I go a little bipolar on dinn
er sometimes, occasionally eating just enough to be full, occasionally cooking a feast and going to town on it.
So stomach aches happen.
I’m in the Land of Milk and Honey and I put them on the table.
And I’ve discovered that better than anything I’ve ever purchased in a pharmacy, better even than the Yogi Tea Stomach Ache tea, is simple ginger in hot water.
Just cut some slices off a ginger root, drop them in some hot water, and presto. Continue reading
Cheese is without a doubt my favorite food, so I was psyched when Shannon took us to the cheese-making class. Shannon listed her take-aways yesterday, but she overlooked a few things.
The bowline, as you might remember from your BSA Field Guide, is useful because while under a heavy load it neither slips nor binds.
talking you can tie a loop and freely pull each end in opposite directions and the cheese slides together as easily as any kind of modern rope made of pulp and plastic fibers. Here, I have demonstrated this fact by tying a bowline, one of the classic Boy Scout knots. Yeah, man, I still know that stuff. Continue reading
My very first braided mozzarella knot! Not bad for a novice, eh?
Oh, Groupon—how did we ever find cheap and marginally educational weekend recreation without you? The ubiquitous discount site was where I happened upon the mozzarella cheese-making class at BrickNYC, a brick oven pizza joint in downtown Manhattan. And since I have long harbored a secret fantasy in which I own a nanny goat named Moo Goo Gai Pan and make my own fresh chevre, I decided that it was worth a try. Here are my key takeaways:
Cheese details are not for the faint of heart.
People really do not like talking about food and poop in the same sentence, especially if the connection goes beyond the most basic one. My classmates looked a little dismal at the revelation that cheese is basically bacteria poo, except for two lively young women who clearly had had the good sense to pre-party before the class began. When the question of the holes in Swiss cheese was posed to one of them, she gasped and exclaimed, “Oh! Like little farts!”
Pity the piglet.
Apparently, you can make cheese from the milk of any mammal (yes, including humans), but the only one that tastes really vile is pig cheese. I was really curious about this fact, and asked our instructor Patrick to elaborate, but he said I was just supposed to trust him. Boo. Sounds like a cop out to me. Doing a little internet research today, the most prevalent theory is that pig cheese tastes bad because they are omnivores rather than ruminants like cows and sheep. Continue reading
I used to think that my mother’s thing for kitchen gadgets had something to do with how much time and effort it took to cook dinner for a family of five, day after day, year after year, and a desire to make the process quicker and easier. There is, probably, still some truth to that theory, but after I saw the way she took to the Kindle and iPhone, another suspicion began to take shape: my mother is a gearhead. There are people out there who revel in having the right tool for the right task, and though I can’t profess to have that personality trait myself, no one epitomizes it more in the realm of cuisine than my own flesh and blood. To get a sense of what I was missing, I asked my mom, Nancy, to take some photos of her most beloved and frequently used gadgets.
Manufacturer: Waring
Wine opener
My mother can drink you under the table, in no small measure because she can get the bottles open faster. A few years ago, I was finally coming around to the idea of one of those Rabbit corkscrews that looks like a medieval torture device, but my mother was already a step ahead. This one requires, literally, zero effort. You just put it on top of the bottle, press a button, and the cork magically and invisibly comes whirring out of the bottle. “It never breaks the corks apart,” my mother explains.
Manufacturer: Vinturi
Aerator and strainer
If ever the cork should tragically break apart, however, my mom has it covered with this contraption. You just hold it over a glass and pour red wine through it. The mesh strainer at the top catches any undesirable sediment and then the wine passes through a series of small holes so that more of it is exposed to oxygen. This eliminates the need to leave the bottle open on the counter, breathing, and, as my mom points out, enables more drinking and less waiting. Sadly, a sulfite allergy has seriously cut down on my mom’s red wine consumption, though she believes that now the same company makes one for white wine, too. “I’m not really sure why you would use that,” she said, but it didn’t sound like she was completely ruling it out.
