Electric Stove

Skywriting, Watercress, and Monks

2007-05-03T18:10:00.000-04:00

I was at a day long meeting down on Varick Street today. I snuck outside for lunch, looked up and saw planes drawing: N Y - L O N D . . . It was "New York" and "London" -- two favorite/favourite cities for me and R*.

Pretty good picture for a camera phone, I thought. (It was an ad for EOS airline.)

Speaking of the Brits and trying to stick to the cooking theme of my blog, I've wrote two posts this week about watercress, a very British veg, over at Apartment Therapy: Kitchen. I learned that some say eating a whole bag of watercress is a good hangover cure and I shared my recipe for steamed spinach and watercress as inspired by the Holy Cross monks.

Mom and I are spending Memorial Day weekend with the monks. Looking forward to it.

Congratulations on your cookbook, Sara Kate

2007-04-23T12:30:00.000-04:00

My copy of The Greyston Bakery Cookbook by Sara Kate Gillingham-Ryan just arrived. Sara Kate is my editor at Apartment Therapy: Kitchen. I'm going to sneak out for a longish lunch to enjoy the sun and her new book.

The cookbook shares recipes and stories from Greyston Barkery, a Yonkers, NY shop that employs local community members who may not otherwise have jobs.

Greystone's mission statment says: "For two decades, Greyston Bakery has blended ingredients - creamy butter, personal transformation, and community renewal - in Yonkers, NY . . ."

I met with my friend AS, a priest in her early 30s ("my age!" as We Like Sheep likes to exclaim), yesterday for Thai food in Hell's Kitchen. We talked a book she's working on and about my interests around the intersection of faith and economoics, the meeting of good business and good works. Greyston Bakery is a delicious example of that.

Googling Mark Bittman

2007-04-20T18:54:00.000-04:00

I have no idea if he is or isn't (I am), but one of the top keyword combos that send people here is "Mark Bittman, gay."

Mark Bittman writes The Minimalist column for the New York Times and his How To Cook Everything is one of my favorite cookbooks. He's an excellent food writer and I learn so much from him.

Some people doing that "Bittman, gay" Google search are probably looking for a food writing hero of sorts, a cool gay guy making waves in the field. Anyone have favorite out gay food writers?

R* and I made Bittman's anchovy pasta sauce on Wednesday night.

Ask NYC restaurants to support The Tap Project

2007-02-12T09:37:00.000-05:00

Over 21% of children living in the developing world
do not have access to clean water.
That’s more than one billion people, or one in five children.

I do not usually talk about my work life here, but I'm working on a fun, important new project at work. I think it should be especially interesting to cooks and food bloggers, so I wanted to share.

I'm the online marketing manager at the U.S. Fund for UNICEF in June. At work I'm exposed to the great need of children around the world every day.

I also see the great opportunity, the potential to change these horrible statistics. While a billion children around the world don't have access to clean water today, it just doesn't have to be that way forever. We can make a difference and the dollars donated to organizations like UNICEF have a direct impact.

I'm working on a new program here at UNICEF and I wanted to make sure I shared this with my food blog contacts too. It's called The Tap Project.

On March 22, participating restaurants in New York City will ask diners to pay $1 for the same tap water they normally serve for free. The funds collected will support UNICEF water programs, which provide safe drinking water for children around the world.

Here's how you can help:
If you're in NYC, you can help by asking restaurants to participate in this program. I've reached out to a couple of my favorite places and I've asked them to participate. I hope you'll do that too.

Also, mark your calender for 3/22/06 -- World Water Day. Check the Tap Project site and dine at a Tap Project restaurant that night. That night, please thank the restaurant for supporting UNICEF's work.

If you're aren't in NYC, you can support this program by making a donation or volunteering for UNICEF. Also, the program will be national next year, so sign up now for more information.

Pork for New Year's Day

2007-01-02T00:19:00.000-05:00

A long time ago my mom told me that someone told her you can't eat chicken on New Year's Day, you'll scratch and scratch all year. (And you have to say scratch twice. "Scratch and scratch all year" is part of this menu choice.)

For the past couple of New Year's Day, I made happen John, following a Lee Brother's recipe from The New York Times, but I decided to try something new today.

I bought one of those large club-like pieces of pork that are always on the bottom shelf of the meat cooler in my local grocery stores. It's amazing that they are under a dollar a pound. I probably don't want to know why its so cheap.

Last night I made a paste of seeded dried smoked peppers, garlic, oil, cider vinegar, oregano and a pinch of cinnamon, working very loosely from a Pork Adobo recipe in the new Joy of Cooking. I rubbed the paste all over my six pound leg of pork or fresh ham.

This afternoon, I cooked two onions for about five minutes in some oil, added a can of vegetable stock and then the pork and all the paste on top. It cooked for about four hours in my huge dutch oven until it was close to falling apart and easy to pull into strings with a fork.

Then I pulled it out of the pot and let it cool.

Then, while R* and I watched the HGTV Dream House (ugly blue kitchen counters, yuck) I made us some pork sandwiches. They were tasty, delicious. The meat was moist, good texture. I especially liked the edges of the meat where the spice sauce really sunk into the meat. Pulling all the meat off the joint made a big mess and I'm not sure what I'll do with all that pork? More sandwiches maybe?

Anyway, since we had pork (and I had crabcakes and eggs from the diner on the corner), let's hope we won't scratch and scratch all year.

HAPPY NEW YEAR . . . and happy blog-birthday to me. It was a year ago today that I got so pissed at the disgusting Shirley's Tunnel of Fudge Cake that I started this blog.

Party's over people

2006-12-19T16:05:00.000-05:00

IMG_0795.JPG
Originally uploaded by electric stove.

We had a great holiday book party. I'll post more pictures and recipes soon.

C and R*

More for Repeal Day

2006-12-05T17:39:00.000-05:00

Don't miss Lobstersquad's post about Hendrick's gin.

I can't stand gin. Yecch, it's like licking the bottom of the Christmas tree. Tell me all you want about juniper and botanicals and I still wont' like it. Put me in a room full of my Brit friends and my R* eating cucumber sandwhices and gin and tonics and I'll pass on the G&T's.

But I love Hendricks. There is something so rose-y, so fresh, complicated but clean. I must buy a bottle and some cucumber and lemon garnish.

Happy Repeal Day

2006-12-05T16:45:00.000-05:00

It was 73 years ago today that Prohibition was repealed. Dewars and The New York Times used this occasion to print a creative two page spread in today's paper. Too bad the nytimes.com/repealday link from the ad just goes to a lousy, slow-to-download PDF . I was expecting something as exciting and well designed as the ad in the paper. Opportunity lost for Dewar's, but R* and I are already customers. We might go to Johnny Walker's tastings, but we drink Dewar's.

In other Repeal Day related news, I decided on the punch recipe for my Holiday Party. We'll serve Lemon Drop Champagne Punch. Thanks for the recipe, Martha. We usually make "pour whatever people bring in the punch bowl with some pink lemonade punch" but this should class things up a bit.

Lemon Drop punch should fit my food inspirations for the party: British holiday cooking and citrus. I learned last week that the Brits are one of the largest per capita champage consumers in the world

Holiday Party #4: Too Much White (Christmas) Food?

2006-12-04T00:12:00.000-05:00

The December issue of Domino Magazine talks about how glamorous it can be to serve a whole meal with all white food. A white bean soup, a white entree, trees of egg white cookies. Maybe that's hot, but one of the first dinners was just that tone-on-tone, but I didn't mean to do it. I think it was pork, canned apple sauce and rice or maybe egg noodles?! White, white, white, and surely not glamorous. I was a junior in college, if I'm remembering right, and I didn't realize everything would be the same color until I got it all on the plate?

Everything I want to serve for the main course for the Christmas party is white. But I'm not going to do all white, since I don't think my all white food bufet would ever be as trendy as what Domino's serving up.

R* and I decided on bacon wraped maple pork loin (white) and chestnut and chipolata dressing (kinda white). I didn't think we needed to serve both mashed potatoes (white) and dressing for a standing-up buffet cocktail party? R* convinced me I could make both since dressing and the potatoes are easy to make ahead of time. I also wanted to serve roasted cauliflower (there's that white food again). Roasted cauliflower is my favorite in(ish)-season vegetable, but fearing an un-trendy white plate, I think I'll have to skip it.

CQ suggested we round it out with the salad we had a few years back. I clipped the recipe from Oprah's magazine: greens, stilton, dried cherries, tamari almonds. I'm not the world's biggest salad fan and it would mean another trip to Trader Joe's for tamari almonds, but that salad might be the way to un-whiten our Christmas plates.

I was thinking sweet potatoes, instead of the mashed potatoes, but I don't like them. I can eat them to be polite, but they aren't something I'd like to serve a gaggle of guests. Plus we were thinking butternut squash soup with Thai spices as the amuse bouche. There's something silly but fun about soup shooters.

R* gave me an authographed copy of Dorie Greenspan's new Baking book. CQ was paging through it tongiht, helping me come up with ideas for the citrus desserts. She found a recipe for Lenox Almond Biscotti, with a variation that calls for lemon. I think they'd go well with champagne or proscecco. As the very helpful margin note says, they can be made a week ahead and stored. I can make them next weekend and have them all taken care of before the party.

It's so cool that Mr. S made Nigella's clementine cake. I think my friend S in DC (who shares the same birthday, happy belated-birthday-cakes for us!) had plans to make it too. I put my clementines in a bowl with some peppermint candy. For now they are a great back drop for the three wise men.

Holiday Party #3: Planning my buffet menu

2006-11-28T10:02:00.000-05:00

A Very British Christmas
Originally uploaded by Flipsy.

I'm planning the buffet menu for our Holiday Book Party. It's about three weeks away so I'm starting to pressure myself to get the menu locked down. Then I can start working on getting the ingredients together, testing some recipes, and placing orders with Fresh Direct, the butcher, and maybe, just maybe splurge for a new piece of All Clad from Cookware and More as a birthday/Christmas treat to myself.

While the whole menu won't be strictly British, some of the menu will be inspired by my take on Christmas in Britan, R*'s home country. I've never been in the UK for Christmas, but I've been doing my research and asking R* lots of annoying questions.

Appetizers
I love the idea of serving a bunch of hot, homemade appetizer, but it is always a struggle. People gulp them down the second I yank them out of the oven. I make Martha's Mini Meatball Sandwiches every year, so I'll stick with that tradition. I'd also like to do some kind of stuffed mushroom, maybe with crab? And then maybe some mini reubens -- I like to do something that's an homage to NYC. Or a soup served on tiny spoons? I'm also going to make some spinach artichoke dip and a few other things that can sit out on trays for a while. If people have the chance to serve themselves some food, there won't be as much of a frenzy over the passed appetizers, I think.

I'm in love with scrambled eggs made in a double boiler, French style as I tried on my first (and only) trip to Paris. Sprinkled with truffle salt, they are amazing and so so rich and earthy. What's a way to adapt that for an appetizer? Is double-boiling eggs for a big crowd too ambitious, will they go cold soon? (Mr. S, are you still reading my blog? For some reason, I'm thinking you might have some soothing, common sense appetizer advice?)

How can I keep the appetizers going while I keep the dinner hot too?

Stilton will be the appetizer nod to the Brits. If I'm over ambitious, I could make tarts with stilton and maybe carmelized onions? Or, more likely, I'll buy a big wedge of stilton and serve it with a port syrup.

The Main Course
The main course is pretty locked, based on a trip I made to R*'s hometown this summer (Kidderminster, UK!) and Elizabeth David's Christmas cookbook. We'll serve bacon wrapped maple pork loin (in theory, this is a Canadian recipe, but it seems pretty Brit to me), mashed potatoes, chestnut and chipolata dressing (definately British, but I need to find a recipe). I haven't decide on the vegetable yet. I'd like to serve roasted cauliflower, but that's too much white on the plate with pork and potatoes. Any suggestions? I also thought about a salad, but since our buffet will be serving 40+ people over the course of a couple hours, I don't think a salad could stand up to it.

Desserts
Nigella Lawson's Clementine Cake is one of my top 5 favorite cakes. I've made this this cake a bunch of times in January and February, when clementines are so available, but I've never served this "wonderfully damp, dense and aromatic flourless cake" for Christmas, but it is a Christmas cake with roots in the UK, like my main course inspiration. The clementine cake will be the start of the dessert buffet. Hopefully, I can find almond flour someplace cheaper than what's at Dean and Deluca, my usual source.

I'm hoping to stick with a citrus theme for the rest of the desserts. To me, there's something clean and spark-y about serving a citrus dessert course, when people will be expecting chocolate and cut out cookies. Maybe a pavlova with tangerines if I'm ambitious? Or grapefruit cookies, maybe drizzled with chocolate or filled with marmalade? Citrus and chocolate seems kind of gross to me, but would I feel weird about not serving any chocolate? This meyer lemon pound cake looks good too and can be made ahead. Or lemon or blood orange granita, but I don't want to wash so many spoons. You do have to think about things like this when cooking for a crowd.

I'll be blogging some holiday buffet ideas over at Apartment Therapy Kitchen and would love some suggestions and ideas. I hope you'll post some comments and suggestions here. Once everything is "sorted" as my Brits would say, I'll post my full menu and recipe links here.

Happy Holidays! (Flipsy, thanks for letting me borrow your picture)

Banana bread sucks . . . Happy Thanksgiving!

2006-11-21T22:55:00.000-05:00

Damn you, Thanksgiving quick breads. Every year my mom asks me to bring the breads. And every year I try to make zucchini bread or cranberry yogurt bread or some such. I try to look for recipes that aren't to leaden or sweet, but are also easy enough to make on a work night and zip into a bag to travel back to my parent's house in PA.

I want, of course, to bring something nice or at least decent. I feel like I'm somewhat accomplished in the kitchen, but I can never get these "quick breads" right. What am I doing wrong?

This year I thought I had the problem licked: found a good recipe on Martha's site, much better than the Big Bird (Hippie, 1970's-style All Whole Wheat Flour) Banana bread I made a few years back. It was much easier to make two loaves of the same flavor. I happened to have flax seed meal on hand (from when we got it as gift of sorts when we went to see the Martha Show last spring. Plus I remembered to buy bananas a week ahead so they would be over-ripe enough for banana bread.

I took the two loaves out of the oven about an hour ago. I tested them with a strand of dried spaghetti to make sure they were cooked all the way through. They've been on a rack cooling and I just started to wrap them up and head to bed. Everything seemed great. I even smiled to myself -- this year, I've got this mini-melo-drama over making quick breads licked.

