, Aphrodite’s lover Adonis is killed in a lettuce field, and thus lettuce became a symbol of mourning and impotence. Poor lettuce; it’s the anti-aphrodisiac.

But you can do better than lettuce this Valentine’s Day! Name the aphrodisiac described by each piece of historical lore listed below. And since this is a tough one, you’ll find each of the answers in the photo collage below, though not all the photos will be used.

collage

  1. The Kama Sutra suggested making this food into a drinkable paste to arouse desire, while the French advised that it be eaten three times the day before one’s wedding.
  2. Because of its shape and color, this food was a symbol of Venus, the Roman goddess of love.
  3. Hippocrates recommended this food for sexual vigor, and couples were once advised to drink an alcohol made of it during the first month of their marriage.
  4. After being scorned by a woman, Zeus supposedly turned her into one of these, and because of its tough exterior, it is a natural symbol for playing hard to get.
  5. The Talmud suggests that married couples eat this food on Fridays in preparation for fulfilling their marital duties.
  6. The Aztec word for this food is same as their word for testicle, and it was believed to be such a strong aphrodisiac that virginal women were forbidden from being present while it was harvested.
  7. This food was once considered an aphrodisiac in Europe, but probably because it was still a rare import from the New World.
  8. This was believed to be Cleopatra’s favorite fruit, and in ancient Greece, its harvest also marked the time of a…erm, copulation ritual.
  9. Cassanova supposedly ate fifty of these for breakfast every morning, and Roman doctors prescribed them as a cure for impotence.
  10. Greek superstition holds that if a woman puts this food under her pillow, she’ll dream of her future husband, and giving it to someone in India is tantamount to making a pass.

Don’t scroll down or click Continue until you’re ready to see the Answers! Continue reading →

A Musical Buffet Puzzle

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milkshake

I’m not sure mine brings all the boys to the yard. Oh, well.

It’s true that beans are the musical fruit, but other foods make their way into songs all the time. Take as evidence the lyrics listed below. Can you name the song title and artist (or in one case, the name of the musical) for each song? If you can get nine out of ten (and the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie), consider yourself a winner.

  1. Sucking on chili dogs outside the Tastee Freeze…
  2. Follow her down to a bridge by a fountain, / Where rocking horse people eat marshmallow pies.
  3. Big kosher pickle and a cold draft beer / Well good god almighty, which way do I steer?
  4. Have some more yogurt, have some more Spam / It doesn’t matter if it’s fresh or canned.
  5. You are my candy girl / And you got me wanting you.
  6. I’m gonna give you / Apple and plum and apricot-a too, eh!
  7. Try the gray stuff. It’s delicious. / Don’t believe me? Ask the dishes!
  8. A bottle of white, a bottle of red / Perhaps a bottle of rosé instead.
  9. In February it will be / My snowman’s anniversary / With cake for him and soup for me!
  10. I love you like a fat kid love cake.

Don’t scroll down or click “continue” until you’re ready to see the answers!  Continue reading →

Pizza Party!: A Contest and Ode to Optimism

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pizzapartyYesterday, my boss said, “I declare today a pizza day,” and my mood instantly improved.

Even people who have fairly neutral feelings about pizza as a food item have to admit that there’s a mystical quality to the phrase “pizza party.” Think of the power those words held over you and your classmates in elementary school. In third grade, my teacher Mrs. Medwid made an announcement one day that my mom (My mom! The secrets that woman could keep…) was going to bring in pizza, and we were going to watch Return to Snowy River on videocassette for the rest of the afternoon instead of doing stupid math homework.  It was maybe one of the best things that had ever happened to me. I don’t think it was even a reward for anything in particular; I think Mrs. Medwid was just awesome and thought we deserved a pizza. I still think of that day sometimes when the world feels harsh.

Look, everybody, winter is tough. The days are short, and the cold winds blow, and a lot of people are feeling down. So let’s bring a little levity to the blog in the form of pizza party anecdotes. Send your best pizza party story to submissions@pitchknives.com by next Friday, January 30. I will post my favorites here, and the winner will receive a pizza-related prize specially devised by me. Now go eat a slice.

