Tag Archives: sundried tomatoes

Food and Death on the Small Screen (or TV with a Side of Sun-Dried Tomato Pesto)

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sopranosAlright, I admit it: I like watching television while I eat dinner. I KNOW, okay? I am single-handedly destroying the time-honored tradition of family suppers, and Jason and I will probably forget how to have actual conversations, and the world is going to hell in a hand basket. And yes, I, too, hate the zombie-like stare-at-the-screen epidemic of the modern era. But, but, but…I like coming home from a frenzied New York City day and cooking dinner and letting myself be hypnotized for a little while.

Jason and I excuse this guilty pleasure by telling ourselves that at least we watch good TV. And it really is a grand age for television dramas, isn’t it? We don’t have cable, so most of our viewing takes the form of gobbling up the latest DVD releases of shows like Game of Thrones or Homeland or Mad Men or (R.I.P.) Breaking Bad. But I like the “classics,” too. I’ve sat through two viewings of Deadwood and I’m not above a third. And when I heard that Jason had never seen all of The Sopranos, the show that ushered in this golden television epoch, we went back to the pilot and started from there.

It’s funny; after my first viewing of The Sopranos, six or seven years ago, most of what stuck with me was the violence, but this time it’s the food that really stands out. Everyone, even the skinny teenaged daughter, is constantly packing away the ziti and manicotti and cannoli and other Italian foodstuffs ending in “I” that I can’t hope to spell correctly. It’s like they’re defying death with the stuff of life. In the last episode we watched, the recent-immigrant cousin Furio expertly formed a massive ball of mozzarella cheese (baby-soft, lily-white, the closest cheese approximation of mother’s milk), while pulling on a cigarette and almost ashing into the bowl. Then he went and beat some people up. Life and death, man, life and death.

Anyway, you shouldn’t try to take on The Sopranos without the proper sustenance. Here’s a recipe for a sun-dried tomato and walnut pesto that’s hearty and delicious and will leave you yearning for the next episode.

Sun-Dried Tomato and Walnut Pesto Continue reading →

Independence Food Contest Victor!

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It was PitchKnives’ 4th of July challenge, but that was nothing new to me.

Two summers ago, my wife and I threw a 4th of July party and asked everyone to bring some food to share. Most people brought the usual stuff — pasta salad, guacamole, beer — but one friend arrived with a loaf of homemade “Red, White, and Blue” bread, which looked as though it had just been lifted from the display window of a European bakery. It was delicious, filled with chopped sundried tomatoes and topped with slabs of Zingerman’s blue cheese.
I assumed she’d spent hours in her kitchen, kneading the thing herself, put she told me confidentially that she’d only put a half an hour of work into the process. The secret? Jim Lahey’s “My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method,” a cookbook that allows you to bypass the difficult parts of the bread-making process. All you need is time (for the bread to complete its slow rise) and a cast iron pot.
To be specific, you’ll also need the following:

3 cups unbleached bread flour

1 and 3/4th cup water
3/4th cup teaspoon active dry yeast (Fleischmann’s is a good brand)
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cup chopped sundried tomatoes (you can use olives, too, in which case you’ll probably want to omit the salt)

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