Not so fast.

One of the loaves seems perfect. When I started to wrap the second loaf of banana bread, I heard this gushing sound. I looked down to see a crack forming across the tip of the loaf. The center of the second loaf was still doughy, nearly raw.

Don't tell anyone, but I'm re-pre-heating the oven now. I'm going to just chuck that bad banana bread back in the oven for 10 or 15 minutes while I'm cleaning up from the cranberry sauce and cranberry relish I made. See if that firms up the middle of it good enough.

I'm also finishing up my two kids of cranberries. I couldn't decided what kind I wanted to make. I'd always wanted to try cooking cranberries, listening them pop open was fun. But I think my family likes the cranberry relish where you just whiz up cranberries and an orange, rind and all, in the food processor.

Both the cranberry dishes seems good and one of the loaves of banana bread is good. I guess three out of four ain't bad.

Making Minimalist Mark Bittman's No Knead Bread

2006-11-14T17:09:00.000-05:00

Dear New York Times Food Minimalist Mark Bittman,

I made your new bread recipe over the weekend.

You've managed to stay on The New York Times most emailed list for a week! You're at #12 today, but earlier in the week, both the recipe and your article were in the top 5, even as the Democrats took Congress. Imagine if this was a slower news week and the recipe and the article counted as the same piece? You'd still be #1! I say you're getting the following you deserve. Take that Florence Fabricant and Frank Rich!

Now for the not so good news: I'm sorry to say you (or at least you recipe) and I did not get off to a good start with this No-Knead Bread recipe.

I made a special trip to the grocery store to get fresh yeast. Your recipe calls for 1/4 teaspoon instant yeast, but the grocery store had only "highly active rapid rise" and "active dry". I printed out your recipe and brought it with me to the store since I knew there was more than one kind of yeast at the store, but neither of these were labeled "instant." I chose "active dry" since that's what I usually buy. Was I right?

I got home from the store and stirred everything togehther. It looked "shaggy", just like you eloquently said it would. That made me feel more confident in my breadmaking abilities.

After the long rise, it was bubbly just like you said. Why didn't the recipe call for sugar? Don't some people say the yeast "eats" the sugar?

I coated with cornmeal and waited through the second rise, while I made our turkey dinner. (We also had brussle sprouts with bacon and a dash of apple cider vinegar, amazing mashed potaotes -- heavy cream is my trick. I didn't have enough broth, so we couldn't have stuffing. Drat!) I taste as I cook. I usually love the flavor of raw bread dough, but this dough had much less flavor than most -- is that becasue your recipe calls for so much yeast and no sugar?

After this second rise, you said: When it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger. That didn't happen :-( That might be becasue I didn't use the right yeast, or my kitchen isn't warm enough or maybe becasue I accidently smushed it once while I was racing around getting the turkey together?

To be honest with you, Mark Bittman, I got kind of sick of it. I didn't want to date the bread, I wanted to eat it and it had been hanging around for almost a whole day by this point. After the turkey came out of the oven, I heated up the oven to 450, got my red Le Creuset hot and chucked it in the oven.

Here, I made two more mistakes: I'm still getting used to my digital oven and I might have turned it off by mistake, instead of warming the oven. I also used my largest dutch oven -- too large I think now that I re-read your recipe. " 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic)" you say in the recipe. Is there a way to quickly tell what size your Le Creusets are, Mark?

In the middle of our turkey dinner, I made a half hearted attempt to re-heat the oven and rescue this poor bread, while CQ and R* went on eating dinner.

My bread came out ugly and flat -- blame the too-big-pan, the messed up rise, the wrong temp in the oven and maybe even the yeast -- but here's the kicker: it was still edible! I pulled that bread out of the oven while I served out some hot chocolate and I'll be damned: the crust was amazing, just like you promised. The crust had this delicate crackle. The insides of the bread were so-so, a little too spongy and not full risen. The loaf was so ugly that I didn't even take a picture to show you, I was too embarased since you said "the method is complicated enough that you would need a very ambitious 8-year-old." I am 22.5 years older than your 8 year old and still found a way to mess it up.

But let's get back to that crust. That "enviable, crackling crust, the feature of bread that most frequently separates the amateurs from the pros." Mark, the crust is killer and somehow I acheived it. I woke up in the middle of the night last night and chowed down on my flat ugly loaf, enjoying all that crust.

You said it might take a few times to get it exactaly right. I'm going to give it another try soon. Can you please take a look at these pictures, see if I'm doing anything else wrong? And let me know about the yeast!

Your loyal reader and fan,

Chris

Holiday Party #2: 57 invitations and 650 square feet

2006-11-13T15:05:00.000-05:00

R* and I sent out the Evite to our holiday party last night . . . I was worried people might think we're thinking too far ahead, but a couple of people have already emailed back and said they'd accepted other invitations for parties that night. There was a review of the this year's Radio City Christmas Spectacular in the Times today. So we're right on time.

We've invited 57 family and friends and their guests. We both love our holiday party and are already emailing back and forth with plans and ideas. We'll serve appetizer and then a light supper and then some desserts and of course cocktails all the way.

Depending on how the RSVPs come in, and we're hoping everyone can make it, this could be the biggest event we've ever hosted in the apartment.

For the supper, we're thinking turkey and mashed potatoes as we did last year. Mashed potatoes for a big crew is fine -- I mash them up in the standing mixer and then keep them warm in the crock pot. I might make one big turkey and then one or two turkey breasts too.

I'm really excited for the challenge of cooking well for this large of a crowd. If you have any suggestions on apartment cooking for large groups, please comment here.

In the elevator at work today, one guy was bragging to his co-worker about his "huge" Thanksgiving party. From what I could gather, he has a large house on Long Island. He's having 28 people!

I should have asked him to come to Brooklyn to see our holiday party for 40-50 in our small one bedroom!

Stove on the Sidewalk

2006-11-09T12:03:00.000-05:00

IMG_2788.JPG
Originally uploaded by electric stove.

I saw this old-fashioned stove, carefully wrapped in plastic, just sitting out on a stoop in my neighboorhood. It seems like someone must have ordered a fixed-up old stove for their new kitchen? If it was on the way out, it wouldn't be wrapped so perfectly.

Look at this thing. Is that four ovens? Does anyone know more about this stove?

I first saw it early in the morning the day before Halloween. There was dew clinging to the plastic, so it looked a little ghostly or haunted. A while back, there must have been someone who treasured this stove when it was new, and then someone else who couldn't wait to be rid of it and get something more modern.

And now it seems like it will get pride of place again in someone's brownstone on Sterling Place. Dare me to knock on their door and ask to see their new kitchen?

A little farther down my street, an old sink is still chained down.

Another bunch of NYC food bloggers

2006-11-06T15:53:00.000-05:00

Vanessa of Vanesscipes read about the NYC Food Blogger Pickle Party we had at my apartment on Saturday and told me that Habeas Brulee hosted a food blogger pot-luck a few weeks back and started a mailing list for NYC food bloggers.

Hopefully both groups can get together for a bigger event sometime!

Kee's Chocolates from Cravings

2006-11-05T15:24:00.000-05:00

Cynthia, the wine and champage editor from Cravings, brought a box of truffles from Kee's Chocolates.

Chocolate shops are popping up all over the city: chocolate drinks, luxe truffles and all that. I have to admit, I hadn't seen the reason for all the fuss. Sure, an occasional mocha is a good thing. And last Christmas, I got a box of chile chocolates from Jacques Torres that I liked.

But, after tasting these Black Sesame truffles, now I have a new craving.

"They're just so clean," Cynthia said.

Yes, clean is why these chocolates are different and so special. There's a pristine mouth-feel that reminds me of sushi and not just becasue of the black and white sesame seed crust.

* * *

Grocery Guy says "however weird people who read food blogs are, people who write them are even weirder." CQ noticed that it had to be a NYC crowd becasue almost everyone had black glasses.

Tag your pictures "pickleparty"

2006-11-05T01:36:00.000-05:00

food blogger party, centerpiece
Originally uploaded by smitten.

Smitten, thanks for posting your great pictures so quick!

Thank You, Wheelhouse Pickles

2006-11-05T01:16:00.000-05:00

Thank You, Wheelhouse Pickles, originally uploaded by electric stove.

Pshew! So many bloggers and so many pickles. It was excellent to meet so many new friends: NYC food bloggers, local food store owners and food blog fans.

I think we had more than 35 people here tonight.

A huge thank you to Jon from Wheelhouse Pickles for cooking the food and providing all the pickles. Thank you Stinky Brooklyn and Smith and Vine for the cheese and the introduction to the 50/50 Martini.

Thanks also to Ann and The Boy from A Chicken in Every Grannycart for gathering the crowd.

I'd like to collect a list of all the bloggers and guests who were here tonight, so if you were, please speak up and post a comment so we can have a link to your site. If you took pictures tonight and are posting them, let us know where we can look too.

Good night and thanks, Chris and R*.

Where have all the flowers gone?

2006-11-04T15:52:00.000-05:00

Where have all the flowers gone?, originally uploaded by electric stove.

I went to the farmer's market at Grand Army Plaza to get flowers and heavy cream for tonight's party. I wanted to make some nice centerpieces and some whipped cream for the egg creams I might make for dessert.

No more flowers anymore. It's gone too cold here now. Cabbage roses and wheat wreaths at the flower stand this week. Everyone was in mini-mourning for all the colors that were there just a few weeks back.

"If you're going to do the eat seasonal thing," I snapped to someone, "this is part of it."

"Do you cook them or plant them?" she asked.

"Neither, they are flowers," I said.

She wasn't convinced. Me either.

Truffle & Salt: Getting ready for the blogger party

2006-11-04T11:39:00.000-05:00

IMG_2811.JPG, originally uploaded by electric stove.

Popcorn is one of my favorite party snacks. Beats opening up a bag of chips, right?

I was thinking about popcorn while I was trolling Crate and Barrel last night. Had to pick up some martini glasses and candles.

Then, I decided I could make the popcorn a bit more exciting. I decided I'd get some Truffle Salt for the popcorn. I didn't realize it was $28 for 3.5 ounces.

After much angst, I picked it up and put it back twice, I decided I'd go for it.

Two new things to be excited about

2006-11-03T13:07:00.000-05:00

I just found a great NYC food blog. Gezellig Girl is brave enough to post about how her cooking style differs from her mom's (hi Mom!), knows about Chinatown (and I want to learn!), is interested in teapots and watches Top Chef. It is very late notice, but I hope she might be able to make it to our NYC Food Blogger party tomorrow.

The second exciting thing is that I won an Ebay auction for the December 2004 issue of Martha Stewart Living.

Not that there were many people clamoring for this magazine, but I really wanted it. Someone was bidding against me, but I still got it for only $4.82.

In that issue, there's information about how to make Christmas centerpieces using carnations. Carnations -- the un-exotic, cheap, forgotten flower, bouquet filler -- reimagined into modern, interesting, yet still inexpensive centerpieces. Its sort of a metaphor for the rediscovery of my part of Brooklyn, or just a good life philosophy in general.

I'm hoping I can pull something like this off for our Holiday Book party. I'm off to Bed Bath and Beyond to think up some simple decor idea for tomorrow night's Food Blogger Pickle Party.

Two parties to plan!

2006-11-02T18:41:00.000-05:00

PARTY #1
R* and I are hosting -- with much help from Ann and Jon -- a pickle-tasting party on Saturday night. I've been jealous how how the bloggers on the West Coast get together and meet each other in real life, so we're going to host NYC food bloggers and friends at our party. Looks like about 25 people are coming.

To keep it low stress, the food bloggers aren't cooking. Jon's brinig pickles from his small-batch Brooklyn-based pickle company, Wheelhouse Pickles.

I need to admit I always get anxious as it gets closer and closer to hosting a party: will the crowd mesh, will there be enough booze, is the food right, R* should get some new iTunes for the audio ambience, how will I find enough time to clean the bathroom . . .

Saturday's pickle party is making me especially nervous since some of my favorite NYC food bloggers and apartment therapists are coming. It is not unlike having Martha Stewart come over.

P.S. If you're an NYC food blogger and you want to come to the pickle party, lemme know. It's a very small apartment, but we'll make it work.

PARTY #2
R* and I also have a Holiday Party every year. We start planning it every Halloween. It's our one big event of the year. So now's the time for me to get out my recipes and notes from last year and start to plan.

I think it's a little bit creepy or boring to write about our party and all the brooding about it and planning and recipes, but maybe it will be fun. At least we'd have a record of what we did for the party this year. If anyone has seen someone blog "a month in the life of planning my party" kind of a blog, let me know, I'd like to see how they did it.

My first idea is that I want to have some amuse-bouches. I love the little appetizer spoons that I blogged here. Today I had perfect reuben sandwhich at a deli in Murray Hill. I'm thinknig corned beef with spicy mustard on a bed of sauerkraut with some cheese metled on top and a drop of spicy mustard. Would that be a weird thing to serve on these spoons? (Sigh, these spoons look kind of ugly in the picture on the web. In the catalog, they looked much better.)

Tour the offices of Martha Stewart Living

2006-10-26T13:32:00.000-04:00

R* and I got to take a behind the scenes look at the offices of Martha Stewart Living. I posted a photo tour over at my Apartment Therapy Kitchen gig. Check it out! We got some great pictures of the test kitchen and the clearstory space.

And here's a post about the day R* and I went to Martha's talk show.

Monkey Face Cupcakes

2006-10-24T17:01:00.000-04:00

Check out these Monkey Face cupcakes my college friend EH made for her son's first birthday. Totally adorable!

A dis from Grub Street

2006-09-27T22:06:00.000-04:00

Today, New York magazine's 10 day old food blog Grub Street says:
"Frankly, we're not always flattered to be part of that great, wide, amateurish group of people known as food bloggers. But some blogs we very much admire — like Augieland . . . "

To see the full post, click here.

Everything but the

2006-09-27T01:32:00.000-04:00

I found this sink on Butler Place while walking to the farmer's market on Sunday.

This second sink has been bugging me for a while. It's chained like a dog to the front of a brownstone a block away from my apartment.

I'm obsessed: who has a kitchen big enough for these sinks . . . why is someone on Butler throwing their sink away, while someone a block away is chaining their old sink down, hanging on for dear life, as if someone could lift the thing if they wanted to . . . then there's this Craigslister I linked to from Apartment Therapy:Kitchen who tore out their big old kitchen and is selling it on Craig's, while wondering if they should be keeping it.