Manufacturer: Egg Perfect
Egg timer
Lest you think that my mom’s gadgets are limited to wine, here’s one that she claimed she used this morning for breakfast. You just pop it in the pot with the eggs you’re boiling, and it changes color to show when the eggs have arrived at soft-boiled and hard-boiled. She’s been using this for decades now, though it has been a subject of controversy. “Dad prefers to time them, and they turn out very nice,” she says slowly and diplomatically. She is saying this because my father has two culinary tricks—grilling a steak and soft-boiling an egg—and I don’t think she wants to discourage him from these tasks. Even so, she admits, lowering her voice, “I still use the timer. It’s much more predictable.” Continue reading
Other than the recipe for my Indian sweet potato fries, I haven’t written about potatoes yet this season. I know it’s suppose to be Spring now, but it’s not, at least not in New York, so I’m going to jump on this oversight now before the tulips, already sprouted, get over their confusion at the climate-change weather and pop their pretty heads.
We know that potatoes “saved Europe” in that they kept the lower classes alive just well enough to keep them from rising up, in their starvation and despair, and taking out their monarchs. We know them, thus, as a staple. Or at least I do. Their manipulation by the Queen drove my people to America, and for many a year they, in their fry form, were the highlight of the cafeteria.
But I ate some potatoes last week that made the standard, American Grocery Store-variety potato seem as bland as spray starch.
Healthway Farmsis a small farm in the Hudson Valley north of the city, and over the winter
Note: An old toothbrush is an excellent tool for scrubbing the dirt from your potatoes.
I’ve come to know that they grow superb spuds. I bought three varieties from them: Adirondack Red, Adirondack Blue, and Carola. I baked all of them with only olive oil, salt, and pepper so we could compare the taste.
Adirondack Blue: You may have had purple fingerling potatoes. I love them. Shannon is “coming to like them.” She claims they have a trace of a metallic taste to them. The Adirondack Blue has a deeper taste than its purple fingerling cousins and none of that sharp minerality. It’s starchier – more potato-y in its way – and holds together in your mouth. Though it is quite different in taste from your standard Russet, its heft and density made it seem the most traditional of our lot, despite the color. Continue reading
Everyone indulges their mischievous and somewhat bawdy antics on St. Patrick’s Day, of course, but what is one to do with the surplus of leprechauns running around the house after the holiday? We have more than most—though I’m only about a third Irish on a good day, I have a name that makes me sounds as if I’m straight off the boat from County Cork, and the little devils just come flocking. To call them a nuisance would be an understatement: they harass the cats, they poop in the shower, they drink all the Scotch in the house out of spite. I think it will be a solid month before I can get the smell of pipe smoke out of the couch, and the red hair I keep finding on my pillow…let’s just say I’m not certain it’s from their heads.
Don’t get me wrong; it’s not that I find leprechaun slaughter an enjoyable task. (In fact, I prefer the term “leprechaun harvest” whenever possible.) But it’s important to remember that they’ve lived a good life, free to roam and tell dirty jokes wherever they like. And a little ether on a rag and then a quick whap against the edge of the sink is a process I find most humane.
Anyway, they make a first-rate soup. So come in out of the harsh March winds, sit down to a steaming bowlful and thank your lucky stars that St. Patty’s Day comes but once a year. For the recipe of what’s in the bowl, keep reading: Continue reading
Hark! What is that glimpse of green that is once again appearing in the produce aisle? It is asparagus, those elegantly slender and vibrant stalks, one of the first vegetal signs that spring is on its way.
“But, lo!” you are probably saying. “What’s with the pee thing?”
It has been noted by many trustworthy sources that asparagus has some unusual after-effects. In 1702, the author of Treatise of All Sorts of Food noticed that the stalks “cause a filthy and disagreeable smell in the urine.” Most who have experienced this phenomenon seem to agree with him about the off-putting nature of the smell, though Proust (always hell-bent on being an outlier) said that asparagus “transforms my chamber-pot into a flask of perfume.”
I would like nothing more, dear readers, than to offer my own opinion on this matter, but I just don’t smell it. (And before you offer, no, I do not want to smell your pee.) I always assumed that there was some difference in the way people processed this vegetable resulting in my unremarkable urine, but a groundbreaking study in 2010 opened up the possibility that I (along with about 78% of the population) might just lack the olfactory receptors necessary to detect the asparagus odor. (So even if I did consent to smell your pee, I might not be able to tell the difference.)
