Category Archives: Food

Cooking, Cooking techniques, Farm Box, Food

Purple produce and uneven sprouts

December 17, 2009 Kate Leave a comment

I could have sworn I wrote this up, but apparently not. Back at the beginning of the winter share distribution I got a truck load of extra-awesome vegetables, including purple potatoes and cauliflower and a stalk of brussels sprouts. I combined all three in a dinner designed purely for my own amusement, because seriously?

How fun are those?

I took some beauty shots before getting down to the cooking:

As cool as the stalk of sprouts is, it does leave you with a slight problem:

Yes, that is the top (huge) sprout next to the one from the bottom of the stalk. Since the sizes were so wildly uneven, I decided to make Greta’s shaved oven-roasted sprouts. The cuisinart makes this WAY easier; use the blade that looks like this and attaches to that stalk thing to keep it at the top of the bowl:

12 seconds later this:

Became this:

I cut the cauliflower into florets to roast (at 400 or 425) alongside the shaved brussels sprouts, and tossed each with oil, salt and pepper.

Meanwhile I boiled the potatoes and tossed them (while hot) with a butter/vinegar/mustard dressing.

A few slices of grilled steak for protein and voila!

The leftovers were excellent for lunch the next day, and in daylight the colors were even crazier:

[FYI, purple potatoes and cauliflower taste essentially the same as normal potatoes and cauliflower, but they look purple. So: Worth it.]
—

I’m scrambling to pack for a lengthy round of holiday visits. Looking forward to NYC and to the usual cooking orgy back home in Oregon. I hope everyone has a lovely holiday season!

Cooking, Disasters, Food, Travel

How not to make carbonara, in 12 steps

December 9, 2009 Kate 3 Comments

Do you ever have a moment of insanity where you think, “I should make ___, but I think I will change the formula in these 6 ways and also not look at any recipes,” and then when you do exactly that you’re shocked when the results are less than perfect? Yeah, me too. Last night, for instance. Here’s how this went:

1. While reading last month’s Real Simple, notice a 1-line “recipe” suggesting a pasta dish with shredded brussels sprouts sautéed in butter and combined with fettucine and bacon.

2. Remember the stalk of brussels sprouts aging in the fridge; think you can probably make things more interesting than just combining the pasta with the sprouts and bacon.

3. Carbonara!

4. Don’t look up a recipe from carbonara, except to see that one online says “beaten eggs” and one in a cookbook says “egg yolks.” Do not read any of the rest of either recipe. Just start cooking, even though the one other time you made carbonara (following a recipe to the letter) you got it wrong and the eggs scrambled.

5. Proceed smugly, shredding the sprouts, cutting bacon into lardons and frying them, cooking the sprouts, separating eggs, cooking spaghetti.

6. Frantically call husband into kitchen to grate parmesan as the pasta finishes cooking; combine sprouts/bacon with pasta; assume the pasta is cooling down too much, dump eggs into pasta in a panic.

7. Pasta and pan are still too hot. Eggs sort of scramble.

8. Fling pot holder on the floor, while cursing.

9. Rip off apron and fling it against a cupboard, while cursing.

10. Storm out of the kitchen in a cursing, flinging fit.

11. Return to kitchen and mumble profanities while seasoning the pasta, meanwhile breaking it into smaller and smaller strands while husband silently pours large glasses of wine.

12. Eat giant mounded bowl of pasta (plus seconds), which looks horrible but tastes pretty damn good. Say a silent thanks for candlelight. Drink wine.

Lessons learned:

— For the LOVE, make sure the pasta is hot enough but not too hot when mixing in the egg.

— Keep in mind that things can only go so badly when the ingredients involved are: Bacon, brussels sprouts, parmesan, garlic, pasta.

—-

I’m in a panic about cocktail party for 40 tomorrow night. It is sleeting and I need to grocery shop but I feel like I don’t have a very solid menu. Wish me luck, please! And if you’re feeling upset by that sad pasta up, let me offer you the following condolence prize:

I visited Bridge in NYC this weekend, and we celebrated her boyfriend Matt’s birthday at the unbelievably awesome Fette Sau (“fat pig”) in Williamsburg. Witness the glory of the Tray Of Meat:

9:29 p.m.

9:55 p.m.