[Link] Bill Buford on the Food Network

2006-09-26T07:42:00.000-04:00

Here's an detailed, well researched article about the Food Network by Bill Buford. He explains that many chefs are leaving the Food Network line up in favor of hot personalities.

I'm reading Craig Claiborne's memoir right now; Craig Claiborne was a 'gay American' and was a food editor at The NY Times. His book has made me very curious to learning more about famous (or semi-famous) gay guys who work in the world of food and food media. Buford gives us this little bit on Dan Smith and Steve McDonagh, hosts of the Party Line:

“We are a gay couple,” they’d announced on their audition video, “and you should really think about that, because the gays right now, they’re hot.” They are from Chicago—actors who started a catering business—with a low-wattage repartee (on dirty dishes: “We have people for that. We call him Dan”) and an anachronistic, almost blithely oblivious aesthetic: their meals seem like something someone’s parents once ate, a campy “Joy of Cooking,” or a display at a MOMA exhibit.

I haven't seen Party Line yet, have you?

I have seen Guys Big Bite. . . and the show bites. Guy beat out my pick Nathan Lyon and went on to win the second Food Network star search. Dan and Steve pulled a Richard Hatch and won the first season.

Sometimes, rarely, never: the answer

2006-09-25T11:51:00.000-04:00

My friend Two emailed today, reminding me to post the answer to the question I asked here.

The answer is this: The picture is a detail from a photo I took inside the 8th Street subway station, home of the R and N trains, or the Rarely and the Never as I like to call them, in a nod to their service frequency. After graduation, I lived in a $600 one bedroom on the last stop on the R train in Bay Ridge Brooklyn. I bumped along on that slow train all the way to work in Soho. Little did I know that R* also lived in Bay Ridge at the same time, just a few blocks away.

My photo shows a mosaic of a grup hanging out by the produce stand. It caught my eye because its art that captures guys, the grup and the shop keeper dressed in brown, in a home cookingish setting. I thought it was interesting because (outside of the celebrity chef universe) we more often see women, like the one in green, in these pictures.

The art goes along with the post I wrote for AT:Kitchen where I wondered if 8th Street could become a new zone for the city's home cooks.

Sometimes, rarely, never

2006-09-21T08:12:00.000-04:00

Love this image.

Can you guess where in NYC I took this picture?

Today on Apartment Therapy: Kitchen I'll give my riff on this week's NY Times Dining articles. This picture fit right in with their market theme.

Sad, sad toaster

2006-09-19T08:34:00.000-04:00

R* and I are a little bit sad about our toaster.

My mom and dad gave it to us for Christmas and by February it was already busted. The bread won't spring up any more. If you wiggle and jiggle the handle just right, it might come up. I usually end up breaking a rule that most hold almost as sacred as not tearing the tags about poly-fiber-fill off their pillows, and stick a knife into a toaster and pull out the toast. (We usually remember to unplug it first). It's kind of like Operation.

Our new dishwasher was next to break, followed by the microwave. The silver lining: Since Sears missed their appointment to fix the microwave three times, they sent us a gift card for $75. Kinda cool.

The toaster market is be crowded at the low and high price points, full of throw-aways that cost $20-ish and $289.98 behemoths by Dualit and KitchenAid. This Cusinart toaster seems like an okay mid-price option, but I think its fake-retro style is ugly.

$30o for a toaster is crazy, right? And then you get to buy it a cage like it's a poodle. Plus we keep the toaster in the pantry and the rich toasters are too heavy to carry back and forth from pantry to counter.

Even with these appliance woes, we're not nearly as sad as this see-through toaster. Can you listen to this song while you browse Sears.com to give us toaster buying advice? Stainless steel, two slice would be cool, and let's avoid Kennmore brand. This is my choice. Do you agree?

A Cortland apple for my teacher

2006-09-18T11:53:00.000-04:00

Today is my dad's birthday. Today's also my first day writing as the New York City co-editor for Apartment Therapy: The Kitchen. At first, the two events seem unrelated, but they aren't. Not really.

My first post as NYC co-editor on Apartment Therapy: The Kitchen is about New York State apples, many of which are grown near Cortland, NY where both my mom and dad grew up. There's even an apple named after little Cortland. (It bugs me that many Manhattan retailers lable them "Courtland" apples.)

My dad teaches me about patience and persistance. These values are easy to forget in the topsy-turvy world of Internet marketing in Manahttan. Dad continues to hang in there with his tough career and has taught me to do the same. I graduated from college with an English degree wondering if I'd ever have a shot at being a professional writer of some stripe: today's the day!

Dad is there to rescue me from so many jams. He's rushed money for lunch or a forgotten field trip to my elementary school and begged the cleaners to stay open for a few more minutes so he could pick up the white band uniform pants and race them to the stadium before my fieldshow performance. In college, he took me to the bank to sign my first loan agreement, so that I could buy myself a computer and get connected to the Internet.

After graduation, Dad was quick to start tracking the stocks of the Web marketing start-up I worked for and all our competitors. Dad could also give R* some competition as far as the person who appreciates my cooking the most. I love going home to Bethlehem, Pa. to grill with him and catching him peeks into the pots and taking a slurp hours before dinner's served.

I think dad likes banannas -- the number one seller in the produce aisle -- over apples, but I still want to wish him a Happy Birthday! And thank dad and mom, my grandmother, my brothers BC and MK, R*, my friends and everyone else for their help.

I will be posting daily (M-F) on AT: K. Posting on the ElectricStove will slow down a bit, but I still plan to post here too.

Don't eat bagged spinach

2006-09-15T11:45:00.000-04:00

The FDA warns U.S. consumers not to eat bagged spinach. Bagged spinach has been traced to E. coli, causing illness and one death.

I never liked those pre-bagged salads though I have been known to use them to get a weekday meal out fast. Now I'll steer clear.

[Link] The butchers of New York

2006-09-13T06:20:00.000-04:00

This week New York magazine takes a butchers at, well, butchers. Check out their feature here. They provide recommendations for butcher shops across New York City and share cooking tips from butchers. According to this story, supermarket butchers buy blood by the gallon to "redden everything up so it looks nice."

The editors at New York are right. I'm never sure what to buy, what to ask when I'm at the butcher. The article has unique photos by Hans Gissinger; his pictures look much better in the print magazine than the online version. Take a look at the series of sausage photos on his website too.

This picture is an aged steak, a T-bone I think, I had this summer from the butcher in Grand Central Market.

I love New York

2006-09-11T23:26:00.000-04:00

Here's a picture from Times Square during the evening rush hour tonight.

As soon as I got home to Brooklyn tonight, I made oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, a soothing end to a sad day. This is the recipe I used. I think it is the same one my family has used since I was a kid.

Sam from Becks and Posh has a round up of what other food bloggers were thnking about and cooking today.

My paper towels tell me fall is here

2006-09-06T07:20:00.000-04:00

I don't like paper towels with print on them. I do not like paper towels with orange leaves or green trees or blue cross-stitch hearts or butterflies and ladbybugs or any of the rest of it. Mary Engelbreit designed paper towels seem strangest of all.

What a depressing way to start thinking about the change in seasons. Happy September!

Suggestions for breakfast in Las Vegas?

2006-09-05T15:40:00.000-04:00

R* is going to Las Vegas next week for a conference. Inspired a bit by Ann Patchett and Maria Kalman stories about hiding in a nice hotel and dreamy breakfasts in the August supplement of Gourmet, I decided I'd join R* in Vegas, baby.

Each morning, R* will wake up early and head out to his business meetings. While he's away, I want to go to some amazing, quiet, cheap, unique Vegas breakfasts. I'm thinking $3.99 steak and eggs at the Flamingo like I've had before (how can I get ahold of their welcome book with the cheap breakfast coupon, since we're not staying there this time), maybe a croissant and jam, and then definitely room service one morning.

I'm going to start by reading these suggestions from Mr. Breakfast and 10best, but I thought a reader might have Las Vegas breakfast suggestions? And if I can find wireless connections, I'll take pictures and blog my Vegas breakfasts.

Trying to perfect poached eggs

2006-09-04T12:51:00.001-04:00

While I rely on speedy scrambled eggs cooked softly to get breakfast on the table quickly, poached eggs on wheat toast with butter on top are my favorite. I love how my mom makes them, but I can't duplicate it. My mom was just here for the long weekend, I should have asked her for a lesson.

I tried to make poached eggs this morning and they were decent, but not like moms. When I make poached eggs, the whites are foamy or rubbery. The yolks aren't dependably soft either.

Somewhere I heard the tip of putting a bit of white vinegar in the poaching water. Though I know my mom doesn't put vinegar in the water when she poaches eggs in a small frying pan, I tried the tip this morning. The white vinegar did stop the whites from running all over the pan. Though the smell of boiling vinegar isn't appealing first thing in the morning, I was glad I couldn't taste the vinegar in the eggs.

After we ate our eggs, R* said he'd use a poaching pan. Does anyone else use a poaching pan? Any other poached eggs tips? I think I used much too big of a pan this time, right?

Found a cookbook, picked it up

2006-08-26T23:07:00.000-04:00

I found this old, soaked cookbook sitting on the sidewalk in Park Slope. The cover of it caught my eye. Though I was loaded down with tomatoes and squash from the farmer's market, I stopped to take a look.

Is this key lime pie served with bologna and caviar on the pink plate?

The bouquet of leaves is sweet. Makes me wonder what the text says. Does anyone know what language this is? I'm thinking Russian.

Looks like a dog is chasing a pig holding cheese on the plate. See how water stained the book is? And it smelled and had moldy spots, or I would have taken it home.

Looks like meatloaf with a hard boiled egg inside. There's toast though, so maybe it's breakfast?

Does anyone know how old this cookbook might be or know what it's about?

[StovePoll] Where do most of your recipes come from?

2006-08-25T16:38:00.000-04:00

I thought ElectricStove polls might be a fun way for me and my blog readers to learn more about each other. Having my own blog has suddently made me very interested in the World Of Web 2.0 and coding and widgets. I thought I'd test out Majik to see how it works for polls. Let me know in the comments section if the poll and the voting buttons are not showing up for you.

Please vote in the poll and then comment on all things poll-ish. So if you think polls are a fun thing to have on the blog, if the poll shows up correctly on your computer, or maybe you have some ideas for a future poll. Let me know.

Enjoy the weekend . . . I'm heading off to the Grand Army Plaza farmer's market first thing tomorrow morning. I'll post about what I find. What are you up to this weekend food wise?

Cooking with mint and lime: Lime Gelato at Tempo

2006-08-24T11:09:00.000-04:00

Almost every Saturday that we're in Brooklyn, R* and I take a walk from our apartment in Prospect Heights through Park Slope and then back again.

A few weekends back we took a tempting walk. We passed Blue Apron, where I almost dropped in to pick up some fancy cheese and pickles. The store was crowded, so we didn't go in.

Next we passed a stoop sale. We always stop for stoop sales. At this perfect old school Park Slope hippies-gentrifying-brownstones stoop sale, you could name your own price for any item. Pick something, say how much it was worth to you, and it was yours. Sure, there were a few signs reminding stoop sale shoppers to be "reasonable," but the couple running the sale didn't seem too strict.

Some Pyrex labware caught my eye first: a beaker with a round base, another with a more triangular bottom. R* and I both liked them but since we had spent the whole morning cleaning and organizing closets, jammed full with many of my previous stoop sale finds and I didn't know how much would be fair to offer for the labware we'd use for vases, we walked away from the Pyrex. Next I noticed a beautiful set of old cookie cutters tucked in a box on top of a filing cabinet. Though I only make cut-out cookies ounces a year, I love the idea of cookie cutters. I could get out my glue gun Martha Stewart style and turn these tag sale cookie cutters into beautiful Christmas ornaments . . . in real life I'd never do that. I pulled myself away from the stoop sale without buying anything.

Once we made it to Tempo Presto though, there was no stopping me. As soon as I looked at their flavor list, I knew I had to have their minted lime gelato. Since my own basil-blueberry ice cream disaster, I've become more focused on trying other people's unique frozen treat flavors. I didn't even ask for a taste first, I just went for it.

Well, my first reaction was: blech! The mint had a vegetal, swampy flavor, similar to the taste and mouth feel of too much dried oregano in a tomato sauce. That mint muck taste didn't blend too well with the clean bright flavor of the cold mint sorbet base. I took a second taste and was so sad. The striped green cup and little green spoon looked delicious . . . and it even matched my green polo shirt.

A man of virtue, R* didn't order anything and sat on a stool in the back of Tempo -- which will soon be opening up a second store in Park Slope -- waiting for me.

"How is it?" R* asked.

"Not so good," I frowned.

My friend JK once told me a funny summer story about a co-worker of hers. This friend would buy an ice cream cone and take just a few licks. Then she would drop the whole thing into a garbage can on the next corner. As soon as JK told me that story I could picture it all: the red and white ice cream truck on a corner, the assured all-black-wearing office worker standing on the sidewalk waiting her turn in line and then ordering her small cone, her perfect two licks and the a delicious walk down a hot city block. But then -- SPLAT into a wire garbage can on the next corner.

Who could stop after just a quick taste of an ice cream cone and drop it into the garbage? With that story in mind and the fact that my three little scoops cost almost $4, I couldn't throw out my gelato, even though I didn't really like it.

A funny thing happened on our way to the butcher's. After a few more little spoonfuls I started to like the flavor of my minted lime gelato. What was mucky turked refreshing, like a swamp turning into bubbling spring. The mint reminded me of the ice tea a neighboor made growing up. She boiled fresh mint leaves to make it and added lots of sugar.

R* and I stood in the butcher shop, waiting for our turn. The butcher called out for my order. I didn't notice him. I was thinking too much about my hot and cold relationship with my gelato. The butcher made some crack about me absorbed in my ice cream like a little kid.

And I'm still thinking about the flavor of that gelato. Lime and mint both seem like flavors we need to be careful of in the kitchen, but shouldn't avoid. "Mint is an aggressive herb -- no doubt about it. Outspoken in all its culinary collaborations," says Bert Green in Kitchen Bouquets, where he attacks cooking herb by herb (Thanks to A Chicken in Every Granny Cart for putting Bert's book on my reading list). Fake mint flavoring -- as in green chocolate chip mint ice cream, which was my favorite flavor as a kid -- doesn't have that harsh aggressive flavor. It just rolls over and plays sweet.

What are your experiences cooking with lime? Mint? Are you usually a love-at-first bite kind of taster like me? Are there other things that I might not like at first lick that I should give a second shot? If I only would have had a quick taste test of the minted lime, I never would have ordered it.