Smoky Potato Chowder

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smoky potato chowderGuess who got a new Crockpot for Christmas? Ba-zam! Yes, I know that this makes me approximately a thousand years old, but I’m pretty excited. It’s like magic. You put a bunch of ingredients in it, and approximately eighty-four hours later, you have a delicious soup.

Seriously, though, I made some pretty awesome Crockpot delicacies this weekend, including this soup that I sort of made up as I went along. I used a variety of potatoes, to make it a bit more interesting. It also features smoked paprika, which is Jason’s favorite SOTM (Spice of the Moment). Truly, he will go through a jar of it in the blink of an eye, but I managed to spirit some away from him to give the soup a little heat and a delicious bacon-y flavor. Eat it on a cold night with a salad and some bread, and you’ll have enough energy to go head-to-head with the Abominable Snowman. Or to teach him how to use a Crockpot.

Smoky Potato Chowder Continue reading →

I Want to Be Alone with My Celery Loaf

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I'll Have What She's HavingWas it just my imagination or was there a little bit of Hollywood at the launch of Rebecca Harrington’s “celebrity diet journalism” book I’ll Have What She’s Having? There were definitely some air kisses being thrown about. There was definitely more blonde hair dye than I typically see in Dumbo. And I’m not going to lie; there were definitely some people there who looked like they hadn’t had a decent sandwich in a while.

But lest we feel too out of place (for, it’s true, we don’t typically spend much time thinking about dieting here at Pitchknives), the charming Ms. Harrington immediately put us at ease by explaining why she embarked on the project of trying a bunch of weirdo celebrity diets. It was not because she wanted to look like Marilyn Monroe. It was because she was perusing a website about William Howard Taft’s possible sleep apnea (naturally enough), and she happened upon his diet regimen from 1905, which called for boiled fish for breakfast, mutton for lunch and a lamb chop for dinner. That, she thought, was too weird not to try.

Subsequently, she embraced all kinds of other curious culinary schemes of the rich and famous, like Karl Lagerfeld’s endless cans of Diet Coke and Elizabeth Taylor’s tuna salad recipe. (In case you want to tuna it up like Liz: “First you take a can of tuna. Then you take tomato paste. Then you take a grapefruit…” at which point, sorry, the entire audience was gagging too loud for me to hear the rest of the recipe.) Some items were not as bad as she anticipated, like Marilyn Monroe’s raw eggs in milk: “Not that bad. Just like bad eggnog.”  But particularly repulsive to Harrington was Greta Garbo’s celery loaf recipe (“Why? Just…why?”), and so free samples of this gem had been prepared for the audience. Continue reading →

A New Word Puzzler for the New Year

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poutine

Poutine made it into Merriam-Webster this year! Well done, poutine.

I recently happened upon this article from the Boston Globe about the new words added to several American dictionaries in 2014. This kind of a thing seems to be a staple of newspapers around this time of year, and every time it strikes me how many new words have to do with food. But then maybe it’s not so surprising—we’re a nation of eaters and eventually the names of our new favorites work their way into the very fabric of our language. I don’t think I’d ever heard of or tasted hummus until I was in high school, but it’s now hard to remember being hummus-less since it’s long been a staple of my refrigerator and my dictionary.

So here’s a little lexicographic puzzle for 2015: can you put the following list of twelve words in the order that they were added to the Oxford English Dictionary? Some of these words are far older in other languages, obviously, but keep in mind that words are only added to English-language dictionaries as many English speakers begin to use them.

  • al dente
  • foodie
  • melt-in-the-mouth
  • noshery
  • pad thai
  • gastropub
  • five second rule
  • mai tai
  • microbrew
  • brunch
  • chocoholic
  • appletini

Don’t scroll down or click continue until you’re ready to see the answers! Continue reading →

Quick, Somebody Give Me a Christmas Cookie I Can Make in Twenty Minutes

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Cookies

Here are pictures of a lot of cookies I didn’t make.