We also drank cider and beer out of half-gallon jugs:

It was a good weekend for food. We ate at Perbacco and had mince-meat-stuffed deep-fried cerignola olives (!!) (Bridge saw them on the menu and just looked at me, all “wow, they know your soft underbelly…”), and we visited my favorite bodega tacqueria on 10th Avenue. We spent an afternoon in my beloved old neighborhood, saw great apartments, and spent a lovely time with friends. Good times and at least a five-pound weight gain, I’m guessing.

Cooking, Cooking techniques, Family, Food, Recipes

Make this now: Bistro Salad, modernized

November 27, 2009 Kate 7 Comments

….Hi.

Yes, it’s been more than two weeks since I checked in. There’s no real reason for it, just a lack of motivation and a general feeling of “blah.” I have about 10 different things I should get posted, which is of course a little overwhelming (I’m trying to get to the photos for this post and I’m already on page 8 of my Flickr without getting close. Agh).

Happy belated Thanksgiving! Ben and I were on our own this year, so we took a drive up to York Beach, ME and ate at Lydia Shire’s Blue Sky, which was fantastic. Between the dinner I ate and my mom’s continued proselytizing, I am convinced of the wisdom of cooking the turkey legs and breast separately: I had lovely slices of the white meat, accompanied by a ridiculously delicious “ragout” of shredded dark meat warmed up in gravy. Yup, that is the way to go.

I never actually posted any of the cooking experiments from my visit home in late October, and I think one of them might come in handy if you’re looking for a satisfying but light dinner for these post-Turkey days. We ate at The Butcher Shop in the South End with new friends before my trip, and I shamelessly hogged a shared salad appetizer, a frisee salad with bacon dressing, shaved egg and fingerling potatoes. A few days later in Oregon, I decided to recreate it for the family, and we got it mostly right, though not quite perfect. It’s a nice riff on the traditional french bistro salad (frisee and lardons with a poached egg). This is easier to share, since there aren’t whole eggs, and would also be great without the potatoes, or as a simple lunch.

First things first, we baked a few strips of good, thick bacon, then cut it up into small little bits and saved a bit of the fat to make the dressing (like a warm spinach salad).

(I cut the bacon fat with a bit of grapeseed oil, which is nice and neutral. I never did get the dressing quite right; I forgot to add mustard and it never came together the way I wanted.)

Next up: Potatoes. Mom got gorgeous fingerlings, which I halved, boiled until nearly cooked, then tossed with olive oil, salt and pepper and roasted until they colored but didn’t crisp up.

Finally, the egg. In retrospect, I’m an ass. I could have passed it through a food mill or pushed it through a sieve. But I was jetlagged, sick and stupid, and didn’t get there. Mom thought her egg slicer could produce a very fine dice, so we gave it a try:

Um, fail. Even if I rotated it 90 degrees for a second slice….no. My solution? The box grater!

(Tom was entertained by taking action shots while I struggled)

It was hard to get through more than half of the egg before it fell apart in my hand, but the results were perfect:

Nice and fluffy.

Assembly time. I dressed the frisee, tossed it with the bacon, and then topped it with the egg.

Tossed the potatoes with the rest of the dressing, and layered those on top:

We also had steak, beets, beans, and peppers:

And wine and candles.

Still to come: A four-hour pasta recipe from the lovely Suzanne Goin, lots of non-food pictures, thrifting adventures with Tom, fun with purple vegetables, etc.

Cooking, Cooking techniques, Farm Box, Food

CSA wrap-up and the onset of winter veg

November 11, 2009 Kate 1 Comment

Yesterday I picked up my first winter share from Stone Soup–two bags full of treats:

Let’s zoom in a bit, since that is a LOT of stuff.

Let’s see, I’m pretty sure it is:
-1 enormous white cabbage
-8 oz. salad greens
-2 rutabagas
-2 heads garlic
-1 head *purple* cauliflower (there were white, cheddar, and romanesco varieties, too!)
-1 stalk of brussels sprouts, OMG I am in love
-2 delicata squashes
-1.5 lbs. daikon radish
-2 bulbs celeriac, yippee!
-2 lbs. onions
-1 bunch of gorgeous little white turnips, with greens
-2 lbs. sweet potatoes
-1 bunch cavolo nero

So exciting. Let’s zoom in even closer on some of my favorites.