My turn in The Kitchen

2006-08-22T09:48:00.000-04:00

I'm trying out for a regular writing gig over at Apartment Therapy's The Kitchen. My take on vaccum packed beets just went live on their blog.

Later today I'll be sharing a favorite NYC shopping spot and a family recipe that can be made entirely with ingredients from the farmer's market. Stay tuned.

September food magazine round-up

2006-08-18T08:30:00.000-04:00

R* and I are off for a long weekend at the beach in Montauk on Long Island. Reading magazines on the beach is one of my favorite things, all the better if they are about cooking.

Before this month's magazine collection gets all sandy and forgotten at the bottom of a beach bag, I wanted to do a quick round up of what's in the mags so far.

When I saw the cover of September's Everyday Food, I let out a disappointed sigh standing at my mail box. The cover promised "Foolproof Family Favorites" but I have plenty of pancake and spaghetti, chocolate chip cookie, and meatball recipes, thank you. I scanned through the magazine, not expecting much, but then I saw their "In Season" section about plums: honey-roasted plums, chicken with plum chutney and a plum upside down cake. Of all of this months food magazines, the plum upside down cake the thing I am most likely to try.

Everyday Food also has a quick story on what Italian Seasoning is and how it can be used. The idea of all that dried, green stuff mixed together never appeals to me, but I have been known to shake Italian seasoning into a sauce in a pinch. I'm interested to see Martha Stewart's Everyday Food experts have to say about the green stuff. The magazine also has a section, "Have you tried molasses?" Well, no, I haven't tired molasses, Martha, but I'm not sure I want to make molasses-glazed turkey breat and acorn squash. I'm a bit of a turkey once a year kind of guy, but we'll see.

September's Real Simple has a very Everyday Food-ish tear-out section promising "6 basic recipes, 30 meals: a tear-and-save booklet. The promise of some real simple during the week recipes to solve my "daily dinner dilemma" was enough to make me spend $4.50 to pick this one up at the newsstand. I love the philosophy of learning how to make these 6 basic things well, including golden chicken and pork cutlets with roasted tomatoes, and then adapting and expanding on these to make, for example, chicken curry or pork with apple slaw. I'll try a couple of these recipes by Sara Quessenberry this fall.

Domino, more of a home decorating and entertaining magazine, made me laugh: trying to convince me that oysters "should stary in a leisurely lunch". They feature the grippy gloves, reproduction 19th century platter, hors d'oeuvres forks and everything else you'd need to buy to do an oyster event at home. No thanks, with more months with Rs in their names coming up, I'll head right to Oyster Bar in Grand Central and leave the shucking to the professionals. They also suggest using parsley as a centerpiece: leave it in the rubberband and just stick a few bunches in a bowl or a vase. Anyone ever do that?

The best food stuff in Domino is a two page spread on Alice Temperley's stable turned into a kitchen in London. The kitchen is modern and bright, but not steel-y or minimal. I'm tearing those pages out for inspiration the next time (gulp!) I might re-do a kitchen.

Another dream kitchen is on show in the September issue of Martha Stewart Living. Martha gives us a "first look at Martha's NEW kitchen" in Bedford. The space is 750 square feet -- 100 square feet bigger than my entire apartment -- with nine feet ceilings. The best article in this issue, though, is the Courtyard Cocktail Party, complete with recipes for Lillet cocktails, tortilla espanola and leeks in vinaigrette. I wish I was invited to that party, helped at French General in LA.

Happy Birthday, Julia Child

2006-08-15T11:51:00.000-04:00

The more I learn about Julia Child, who would have turned 94 today, the more odd specifics I find that we share: both of us are over six feet tall. We both liked hard boiled eggs, beer and mayonnaise (Hellmans for me, homemade for Julia) for lunch. We both moved to New York City after graduation to work in advertising and we'll both admit to occasionally using the toilet as a garbage disposal. We're both Americans with strong ties to Europe, partnered to artistic guys. Julia occasionally asked her husband Paul to help her take photos of her food; R* often does the same for me.

Today, under the leadership of Champaign Taste, some food bloggers are cooking up Julia's recipes to remember her today. I have to admit I've never tried one of her recipes, have only seen a few episodes of one of her later shows and I don't own her famous volumes on Mastering The Art of French Cooking (yet).

While I've never made any of her recipes, there's still a little bit of Julia in my Brooklyn kitchen.

This time last summer, R* and I we're stuck with our half renovated kitchen. Steve, our contractor would show up, work for a few hours, disappear for a week. Each night R* would come home to see what work the contractor had (or hadn't) don't that day. He patiently wrote notes on paper plates and taped them to the spots that needed work.

I like to think that Julia and her husband Paul went through something similar when setting up her kitchen in Cambridge. According to the Smithsonian, where their kitchen is now displayed, "While she mapped out the functional principles, Paul brought his sense of design to arranging the kitchen's elements."

R* and I also collaborated on designing our new kitchen. In searching the web for inspiration for paint colors and fabric for the project, I found descriptions and pictures of Julia and Paul's Cambridge kitchen. Their kitchen had a blue and green color scheme with Marimekko tablecloths.

I pulled an all-nighter last summer and spent the whole night searching for color, fabric and fixture ideas for the kitchen. I fell in love with this Marimekko Suma Blue print. While Julia and Paul might not appreciate the busy urban pattern (or would they?), the blue and greens in the fabric and glass backsplash tiles are very similar to the colors Paul picked for their cabinets.

Early on in our kitchen design process, I had dictated that there would be no blue in the new kitchen. My mom's kitchen was always decorated in blue and my pre-renovation kitchen was also blue, but that's just what we ended up with. Our Benjamin Moore Blue Ice walls might be a bit colder and more contemporary than the colors Paul picked, but I bet they would appreciate the update. I wish we had enough wall space for her famous peg board storage. Someday.

Don't miss the August issue of Gourmet

2006-08-13T15:39:00.000-04:00

The September magazines are making their way to my mailbox. This means there isn't much shelf-life left for the August issue of Gourmet and I'm telling you: get it while you can.

I usually throw away these special supplements away as soon as I can, since they are almost always just an excuse to squeeze in a bunch more ads along with some tepid advertising content -- a bunch of cartoons and some car and vodka ads. This is so not that.

This handy subway-reading sized supplement has 15 stories and essays from excellent writers, no all of whom usually specialize in food writing.

Here are some quick quotes from my two favorites in the supplement:

"The coffee shop is the ultimate sensational way to start the day . . .
Everyone is polishing off this , and washing it down with that. It gives one
HOPE."

"Please do not underestimate the charm of the doily or the dearness of the
five-minute egg sitting innocently next to the toast. Or the heartbreak
of a dish of butter or the hope of a dish of marmalade. I will complement them
forever."
from "Sunny-Side Up On the Love of Breakfast" by Maria Kalman

I didn't recognize Kalman's name, but I should have. She drew the New Yorkistan cover for the New Yorker and illustrated the new version of Elements of Style. In the Gourmet supplement, she created an "ode to breakfast" that reminded me of the attention to detail of Clotilde Dousiller, the weird wit of Wallace Stevens and the detailed drawings found in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, my other favorite read of the summer.

I was more familiar with Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto. Patchett writes about escaping to the Hotel Bel-Air, "staying in my room and frustrating the housekeeping staff," looking for true anonymity and a space get some work done. At the Bel-Air, she says:

If you don't feel up to a very fancy meal you can slip off to the bar where the
waiters are friendly, the pianist is charming, and the food is very bad.
If you accidently slip up and order the chicken pot-pie do not, under any
circumstance, eat it.
from "Do Not Disturb" by Ann Patchett

The supplement also introduced me to Junot Diaz and a series of still life photos of "what remains" after eating by Laura Letinsky. These photos inspired me to post a photo of my own dirty dishes.

Megnut has a post about these "steel-trap brains turned to the subject of food" at the 92nd St Y event that launched the supplement.

Congratulations and thank you to Philips and their ad agency Carat for funding this supplement. When R* and I soon go searching for our flat screen TV, we'll keep this in mind :-).

[Links] Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs

2006-08-13T11:51:00.000-04:00

Don't miss Matt and Ted Lee's book review in today's New York Times. The book explores African-American women's food history.

I never knew chicken was referred to as the "gospel bird" before. Since I found out about Holy Spirit Soup, I've been interested in religious names for food.

A cook's cocktail: "Negronis for my friends"

2006-08-10T13:23:00.000-04:00

Last week, I went to Agata & Valentina's restaurant on the Upper East Side with some co-workers. They had a fancy, long list of wines. The bartender was great about letting us try a few sips of a couple wines, but nothing seemed right. Then I reached over for the cocktail menu. The negroni immediately called out to me: a blend equal parts Campari, vermouth and gin.

When I asked the bartender for a negroni, he immediately asked, "Have you had one before?"

"Yes," I urgently replied. I couldn't wait to get my hands on that drink, but my reply was a little bit of a fib. I'd never had a Negroni before, but Campari is a favorite of mine and in my mind, I was already tasting this cool, crisp mix of herbal and rounded fruit flavors.

"Something I like that you probably won't" is how Sushiesque describes the negroni. The flavor of Campari -- and all of "those sort of oddly flavored fortified wine/booze thingies" as fellow herby aperitif lover Ann from A Chicken in Every Grannycart wisely calls them -- can be confusing to the tongue at first. We Americanos are not used to these deep herbal flavors.

I think the Negroni is the a cocktail a cook can appreciate best: full of flavor, bracing but balanced, both juicy and strong. The gin gives an alcoholic bite and rounds out some of the bitterness of the Campari; while Campari provides fruit flavors and a rich red color; though some vermouths are clear, the vermouth my bartender used turned the Campari's red to my cocktail's mahogany sun-brewed iced-tea color and sends some sweetness to relax the Campari.

I've been known to compare drinking gin and tonics, one of R*'s favorite drinks, to "licking the stump of the Christmas tree" while R* says that my Campari and sodas "taste like medicine." Yet in this balanced blend, I begin to appreciate the flavor of gin. I can't wait to make R* one and see if he likes Negronis too.

Sushiesque also provides wallet cards with the negroni recipe on them and some excellent comments which inspired my title for this post.

My negroni was served in a martini glass. Turns out, negronis and other Campari aperitifs are usually served in a rocks glass on ice. I'll try them that way when I make them at home.

The problem with black pepper

2006-08-09T16:51:00.000-04:00

"It is universally agreed that black pepper boiled in a soup or stock or stew for longer than ten minutes turns bitter and loses its aromatic and pungent properties. Yet few people correct and enchance old recipes by leaving out pepper until the end."
- Jeffrey Steingarten in Red Wine and Old Roosters as excerpted in Best Food Writing 2002

I must have missed the memo. I really didn't know regular, trusty old black pepper could turn stews and stock bitter.

In the beef stews I make all winter, I tend to mix the beef cubes in a flour coating with some salt and pepper. I brown the beef and then add wine and slowly stew the whole thing. Is the pepper added in this step adding off flavors?

This topic seems like just the sort of thing that Cook's Illustrated should know about, but I did a search on their paid site and didn't find anything.

Does anyone else have a tip about using black pepper turning food bitter? Is Jeffrey Steingarten about the universal agreement on this topic?

Lillet is shady

2006-08-09T10:46:00.000-04:00

Last week, while I was in the liquor store stocking up on rose -- the "summer drink to be seen with"-- I got caught up in a fit of faux French-ness I also asked for a bottle of Lillet.

Why did I ask for Lillet? Well, I was seduced by Urban Spam.

See, all summer-long, I've been seeing noticing these deep red umbrellas lounging over the best sidewalk cafes in Chelsea and the West Village. While rushing by, I've wished I could stop and just sit under those umbrellas.

Though I worked in advertising, I usually don't like to admit I was directly pushed into buying something by an ad. I like to think I'm immune to the powers of the ad.

But the umbrella ad definitely inspired this Lillet purchase. There was no word-of-mouth from a knowing bar tender or life-changing trip to France that made me try Lillet. There is only the umbrella ad.

Now I probably wouldn't order Lil-it or Lee-lay or Lil-let in a cafe since I didn't know how to pronounce it or how to order it. Was it a wine, a cocktail, served on the rocks or in soda? I wasn't sure.

After a little Googling, I learned that Very Cold is the way to serve Lillet. Some like it straight, some mix it with soda, many like it with an orange slice garnish. After chilling my Lillet for a few days in the fridge, I tried it straight and then tried it mixed in soda.

Though he's a white wine fan, R* said he didn't like it either way. Though I didn't tell R* at the time, I didn't like it that much either. The taste seemed to manufactured or composed. But yes, the bottle was pretty and the fruity herbal flavor seemed like it had potential if I could figure out what to do with it. I was poaching salmon that night and didn't have any white wine to flavor the poaching water, so I tentatively put a few glugs of Lillet into the mix. I didn't notice much difference in the fish, maybe that's becasue salmon has such a strong flavor of its own. The Lillet site is all in Flash, but there are some recipes and commentary there that are a helpful reference.

That night I dumped the rest of my Lillet and soda down the sink, poured myself a rose and told myself I'd get back to the Lillet another day.

I'm liking Lillet again today because I just noticed this post in praise of Lillet on Domino magazines new surprisingly down-to-earth blog.

Blame the heat for the long lines at Starbucks

2006-08-08T10:10:00.001-04:00

I think it was my time spent working at a big ad agency on 49th and Madison that got me hooked on Starbucks. There were three or four within two blocks of my office, not to mention the Starbucks in Rock Center and the one in Grand Central. When the work stress got overwhelming, there was always a Starbucks escape a block away (126 of them in Midtown East according to their store locator).

I never go for their Mochachokealateeyaya with Pomegranate Green Tea or whatever Slurpee-style stuff they were pushing, but I think the Starbucks iced coffee and iced tea are excellent.

Many times, as I stood in a long, hot line waiting for my iced coffee, I wondered if Starbucks, at least Starbucks in NYC should introduce an express line for those of us who just want the plain "pour and serve drinks": coffee, iced coffee, iced tea.

Starbucks didn't meet their earnings results this quarter and they are blaming it on the heat (or is it the humidity?) and long lines at their stores. Here's a fun post with pictures of those lines around the city and a review of their earnings report.

Maybe the dip in earnings will push Starbucks to open express lanes for those of us with plain Jane orders?

While I'm on the topic of Starbucks: why don't they offer lemons for the iced tea? It seems like they can strive to offer every customization and combination of caffeinated beverage, yet they don't offer humble lemons with their iced tea.