Regardless, I think this is a small price to pay for some delicious asparagus. To me, it tastes like a plate full of spring. Here’s an easy recipe to kick off your asparagus season: Continue reading
Ah, the cruelty of early spring, when the skies are gray and the produce selection is still scarce. The season has left me in a decided creativity slump in the cooking department. So it was high time that I broke out the recipe dice from my friend Mignon, who cleverly managed to combine my love of food and nerdy games into a single Christmas gift. Here’s the concept: you roll fourteen dice, each with cute little pictures of ingredients on each side. You’re allowed to re-roll a certain number of them, but you’re supposed to try to use all the ingredients in a single meal.
Okay, let’s get this out of the way: I cheated. But only a little, I swear! I took out the meat die, which is legitimate for vegetarian play, I think. I also had just made a huge batch of cauliflower soup just a day or two before and staring at the cauliflower heads in the supermarket made me vaguely depressed, so I threw that one out, too, though under different circumstances, I think it could easily be added to the mélange recipe below. I would like to point out, however, that I used the other twelve dice, even though I rolled nopales on my re-roll, the equivalent of pulling a Q in Scrabble, and went to four grocery stores before I found them. Here are the ingredients I had to work with: artichokes, Brussels sprouts, cheese, cous-cous, garlic, lemon, mushrooms, nopales, onion, peas, rosemary and tomatoes.
The dice definitely got me to think outside the box. And I’ll probably make both of the recipes again (though probably not in the same meal). In case you’re having your own kitchen slump, here are the two recipes I came up with: Continue reading
This time, I’m afraid, there’s simply no hope of convincing the neighbors that I’m not completely insane. This morning at 7 a.m., I was outside in the swirling snow, shaking snow from a shrub into a cake pan, a bottle of maple syrup clamped tightly in one armpit. I am thirty-one years old, but the vestiges of my Little House on the Prairie fetish are still on display for everyone on my block to see.
When I was very young, my sister read the entire Little House series out loud to me, and man, did I love it. Sure, Mary was kind of a bore, but Laura was clever and charming and brave—all things that wee Shannon aspired to be. And I was enthralled with the idea of pioneer life. If my family ever had to move into a sod house for some reason, I was prepared to milk a cow, knit some mittens, and whip up some corn pone in order to help us through the long winter. I went so far as to insist that my parents buy me the Little House on the Prairie Cookbook, which explained how to make delicious treats like hardtack.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when New York was on the cusp of getting its first real snowstorm of the season; a scene from the first Little House book came back to me in a flash. Hadn’t Laura made maple candy by dripping syrup on fresh snow? Wouldn’t it be a hoot to do it myself? Alas, the timing of that storm was all wrong, and by the time I was out and about the next morning, it had turned to rain and slush. So this time, when I woke up to a couple of inches, I was determined to make it happen. Mind you, I haven’t read the book in question, Little House in the Big Woods, in well over two decades and my copy of the cookbook is probably still in a crate somewhere in my parents’ house, but as I remembered it, they just packed some snow in a pan, drizzled syrup over it in snazzy designs and—Voila! Candy!
In actuality, this is not what happens when you put maple syrup on snow. Continue reading
There are some food textures that I cannot abide. Enormous hunks of sun-dried tomato make me gag; the mealy, fibrous feel of some kinds of squash turns my stomach. The soggy consistency of overcooked, waterlogged rice might top both of these, however, on my personally calibrated grossness scale. Last week, when Jason got distracted with multiple other components of an ambitious dinner and let the brown rice go too long, I just couldn’t eat it. But since both of us hate wasting food, the conundrum became what to do with a giant pot of leftover rice.
Thus began my scheming for a grand resurrection of the watery grains. In the past, I’ve enjoyed both a Moosewood recipe for stovetop rice pudding and a slow cooker recipe for oatmeal that tastes like pumpkin pie, so I thought I might be able to combine them into a yummy weekend breakfast. Also, we had an abundance of carrots in the fridge after Jason found a mother lode of root vegetables at the farmers market, and when I recalled that I do now have a modicum of carrot cake experience, a plan began to take shape.
Below is the recipe that I came up with. When the rice was cooked with almond milk until it had the consistency of oatmeal, I no longer found it repulsive. And despite having the word “cake” in the name, most of the ingredients are terrifically healthy. You deserve a merit badge, however, if you manage to leave off the cream cheese (cheese of wonder!) and honey glaze that I added at the end for a boost of carrot cake flavor and a touch of decadence. Continue reading