I have missed out on fiddlehead ferns for the past three years because they show up at 
the farmers markets, ramps playing Poncho to their Lefty, and are snapped up in two or three days. But annoying that cab by biking up the narrow lane east of Union Square Park yesterday paid off because it put me at the market on one of those two or three days this year. Hell yeah.
So, a haiku for you, fiddleheads…
Oh, fiddlehead ferns
Thank you for getting it on
With Shitakes in my pan
At the very end of making a miso-lemon glaze in which to bake tofu last Sunday night, I realized that I had intended to include garlic in the mix. I quickly crushed a bunch of cloves, pressed them into the tofu, and closed the oven door. When I checked on dinner half an hour later, I found the garlic a bright, Easter Basket-grass green. What the hell?
Turns out that crushing garlic releases an enzyme named Alliiase which in turn goes to work on a sulfurous compound named Allicin. Allicin is garlic’s primary defense against pests and also the chemical basis for humanity’s long reliance on garlic to bolster health and fend of diseases. When the flesh on the garlic bulb is torn, the Allicin breaks down into other sulfurous compounds, and when those compounds mix with an acid they form carbon-nitrogen rings that link together in various combinations to form molecules. Continue reading
Yes, dear readers, some time has passed since I last posted. There are a few reasons for this, the most excellent one being that I was visiting my parents in Florida and communing with my spirit animal, the manatee (quiet, gentle, vegetarian, spends most waking hours eating). But the blog was on my mind while I was traveling, as my mother, Nancy, introduced me to a new batch of fun kitchen gadgets.
A couple of these were a blast from the past, like this rad hand-carved tasting spoon from the Berea College in Kentucky. This place is worth checking out; they give scholarships in exchange for work in their crafts studio, and the students make some beautiful stuff. But back to the spoon: you use the big end to stir with, and instead of slobbering all over it with your dirty mouth, you tip it backward and the soup or sauce runs backward along the channel where you can taste it from the little spoon. Apparently these have been used in France for ages, and the ones from Berea have a nice old-fashioned feel, meaning that they make great gifts for both those with Little House on the Prairie sensibilities (me) or germophobes (you know who you are).
Another find from Berea was this little baker’s broom that you hang in your kitchen. “What do you sweep with it?” you may be asking. Nothing! Ha! Got you! When you bake a cake, you’re supposed to snap off one of the bristles and use it to test if the cake is done. Seriously, how did my mom know that Jason tried to use a chopstick to test banana bread last week? Anyway, she thought that this might have been an old Shaker invention, and though I couldn’t find any proof of that, I believe her, the Shakers being notorious for their furniture-making, riotous dancing and cake-testing. Continue reading
Fresh 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
I 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.
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
Fresh ricotta with dill
One day, while I was procrastinating from doing homework for my online Science and Cooking class and a million other tasks by poking around on Arts & Letters Daily, I came across this article from the London Review of Books. Apparently, I am not the only person who was lured into taking a Harvard science class by the insertion of “cooking” into the title. Just remember, readers, where you heard it first.
When I did finally stop surfing the web and started doing my online coursework, I noted dismally that I am falling pretty far behind. I have waded through material on phase changes, but I still confuse elasticity and plasticity, and who knows when I’ll finally get around to spherification. I think the main problem is that I get weirdly hypnotized by certain videos and have to stop working to let them sink into my brain. For instance, who would have guessed that very, very pure water doesn’t freeze easily, even in a refrigerator that is kept below the freezing point, because there are no microscopic bits of muck for the ice crystals to glom onto? It’s called supercooling (no, I am not making that word up), and it allows for wacky poured ice sculptures to be created at the table by fancy chefs like Jordi Roca. (Note: the instant formation of it is more magical and less phallic than this still image would have you believe.) Seriously, don’t you feel like you need a few minutes to digest that image before you memorize some formulas? I did.