I assume they don't stock lemons because lemons, unlike say tangerine syrup, are a fresh product with a relatively quick shelf life.

One last question on Starbucks: while they coat the rest of mid-Manhattan like gum on a hot sidewalk, why are there no Starbucks near my new office in the East 30's? There's a Dunkin Donuts and another one opening up soon, but no Starbucks.

I never thought I would become one of "those people" who moaned about the distance between their office and Starbucks. I guess I could blame this new personality flaw on the heat.

After and before our summer dinner party

2006-08-07T21:49:00.000-04:00

R* and I had a dinner party for five Sunday night.

I built the menu backwards. CQ wanted me to make the chocolate cake again and I thought it would go well with some home made vanilla ice cream and the cake would be a great way to belatedly celebrate 2's birthday.

With that rich cake at the end of the line where I might have put a peach sorbet or tart, how could I create the rest of the meal to celebrate the peak of the farmer's market growing season? Here's the menu . . . how do you think I did?

Prosciutto and Cantaloupe
Fresh Tomatoes with Ricotta
Cold Borscht with Dill, Cucumbers, and Hard Boiled Eggs
Mustard and Chili Rubbed Rare Roast Beef
Heirloom Tomatoes and Arugula Salad
Boiled Redskin Potatoes
Steamed Yellow Squash
Chocolate Souffle Cake
Philadelphia Style Vanilla Ice Cream

In "Growing Up Gourmet" by Barbara Haber (Best Food Writing 2002), Haber says that food is an "exquisite battleground" because it gave Lillian Hellman and other food lovers "a lot to fight about: what to cook, how to cook it, how to serve it, and with whom to share the meal." While I like this metaphor of a fight (food fight! food fight!), I'm really not much of a fighter. For me, it's a Sudoku puzzle for the plate:

** If I serve the hot potatoes with the cold borscht -- "the best a beet can hope for" -- as Bittman suggests, what will the starch be for the meal?

** The butcher at A&S Pork Store suggests I can substitute London Boil for tenderloin and save some serious money, as long as I slice it "reeeeeeeaaaaaaly thin."

** I ask R*: Should we use the everyday cereal bowls for the soup or coffee cups or do I need to buy something?

** How do you chill ice cream according to the "manufacturer's instructions," as nearly every ice cream recipe preaches, when you bought your ice cream maker last summer at a stoop sale for $5 and never got an instruction booklet?

** What about zinnias for the flowers? I hope no one mistakes them for Gerber daises. Zinnias, fuzzy bug eaten leaves and all, remind me of summers spent in upstate New York with my grandparents and aunt.

While I'll never understand why people deliberately frustrate themsevles with sudoku and word search puzzles, especially on the New York City subway which is possibly the world's most frustrating place even without puzzles, and while I hope I won't be fighting on my death bed as Lillian Hellman was in this excerpt, I love the Mrs. Dalloway-esque internal dialogue required to host a successful dinner party. I can't wait to start planning the next one. And to keep myself from thinking about our Chirstmas party too much, I made a rule a few years back: no planning the Christmas party, no menus, no guest lists, until Halloween.

These are the things I think about, before and after our parties, things to consider while setting the table with my grandmother's Fostoria American dishes and then re-consider like this morning while I was un-loading the dishwasher and putting in a third load of post-party dishes (yes! this dishwasher is fixed!) and picking half-moons of limes and a piece of water-logged ciabatta out of the drain.

Food taboos in NYC: Pink wine and granny carts

2006-08-07T10:24:00.000-04:00

Pink wine was considered beyond the pale, a Kool Aid drink best left to Bartles and James. No serious New York City host would serve it, but this summer the prohibition on pink wine has been lifted. While the cosmo, New York's last hot pink drink, is "so over", we have a new trendy pink drink in town. Rose is the chic pink "summer drink to be seen with" according to Sunday's New York Times.

Looks like we beat the Sunday Styles trend patrol on this one. R* and I have been enjoying roses all summer. I read about roses in Martha Stewart Living on our flight to the UK . Then I heard more rose buzz on Apartment Therapy: Kitchen.

I'm never comfortable in a wine shop: I don't want to end up with a terrible wine, nor do I want to spend too much. Shopping for rose makes me especially uncomfortable because of lingering concerns that pink wine is un-cool or at least un-manly. Yesterday I ran in to our local wineshop on Flatbush Avenue. I asked for a rose that wasn't too sweet, they led me to their last bottle of Big House Pink. I thought a rose would be a good match for the mustard-and-chili rubbed rare roasted beef (recipe from Hot Night, Cold Suppers) I served for dinner.

Trying to do my part in making more people "think pink" when it comes to wine, I served little juice glasses of Big House Pink with the rare beef. I thought the Big House wine was ok, but not as great as some of the roses I've tried, though I didn't keep track of any of their names.

Most New Yorkers, especially us guys, would probably rather be caught red-handed with pink wine than be seen pushing a granny cart home from the grocery store. I'll confess to owning a granny cart. I used it from time to time -- if I knew I would be stocking up on something heavy like bottled water or canned tomatoes or a frozen turkey -- but these days, I order the heavy stuff from Fresh Direct and keep the cart in the closet.

The tables might be turning on the cart's cool factor. The cart is going "from squeak to chic" according to The New York Times. Brian Keith Jackson says, "Though carts can be stylish -- I've got my eye on the Swany Smartcart at Gracious Home, definitely a Volvo among carts -- perhaps what they symbolize most is growing up."

I might think about taking my cart out for a shopping trip soon, but I don't think it will be a regular thing. I go to the grocery store so often, I don't need to push a ton of food home all at once, but you will find me often over at A Chicken in Every Granny Cart -- one of my favorite food blogs, with a name that gives it immediate NYC street cred.

Suggestions for steaming supper, anyone?

2006-08-05T10:17:00.000-04:00

I have this idea for a steam powered summer dinner party for four -- one person per burner on my stove.

Inspired by Martha Stewart's Steamed Seafood Medley (watch the video on this page too, I think it's interesting how she puts it all together, it looks fun) recipe, I would build four identical stacks of bamboo steamers, one for each guest. After a few minutes of steaming, I'd take the top layer off the steamer and serve the appetizer, then a few minutes more and the next course, on and on down the steamer. Martha reminds me that the things that take the longest to cook should go on the bottom of the steamer and those that cook the fastest should go on top.

I went to Chinatown yesterday, looking for soup bowls and steamers. I didn't find soup bowls I liked and I realized I wanted to think more about a steamer before I bought one.

In keeping with the steam theme, I'd make a steamed pudding dessert. While standing in line at the grocery store check out earlier in the week, I found a recipe in Rachel Ray's magazine for a pudding that is cooked in apple cider steam. I'm not ready for fall-ish cooking ideas like that just yet, but it might be great for September.

One problem with this dinner idea is that I don't have four bamboo steamers. I don't even have one! They seem cumbersome to store in my small kitchen, so I'm wondering if I should invest. As an alternative, I could try cooking it all in one big steamer, or doing it in batches, but that seems to take a lot of the ease and excitement out of the process.

Also, is it just me, or does food that is steamed get cold very fast? I don't know how it's possible that food heated in different ways gets colder faster, but last night I steamed some broccoli for dinner. I sware that from the time I took it out of the pot, put it on my plate and brought it to the table, it was cold already.

I have more questions: freshness, fish and flavor. Good fresh fish, I find, is very expensive in New York City. If I would buy three different kinds of fish for four people -- it would get to be on the expensive side. In my experiments I've found I really have to concentrate on flavor when I steam. When you cook with butter or oil, you can count on those flavors. When you brown things, you get carmelization. Here it's ingredients in their most pure form.

Mr. S posted a comment on here encouraging me to steam summer sqaush. It was an elegant, simple take on one of my favorite vegetables.

Any more steam advice?

Two darn hot suppers

2006-08-02T00:18:00.000-04:00

Humidex be damned, I'm in the mood to cook. Here's what R* and I had for dinner so far this week. Both the gazpacho and the scrambled egg salad took less than 15 minutes to make. They weren't hard to shop for and I barely had to touch the stove.

Last night, we made gazpacho, working roughly from Craig Claiborne's simple recipe from 1968 which Amanda Hesser reprinted in The New York Times a few weeks ago. I mention these Time's food writers past and present by name because I read Hesser's Cooking for Mr. Latte over the weekend and I just started Claiborne's memoir yesterday afternoon.

I left the office last night, determined to making the gazpacho just as Craig intended. I printed out the recipe and headed out to the grocery store.

Thought they aren't the recipe, the fruit stand on 34th street had some great looking avocados so I picked one up. I thought avocado be a great garnish for the gazpacho.

When I got home I realized the green pepper I had carefully selected at Gristides (NYC chain grocery store produce is gross, but works in a pinch) got lost somewhere between my after work shopping trip and my kitchen. My green pepper must be wandering the 6 train somewhere, but in a forgotten crisper drawer I found a yellow pepper from the farmer's market that was willing to substitute. I roughly chopped the pepper and threw it into the food processor with the cucumbers and tomatoes in the food processor.

I used champagne vinegar instead of the wine vinegar the recipe suggests, since champagne vinegar seems more mild and would allow the flavors and acid notes of the perfect fresh tomatoes to come through. I sometimes get confused or just annoyed when TV chefs remind you to use a "good vinegar" instead of just "vinegar." They don't take the effort to explain the difference.

The recipe said to use the blender, but after my blender disaster, I decided I'd stick to the trusty Cusinart food processor.

The recipe called for a couple of pieces of fresh bread. I forgot to buy bread, but I had some breadcrumbs I made a few weeks before. I used them. This is a recent cooking revelation of mine: home made fresh breadcrumbs taste so much better than the store bought ones in the can -- try it. All you do is grind the bread up in the food processor, dry them out on the counter or in the oven and you're done.

After spinning it all together in the blender or in my case the food processor, the recipe suggests putting the whole slushy mess through a strainer. I think this would refine the soup and pull out the tomato skins and bigger pieces of cucumber pulp.

I had intended to follow this step, strain out all that pulp, but R* and I were already eating our gazpacho-slush straight out of the food processor. There was something comforting about eating this soup as is.

"A country-style soup," I said. "Rustic."

"Like baby food," R* said, "but it tastes really good."

I ladled the soup into our bowls, adding a bit more water, while R* cut the avocado into a beautiful fan. With some cheese and crackers and a bubbly rose, this was a great dinner.

Monday night, I was feeling less inspired (hence the bad photo). Still, we ended up with a good quick hot weather supper. I call it Scrambled Egg Supper, but maybe there's some fancier references to this somewhere? Though I don't love the stuff, I tossed some mesclun mix from Gourmet Garage with some Dijon dressing and a local tomato. I made a ring of salad around the outside of our dinner plates.

Meantime, I whisked 4 eggs with salt, pepper and cream (left over from my ice cream making adventures). I poured the eggs into a non-stick pan on medium high heat. As soon as the eggs hit the pan, I lowered the heat and once they were half cooked, I turned the heat off. Don't over cook your scrambled eggs, people

I put the scrambled eggs in the center of a plate, surrounded by the salad. For a great finish, I crumbled some Grana Padano cheese on top of the whole thing. I never tried Grana Padano before, but it was featured at Gourmet Garage as a mild alternative to Parmigiano-Reggiano and I remembered all the ads for Grana Padano on Lidia's PBS show, so I tried it. The dry crumbly texture of the cheese goes very well with gently scrambled eggs and with some rose wine.

How about you? Are your kitchens closed until we at least get down to 90 degrees? Would you ever serve eggs for a summer supper?

I don't understand salad anymore

2006-08-01T13:22:00.000-04:00

I'm sick of the preamble about the heat that seems to stick to the start every conversation today. The more you talk about it, the hotter it seems to get, but as it gets warmer and warmer, I wonder what everyone else is cooking for dinner? It's easy enough to say salad. But really, salad?

Do you hate salad? I get to the point where I do. (I'm not talking about potato salad, egg salad, pasta salad. I'm still into the mayonnaise side of salad, if they can really be called salads.)

I feel the same way about green salad that I do about Star Wars: I don't get it, other people are all over it, but I just stand their nodding and wondering what I'm missing. Washed pre-bagged salad tastes like eating drycleaner bags to me. And "that mesculn mix" is just that: this mess of expensive leaves, it used to taste special, but now its wilting from over-exposure. Ubiquitous mesculn mix, like the cosmo, seems totally '90s to me. Is it that my tastes have changed or has the quality of this spring mix stuff declined?

The greens from the organic stand at the Saturday Grand Army Plaza farmer's market are a crisp exception. They have coolers full of beautiful leaves -- miniature kale and all kids of good stuff. I promise I will pay more attention to their stand this Saturday, even if they are a bit snobby. The problem, I've noticed, is that their leaves only last for a day or two max. You have to get the leaves home and right into the fridge. I put a paper towel in the back with the to sop up any excess water. That seems to extend the life of the leaves bit.

Another obvious alternative is to buy greens the old-fashioned way and wash them and cut them up. Sure, I could do that, but being real . . . at the end of a long day, this seems like too much effort for not enough flavor.

On the last episode of Jamie Oliver's show (it's on in re-runs in the middle of the night on Food TV and I DVR it) he made a Crunch Salad with baby carrots and radishes and sprouts and best of all -- no lettuce. Then he coated it all in a rich, creamy dressing. That looked good and made me long for his knife skills and the assistants he must have to get that many great vegetables together. R* said he likes sprouts and ate them often when he was in Australia. I ordered some sprouts from FreshDirect, so I'll give them a try tomorrow.

Here at my office building the fire safety warden just came over the emergency broadcast speakers: "Conservation is key on this brutally hot day." He wants us to turn the lights off in unoccupied areas of the building. We've done that already, of course.

I'm a bit worried about the possibility of a power cut, as R* and his English friends call them, over the next couple of days. Let's see what happens . . . and I'll distract myself by thinking about what to cook.

When you get too greedy with farmer's market tomatoes

2006-07-26T18:09:00.000-04:00

Like many bloggers, I use SiteMeter to track the keywords that drive visitors to my site.

Yesterday, I upgraded my SiteMeter account and started paying for their service. Now I can see more in depth analysis of the keywords people use to find my blog.

As you can see from the screen shot, while a few people are holding out for tuna surprise (I wonder who bakes a tuna casserole in July?) or dishwasher fish (this makes more sense, right? You've already got the dishwasher on. Rather than turning on the oven and creating more heat, do the fish in the dishwasher) most visitors are Googling summer sauce words including: tomato, basil, pasta, and fresh sauce.