I know I’ve said it before, but vegetables just amaze me.

I am alone for a couple nights, so I indulged in a super-simple dinner, even though I knew I should be eating up those perishable greens and saving the sturdy root vegetables for later in the winter.

Dinner for One: Mashed rutabaga and toast

Peel and cut up the rutabaga (preferably not an enormous one):

Boil in salted water until nice and tender.

Mash with butter, salt and pepper. (I have recommended it in the past, but it’s worth repeating: I love my Oxo potato masher, with the handle on top. It’s easy to get enough pressure behind it, and the way it’s designed lets you mash things right in the pot and get to the corners, etc.) Devour with buttery sourdough toast.

I considered frying an egg, but decided to skip it and make popcorn for dessert, instead. I ate the whole bowl while watching CSI reruns and feeling less sorry for myself than I usually do when I am on my own for a few days!

BTW, just in case you’re interested, here’s a slide show of the vegetables from the summer share, from June through October, plus the winter share. If you’re in the Boston area and you’re interested in a great CSA, get on Stone Soup’s mailing list now so you can try to get in on the 2010 action!

Cooking, Cooking techniques, Farm Box, Food, Recipes

Slow cooker pulled pork

October 20, 2009 Kate 7 Comments

Meat cuts like pork butt always call my name at the butcher counter because they are so darn cheap and so easy to prepare. Last week I had apples and pork on the brain, and it was also getting really chilly all of a sudden, so I hauled out (and scrubbed off) the slow cooker and got to work.

(A bum bottle, sadly. Worked fine as cooking liquid but wasn’t drinkable. Boo!)

I took the elastic waistband off the pork and trimmed off the bigger chunks of fat–this is a really fatty cut, so I also had to skim off fat from the cooking liquid at the end.

I patted the pork dry and seasoned it with salt and pepper, then seared it well on all sides and put it in the pot.

Along for the ride were a couple red and yellow onions.

I used a couple glugs of chicken broth and some of the cider for my liquid, and set the slow cooker on low for 7 hours. After six or so I came back and added in my apples, cut in quarters and cored.

At dinner time I pulled out the meat and apples and onions and drained the liquid into a gravy strainer to separate out some of the fat. I sort of messed up, mangling the cooked apples in with the onions, so instead of just mushing up the apples as sauce (which would have been great) I mixed the two together. That was fine but definitely diluted the apple flavor. I added a little cider vinegar to sharpen it up, and more salt and pepper.

I tried to get the extra fat off the meat, then I put it back in the pot with the liquid and pulled it apart with a couple forks.

We had the apple/onion sauce and chard on the side.

Three pounds of pork yielded a mountain of meat, and I have to admit it was sort of bland. I need to dissect how Chipotle makes their carnitas so flavorful. Ben took leftovers for two lunches, and we made flatbread pizzas with some more. I froze the rest for future use. For the flatbreads I drained the liquid off the meat and crisped it up in a pan, then topped garlic naan with the meat and some shredded cheese.

Once they were baked I put a little arugula salad on top.

—

I’m going to try cooking chicken legs–another extra-economical cut–tonight. Wish me luck! As long-time readers know, I loathe cooking chicken.

Cooking, Family, Food, General, Home

Why I write about food (my accidental manifesto)

October 14, 2009 Kate 15 Comments

Ben and I had a long conversation a couple weeks ago, while we were in the car driving back to Cambridge from New Hampshire. We were talking about goals and dreams and we somehow got on the topic of the blog and what I want to do, career-wise, and eventually I found myself going on and on about why I care about food. As I spoke I started to make some connections to my childhood and the way we live now, and I thought it might be useful to lay those things out. Warning, this is long. Long long.

Dinner as bonding time
This isn’t rocket science. There have been tons of studies that link eating dinner as a family to better test scores, behavior, success in life, etc. I’m sure all of that is true, but the root is bonding time, I think.

When I was a kid, we ate dinner at the table every night. Sure, there were exceptions (my parents had a work event, one of us had a play or something at school), but 95% of weeknights we sat down at the table. As my mom finished dinner, Dad would turn off NPR and turn on Dave Brubeck or Miles Davis, light the candles, turn off the overhead lights, and we would set the table with cloth napkins. Everyone was expected to participate in the conversation (which was a major drag when I was 13 or 14), and we stayed at the table until everyone was finished eating. After the main course we’d have salad and wipe our plates with a bit of bread.

