Devour this

tiny tasty tidbit

'Just tossing a bone out there -- this won't be a lengthy piece.  I just have to record this wonderful week Jeff and I spent dog/house-sitting in Manhattan last month.  Our friends Vanessa and Dan are fortunate to live in a spectacular old apartment in Gramercy and we were lucky enough to answer the phone when they called to ask us to dogsit their pup Sputnik (who, by the way, is our 2nd favorite dog after Mia).

Here's the sweet, yogic boy (he does more downward dogs and updogs in a day than I do in a month!):

We woke up Saturday morning, suited up the pup, and headed to the Union Square farmers' market, conveniently located only a few blocks away (swoon).  We lolled about, smelling this, tasting that and much, much later meandered home, bags heavy with fresh food and an armful of beautiful yellow and white daffodils to boot.

Oh, and here's a better shot of the busty sourdough boule; I'd be remiss not to show her off:

So I went about chopping some little round onions and fresh plump garlic, and threw it in a sizzling pan with creamy white potatoes.  (Sidenote: Yes, those are sunchokes in the bag in front of the teapot.  I decided to start purchasing vegetables I've never tried before.   It took me a few days before I got up the nerve to do something with those, but I must say they're absolutely delicious sliced thinly and thrown into a salad.  Oh, and that square of milky cheese -- fresh mozzarella that was crumbly and holey and salty, unlike any I've ever had.  Amazing.)
Back to breakfast.  The potatoes.

As you can see, they were simple potatoes.  In a simple pan, in a simple kitchen.

The simpler, the better.  It was probably the best meal and best morning/afternoon and best overall week I've experienced so far this year.

Yup, that's beer with breakfast.  Just for fun and because we're silly like that.

My sweet potato (and egg and chocolate and peanut butter) nights

I love my food blog.  I promise, I really do.  It may not seem like it, what with the lengthy lapses between posts, but rest assured it stems not from lost love, but merely sheer laziness.  I believe I suffer from the worst combination of oxymoronic actions: dogged procrastination and uncertain guilt.  I am one of those perpetual, eternal, steno notebook-wielding List Makers constantly adding to a mile-long chart of duties "TO DO TODAY."  You can bet your bottom dollar there are plenty of highlighters, inked stars, underlines, and boxes involved.  I get a rush when I strike a line through a completed task.  But there are many items on the list that survive from week to week, those I put off until I either resign them to never be completed or try to pretend I never really wanted to do them in the first place. This all leads to much guilt.  I realize the lists may be the end of me, but I always return to them.  I still have love for them.

But back to the point.  My food blog.  Which I love. Here we are, it's a new day (night), a new post, and I have new (to me) food to write about.
In honor of the final NCAA game (whose acronym, to be completely forthright, I have honestly mistaken for the NAACP, who hasn't, right? Right?), I wanted to make some yummy snacks for my friends.  The whole thing started with onion rings.  I've been craving onion rings ever since I happened upon a recipe for these Buttermilk Onion Rings and knowing I had buttermilk just waiting in my fridge since I made this Blackberry Jam Cake with Toasted Pecans last weekend (Happy Birthday, Jeff!):

So to go with the onion rings, I thought I'd make some sweet potato biscuits since I bought some yams from Trader Joe's the other week and have been on the verge of forgetting about them (thank goodness they're on my grocery inventory list -- I'll go into that another time).
Orangette had a fantastic-sounding recipe for these biscuits and she turned them into amazing sandwiches to boot!  After I spotted her noted Honeycup mustard on my favorite neighborhood store's shelf, it was all over.  I put the Sierra Nevada Porter mustard back (another time!) and set about with some good ham and threw in good cheddar for good measure.  And since I wanted to use all of my sweet potatoes, I increased the recipe by half.  Here's a peek at my basic fraction calculations.  And yes, I'm well aware of my nerdiness.  Math is so not my strong suit.  I was all confused.

But I had great fun making the biscuits, especially patting out the dough.  It was quite soft and yielding and the most beautiful rich burned orange color.

The biscuits loaded up with ham, cheddar, and the "uniquely sharp" honey mustard were a sweet, tangy, buttery success.