These hungry searchers are finding there way to the post I wrote about my farmer's market fresh tomato sauce. So here's another post for those searchers. Give the people what they want, right?

Today, the new farmer's market column in the New York Time's Dining section shares a recipe for a unique kid-friendly pasta salad that uses tomatoes, both fresh and oven roasted.

Best of all, the article claims that this pasta salad isn't bland. I hope not. I've abandoned pasta salad because so far, all of it is either bland or tastes overwhelming of balsamic vinegar or some other Wishbone concoction.

This recipe seems like a savvy opportunity to use up all the tomatoes that I buy with the best of intentions, each time I go to a farmer's market. Then I ignore them as they sit on my counter (never in the fridge, don't put your tomatoes in the fridge -- that makes them turn mealy) for a week or more. By the time I get back to them, the poor fresh tomatoes are too ugly and shrunken to eat raw . . . but they are expensive and I feel bad about throwing them away. Bonus points to this recipe for also calling for corn on the cob, the item I'm second-most-likely to buy too much of at the farmer's market, after tomatoes.

Well, I be lucky enough to have life align where (a) i have extra tomatoes (b) i have 4 to 6 hours to roast them and I'm willing to turn on the oven (c) i'm up for serving that summer old-stand-by pasta salad, this is just the recipe for me.

((There used to be a 'back-door' that would allow bloggers to link to Times content. Does anyone know if this is still available? If it is, please let me know. In the mean time, I'm posting the recipe here directly, since links to the Times go dead in a week. I wish the New York Times could be more Epicurious-like and allow us free access to all their recipe content.))

Enjoy this recipe . . . and if you make it before I do, let me know how it turns out!

Recipe: Summer Pasta
Time: 4 to 6 hours (mostly for roasting tomatoes)

FOR THE ROASTED TOMATOES:
2½ pounds tomatoes (may be imperfect or overripe)
2 tablespoons olive oil1½ teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons sugar

FOR THE ASSEMBLY:
Salt 1 pound pasta like farfalle, penne or fusilli
4 to 6 cloves garlic, finely minced and mashed
2 tablespoons melted butter
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2 ears corn, raw if very fresh, or lightly steamed
2 pints cherry or grape tomatoes (preferably low-acid orange or yellow), halved or quartered
12 ounces fresh mozzarella or Valley Shepherd Jersey Fresh Mixte, diced (see note)
¼ cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano1 cup mixed herbs, torn into small pieces (mostly basil, with a little purple basil, orange mint, summer savory and parsley).

1. For the roasted tomatoes: Heat oven to 275 degrees. Line a large baking sheet with parchment paper. Cut tomatoes into slices about ¾ inch thick, reserving ends for another use. Lay slices on baking sheet, and brush with olive oil. Sprinkle with salt and sugar. Bake 15 minutes, and reduce heat to 200 degrees. Continue baking, turning halfway through, until tomatoes are shrunken and chewy but not crisp, 4 to 6 hours. (They may be started in the evening and finished the next morning. After partial baking, turn off oven, leaving door closed. In the morning, if tomatoes are not done, reheat oven and continue roasting.)

2. For assembly: Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil. Add pasta, and cook until al dente. Meanwhile, chop roasted tomatoes very finely until they are almost a paste. Place in a large serving bowl, and add garlic, butter and olive oil. When pasta is cooked drain well, and add to the bowl while still hot. Toss well.

3. Stand ears of corn on end, and slice kernels from cobs. Add corn, cherry or grape tomatoes, mozzarella and Parmigiano-Reggiano to pasta-tomato mixture. Toss well. Add herbs, and toss again. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Yield: 6 to 8 servings.
Note: Valley Shepherd Jersey Fresh Mixte cheese is sometimes available at the Union Square Greenmarket.

Ramen noodles . . . not just for college students anymore

2006-07-23T19:39:00.000-04:00

Last week, when it got so hot, I stopped cooking. Then, after a few days, I took the unstoppable heat and the humidity as a kitchen challenge.

I decided I'd run into one grocery store, grab what I needed and get home to get the air conditioner blasting.

I decided I'd make soba noodles with vegetables and mint. That plan melted down as soon as I got inside D'Ag's grocery store. The snap peas were $4.99 a box, though they had already started to brown. So even though they were a key part of the recipe, I skipped the peas. The mint looked fresh so I got some, alone with some carrots and scallions, as called for in the recipe.

They didn't have soba noodles either. I tentatively picked up some ramen noodles, then I put them back on the shelf. I was hooked on ramen noodles in college. My parents bought them for me by the case at BJs. I ate the ramen noodles raw, like chips.

Since graduation, I've done my best to quit ramen noodles and serve my pasta cooked. In a rush and unwilling to go to another store in search of soba, I found these Chinese Noodle ramen noodles. I was hoping these would be less greasy than the ramen of my past and they were.

Some salad recipes encourage you to use summer squash raw. I don't like that, so I steamed them. I think steaming brought out the sweetness in the squash, but I think I over-steamed them a bit. I'll work on that for next time. I chopped up the mint, scallions and the carrots. At first I cut the carrots into little match sticks, then I tried some with the carrot peeler like Martha suggested. I'm not sure which I liked better. The peeled slices look better with the noodles, but personally I don't like eating carrot 'peels'. Eating carrots cut with a peeler makes me feel a little like a human garbage disposal.

I made the dressing as the recipe directed, except I substituted regular soy sauce for the tamari soy sauce. (I've had tamari almonds before, but I don't know the difference between regular and tamari soy.)

I found a couple of cucumbers in the back of the crisper, so I threw them in too. They ended up being my favorite part!

The ginger and the mint were great together, hot and cool flavors, pulled together by the sesame oil dressing. Perfect one bowl dinner for a hot night. We ate right in front of the air conditioner.

I'll stock up on soba noodles before the next string of 90 degree days strikes and in the mean time I have to do something with all that mint.

For 353 more(!) ramen recipes, click here.

Adventurer of Ice Cream, Part 1

2006-07-22T17:46:00.000-04:00

I'm making, er, I was making basil ice cream based on this recipe from Epicurious.

I put the bottom pieces of the blender pitcher together in the wrong order. As I lifted the pitcher to pour the custard back into the pan, the bottom of the pitcher fell away and sent my blend of exotic smelling milk, sugar, chopped basil, and egg yolk all over the counter and the floor. All over.

It green-gushed everywhere: my glasses, the dish towel drawer, the cat and in coated the cabbage I started working on for supper.

Since R* is on Long Island for the day managing a friend's moving sale, I decided to dedicate today entirely to researching and making ice cream (and trying to get Sears to fix the dishwasher). I'm trying to create my entry for The Best Lick ice cream recipe contest at Apartment Therapy Kitchen.

My plan was that I would make three kinds of ice cream today. I would try existing recipes for a custard-based basil ice cream and then a Philadelphia-style berry ice cream. Then, based on learning from those tests, I would start developing my own recipe building on what I discover in my testing.

After steeping the basil in warm milk, the recipe says to use the blender to chop the basil leaves into very small pieces. Then, the recipes says to use a hand blender to mix the rgg yolks and then incorporate them all together. Since the blender was already dirty from step one, I thought the blender could be used for the rest of the steps, keeping the hand mixer out of things all together. I wonder if the Epicurious recipe recommends using the blender for only one step and the moving on to the mixer is because blenders, especially the cheap-o kind I have that I really only meant to use for margaritas, are unstable.

So far I've learned:
[] I didn't know how to put the blender together correctly. It frustrates me from time to time, but I now admire the genius of how the Cusinart only works when each piece is lined up properly.
[] As soon as I got back from the farmer's market with my blueberries and lemon basil, I wrapped a blueberry in a basil leaf and bit. The taste was not encouraging. Too bitter, too vegetal. After that mess of flavors cleared though, there was a bright clean lemon basil taste with an almost cinnamon-like blueberry taste. These are the flavors that I need to fight out of my ingredients as I cook.
[] I'm wondering if I should add lemon zest to exaggerate the flavor of the lemon basil. I'm trying not too -- I think it would be exciting to get a perfume of lemon without using any. A little trick. One problem with that is that people who don't have access to lemon basil will not be able to make the recipe as I'm testing it.
[] I tasted blueberries at four different farmer's market stands this morning. The mouth feel, size and taste of the berries varied much more than I expected.
[] The smell of the lemon basil in the milk is amazing, reminding of the perfect lemon panna cotta J and I had at Dona last week. Since my spill, the whole apartment has that sunny lemon smell.
[] The color though, I'm not so sure. At first glance, I thought it was a beautiful pale pea color. Once it was all over my counters, it looked like bile or a McDonald's shamrock shake that was abandoned in the back seat of the car.

Bail out the dishwasher. It's not a barrel of fun.

2006-07-22T04:27:00.000-04:00

After going years without a dishwasher, I immediately fell for this Bosch dishwasher (Stainless Steel Bosch Appliances 24 in. Built-In Dishwasher with SENSOTRONICÃ™ Wash, Model SHX46A05UC). It cost much more than I had budgeted, but I figured I could find a less expensive fridge (who needs a post-grocery shopping quick chill mode anyway?) and spring for it. I lovedthe Bosch's minimal look with all the controls tucked inside the door and its ability to manage plates and wine glasses on both racks, perfect for parties.

Whenthe dishwasher was installed, R* and I had a running joke about not being able to tell if it was on our not, that's how quiet it ran. And all my dishes, even bowls with dried chocolate frosting stuck to the sides and a Pyrex meatloaf pan, came out perfectly clean.

Until about a month ago, I only had one quibble with the dishwasher: At the end of the cycle it beeps and beeps. If you don't come running to shut it off, it keeps blaring like an alarm clock with a snooze bar gone wild. I learned to babysit the beeping and then found out that some models flash a red beam of light on the floor, rather than giving an audio alert. If you're dishwasher shopping, look for that feature.

Now I have two much bigger concerns. I bought this dishwasher from Sears late last summer for almost $1,000 and had it installed in November. After less than eight months of light use, it isn't draining or drying the dishes and there is a crack in the plastic surrounding the on/off switch. Water can seep through this crack into the digital control panel.

Sears repair center (1-800-4-MY-HOME) has been difficult to deal with on this repair project. Since I work during the week, I need them to come on weekends. They, of course, are booked 3-4 weeks out for weekend service and the Long Island-based repair people don't like coming to Brooklyn. Last time, we stayed at home a whole sunny Saturday and when repair guy showed up at 6 p.m., said he had to order parts and would be back in about three weeks.

Finally, tomorrow's the day. I called Sears tonight to confirm. Mrs. Palmer in Texas, a supervisor at Sears customer service who appreciates "one more chance to get this right", told me that I'm the first stop on the repair team's run. I'll let you know what happens.

"Tub won't drain" says one reviewer who also had a bad experience with this Sears "lemon." Does anyone else have a problem with this or another Bosch dishwasher? I thought I did my homework before I bought this appliance, so I'm so disappointed.

Farmer's Market Fresh Tomato Sauce

2006-07-13T14:45:00.000-04:00

Red is one of my favorite colors. If you came over to my apartment for dinner, you'd see that I have a collection of red-painted flea market chairs around the farm table. On the chocolate brown wall above my bed, I have an abstract painting of a swirling, red circus big top. I have a closet full of red Ikea flower pots, red placemats and candles.

My fascination with dragging bring red things home extended to the Grand Army Plaza farmer's market. I bought tomatoes from three different stands.

First a confession: I don't love tomatoes. I don't know if I should blame that on the under-ripe seedy, slimy and sour tomatoes we find at the grocery store for most of the year or if I blame it on tomato overload at a young age. In a patch of the backyard where the previous owners og our house had an above ground swimming pool, my parents grew Big Boy and Early Girl tomatoes.

For the past two or three summers, I've been more intersted in tomatoes. While I still skipped standard tomatoes, I found myself falling for quirky heirloom tomatoes. I'd tentatively cut into their gnarled bumps and humps, shake on some salt and pepper and slurp them up. Still, I wasn't really a tomato guy. Last Sunday, though, I couldn't help myself. There was so much red.

When I got home from the market and posted this, I realized how many tomatoes I'd bought. Too many to slice and eat in sandwiches, too many for a salad.

Sunday night, I decided I'd make a fresh tomato sauce. After looking at a few recipes, I got to work in the kitchen. It was hot and we were hungry so I wasn't up for a lot of messing around. The results of my quick work were my favorite thing I'd made in a while. Here's what I did:

I put a red Le Creuset ~~double boiler~~ Dutch oven on over medium heat with some Trader Joe's olive oil. I deliberately didn't add onion or garlic since I wanted full-on fresh tomato flavor.

I put a second pot of water over to boil for my angel hair pasta. I cut the cores out of three tomatoes (who really needs a corer?) , which together weighed just over a pound, with a paring knife and then chopped them up. Unlike grocery store tomatoes, these the meat of the tomato, the seeds, the juice all hung together.

When the oil was warm, I added my tomatoes and I let them cook on medium-low for about 10 minutes, adding salt and fresh cracked pepper. When the tomatoes were almost done cooking, I added about 3 springs of fresh cinnamon basil leaves, which I had carefully washed, pulled from the stems, and given a rough chop.

I decided to skip peeling the tomatoes. The biggest pieces of skin clung to the side of the pot and I picked those out as the sauce cooked down. I let the sauce cook for a few more minutes while the angel hair finished cooking. Then I put the pasta on a platter, put the sauce on top and we were ready for dinner.

The cinnamon basil went especially well with the tomatoes, as the guy who sold it to me at the farmer's market promised. I find regular basil to be overpowering: soapy, medicinal or too green tasting. The cinnamon basil is more complex, but still lighter. Unlike the lemon basil I also tested, the cinnamon basil flavor didn't ease up when cooked.

I called R* over to the kitchen island and we ate it all sitting right there. I served this angel hair with fresh tomato sauce with a side of steamed yellow squash.

"You can taste the freshness," R* said. And that's the best summary for this simple, rich red summer supper.

UPDATE: If you're looking for another summertime fresh tomato recipe, try this.

[Links] "Don't Cry for Me, Sausage Pizza"

2006-07-10T19:27:00.000-04:00

R* and I have been waiting for this for months! Tonight we're going to see Madonna at the Garden.

Searching for a connection between me seeing Madonna live for the first time and my food blig, I found this: "Do you want divas with that?" via The Amateur Gourmet. The post, written by a fellow Brooklynite, is about two guys on a road trip dreaming about opening a pizza place in the Village, where every pie is themed on Madonna hits. Check it out!

