The Seduction of Spring: A Seed Catalog Puzzle

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Renee's GardenI woke up this morning feeling, in light of last weekend’s sidewalk thaw, that it might be a good morning for a run. Then I realized it was 14 degrees outside, and my enthusiasm waned considerably. I like winter (I do!), but this is the time of year when gardeners and cooks alike begin to itch for warm weather and the promise of fresh local produce.

Reading through seed catalogs on a morning like this feels illicit, full of sensual but very distant pleasures. This is at least in part due to the descriptions themselves, which are colorful, exuberant and (at least to my cold-addled brain) a touch erotic. Below, I’ve pulled some names and descriptions from the online seed catalog for Renee’s Garden. Can you guess what kind of vegetable is being described in each case? If you can identify all twelve, you’ve got it bad for spring.

1) Chelsea Prize: Elegantly slender, thin-skinned English with absolutely delicious, crispy sweet flesh. Easy to digest. Self-pollinating, vigorous vines.

2) Circus Circus: Our trio of cool colors includes creamy white, bright orange and a deep, dark purple with orange centers. All 3 well-bred Dutch varieties are sweet tasting, crisp and smooth.

3) Garden Babies: These babies have softly folded leaves, a lovely buttery texture and outstanding sweet taste. Ideal for containers, Garden Babies are slow bolting, heat tolerant, and make compact 6-inch heads at maturity.

4) Mandarin Cross: Golden-orange fruits with wonderful creamy texture and a mouthwatering sweet, even flavor finish These gorgeous fruit are borne in abundance and ripen like jewels on strong indeterminate vines.

5) Neon Glow: Color combo of vivid Magenta Sunset and Golden Sunrise stalks that contrast beautifully with green savoyed leaves for bright color and great eating. Eye-catching, productive, and striking in both vegetable and flowerbeds.

6) Profuma di Genova: Our fine Italian import is bred for pure bright flavor without minty/clove overtones, a compact shape and excellent disease resistance.

7) Raven: Dark green, smooth-skinned, cylindrical fruits are glossy and especially tender-fleshed. Delicious flavor picked as babies or at larger sizes. Abundant fruits are born high up on bush style plants that don’t sprawl.

8) Slenderette: The sleek rounded pods of gourmet-quality Slenderette are particularly tender, juicy, and sweet tasting with no tough tips or fiber. Vigorous, productive plants bear delectable, bright green, 5 inch pods early in the season.

9) Striped Chioggia: Italian heirloom with bright, candy-red exteriors & interior flesh beautifully marked in alternating rings of cherry red and white. Delicious sweet flavor & fine texture. Great tasting leafy tops.

10) Sugar Daddy: High yielding bush vines that load up early with double pods, plump and nutty-sweet, at each plant node. Hard to resist eating right on the spot.

11) Sunset: Beautiful heirloom mix yields huge, elongated tapering fruits with thick, meaty flesh that mature to rich red, yellow or orange. Perfect for snacking, salads, sauté, or roasting.

12) Wyatt’s Wonder: Gorgeous, globe-shaped, deeply lobed, rich orange giants. Developed especially for impressive size and beauty.

Don’t click Continue until you’re ready for the answers… Continue reading →

The Winter Thaw, or Cocktail Class with Encyclopedia Brown

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Benjamin Zorn

Benjamin Zorn, preaching the good word at the BPL

Benjamin Zorn is a bartender at Tooker Alley in Prospect Heights and a cocktail-smith of the highest order. He also looks a little like Encyclopedia Brown, but that was appropriate to the context in which I first encountered him. Last week, Jason and I took one of the “culinary cocktails” series of classes at the Brooklyn Public Library for which Zorn was the master of ceremonies. Why the library decided to let a bunch of people come drink in their fancy new lab area, I’m not entirely sure, but it probably has to do with the library being awesome.