Another problem is that I’m lagging behind on my labs. The use of my disorderly, cluttered kitchen as a laboratory makes me nervous and leaves me with little hope of precision. But when I can rouse myself to action, they usually prove interesting. By far the best lab so far has been making ricotta cheese from a quart of milk and a little white vinegar. I’m actually not sure what I was supposed to learn about phase changes from this, but I made cheese, guys! From scratch. Continue reading
It’s been soup and stew season in our home for these past few wintry weeks. That’s fine by me; I love curling up with a steamy bowl of something tasty while it’s snowing outside. But this weekend I noticed that all of our soups had begun to resemble each other, featuring beans or tomatoes or both. It was like they all shared a common ancestor, and that ancestor was chili. Don’t get me wrong: I love a good bean as much as the next person, but a girl cannot make it through soup season on chili alone.
So I set about creating with a soup that was warm and filling, had a dearth of legumes and contained nothing canned (as I was loath to brave our icy front steps to pitch the empties into the recycling bin). The result was a kind of potato chowder with a spicy Indian twist, but nary a bean in sight. If you need a break from the chili this week, give it a go.
Spicy Spinach and Potato Chowder
You know Ginko trees, those numbers with the stanky yellowish berries that I, and perhaps you, called “stinky trees” as a wee lad? Well, I ate some of that stank.
This came about because Shannon is awesome and for an anniversary present took me deep into Queens to spend an afternoon with Wildman Steve Brill. A name like Wildman 
primarily conjures in me images of either a crazed and burly mountain man type or a happily-hard-livin drummer in a band opening for Dokken in 1987, but Steve Brill fits neither of these molds. In fact, this is the picture he has of himself on his website, which more perfectly sums him up than anything I could write this morning.
Our afternoon with Steve, billed by Shannon as “New York’s top wild food foraging expert,” was spent walking Forest Park learning about and filling up a bag with wild roots, berries, and greens (or weeds, if you want to be classist) that we could incorporate with dinner. It was nothing less than unflaggingly awesome. Continue reading
Until very recently, I thought of pomegranates as closely akin to one of those puzzle boxes from which you can never extract the dollar bill imprisoned inside. Though I love the sweet-tart explosion of juice you get from a spooning a big bite of pomegranate seeds into your mouth, I found the thick-skinned, oddly-constructed fruits almost impossible to break apart without creating a mess that seemed to indicate that something really, really grisly had gone down in my kitchen. These attempts left me exhausted and pomegranate-shy.
And then, a few weeks ago, we were visiting our friends Martha and Vince and their lovely newborn daughter Millicent, and Vince, culinary maestro that he is, went to the kitchen to get a pomegranate and came back five minutes later, cheerful and spatter-free, with a bowl of loosed seeds. When I told him the method I’d been using (gained from a misguided trust of Martha Stewart) of sawing the thing in half and whacking at it with the back of a spoon, he looked mystified and slightly offended. “There are videos on YouTube that can fix this,” he said. And so there are!
There are so many things to like about this video: this woman’s obvious anxiety about pomegranate misinformation, her rather dorky air of confidence that she is absolutely correct, and the fact that she is, actually, right. Continue reading
It’s winter greens time. I love my dark greens. Other people don’t. Most people don’t, probably. Shannon has traditionally been one of these people, and this is convenient for me because 1) I live with her, and 2) one of the things I love in life is winning converts to foods they’ve previously sniffed at. I have yet to convince Shannon that V8 is awesome, but I did manage to whip up some greens last night that won approval and even an extended life in the form of a second helping. Greens are insanely healthy for you, and you’ll notice a difference in your day if you eat them regularly. With a little creative spicing and coupling with beans, they’ll easily become one of your staples.
We had a bunch of braising greens from the CSA, a clutch of mustard greens and kale and turnip greens and other things I couldn’t identify. We also had some nice new carrots, and I twisted off their greens (6 times as high in Vitamin C as the roots, plus high in magnesium, potassium, and Vitamin K) and added them to the mix. I then proceeded with the following simple recipe. Any mix of dark greens will work.
Ingredients:
Crush the bulb of garlic and divide it between two pots. In one, add olive oil, the diced jalapeño, and a pat of butter. In the other, add just a bit of olive oil. Set the first pot aside. Continue reading