My favorite:
Ray of Lite (Whole wheat crust, soy cheese, spinach, broccoli, grilled chicken)

Links: We like dinner parties and roller coasters

2006-07-10T19:08:00.000-04:00

Dining on Coney Island:
Over the 4th of July holiday, R* and I went to Coney Island. We went to the side show, watched people Shoot the Freak while we sucked down some great gelato, and we rode the Cyclone for the first time. The Nathan's fries were so much better than the fries at Nathan's in JFK international departure terminal and the one squished next to a Dunkin' Donuts in Penn Station. We didn't take the camera with us, so I didn't blog our trip, but I found this great description of Coney Island eats this morning. I'm going back to Coney Island next month to see a Cyclone's game with Dad (Happy Birthday, Dad!) and we'll search for this pistachio soft serve then.

Dining with an actual famous person with quasi-royal connections:
R* and I haven't had a dinner party all summer and I still haven't seen The Devil Wears Prada, so I lapped up every detail of this dinner party with an unnamed fashion personality on one of my favorite New York blogs. Is it really true that the proper way to eat asparagus is with your fingers?

Ricotta regret

2006-07-10T10:08:00.000-04:00

I tried two ricotta related recipes last week: Martha Stewart's rigatoni with swiss chard and my own spin on a ricotta and quinoa stuffed zucchini recipe from Chocolate and Zucchini.

After considering the possibility of replacing the ricotta with cottage cheese, I decided I'd stick to the recipe's original intent and try the ricotta. I picked up a big tub of Sorrento ricotta and got to work. I had only cooked with ricotta once before, when I made lasagna at my parent's house. Though that didn't turn out too well -- my lasagna was bland at best -- I still tired to be hopeful.

While the flavor combinations in both taught me new ways to use all the vegetables available in the summer season (quinoa and zucchini! white wine, red pepper flakes and rainbow chard!), the ricotta nearly ruined both dishes.

I thought ricotta would be a new way to support tender early summer vegetables from the farmer's market. I expected it to be creamy, but it was gritty. I thought it would have a mild dairy taste, but the flavor was more like old water.

I wonder if there's a fancier, better, fattier version of ricotta I should have been using? I'm hoping the ricotta Clotilde cooks with in Paris is better that what I picked up at the supermarket. Anyone have some ricotta revelations?

When I get home, I'll look at the fat content of the ricotta and check the expiration date. Too bad I only thought of this now.

Links:
KQED food blog: "I for one will probably never (well, maybe in a pinch) purchase a tub of store-bought ricotta again."

I went a little crazy at the farmer's market today

2006-07-08T16:41:00.000-04:00

I might have gone a little overboard at the Grand Army Plaza farmer's market today. I got two pints of blueberries, lots of tomatoes, yellow squash, some chard, baby red potatoes, shelled peas, a yellow pepper, kirby cukes, eggs, eggplant and three different kinds of basil: lemon, cinnamon and red rubin.

As soon as I got home, I made some bacon, tomato and basil sandwiches and scrambled eggs for lunch.

I really liked the combination of the lemon basil with the tomatoes and some Hellman's mayo, but I don't R* was so sure. I was excited to crack into the eggs, but I was disappointed that they didn't have the deep orange yolks like the farm fresh eggs we had in the UK.

What are my plans for the rest of it? I could use some help.

I'm going to take a second try at the grilled eggplant recipe from Wednesday's New York Times. I'd like to find a way to feature the fresh peas. Summer squash is my favorite summer vegetables, but I don't like it cooked with tomatoes and I haven't had much luck grilling it and I hope I can find ways to use all that basil before it wilts.

I'm going to make a blueberry pancake bundt cake, a salad of cold yellow beans and the orange pepper with a vinaigrette, and pasta and chard with ricotta. What else?

I thought the red rubin basil was beautiful, I loved the smell of the lemon basil and the guy at the stand said the cinnamon basil was amazing in pasta sauce. I couldn't decide which kind to get. I asked if I could get a pack with a little bit of all three kinds and the guy agreed. I'm wondering if I could come up with a drink or a dessert for the lemon basil and the blueberries?

Breakfast for dinner

2006-07-06T21:44:00.000-04:00

Breakfast for dinner just sounded so good tonight. Whole wheat pancakes with fresh blueberrys, real maple syrup, and good bacon. It hit the spot.

Last weekend, I decided I'd forget about my personal anti-blueberry bias. I threw some blueberries into a yogurt cake I made for a 4th of July picnic. Inspired by The Amateur Gourmet, I decided the bluberries would make my cake seem 4th of July-ish somehow.

As I popped the cake out of the pan, I scraped my finger around the inside of the baking pan and scooped up a few of the warm blueberries from the bottom of the cake into my mouth. I didn't think I'd like it, but the blueberry juice was wine-y but also earthy and even a bit herbal. Suprisingly delicious.

I put the rest of my New Jersey fresh blueberries to work in tonight's pancakes. For the batter, I used whole wheat baking mix from Trader Joe's. I followed the package directions and added some vanilla and a tablespoon or so of Hodgson's Mill ground flaxseeds. Ground flaxseeds aren't the kind of thing I normally have on hand, but we got them in our goodie bag from when went to the Martha Stewart show. I thought the flaxseed might make the pancakes taste a bit more wheaty and flaxseed supposedly helps to cut bad cholesterol. That might make having bacon and pancakes a little more acceptable. This batter puffs up perfectly, but I think the Hodgson's Mill whole wheat buttermilk panckaes I've made before taste better than the Trader Joe's version.

My favorite grocery store brand of bacon is Boar's Head. I think it has a more natural, old-fashinoed smokey taste that the other brands that are regularly available don't have.

I had fun cooking this on the griddle that came with my Kenmore stove. This is only the second time I've used this grilldle. I'm not sure if I'm using it right. My stove has four seperate burners but doesn't have a 'bridge' to heat the space between the burners. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be happy with having a cold spot in the middle of the griddle, or if I should put the griddle on across just one big burner, though that would mean the edges of the griddle would be cold. If you have a suggestion on how to use the griddle, could you post it here?

The flavor of blueberries and real maple syrup is a great combination. Check it out.

Check out the new Chowhound

2006-06-28T13:03:00.000-04:00

For a long time Chowhound was an independent online bulletin board site that focused mostly on restaurant reviews. This March, they were acquired by Cnet and I noticed today that they recently re-launched their site.

While I lurked around the old Chowhound site from time to time, looking for restaurants to take clients or seeking cheap and delicious lunch spots near the office, I never posted. I was intimidated to make my thoughts known among so many rabid overly obsessed foodie-types. Plus, the site was slow (because the founders struggled to pay for enough server-power to keep up with the growing fan base of their site), the interface was confusing and there wasn't a way to search through all of the information on the site. I liked Chowhound's retro text-based design, but it was too much work to use.

The redesigned site is slicker and easier to navigate. For those of us who aren't up for scrolling through pages of board posts, I'm excited to see their Digest feature. It looks like editors are posting the best of the boards here and adding their own commentary as well. Smart.

Before the re-design, I didn't even know they had a section devoted to Home Cooking. I have to spend some time there. Since Cnet also acquired Chow magazine, there's more to come, I'm sure.

Links:
Sramana Mitra: Interesting post on the biz reasons for large media companies to acquire food sites.
Village Voice: Interview with the founder of Chow Hound

Cookie Sheet v.s. Half Pan

2006-06-21T08:01:00.000-04:00

I don't love my cookie sheets. They just aren't that versatile. Sure, they work for baking cookies, but if I use them to roast vegetables, they are difficult to clean up. I put one of my cookie sheets in the dishwasher and ruined it -- it turned all rusty. And if I put them in under a casserole to catch overflow, they warp.

I saw these half sheet pans on sale at Bowery Kitchen Supplies in the Chelsea Market. They reminded me of the catering kitchen where I worked in high school. We used pans like these for roasting, baking cookies, lugging things back and forth to our vans, everything. But maybe they work better in commerical ovens than in home ovens? Anyone know?

I didn't buy one because I didn't want to lug a pan around with me all day on Sunday, but should I try one out?

I like how much more substantial these are compared to cookie sheets for the home-cook. This should make them easier to clean and less prone to warping. Are there down sides that I'm not thinking of? Please let me know what you think.

I found some interesting information on Martha Stewart's Baking Sheets 101. Is what she's talking about the same as what's in my photo above?

Double-thick aluminum half-sheet pans with rolled edges These pans cost from $11 to $15 and are ideal for everything from baking cookies, pastries, and breads to roasting cuts of meats and vegetables. Typically, half-sheets measure 13 by 18 inches-the perfect size, since most ovens have an interior rack that measures 22 inches wide (for optimal results, several inches are needed around the baking sheet for air to circulate). Similar baking sheets are available in smaller sizes. Quarter-sheet pans with rolled edges are the right size for many toaster ovens and are great for toasting breadcrumbs, nuts, and coconut in small amounts.

Western Beef is moving

2006-06-21T07:54:00.000-04:00

My trip to the Fairway in Red Hook

2006-06-17T22:01:00.000-04:00

I finally made it to the new Fairway in Red Hook last Friday afternoon. Getting there is quite a trick. As the ominous directions on their site say the new store is "at the end at the water's edge." I was hoping I could get there by boat, but I found out the water taxi only runs on the weekends, though they have just announced a special $5 fare for Fairway shoppers.

A sign just inside the door explained that first-time visitors to their "big, dumb" store could follow the yellow arrows on the floor of the store to be sure not to miss anything. Grocery store dork that I am, I followed the yellow arrows all through the store.

The first part of Fairway, built in a former coffee warehouse, is not laid out in a standard aisle format. It winds around, from produce, through the prepared foods, the deli, meat and seafood departments and then the organic and specialty departments, with a layout similar to Stew Leonards, but much less corny. All of the meats, vegetables and produce seemed to be very high quality.

Continuing to wheel my big green car along the yellow arrow marked trip, I stopped to play with this Willy Wonka style organic peanut butter machine, in the middle of their organic store within-the-store. I wanted to buy some peanut butter just for the chance to play with the machine, but I quickly reminded myself that I still had plenty of organic peanut butter left from the huge shopping I did on my first visit to our new Trader Joe's. The organic section seemed to have many of the same bulk and specialty items I bought at the Park Slope Food Co Op. It even smelled like the food co op. This could be a good source for Brooklynites looking for organic and natural items, without so much drama.

I am a big Ina Garten fan and was interested to check out her her new line of products for the first time. A few of the Barefoot Contessa's pretty striped packages tip-toed into my cart, but the good old-fashioned price tags on the top of the boxes kept reminding me that these items were very overpriced: $8.99 for coconut cupcake mix and $11.99 for coffee cake mix, forget it.

Fairway also has a good selection of groceries from England, including Lucozade, a sort of more aggressively flavored carbonated Gatorade, which R* introduced me to on our last trip to the UK.

There were spirited signs hanging through the store. One sign convinced me to buy imported artichoke and garlic cream, which, according to the sign, could be slathered on chicken or served on bread. The information on a few of the signs was so helpful that I wished they had copies of them to hand out. These signs read like they were written by people who really cared about food and about Fairway shoppers. Too bad I can't say the same for many of the employee's who were working the floor the afternoon I was there.

I asked for help finding the preserved lemons. The first person I asked through I was looking for lemon preserves and took me to the jelly aisle, then he asked a co-worker for help and then a manager. After about 5 minutes of awkward waiting in the olive oil aisle, it turned out that they were all sold out of preserved lemons. I realize that preserved lemons are an obscure item. I've never bought them before and I know they are not in stock at most grocery stores in the city, even Fresh Direct.

The only reason I was looking for preserved lemons was because they are featured on Fairway's blog as one of the "ten things I must have on hand at all times" so I figured I would give them a try. The manager cursed when he got the word that the lemons were out. The Fairway blog is excellent and I hope they keep updating it.

The last part of the store on the yellow arrow tour is the more traditional part, with the standard aisles of paper goods, canned vegetables, snacks, milk and yogurt, etc. Next to the bakery aisle, there's a cafe with sandwiches and cakes and cookies. I had a decent apricot tart and an excellent iced tea.

Rather than buying food from the cafe, I suggest picking out a snack from the prepared food section which has more selection. The woman working at the cafe said you can buy anything in the store -- except beer -- and eat it on the outside deck.

While relaxing and soaking in the sun on the cafe patio, which doubles as a dock for the water taxi, I saw the Queen Mary 2 pulling out of its dock. You can see the Statue of Liberty just behind the boat in the picture above.

I left at about 5:30 p.m., just as the store was getting a bit more crowded. I asked the check out workers about crowding. They said the weeknights were pretty empty, but the weekends were "crazy."

The Fairway is by far the best grocery store in Brooklyn. I will be very interested to see how business at the store plays out. Will such a large store so far from public transportation be able to survive? With Ikea on the way, maybe Red Hook will grow up around the store.

Links:
Gowanus Lounge: Red Hook Transportation Problems
Brownstoner: Park Slope types whining about bike parking at Fairway
B61 Productions: What's up in Red Hook

Cooking fish in the dishwasher with Bob Blumer

2006-06-16T10:49:00.000-04:00

I was late for work today because the dishwasher repair guy showed up early. While trying to remain calm about a broken part on my beautiful if busted less-than-a-year-old Bosh dishwasher, I realized that this week is the 10 year anniversary of the start of the summer I spent interning at Salon Magazine in San Francisco. Back when I worked at Salon, it was called Salon1999.com. Having 1999 in the URL made the site feel futuristic at the same and there was some hairdresser in Texas who wouldn't sell them the Salon.com URL. Somewhere along the line they must have acquired the Salon.com link and ten years and four jobs later, I still work in Internet marketing.

The reason I bring this up on my food blog is that Bob Blumer wrote a weekly column for Salon called the Surreal Gourmet. Each we he had a new recipe, original drawing and copy about why he came up with the recipe and what he associated with it. Best of all, each recipe came with a secret tip, an adventurous way to expand the recipe and some (pre-iTunes) music to cook by.

I'm so thankful that Salon still has all of Bob Blumer's artwork and recipes still archived here. In some ways, what Bob started on Salon was a precursor to the food blogs of today.

I saw on his website that Bob has or had a show on the Food Network. I'll try to catch that. Has anyone else seen it? If you have, please post a comment below.

In the mean time, I'll be digging through his archive. The place where I lived in San Francisco had a disgusting kitchen and a big dog who lived there, so I never tried one of Bob's recipes, but I always loved the pictures. Now I'll have to try them out.