Similar to many enthusiasts of offbeat and intricate crafts, Zorn was almost visibly vibrating with fervor and brimming over with an abundance of helpful hints. These ranged from the obscure (explaining the dangers of ice chips in egg-white cocktails to a crowd of people who did not look as though they previously knew egg-white cocktails existed) to the obvious (“You can tell a bartender’s sense of humor from the way he names his drinks”*), from the practical (the difference between an $8 bottle of vodka and a $15 bottle of vodka is mostly sensed in the hangover) to the near-mystical (“Always pour with confidence!” my final note of the evening reads, which I must have written right before I chucked my notebook aside and started drinking the free samples.)

But perhaps the most useful concept (and the main theme of February’s class) was this: you can get a lot of mileage out of sticking to the elegant proportions of classic drinks but jazzing them up with infused liquors and syrups. Usually, I’m not wild about Old Fashioneds but when Zorn made one with star-anise simple syrup, Brooklyn-made bitters and an orange peel…hot diggedy!

Anyway, I didn’t want to rip off Zorn’s recipes, so I decided to use what he taught us and come up with my own take on a Tom Collins. I call it the Winter Thaw, and I’ll post the recipe below so you can rev yourself up before attending Zorn’s next library class in March.

The Winter Thaw Continue reading →

Beer, I Salute You!

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UkraineStein

Here’s to Ukraine!

There are days when writing about beer seems insanely frivolous. Days I feel idiotic for reporting on the subject of an intoxicating beverage, a means of escape and relaxation. Waxing rhapsodic about something as juvenile as a good buzz.

Today, Ukraine is dividing and a former heavyweight boxing champion now shoulders the responsibility of a movement to change the course of his country’s history. And in the US thousands still remain jobless. And within this house, we struggle to pay our heating bill.

I am fully aware that terrible things are happening every day in the world, and I’m not sure why I chose today to be bothered. It is February and dark and the weight of the world hangs heavy like the snow clouds above us.

So why give a rat’s ass about beer? Continue reading →

A Culinary Commemoration of Our First President

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crossing the delaware

Liberty and cornmeal for all!

This weekend I found myself a little depressed by our collective neglect of Presidents Day, or rather, our insistence that we get the day off work or school without any actual lauding of our nation’s leaders. Come on guys: George Washington was kind of awesome, and we’ve already downgraded his birthday to a more generic celebration of all presidents. Doesn’t he deserve a little more respect? What form that respect should take is a little harder to parse. It’s not like I’m suggesting we go full-on North Korea with demonstrations of military might and square dancing for our former leaders’ birthdays. But since fate was bringing me to the nation’s capital on Presidents Day weekend and I always prefer tributes involving food, I thought that I should do my best to find a Washington-worthy dish.

I spent Saturday in Baltimore, and though I was in the most Washingtonian of neighborhoods, Mount Vernon, complete with a toga-wearing statue of the man himself, the mushroom sandwich that I ate there did not strike me as particularly presidential. Nor was the delicious Mexican food I ate that night, nor the delectable Burmese food I had the next day in D.C. I’m hardly an expert in the realm of presidential trivia, but the possibility of Washington having traveled extensively in Mexico or Burma seemed like a bit of a stretch to me.

So as my time in D.C. was drawing to a close and my last meal there was shaping up to be lunch with my friend Mignon at the Bayou Bakery (her one-time Grub Match pick), the prospects for a culinary GW send-up were looking pretty grim. And then—eureka! Continue reading →

Nukeing the Mint

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IMG_1077Fresh herbs in the grocery store are a pet peeve of mine.  Unless I’m cooking for a bunch of people, I almost always end up with some left unused.  And then I put them in a cup, water covering the stems, and set them in the grocery, where they will almost certainly go to waste, me unable to throw them out because of my abhorrence of waste and they not able to keep from eventually turning into a mush.

So I was psyched to hear that I could microwave fresh herbs and, presto, get a dried version that will keep.

First, let me note that I bought this mint something like a week and a half ago.  Safely cocooned in its petroleum-based shell, this bunch was more or less the same today as it was in January.  Second, maybe it lasted because the whole thing was still attached to its roots.  Anyway… Continue reading →

Challenges & Comforts: Preparing Your Fridge for a Snow Day

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A rare beer angel

A rare beer angel. I highly recommend making one yourself using your own favorite brews!

