Site Meter

Odds & ends

As you can see, I’ve been cooking. Oh, how I’ve been cooking. But there hasn’t been a lot to say about the food. I mean, we can all get behind a great roast chicken, but really, what more could I possibly tell you about it? Well, OK, just a word about this one, then we’ll move on…

I was craving another Zuni roast chicken for dinner during the week, but my way-back machine was in the shop and I couldn’t have one seasoned in time for that evening’s meal. So I did the next best thing; I used Thomas Keller’s method of seasoning and dry roasting a chicken in a 450-degree oven for an hour. (Thanks for the heads-up, Dietsch.) It’s very similar to the Zuni method, only it requires no advance planning. It’s also very similar to my grandma’s roast chicken: 500-degree oven for an hour, but she bastes it in butter whereas this one stayed completely dry, the better to crisp the skin, my darlings. It was a delicious bird, only not seasoned through the way it would have been if […]

By |January 31, 2009|Appetizers, Asian, Chicken, Eggs, Italian, Pictures|9 Comments
Read More

Slap yo’ mama

Confession time: I wasn’t raised on anything even resembling homemade biscuits, an especially shameful admission for a Southerner. The closest to “from scratch” my family ever got was Bisquick, but more often Dad would crack open a can of flaky biscuits and call it breakfast. So I don’t know where I developed a taste for the real stuff, but I’m glad I did, because there’s just no comparison.

This was a big biscuit weekend around here. I woke Saturday with a craving and set the wheels in motion, but the results were unsatisfactory, so I followed up with a second round Sunday because I just knew there was a better recipe out there. And of course there was; Gourmet ran an article on Ms. Edna Lewis and her protegé Scott Peacock not so long ago, and the magazine was practically staring me in the face as I blithely searched recipes online. Why would I look for second-rate when the ultimate was right there? It’s like reading Adrian Tomine when all you want is Dan Clowes or popping in a DVD of When Harry Met Sally when you know you’d […]

By |January 21, 2009|Baking, biscuits, Pictures, Southern|12 Comments
Read More

It’s a neighborly day in the neighborhood

I’m a terrible neighbor. Oh, I don’t let Rufus pockmark neighbors’ yards with calling cards or have crazy drink-till-dawn parties or have a car on blocks in the front yard, but I’ve found other less obvious ways to be a bad person.

Those of you who are lucky enough to be in warmer climates at the moment might not have heard, but it’s cold here. Negative wind chill cold. Unacceptably cold. AND it snowed like a sonofabitch last weekend. So we’re all miserable, is what I’m getting at. When it snows over the weekend, Gil and I sometimes shovel the driveway, but more often he just drives over the snow in his Honda Element and we don’t think too much about it. Last weekend, however, in the midst of all the wintery misery, our neighbor came over with his snow blower to take care of the dirty work for us.

As he was doing his thing, I looked over at our fruit bowl and noticed a few blackened bananas there just begging to be made into banana bread. So I dug out my version of a Cooking Light […]

By |January 17, 2009|Baking, Bananas, Pictures|4 Comments
Read More

The meal in the iron pan

This slushy winter weather has pressed my cast iron skillet into heavy rotation lately. As our mothers and grandmothers knew, cast iron cookware is perfect for homey meals or stove-to-oven cooking with a minimum of mess.

Awash in laziness last weekend, I decided to try my hand at a Spanish torta, as it required the relatively simple journey from living room to kitchen instead of a more arduous trek to the grocery store. The recipes that turned up in a Google search varied only slightly from each other, so I got the gist of them, used Martha’s (yes, we’re on a first-name basis) as a guide to ingredient amounts and oven temperature and set out to create my own vegetarian version.

To the basic recipe, I added diced red bell pepper, sautéed broccoli rabe (leafy greens only), garlic and a hefty dose of hot pimentòn. (Several of the recipes I found called for chorizo, which I agree would be a superb addition, but there was that whole going-out thing to avoid. The pimentòn seemed an […]

By |January 12, 2009|Appetizers, Chicken, Pictures, Potatoes, Spanish|8 Comments
Read More

Oh. Mah. Gah.

To celebrate Gil‘s 38th birthday tomorrow, I thought I’d treat him to dinner this evening at a nearby restaurant with the excellent and unusual reputation of fine French dining in a casual strip mall atmosphere. Sadly, today’s snow closed the restaurant prematurely and we had to reschedule for next weekend, so I broke out the latest issue of Food & Wine to make him a birthday dessert that would take some of the sting out of his missed dinner.

“That must be some dessert!” you say. “Whatever could it be?” Oh, just a little something called Warm Chocolate Croissant-Bread Pudding.

As you know, I’m no stranger to the charms of bread pudding and I’ve often substituted croissants for bread when I’ve thrown caution (and calories) to the wind, but this is easily 10 steps beyond anything I’ve made. And it was so simple! Just a few ordinary ingredients, about an hour of my time, and Gil and I were stumbling around in a lovely chocolate- and carbohydrate-driven serotonin haze.

By |January 10, 2009|Baking, Bread pudding, Chocolate, Desserts, Pictures|10 Comments
Read More

The Meet-iversary

Five years ago this evening, I ended my post-work crosstown death march at St. Mark’s Bookshop chilled to the bone, and hoping my nose would unredden before meeting my latest online date. This was going to be the last for a while, I’d decided; the frustration of dating required a cleansing break a couple of times a year. And anyway, given the general length and creativity of the typical online dating gambit, this guy was lucky I deigned to respond at all to his mere two-sentence note that said, basically, hi and write back. But his ad mentioned a chaise longue, the strangeness of which piqued my interest, so I responded, and found myself here a couple of weeks later (after holiday travels and an all-night poker session on New Year’s Eve that I was still recovering from).

I looked over the selections at the design table up front and enjoyed the warmth of the store, hoping he might be a few minutes late so I could thaw a bit more. But he showed up on time (Considerate: check) and introduced himself. I put down my book and looked up, and up, and up. (Tall: check) He was […]

By |January 2, 2009|Anniversary, Pictures|12 Comments
Read More

Happy 2009

We sprang out of bed at the crack of mid-morning today, and after a strong cup of coffee, I got started on the traditional new year’s day meal of black-eyed peas and greens (turnip, this year).

Carefully sorting through the beans, I searched for rocks and discarded the misshapen beans, then chopped the other ingredients according to my all-time favorite recipe from The Prudhomme Family Cookbook.

The greens are more intuitive. I never make them the same way twice, but they always start with stemming, chopping and a vigorous washing before I even think of cooking them.

This time around, I chopped the 1/4 pound of tasso leftover from the beans and halved a small piece of salt pork, then covered the meat with water in a large pot. I brought it to a boil, then lowered the heat to simmer for about 30 minutes to create a flavorful cooking liquid for the greens. At that point, I added some chopped onions, cayenne pepper, a little bit of salt and the greens. They simmered for about 20 minutes, […]

By |January 1, 2009|Beans, Greens, Holiday, Pictures, Rufus|4 Comments
Read More