When I got married, my mom gave me napkin rings with our initials, along with cloth napkins, as a wedding gift. I don’t know why lighting the candles and using real napkins makes a difference to me, but it does. Maybe it’s that there is a distinct moment when it is truly Dinner Time. Sometimes we are eating a really simple salad and some bread with cheese toasted on it, but we sit across from each other at the table and we talk about our days and it is a really important part of our lives. We both feel off-kilter when we go a week or two without regular meals together at home.

Eating together means you are checking in every night, without the distraction of TV to let you get off the hook and avoid talking. It means eye contact and a glass of wine (or water!) and a respite from the blackberry. It’s not really about the food, but:

Food as social fodder
At some point I started thinking about food more seriously, and I chalk that up to my family, too. When I was in elementary school my mom started teaching cooking classes, as well as getting more and more serious about food herself. By the time I was in high school we were regulars at the farmers market and she had an in with a wholesale gourmet purveyor in Portland. Food had become the common language in my family, and we talked about it all the time.

Ben first visited us in Oregon the summer after we started dating, and at a certain point that week he turned to me and said “Um, do you guys ever stop talking about food?” No. If we’re not discussing what’s for dinner (say, because we’re currently eating dinner), we may be talking about things we plan to eat tomorrow, or things we ate recently that we want to replicate, or what’s due soon at the farmer’s market. Months before a trip to Eugene, my mom starts making a list of things we need to cook while I’m home. We’re a little obsessed.

The result is that I think about food all the time, sort of the way a sports fan thinks about his team of choice. I’m not into the whole “foodie” (gah) restaurant scorecard/chef-tracking thing, but I get really giddy about asparagus season.

What I don’t like is snobbishness and the idea that food needs to be fancy to be good. Food needs to be good to be good. Sure, I focus on trying to keep what I cook local and seasonal, but I won’t lie, we were at a small country fair this weekend and I found it crucially important to sample both the “giant donut” and the fried dough. And some cotton candy. (The giant donut won, and it was indeed the size of my face.) Which brings me to my last point (and about time, too):

Food should be fun and delicious, not scary
I was pleased that the movie version of Julie and Julia highlighted my favorite Julia Child advice, “be fearless.” (My other favorites, paraphrased: never apologize (this trips me up), always mix with your hands, and cover mistakes with whipped cream.) Cooking and eating should be fun, enriching experiences, not stressful ones. When we got married I had never cooked dinner regularly. Living in NYC with roommates and crappy kitchens meant that if I made anything at home, it was probably a fried egg or some Trader Joe’s dumplings. And yet I plunged into cooking that first year in Hanover, choosing Sunday Suppers at Lucques as my cookbook of choice and throwing one, maybe two dinner parties each week. Of course I overshot sometimes, and got stressed out trying to time the meals right, and I freaked out that time the plastic wrap melted into the short ribs, but it never occurred to me that I should start with simpler things, because for me the challenge made it fun.

Maybe it’s because I grew up sitting on the desk in the kitchen while my mom cooked dinner–I certainly didn’t cook much at home, aside from helping her with tedious tasks and going on occasional baking kicks. I did know how to do a lot of basic things, but let me tell you, my knife skills were pretty shoddy. The first time I made those triple pork burgers they took forever, and I swore it wasn’t worth the trouble. Funny; the most recent time I made them the prep took about 1/4 the time. Practice does, indeed, make something closer to perfect. (Though Ben and my mom swear that if I keep practicing one day I’ll be good at slicing bread, and so far that is a blatant lie. Stupid wonky slices.)

What I want to get across is that cooking doesn’t need to be intimidating. The worst that can happen is that you burn the hell out of something, or, um, explode the pyrex, or flood the kitchen with pizza dough. Kitchens are made to be cleaned up. You can always eat a scrambled egg or order takeout if things go truly awry.

I write about food because food makes me happy, and I want it to make other people happy, too.