I also wanted to make deviled eggs.  Going for the whole southern shebang.  I used elements from this recipe and this one (by the way, I've become lovingly dependent on Simply Recipes.  Elise is Awesome). 

And then, being the good Maryland girl that I am, I liberally sprinkled the tops with Old Bay seasoning.  Talk about kicking it up a notch.  Scrumptious.  These were a hit.

Ah,and dessert.  What snackfest would be complete without brownies?  I saw this recipe for Peanut Butter and Fudge Brownies with Salted Peanuts and that was that. I had the chocolate out and chopped in no time.

It was fun to make, no mixer involved this time (except for the incredibly! delicious! frosting) -- each element was whisked together one at a time by yours truly and it felt good to whip that glossy chocolate goodness around in the bowl, feeling each granule of sugar crunch underneath my wrist.

And the result?  Heavenly Peanut Butter and Fudge Brownies with (50% less salt--Trader Joe's, I love you) Salted Peanuts.

You might be wondering, Hey, where's the picture of the onion rings?  I thought she said that's how this whole thing started.  Well, they may have set the wheels in motion, but those rings didn't materialize.   They're on my list of things To Do tomorrow.

P.S. Oh, and K.U. won.  Yay, Kansas!  (I used to live there, too.)

Books: food of life

I love books: always have, always will.  From grade school days of devouring Babysitter's Club and Sweet Valley Twins paperbacks to getting caught with a flashlight and book under my pillow to working in book publishing and being surrounded daily by bound words on pages, the love affair has lasted and there's no end in sight.
Tomorrow will mark my first book club meeting -- some friends and I have been toying with Virginia Woolf's  Mrs. Dalloway for the past month and tomorrow...we discuss! (We'll likely mostly eat and drink and chat.)
  A wonderful English professor and friend from Rutgers gave me this lovely copy of Mrs. Dalloway.  I had a hard time finding the cover image to show you all.  A more recent cover displays a modern-looking scene with a woman in floppy hat and flowy dress -- no doubt embodying Mrs. Dalloway herself, but this cover seems much more appropriate to me. The other looks too casual, lighthearted, and capricious, while this geometric, almost stark imagery seems to be better suited to the story.

Anyway, I'm sure you're more interested in what I've cooked for our little book club tomorrow.  I made a huge pot of Tomato-Lentil-Vegetable Soup adapted from At Home with Magnolia by Alyssa Torrey, once owner of Magnolia Bakery in NYC. (Full disclosure: the publishing company I work for published this book.)  I have thoroughly enjoyed this pretty little cookbook and have found more than a few recipes entirely satisfying.  This soup is no exception.  Chock full of fresh veggies and plenty of plump green lentils and brown rice, I don't think anyone will be leaving my apartment hungry tomorrow evening.

*I apologize for the unattractive photos -- camera phone in use.*
In my gigantor Calphalon stockpot (thank you, Jen and Joel!), we have onions, garlic, carrots, celery, spinach, corn, tomatoes, veg stock, lentils, brown rice, cumin, salt, and pepper -- as I said, loads of veggies and lots of flavor!
Here's my adored pot and you can also see my brand new, beloved mandolin.  A great purchase.  It was invaluable in making homemade potato chips and onion dip on Oscar night, but more on that another time.

For tomorrow's event, I'm also planning to make a Sicilian-style potato gratin from this month's Bon Appetit magazine and some chocolate-ricotta pudding from Moosewood's Simple Suppers (thank you, Jessie and Brandon!).  Photos and reviews to come...

Reinventing the game

I was just happy to have turkey.  When you’re dining with a vegetarian family at Thanksgiving, it’s not a given.  When I heard we were butterfly-ing a 30-pound hunker that had days before been running around a Maryland farm, I was more than a little shocked.  But when I saw the thing, when I actually laid eyes on its bulging, plucked body with sizable black feather nubbins stuck in its large pores, I was flabbergasted. 

At an event I covered the previous week for TimeOut New York (where I sat next to Jeffrey Steingarten!), Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink editor Andy F. Smith said 99% of Americans would be eating a turkey that had been frozen.  Was I happy to be in the 1% that wouldn't?  I wasn't so sure.