This morning there is about five new inches of snow on the ground and a Level 2 Snow Emergency in effect, which means (and I’m paraphrasing): don’t go out on the snowy roads and get so badly stuck the city has to tow you out, you bung hole! So here I am at home today. I checked our supplies, starting with what’s in the fridge. Turns out I have twelve different kinds of beer in there. This pleases me to no end. (I tell Ben and we do a fist bump.) Here’s some of what’s in my fridge and why they’re the perfect beers to be in my snow day collection:

The Brand New

Careful! That branch could fall into the river at any moment!

Careful, lady! That branch could break at any moment!

The Ophelia Hoppy Wheat Ale is Breckenridge Brewery’s newest seasonal beer. It is supposed to be hoppy and wheat-y, although the brewery’s copy also describes it as “The quintessential good girl gone mad,” which I don’t really get. Maybe in the end it was a hops allergy that turned poor Ophelia loony. Or maybe she drank herself silly waiting for that whiny Hamlet. “Get thee to a nunnery” my ass, buddy. Anyway, snow days are an excellent time to try beers you haven’t experienced yet, especially those named after a crazy Dane who knew what a truly rough winter was.

Their slogan is "Normal Is Weird," which I appreciate

Their slogan is “Normal Is Weird,” which I appreciate.

Also new-to-me is Flying Monkey’s Smashbomb Atomic IPA from Ontario, Canada. This brewery has only recently started distributing in Ohio, whose citizens suck down over 30 gallons of beer a year, according to the Beer Institute (whatever that is — Fox News used it as “research,” too, and it appeared in an article next to one about the unhealthiest hot Starbucks drinks, because if it’s not running on a ticker beneath O’Reilly’s getting-longer nose we won’t know how bad hot chocolate is). I’m sure my household assures Ohio’s average is over the 30-gallon mark, especially with all this affordable pinko Canadian terrorist beer. Continue reading →

Off-the-Hook Mayonnaise for the Stubborn or Scientifically Curious

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asparagus with aioliI knew that something was amiss when I asked Roger if he made mayonnaise with a whisk or a mortar and pestle and he looked at me as if I had just asked if he preferred swallowing knives or molten lava. “Are you serious? Use a blender,” he said. And I should have trusted him, since he is a food guru, a homemade mayonnaise enthusiast and, though we have never arm-wrestled to prove it, probably somewhat better endowed with arm strength than I am. But I was supposed to be doing it by hand to better study the emulsifying process for my MOOC, and I had been bolstered by misleading videos of famous chef Nandu Jubany whipping some up in five minutes flat, so I cheerfully embarked on the most brutally work-intensive quarter cup of mayonnaise ever created.

mayonnaise

This is a horrible photo, but my wrist was too tired from stirring to hold the camera.

Aside from carpal tunnel syndrome being one of the main ingredients, homemade mayonnaise really is easy. It consists entirely of things that are likely in your kitchen already, namely an egg yolk, some olive oil, a clove or two of garlic (if you like saying the word aioli) and some salt and pepper. And, no joke, it tastes much better than what comes in a jar from the store. When I let Jason taste it, he called it “off the hook,” which is one of the highest compliments that can be bestowed upon a condiment. It was a little salty on its own for my taste (Jason loves salt so much that I think he is part ocean fish), but on an open-faced sandwich with some lemon tofu and lightly sautéed asparagus, it really was delicious. Jason kept making soft moaning sounds throughout the meal, presumably to express pleasure and encourage future mayonnaise making on my part. But I think this is really the kind of culinary experiment that he needs to experience for himself.

And here’s how you can experience it. Continue reading →

Preparing for National Corn Chip Day, or the Strange World of Food Holidays

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I have neither the skill set nor the personality to be a good bartender or business owner, but I think if I ever received a windfall of money it would be hard to not capitalize on an idea for a bar that my friend Mignon and I developed many years ago. It would be called Holiday, and it would operate under the premise that “every day’s a holiday.” There would be a drink special of the day that would pay homage to whatever bizarre and little-known holiday happened to fall on that date.