In the interest of service journalism, How to enjoy food, my humble guide:
Geek out about the colors and shapes of vegetables and food. Use white plates, or vintage ones that make you happy. Try a complicated recipe when it won’t freak you out if it doesn’t work. When in doubt, make a braised stew. Buy dessert unless you really feel up to it. Eat fried dough at every fair you encounter. Eat more noodles. Use salt and butter and olive oil and sugar: In my experience, you’ll be ok if you’re also avoiding processed foods and eating lots of delicious vegetables and not eating pounds of any one thing. Visit farms. Visit farmer’s markets. Save up for one really astonishing meal every so often. Light the candles and sit down at the table for dinner. Brussels sprouts. Cabbage. Carrot salad. Beets. Garlic. Also wine. And, in the summer, gin.

—-

And now I’m going to go make a dutch baby for dinner, because who doesn’t love an oven pancake?

Cooking, Cooking techniques, Farm Box, Food

Roasted delicata with shallots and cipollini

October 8, 2009 Kate 4 Comments

Here’s an easy one to try out when you’re feeling autumnal! When we worked at the farm a few weeks ago, Jarrett gave me a couple pounds of shallots, including some that were “seconds” missing too much skin to keep well and get distributed. I needed to use the seconds up sooner rather than later, and I also had a handful of little cipollini onions in the pantry, so I decided to try roasting them up with a couple delicata squash from the farm.

The joy of delicata (aside from the delicious, not-too-sweet flavor and great texture) is that you can eat the skin, which is thin and gets tender once it’s cooked. I cut two in half, seeded them, and then sliced them into little half moons to roast.

When I was scooping out the seeds I found THE weirdest thing: One seed had somehow SPROUTED inside the squash!! Crazy.

I peeled the skin (and sometimes the outer layer) off the cipollini, and peeled and halved the shallots.

Olive oil, salt, pepper.
(Meanwhile the oven was preheating to 375 or so.)

Ben was at a meeting and running late, so I hedged a bit on cooking–everything stayed in the oven a bit too long, but you probably need 45 minutes to an hour to get the onions really caramelized and delicious. After half an hour or so, I drizzled on some inexpensive balsamic vinegar, as an experiment. Tossed everything around and then put it back in the oven to finish cooking.

I made israeli couscous and dressed that with olive oil and more of the vinegar, and grilled sausages for a bit of protein. Great combo–sweet squash and onions, all with different textures, and a different sweetness/slight tang from the balsamic.

My really genius move was saving a handful of squash and shallots for pizza topping later in the week! It made an amazing white pie with fresh local ricotta and mozzarella.

City Life, Design/Living, Food, General, Good stuff, Home

Things I like today: October

October 1, 2009 Kate 12 Comments

As we slip into Autumn, I’ve bought a few new things and am dreaming of a few others. It’s funny how universal that Back to School urge is; this is the one time of year when it’s incredibly hard to resist freshening up my wardrobe and the house. So far I’ve remained pretty restrained, but I thought I’d share a couple things.

1. An older acquisition: Bridge gave me this awesome hand-printed towel as a birthday present, with a quote from Pride & Prejudice. (Oh, Mr. Darcy.) I couldn’t bear to use it as a towel so I tacked it up above the sink and I love the result. (It’s from the shop Brookish on Etsy, though I don’t see any more towels at the moment. Lots of other P&P stuff though!)

2. I had a lingering credit at Simon Pearce, up in Vermont, and while we were in NH last weekend we made the trip over to the main store. I totally scored! I got a salt pig on sale, and found fantastic Dwell placemats on clearance.

Even the little sheep likes the salt cellar:

3. I checked out Laurie Colwin’s “Home Cooking” and “More Home Cooking” from the library ages ago and I can’t bear to return them until my copies arrive from Amazon. Must make gingerbread. Adore Laurie Colwin.

4. Oh god, a couple years ago I became fixated on dark brown shearling-lined Bean Boots, but I resisted because they seemed like they’d get quite a bit of snow in around the laces. The L.L. Bean gods heard my excuse and now they taunt me with these beauties:

I have perfectly good snow boots. I will love them from afar. (And I do still really love the laced-up ones, too.) But they also have nice-looking Hunter-style wellies, complete with fleece liners! I want those. My rain boots leak a little.