Oh, it was all I could do to stand back and stifle nervous laughter while my boyfriend’s mother wrestled the beast with a pair of kitchen shears and a pile of black plastic-handled knives.  She was consulting a Washington Post article showing 4 demure images of two hands gently cutting through turkey skin to remove the backbone and completing the butterfly process by pressing down on the breasts to break the bones and lay the bird flat, making it all the more quicker to cook through.

Well, the first pair of kitchen shears broke within the first 2 minutes.  The woman in the article obviously wasn't dealing with the type of monstrosity we had on our hands.  I couldn't let my Thanksgiving kitchenmate hack away while I flip-flopped between hysterical laughter and nauseousness.  I grabbed a pair of scissors and flung them into the flesh with determination.

I could hear cartilage crunching between the blades, but the backbone wasn't budging.  It was time to get the hammer out. 

After a series of arm- and hand-strengthening exercises, wrists deep in turkey innards, gagging at dark red coagulation and inch-thick flabby skin, we’d removed a huge hammer-handle sized bone, along with the entire cavity of the bird and most of its right leg to boot. 

I don't have to tell you that "gently applying pressure to flatten the turkey" didn't do the trick.  But that hammer sure did.  Julia Child did say that hardware tools were handy to have in the kitchen.  I bet she conquered more than a few oversized Broad-breasted Whites in her day.

We rubbed our mangled bird with fresh herbs, salt, and butter and stuck her in the fridge to marinade overnight.  The poor thing had gone through hell and so did we.  Believe it or not (and you'll have to do it on faith alone because I don't have any "after" shots), the turkey ended up looking just fine in the end, despite the trauma it went through.  And miraculously, come dinnertime, my appetite for turkey made a comeback as well.  The Man Who Ate Everything would be proud.

Dinner for one

I've been reading tidbits lately about dining and eating alone.  Of course there is a difference between dining and eating as dining connotes pleasure, while the act of eating can take the form of harried face-stuffing, tasting nothing.  I taste my food.  I'm enthralled with eating.  I enjoy good food and am almost as happy sitting down alone to a meal I lovingly prepared as when I'm in the company of others.  Almost.  As much as I smile and daydream in the kitchen and snap a hundred blurry photos of beautiful water droplets on broad kale leaves or bright purple squiggly lines of a taut head of cabbage...[insert evidence here]

when I sit down to the meal I've prepared, I don't like to be entirely alone.  I like a good book, a food magazine, a silly show, a great movie, a food blog...something! 

I've read M.F.K. Fisher's essay on dining alone and this post recently and I think I'd like to try spending quality time with my food--just us, no distractions.  Warm kale, creamy chickpeas, chewy bread, and me.  Or sweet and tangy cabbage, robust chicken and apple sausage, salty pan-fried potatoes, and me. 

Want to join me?

Shout out to MD crabs, and losing pie contests

I really think I've done it.  This may only be my second or third attempt to develop an original recipe, but I truly think this one (Maryland Crab Soup Pie) is a winner.  Martha Stewart may not have thought so last Saturday, or rather the Blue Hill at Stone Barns chefs didn't, but in my mind, I conquered. 

What:  "Seasonal Pie Bake-off" with Martha Stewart as "special guest judge"

Here's Martha Stewart viewing pies (not mine):

Where: Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture gorgeous bucolic farm in Westchester County, NY

Here are the other pies: (Pizza pie, who knew?)

Results:  Check out my post on The Feed, TimeOut New York's food blog

Want more "full-disclosure" details?  Yes, nutty me drove from NYC to Baltimore, MD and back last Thursday evening (after work!) just to gather the true Maryland blue crabs I needed to make my pie authentic (and at 192 miles, pretty local, right?) --Oh, I was also visiting my best friend who'd minutes before flown into BWI from LAX and immediately headed to this restaurant to eat crabs loaded up with rock salt and Old Bay (holla! if you're from MD) with some friends and family, so I'm not completely nutty.  From the USQ Greenmarket I gleaned all my veggies:  decent pale-yellow corn, plump lima beans, thin French green beans, heavy red tomatoes, hefty, rough-and-tumble carrots, a staunch head of cabbage, firm, smiling celery, dusty onions, and some perky little potatoes, oh, and some peas (disclaimer:  being it's not pea season, an organic and frozen variety of those snuck in).