National Corn Chip Day

It’s best to eat a few in advance to really get in the spirit of things.

You might think it preposterous that we could find a holiday for every day of the year, but the real problem would be choosing between all of the possible options for any given day. As I type this, it is, according to various sites, Fun at Work Day, National Kazoo Day and Thank a Plugin Developer Day. It would be a stretch, I think, to create a plugin-themed drink. But come on—a kazoo-themed one is just too easy.

One thing that quickly becomes apparent if you scan one of these lists of holidays is that a disproportionate number of them have to do with food. This month alone is Hot Tea Month, National Oatmeal Month, National Soup Month, Artichoke and Asparagus Month and California Dried Plum Digestive Month (among others). Unfortunately, you missed Chocolate Cake Day by a hair (January 27th), but there’s still time to prepare for National Corn Chip Day (January 29th). Continue reading →

Cornbread with a Side of Stalinist Hijinks

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von bremzenLast fall at the Brooklyn Book Festival, I wandered over to one of the stages where a panel of food writers were holding court and became instantly charmed by a woman with audacious glasses, voluminous scarves and a loud Russian-accented voice. She was just the blend of frank and weird that I like in my authors, so I resolved to read her newest book, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing.

I’m so glad I did. Anya von Bremzen’s bizarre mash-up of cookbook, family history and anthropological study of Homo Sovieticus is one of the oddest but most enjoyable food volumes I’ve ever laid hands on. There is surprisingly little talk of borscht, but instead you’ll learn about Russian meat patties while also finding out how Stalin kept himself amused at his summer house meals. (It involved leaving tomatoes on chairs and exhorting high Politburo officials to put “dick” signs on Khruschev’s back. That wacky, mass-murdering prankster!) And the book is beautifully written, so much so that I laughed out loud when she described how her ex-boyfriend humbly offered himself up to co-author her first book and correct her “wonky English.”

cornbreadThe USSR seemingly having been full of voracious meat-eaters whenever supplies allowed, there aren’t a lot of recipes here for a vegetarian to attempt, but von Bremzen did provide a recipe for cornbread that I was eager to try. She actually included it as something of a joke, representative of Khrushchev’s certainty that corn was going to solve all of the USSR’s food shortage problems. Instead, he managed only to baffle and disgust millions of Russians who held firmly to the belief that bread could be made only with wheat. For this, he earned the title Corn Man, which I gather sounds like a worse insult in Russian than in English.

Anyway, the USSR was a massive place, and some of the people there did, in fact, eat corn, like in Moldova, whence the author drew the cornbread recipe. I was attracted to it mostly because it calls for as much feta cheese as it does cornmeal, with some butter and sour cream to boot. Continue reading →

Warm Beer & Other British Customs I’m Adopting

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CAMRA_Logo_with_wordsAfter paying a heating bill that cleaned out my bank account, I was certifiably in need of a beer. However, the heating bill was high because it’s a booger-freezing 6-degrees outside and the thought of wrapping my hands around a chill pint of pale ale gave me the shivers. And then, because my memory is sorted alphabetically by beer, I remembered going to a convention of “real ale” brewers near Boston in early spring one year. NERAX (New England Real Ale eXhibition) promotes the drinking of “real ale,” an attribute of which is its warmer-than-average-US-beer temperature. And I can assure you, I was a warmer-than-average-Boston-spring-evening temperature on my walk home that night.

NERAX is sort of like the New England version of the perhaps more infamous group, CAMRA. CAMRA, or Campaign for Real Ale, is a British organization (or organisation, if you will) founded in 1971 to “campaign for real ale, pubs, and drinkers’ rights.” They formed as a reaction to the big beer companies mass-producing weak, bland beer. They advocate real ale and community-based pubs and they use language like “traditional,” “social cohesion,” and “under threat,” in their literature, making them sound wee bit like an alcoholic IRA. (Let’s keep that joke inside your head.) Continue reading →