5. In honor of fall, I washed out an old spice jar and filled it with cinnamon-sugar. Happy breakfast days for me.

(BTW, I found a roll of 100 of those round blue labels on clearance at Papersource a month or two ago, and I recently labeled the tops of all my spice jars. They are in a container, so I used to have to lift them out one at a time to find a specific jar. I should have labeled them ages ago, duh!)

6. I found a ring at Forever 21 and fell in love with it, but of course it’s, like, gilded plastic and is already starting to peel. I need to find a real-metal version of it, but somehow hollow (light) and sturdy (non-denting). Love love love.

Misc.
This summer I gave in and bought American cheese to use on burgers. Because, I’m sorry, cheddar goes greasy and I don’t like blue cheese much and American melts best. Anyway, the other place American cheese sort of takes the prize is when you want a plain, non-fancy grilled cheese. And burger season is over so guess what I had for lunch yesterday?

You know you’re jealous.

Finally, in crafty news, I found these earrings marked down to $4 at Kohl’s (don’t ask) and thought they’d be pretty cool without all the extra loops. So I took them apart and put them back together.

Things I must do this month:
-Cook something amazing with the mound of shallots I scored from the farm.
-Re-do my desk chair, which is in sad shape with old foam crumbling out of the bottom and onto the floor. (Ew.) My solution has been a plastic bag taped to the bottom of the chair but that’s stopped working.
-Make gingerbread.
-Walk Lola, the darling dog who now lives downstairs!

Farm Box, Food, General, Good stuff

Farm days

September 28, 2009 Kate Leave a comment

Regular readers are well aware of my adoration for Stone Soup Farm, the source of my wonderful CSA farm share for the last two years. The farm has kept us well fed with the most gorgeous vegetables (and eggs, this year!), continually reminding me of the value of eating local and supporting area farms. Stone Soup is owned and run by Jarrett Man, who only graduated from college a few years ago (with a bioengineering degree!) but has managed, despite weird weather and the myriad complications of running a small business, to organize a good-sized crew and grow an incredible range of crops.

Last summer we kept talking about driving out to Belchertown, Mass., (about 80 miles west of our house), but we never managed to make the trip. This year we were lucky enough to go twice, once in early August and once last weekend. I’d like to share a bunch of my photos of the farm from both trips. Jarrett always teases me for being weeks behind on my blog posts about he weekly share distributions, so hopefully this will placate him.

August:

The barn holds offices, a kitchen, and the farm stand.

(I have always loved barns!)

Farmstand:

Neat and tidy greenhouse:

Some of my favorite vegetables, growing happily in the fields…

…and in the background, the poor, blighted tomato plants (agh):

Then I found the chickens. They have a lovely roaming coop, which is rolled to a new piece of field every week. The chickens peck up whatever is left in the field and fertilize the patch (adding nitrogen to the soil), then roll on over to a new area. There are three breeds, though I can’t remember the names. Jarrett told me next year there will be three new breeds, including the Araucana (Easter Egg) chickens Martha Stewart made famous for their pastel eggs!

I love chickens; I find them hilarious and charming to watch and I would have stayed for hours if the guys (Tom and Ben were with me) had let me.

Some of the ladies head my way while the proud rooster looks on:

Tail-feathers fluttering in indecision:

Each evening all the chickens march into their house to be safely closed in for the night.

I must say, watching the chickens was a delight. They were nibbling clover, wandering around a large fenced enclosure, strolling in and out of their cozy rolling house… Very happy birds in a very happy place.

September:

Jarrett sent out an email inviting CSA members to share in the work of the farm, in addition to the bounty. There were 1000 pounds of onions (plus shallots and 5000 bulbs of garlic, though we didn’t get to those) that needed to be trimmed and cleaned before being handed out in the weekly shares. All those alliums were curing on the floor of the greenhouse, and we drove out for a “Smelly Potluck” to help get them all prepped.

Ben gets down and dirty:

More helpers, including Jarrett’s dad, on the left. (His mom sent along a big pot of soup!):

Freshly harvested onions are laid out to cure, pulling all the juices from the stems into the bulb:

Once they are ready to be used, the stems get trimmed off:

The loose outer layers of skin (often dirty) are rubbed off, leaving a clean, tidy onion:

We did our best but there was still quite a long way to go when we headed in for dinner around 6 (you can’t see the stacks of crates that had already been moved out of the greenhouse!):

Jarrett took us on a tour of the varied “root cellars” and storage spots around the barn–including a room downstairs and a refrigerated stand-alone unit. It was fun to see all the deliciousness we will get in the winter shares, and we also got to grab some squash and spare shallots to bring home.