I chopped and chopped, picked apart little crab bodies and claws for hours,

and stewed everything up until my whole apartment building was filled with the rich, nose-tingly scent of seafood, spices, and seasonal harvest. 

Meanwhile, I also made pie crusts, lots of them.  The chosen one: Melissa Clark's  All-Butter Pie Crust from the New York Times. Fat meltingly delicious...do you see all the spots of butter in there??

Slapping it all together with some roux to thicken

and without a thought about presentation (OK, I thought about it and was going to have 2 crab claws coming out of the top as my friend's mother suggested, but it just didn't work out.  I accidentally threw the crab claws away that I was saving for this...it was a looong night, believe me), I lugged my two pies (one for presentation -- I know, I know) all the way to Tarrytown, NY.  If you read my short TimeOut blog post, you know how things ended...

Nevertheless, I had many a compliment on my pie that day.  The best part of the Harvest Fest was the pie free-for-all at the end of the day.  Competitive pie bakers, plastic forks, and dozens of pies...it was a germophobe's nightmare and a pie lover's heaven.  More than a few people told me my pie was their favorite.  One woman even asked me for my card to see if the pie would be available to be shipped to her!  Hmph, so there!  Really, I lack competitive spirit, but when you know you done good, you just know it.

Kimbap...the world's perfect travel food

There's nothing quite like assembling familiar ingredients with their recognizable tactile qualities and nostalgic smells and memorable tastes to create a dish that was once so familiar I used to groan at the sight of it.  My mom and her friends would often make kimbap (pictured above) for our traveling families to snack on in the car during long trips.  How silly I feel now when remembering how I whined to stop at McDonald's instead. 

But it's good to know I've grown up a tiny bit.  While preparing for a little road trip these colorful, healthful bites kept appearing in my mind.  I realized it was high time I recreated the dish for my  own traveling companions.

Off I went to Han Ah Rheum, the compact Korean grocery store in Manhattan's darling Korea Town.  I bought some ingredients I wouldn't be able to find elsewhere:  dackwong (pickled radish, yellow from miscellaneous dye, I believe -- I haven't yet discovered the reason for it), some flattened fish cake, and kim (Korean for "seaweed"). 

Incidentally, bap is the Korean word for "rice."  Now you know why so many of your favorite Korean dishes (bibimbap, kimchi bokeum bap, and soon--kimbap) end in bap!  Language lesson of the day.  Bap can also mean "meal."  But back to the food.


You can see the bap above.  That's the rice I grew up eating.  Milky white, super sticky, and delicately flavored.  I can't help loving this rice above all other healthier, more colorful rice.  It's a cinch to make -- just be sure to buy Japanese- or Korean- style rice, sometimes labeled "sushi" rice.  Rinse the rice a few times in cold water until the water runs more clear than cloudy.  I don't know the reason behind this, just that it's what my mother taught me and I've stuck by her method -- it hasn't steered me wrong (honestly, I make perfect sticky white rice every time).  Cover the rice with approximately a 1/2 inch of water (I'll show a pic of the finger-measuring method next time) and place over high heat until boiling.  Immediately reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes, covered.  Don't be tempted to lift the lid until the 20 minutes has passed.  You'll be rewarded with steaming, fluffy Korean-style rice. I added a little rice wine vinegar and some salt.

While the rice is cooking, you can steam your greens (I used spinach this time), pan-fry your fishcake (I did this because mine had been frozen and I was hoping to lose some of that freezer taste), and cut your carrots (quickly boiled in some sugar-vinegar water) and dackwong into thick strips.  If you're full of energy, you should also cook up some omelet to slice up and throw into your kimbap. 


You'll want to drop some toasted sesame oil onto a sheet of kim and  smooth on a thin layer of rice with your fingers.  Line your accoutrements up in the center and roll into a long tube.  Dab some water on the edge and press gently to seal.  Voila!  It's like sushi, but it's not...it's kimbap!


With a serrated knife, carefully use  a sawing motion to cut the rounds.  Hopefully you'll be able to cut them faster than you can pop them in your mouth.  Regardless, you won't be hungry anymore by the time the preparation is over.  But that's okay!  You'll have plenty left over to pack along for your road trip.