I’d like you to know that I am not a total slouch at some aspects of Christmas. I like thinking up gift ideas, and I can wrap a mean present. My less-than-perfect pitch is balanced with caroling gusto. I’ve been planning dishes for Christmas Eve dinner for weeks now. But man, I’m bad at Christmas cookies.

Christmas cookies are one of those things, along with cards (and really, bless all those people who still send me Christmas cards, surely knowing that they are getting nothing in return), that I’m just bad at making myself do. My mom saved me a newspaper section that was completely comprised of cookie recipes. I have read it approximately twenty times without actually making any moves toward baking them myself. When my friend Mignon mailed me some whimsical sugar cookies (including one that, I’m pretty sure, was a teeny tiny albino dolphin), my first thought was, “Thank goodness. This buys me at least another two days.”

But let’s face it—it’s now or never. Help me out bakers: what’s your absolute easiest cookie recipe?

Winter Solstice Casserole

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solstice casseroleIt’s hard not to think of Christmas as the granddaddy of December holidays, at least in this part of the world, but allow me to remind you that there’s another, more (literally) astronomical occasion to celebrate this Sunday: the winter solstice. Have you all gotten your Saturnalia costumes dry-cleaned?

People have been celebrating the shortest day of the year ever since…well, since they were able to calculate that it was the shortest day of the year. Some pre-Christian celebrations included Scandinavians burning a Juul log to honor Thor (yep, that’s where the Yule log comes from), Mayans doing a terrifying if-we-don’t-break-our-ankles-this-will-probably-be-good-luck trick called the flying pole dance, and Romans crowning some poor schmuck as Saturnalian king and giving him unrestrained license until they killed him seven days later.

solstice, servedGiven the, erm, vibrancy of some of these festivals, it’s a shame that most solstice celebrations have dwindled to nothing. It’s still an important holiday in the pagan religion, but despite the impact of a phrase like “pagan ritual,” I read through a couple of them, and they seem mostly to involve pretty staid activities, like watching the sun rise or sitting in the dark while mindfully chewing bread.

So how should you commemorate the solstice? Invent your own celebration. I made up this solstice casserole—filled with winter vegetables, spiced with black pepper and nutmeg, and blanketed with a thin layer of snowy white cheese.

Winter Solstice Casserole Continue reading →

Venerating the Bean: Winter Minestrone

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minestroneAnd now allow me to praise a cookbook that I haven’t actually read. When An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler came out a couple years ago with its tagline of cooking “with economy and grace,” I thought it sounded kiiiiind of boring, despite the good reviews it was getting, and chose to ignore it. And then this weekend I was flipping through a food writing anthology and happened upon a chapter from the book called, “How to Live Well,” which, in my opinion, is such an eye-roll-worthy title that I almost flipped right past it. And then I realized what the entire chapter was about: beans.

It turns out that there’s a lot to be said about the humble bean, that darling of the Tuscans. Adler outlines how to cook ‘em, how to dress ‘em up, how to enjoy them, all in a tone that is straightforward but definitely not humorless. I was charmed. Knowing that Adler was an avid bean eater put me solidly in her court.

Another thing I liked about the chapter was that the recipe she gave for minestrone was incredibly elastic, because it’s supposed to reflect the season (and possibly your mental state, like a mood ring). Got some spring peas? Awesome. Winter root vegetables? Also cool. I tried my hand at the recipe this weekend, and the result was a thick, hearty vegetarian minestrone, perfect for winter. (And holy moly! That “whistling the skin off a bean” method she mentions actually works!) I’ll share the recipe I used below, but really, I suggest checking out the book and making that minestrone your own. And if you don’t have time for the whole book, don’t worry; I’ve already dropped enough Christmas hints that it will probably show up here again soon.

Vegetarian Winter Minestrone Continue reading →