We gathered at a picnic bench by the barn to enjoy the last of the sunlight and eat a potluck while watching the barn cat torment the visiting dog.

My back ached the next day. I am a soft-handed urban wimp!

Cooking, Farm Box, Food

Bits and pieces

September 17, 2009 Kate 3 Comments

To be perfectly honest, I haven’t cooked a real meal in two weeks. We were out of town for Brooke’s amazing wedding, and Ben has been on the road for work or out at meetings, so I’ve been eating by myself a lot. I very occasionally go all out for myself, but generally I confine solitary dinners to leftovers, Indian takeout, or a fried-egg concoction. (Incidentally, anyone intrigued by what other people eat when they are alone should check out the compilation “Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant,” titled for the essay by the same name by the late, great, Laurie Colwin.)

Anyway, a couple things I never posted over the course of the summer:

“What’s This” Cabbage and Steak, with Hazelnuts:

It was a tiny and charming head of cabbage, ruffly and slightly Napa-esque, but round and little. The leaves acted like boats when I washed them:

I planned on slaw, but when I tasted a bit of a leaf I found that it was tough, and wouldn’t be pleasant to eat raw. So I sauteed it. The flavor made me think the slightly sweet nuttiness of toasted filberts (hazelnuts) would be a good match; I tossed some on at the end and served it over rice with marinated steak.

(Mmm, cabbage. I have a variety of greens sulking in the fridge right now; I think I will make tonight the exception and really cook something for myself. I always wish I got to eat all the garlicky greens, and tonight I won’t have to share a bite!)

Another night I made aioli. I didn’t consult any recipes, so it was a little nerve-wracking. I lucked out though (and moved slowly with the oil and fast with my whisk-arm!), and it came together just fine. We ate it with blanched beans. To my surprise and heartbreak, purple beans turn green when they’re cooked!

Before cooking the beans:

And now some non-cooking food items, for your amusement. Sooooo, you know how Ben and I got married three years ago? Well, the top tier of our wedding cake never got eaten. It was a modern cake, with a large top tier, and somehow we never seemed to have enough people around to eat it near our anniversary. Three years of taking up half the freezer was enough. Tom was visiting in early August and I just….did it. Out came the cake, off came the many layers of tinfoil and saran wrap, and from the depths emerged a terrifying, sticky mess of melty fondant. AGH.

I figured I’d see what was underneath (the cake was almond poundcake, which I figured would hold up pretty well, and there was chocolate ganache under the fondant–all very sturdy). With Tom laughing hysterically in the background, I wiped off the fondant, and the ganache underneath seemed ok. It did have an unappealing glazed look (leftover fondant), but what do you expect?

After a further wipedown, I covered it and let it thaw overnight. We cut a slice.

And it was fine! Tom, despite his mocking, definitely agreed.

We fed it to many people over the next couple days, and nearly all of them approved, as well. I wonder what the uber-talented April Reed, who made the cake, would think of my long-delayed consumption? (I’m still bummed that a faulty muffler melted much of the fondant on the cake before the wedding, and then the venue people threw away the exquisite sugar flowers April made, which I had planned to keep. Oh well. Working with April was the most relaxing part of wedding planning, and great fun.)

Incidentally, Tom came down from NH for that visit bearing hilariously NH-themed gifts:
-1 jug, 1 bottle of hard cider
-Half-gallon normal cider
-Moose tenderloin (currently frozen)
-2 pounds blueberries, labeled like so:

Hey, it kept the sharers of the common fridge from eating them!

Kate Flaim

Category Archives: Food

Purple produce and uneven sprouts

How not to make carbonara, in 12 steps

Make this now: Bistro Salad, modernized

CSA wrap-up and the onset of winter veg

Slow cooker pulled pork

Why I write about food (my accidental manifesto)

Roasted delicata with shallots and cipollini

Things I like today: October

Farm days

Bits and pieces

freelance writer