P.S. And the great thing is, you can roll up just about anything in these goodies!  Green onion, sauteed zucchini, cucumber, bulgogi, kimchi, ... possibilities are limitless. Go crazy or keep it simple.  The choice is up to you (as long as it's not McDonald's). 
Happy eating!  Leave a comment or e-mail me for a more exact recipe!

Camp Food

I don't know many better tasting items than potatoes cooked in a cast iron pan over a campfire's open flame.  All the burned bits that stick to the bottom until you scrape them up with the edge of your metal spatula and flip them onto a plate of buttery eggs and flame-grilled baguette toast...

I know what you're thinking.  Those are mighty big portions for breakfast.  Hey, we're camping.  We're walking 2.5 miles into the woods looking for a hidden lake that ended up looking like this:

We needed those calories.

Mid-day snack: veggie bologna fried in the same heavy pan (no carcinogen worries here!), over a later day fire, topped with luscious late summer tomatoes between slices of crusty whole grain toast.  Don't mind the black corners.  We didn't.

Gilbert Lake State Park treated us well.  And we treated ourselves to good camp food. Sadly, I didn't take pictures of our pièce de résistance -- cedar-plank grilled wild salmon with a honey dijon glaze, marscarpone and chive mashed potatoes (OK, I made those at home and just warmed them over the fire; it still counts!) from a fantastic recipe in a fantastic book, grilled asparagus spears, and flame roasted corn on the cob.  I vote to eat by lantern over candlelight any night of the week.

We gave our pup Mia some leftovers (not frequently done).  Now tell me this dog isn't one happy camper.

Taco Night and Next Day Nachos

Mexican food might be my favorite.  I could say that about any cuisine on a given night, though.  But it seems I crave Mexican most often.  Or Korean food.  Anyway, dating back to my elementary school days, taco night has been a culinary highlight in my life.  My dad and I would chop up icy iceberg lettuce and wobbly tomatoes and shred bright orange cheese and put it all into our special plastic taco tray with its separate compartments for each acoutrement.  I wish I could get my hands on another one of those.  Then I wouldn't have all the sinkful of dishes to wash afterwards...
But even hours of dishwashing can't diminish my excitement for taco night.  And while I don't brown that grocery store hamburger meat my dad and I loved, I do still pour that taco seasoning packet over the skillet of crumbled up vegan patties.

I've tried not using it, but I can't seem to combine the right mix of spices to create that zippy taco flavor.  I haven't yet allowed myself to look at the ingredients on the package to see how many unrecognizable elements are listed.  Ignorance is a blissful, taco-filled tummy.

Next Day Nachos are simply taco leftovers piled on top of thick corn tortilla chips and baked in the oven  -- chips get even crispier, cheese meltier, tomatoes juicier...gobs of salsa, sour cream, and guacamole and I'm once again transported to the land of Yum.

Ugly Post, Good Food (playing around with placing/sizing images)

It's not often you one-up a recipe from a seasoned chef...well, ok, it is often.  It happens all the time -- to everyone, apparently.  Go to any recipe site and read the comments:  everyone has doctored the recipe they attempted and it supposedly comes out even better!  Although I never quite understand how they know it's better when they didn't make the recipe as it was written...but that's no matter. 

Tonight I made Ina Garten's Eggplant Gratin.  Though I made a big improvement (so I think):  instead of using a "good-quality store bought marinara sauce" as she directs, I used my own, homemade sauce right out of the freezer (Literally, right out.  I was crumbling frozen marinara over my gratin.  Kind of strange.).  Here's my frozen sauce.

Anyway, I sliced some slender, lavender Japanese eggplant and shiny, globe eggplant into 1/2 inch rounds. 
I pan-fried them in some olive oil, layered with a ricotta/egg/
half-and-half/
Parmigiano Reggiano (the good stuff!) mixture, topped with homemade marinara and extra cheese and slid that sucker in the oven!

Meanwhile, I made a bowl of my version of Greek salad, with plenty of fragrant fresh dill.

Another lovely summer meal prepared with farmers' market produce in a steamy, stifling apartment kitchen.  But no complaints. Not with food looking and tasting so good...