Here's a few highlights you shouldn't miss:
Spontaneous summer salad and an awesome centerpiece idea

Tips for grilling

Hummus to celebrate Ellen's Coming Out (totally 90s fun!)

Diet Coke and Mentos

2006-06-14T11:58:00.000-04:00

Am I the only one who has completely missed out on this craze? Why am I always the last to hear?

This isn't the kind of recipe I usually talk about on this site, but I can't resist. Apparently, when you mix four or five Mentos into a bottle of Diet Coke, you can create a geyser that shoots several feet into the air. Cool!

Now I've microwaved a Peep or two in my day, but this is even cooler. If I had a backyard, I'd be out there tonight trying this.

Murray Hill Steak Out

2006-06-12T14:06:00.000-04:00

One of the hardest parts of starting a new job is finding new lunch places. Places that have a fair price, pretty short lines, interesting food that break up the day a ltitle. I headed out today determined to find something great. A co-worker suggested that -- if I wasn't up for the cheap sushi place -- I walk down Third Avenue and check out all the places.

There were a bunch of pubs packed with people watching the World Cup (cmon England!) and a Patsy's Pizza. I almost went for the pizza, but I wasn't up for $12 for a small pie.

Then I found a tiny place with a window full of solid reviews and a delicious smell: Carl's Steaks.
I was sort of hunting for a make-your-own salad place, a standard part of work week lunches in my last job and I wasn't even too excited for a cheesteak after spending a good part of the weekend grilling hamburgers for a church picnic, but I decided to go for it.

I got a cheesesteak with provelone cheese and onions with a fountain Coke. This is the perfect sandwhich, the hoagie rolls was the right mix of moist with a crunchy crust, the onions were nicely gilled and the meat had lots of flavor. The cheese was nicely melted on top. Best of all there wasn't a lot of extra crap in the sandwhich. They don't need to hide the meat becasue it's so good. I also had forgotten how good a fountain Coke is, lots of ice served in a waxy paper cup. I think fountain soda tastes much better.

Weirdly Carl's long, narrow restaurant kind of feels like a barber shop. The all-male clientle was watching Wold Cup on two loud TVs. I didn't mind since I'm curious about soccer/football after my trip to the UK, plus the sandwhich took my whole attention.

After coming back the office, I did a quick Google to see what other people are saying about the place. They said that the biggest problem is that you get back to the office smelling like a cheesesteak. I didn't even notice, that's how good my cheesesteak is.

When I tell people I grew up in Pennsylvania, they sometimes ask me what my favorite Philly cheesestake place is. For now, I can say it's in Murray Hill.

Cream tea in Chaddesley Corbett

2006-06-11T21:22:00.000-04:00

While we were on vacation in the UK, R*'s mum made sure stopped for cream tea at the Chaddesley Corbett Post Office.

R* and his mum ordered hot chocolate and a scone. I was indecisive about the menu. I wanted to order the full cream tea, but didn't want to seems like too much of a pig. I already had a pasty while souvenir shopping in Kidderminster a few hours earlier.

Since I never had a real English cream tea, R* and his mum encouraged me to order one, so I went for it.

After a few minutes spent gazing out the tea room's beautiful picture window (you can see the big window in the far right of the picture below), the waitress came back to say that they were almost out of plain scones. She explained that the scones were homemade every day by a local woman. The order for the new day hadn't yet arrived.

She offered cheese scones as an alternative. Those also sounded good to me, but R* and his mum said that they would rather share the one order of plain scones.

We waited a few more minutes. There were some souvenir note cards with watercolor paintings of the black and white cottages of Chaddesley Corbett and some Chaddesley Corbett tea towels. R*'s mum explained that it's a tradition for some people to give tea towels from the villages they visit.

Then a man with two over-stuffed plastic shopping bags came into the room. He told us he had the new scones and asked if we wanted to go back to our original order of scones for three. Yes, we quickly said.

After a few more minutes, our food came out. The hot chocolates came first, in tall china mugs. Then my tea pot and the scones, served with clotted cream and raspberry jam. They came in a crescent-shaped dish, to hug my saucer.

I dug right in. I was trying to be tea room proper, but I couldn't help myself. I broke open my first scone and it was still warm in the middle. I started smoothing the rich clotted cream on to the scone and then the raspberry jam.

Then my British hosts politely stopped me . . . know why?

Six hour flight and four minute eggs

2006-06-06T15:15:00.001-04:00

I'm back after a week in the UK visiting R*'s mum and visiting the part of the country where he grew up and went to school.

Some critics might say that the UK is not the place for foodies to visit, especially outside of London. That of course is ridiculous and it didn't take me long to start making some new food discoveries in the UK.

R* had already been in the UK for work, and he picked me up at the Birmingham Airport and drove me to his mum's house in Kidderminster. It was about 8:30 a.m. when I got there and she had breakfast waiting: Alpen cereal, grain toast, Golden Shred marmalade and four minute eggs.

How awkward. I wasn't quite sure how to eat the four minute egg his mum served me. R* and his mum started discussing the merits of the precise number of minutes the egg should be cooked while I thought about the best way to whack into the egg and spoon some out. I wasn't too sure about eating a raw-ish egg. Would it be slimy?

I had heard of soft-boiled eggs and "dippy eggs" before. I even own a couple of egg cups from an Italian pottery store in North Beach, San Francisco. My egg cups look like guys' faces. I bought them as a souvenir from a visit to see XN because I thought the egg cups looked like me and R*. I use the egg cups to hold peppercorns.

They looked expectantly at me and then, sensing my awkwardness, R* explained it to me. He showed me how to use the side of the small silver spoon to tap into the egg and make a hole in the top of the egg shell. Then sprinkle salt and pepper into the hole in the eggshell. You can then use spoon to eat the egg, or dip a strip of toast into the egg. R* calls those strips of toast "soldiers."

His mum laughed and said he was too old for her to cut out his "soldiers" for home, but if he wanted to do it, he could do it himself. Since this was my first visit to their house, I was nervous about getting crumbs or egg on the table cloth or cloth napkin, so I cautiously dipped in with a spoon. I went back for a second spoonful, breaking through the orangey yolk.

The egg was velvety and rich, fresh and smooth, not quite like anything I had tasted before. Both the free-range eggs and the grain bread, his mum explained, were from the garden center and grocery about a block away from her house.

Now that I'm back I need to seek out some free-range farm fresh eggs and have a go at making them too.

Kitchen's Closed

2006-05-26T18:36:00.000-04:00

Hey, I'm flying out tomorrow afternoon. I'll be meeting R*'s friends and family in Birminghman and Kidderminster in the UK for the next week. I'll be taking lots of photos in grocery stores, restaurants and checking out the food scene there. I'll post when I get back. See you soon.

Two treats from Jersey

2006-05-21T19:32:00.000-04:00

My friend J called to say she would be in the neighborhood to see her husband play in a band. While we keep in touch every day on email, IM and text messages, we don't get that much time to see each other IRL (in real life). J lives on the other side of Brooklyn which because of the way the subways run, might as well be the other side of the moon.

We've been helping each other along with cooking conundrums for the past couple of years and I thought it would be fun to cook something that shared a little bit of what we'd learned. Plus, with R* traveling through the UK and away for almost a month, cooking away for J would be a great distracting.

I started at the Grand Army Plaza farmer's market and finally, after a long winter, found real local farmer's market offerings. Bye bye apples and pears, later potaters. This week, along with the asparagus and spinach that had been in for a couple of weeks, they had strawberries and sugar snap peas. Neither of them were part of what I had planned to make for our supper, but after I stole a taste, they were too great to pass up.

I left the farmer's market with a pint of strawberries, half a shopping bag of snap peas and some cheese. R* and I don't usually like to wait in the cheese line, but I decided I'd wait patiently and read flyers about how the mom-and-son-cheese-team raise their 25 cows in CT.

Walking toward the butcher, I keep tasting a strawberry and then some peas and then another strawberry and then a pea. I was impressed with how great both of them were.

Sesame oil and soy immediately came to mind for the sugar snap peas. I couldn't shake that idea. But these peas were too good to be hidden under all that sort of take-out style flavoring. I wanted something fresher.

I switched to thinking about the strawberries. Short cake would be the way to go. I thought about sneaking some Bisquick to make the biscuits in a split, but then I decided I wanted this all to be from scratch, "real" cooking that still left me most of the day to wander around Park Slope.

Then I remembered Clotilde's yogurt cake from Chocolate and zucchini. I decided it would be great under the strawberries with some home-made whipped cream from my new Kitchen Aid. By that time, I made it to the butcher.

The butcher was oddly empty. I guess when the weather gets better, people don't go to the pork store or something? I asked for the broccoli rabe sausages, which R* and I got last time were were there. The guy slicing prosciutto in the back called out, "That's special order. We can make it but we need 24 hours notice." Since they had had the broccoli rabe sausages the past couple of times I was in there, I was surprised that they said it was special order. The guy behind the counter suggested the parsley and cheese sausage.

I had seen the parsley and cheese sausages at the butcher for a couple of years, but I never tried one. They are a tight circle of thin sausage, wound into a circle and stuck into place with 4 dowels. They showed huge circles of sausage in the case, but they came up with one that was smaller, just right for J and me.

Another guy started loading up the fresh mozzarella bin on the top of the butcher case. Just made it, he said. I told him how much I liked there cheese, but said I wasn't up for it today. "It's still warm, makes a big difference. You'll see." I said no but then I caved and got the cheese and the sausage and got out of there, but not before they also had me try the balsamic ravioli -- which is cold ravioli with sun dried tomatoes in a balsamic sauce. I was surprised how dry it was and the dried tomato was tough and stringy. I thanked him for the taste and left.

Next up was the wine store Red White and Bubbly, Park Slope's entry into the overwrought wine store trend. Most NYC neighborhoods have a few regular liquor stores and then, popping up all over are these higher concept wine shops with tasting rooms and chandeliers and witty O. Henryesque descriptions attached to some of the wines.

It was Rose Day at Red White and Bubbly. Once I figured out what they were talking about, I realized I hadn't had pink wine since Bartles and James were around, so I decided I'd try. Light, fruity, served chilled in tiny little stem glasses. The tastes were fine, but I never know quite what to say to the reps pushing the wines in these snooty shoppes. I tried to make them feel appreciated, muttering out an "It's more bubbly" in response to one of the tastes.

The rep was quick to correct me. That "bubbly" was not the word, and she repeated some out wine term that means taste bubbly but isn't really carbonated. I can't remember what she said anymore. She pissed me off. She should have been glad I was paying enough attention to notice that her wine was more bubbly than what the other guy had. Then she waxed on about how some rose was from Israel, some from California.

Those tastings make me feel guilty, like trying 5 tablespoons of wine obligate me to buy some. When I first got in the store, I had read the story about one of the rose wines -- perfect for outdoor grilling on the terrace. I liked the picture on the bottle and it was $12, so I grabbed it in the spirit of Rose day though of course I don't have a terrace or a grill. The fruit, sweet, acid in all of the rose wines seemed like it would go with the sugar snap peas and the strawberries. I also got some orange bitters and a few other bottles. I can never get out of there for under $50.
I hauled my stuff home, started to look for sugar snap pea recipes and . . . fell asleep. I woke up with a lot of laundry and less than two hours until J was set to arrive.

I started the potatoes boiling for the German potato salad, then I mixed up the yogurt cake (i didn't take time to sift, just stirred it all up in a bowl and hand mixed and it was fine. better than fine!) for the strawberries and then boiled some water to blanch the peas. I had to pull the strings out of all of those peas. Then while the peas were blanching, I made an ice bath for them, as I had learned from my quick Google for sugar snap pea recipes. These peas, they say, need to be blanched very quickly and then plunged into cold water to keep their bright green color.

I tucked the peas into the fridge, took the cake out of the oven, changed the laundry and ran to the store to get bacon and parsley for the potato salad and cream for the whipped cream.

I made it to the store in back in 7 minutes, just as J arrived. We started talking and J somehow started organizing my spice drawer -- a project I hadn't tackled in the six months since the new kitchen was done -- while I sliced the strawberries and then tried to figure out how to shave Parmesan into the sugar snap peas. I couldn't find the cheese slicer and the slice thing on my grater didn't work well either. Remembering a tip from some food tv show or magazine, I used the vegetable peeler to get nice thin slices of Parmesan to go on top of the cold sugar snap peas. They were delicious.

Fairway now open in Red Hook, Brooklyn

2006-05-17T12:34:00.000-04:00

UPDATE: Click here for my review of the Red Hook Fairway.

According to The New York Times, the new Fairway grocery store in Red Hook opens today. Neither the Fairway Web site nor the Times article say how late they are open though, so I'm not sure if I'm going to trekk all the way there after work tonight.

And what a trek. Now, I live in Brooklyn and love Brooklyn and I confess to being a grocery shopping addict. I'm willing to lug bags full of Trader Joe's food home from Union Square on the subway and I faithfully endured all the eccentricities of the Park Slope Food Co Op for two years, but this new Fairway might be where I draw the line. Taking a boat or taking the subway to the bus to go to a grocery store just might be too much.

I'll try this commute at least once though, especially since the store looks so great. And I'll take some pictures and reports back.

If the 52,000 square feet store really is that hard to get to by public transportation, at least the lines shouldn't be too bad.

Pork Ribs for Mother's Day

2006-05-14T23:41:00.000-04:00

I woke up on Saturday morning with a voice mail from my mom: I'm standing in the grocery store and I'm wondering how you cook ribs. Your grandmother and I got ribs for the grill and we were wondering what you put on them.

I'd never made ribs before and I hadn't even had them in a restaurant in a long time, but I slowly warmed up to the challenge.

I returned mom's call from the Port Authority bus station. Mom picked up and I told her what time I would be getting in and, of course, she mentioned the ribs again.

She said we'd figure out how to make the ribs and go back to the store to pick up the ingredients later. I was so close to saying that it wasn't really warm enough yet to grill outside and that ribs are really an odd thing to have for Mother's Day anyway, but then she started describing the ribs she'd been having in restaurants lately. Tender, sweet and smoky, with a great sauce. Yum! I got on the bus and started getting into the idea of grilling those ribs.

Saturday night we went online to look for recipes. Since we wanted some time to plant flowers, we didn't want anything that was too time consuming. I was suprised to see that even the "EZ" recipes called for cooking the ribs twice. An hour or more in the oven, and then some time on the grill plus simmer time for the sauce. We decided that we'd try this recipe from Martha's Everyday Food.

The next morning, after a quick stop at the grocery store for spices (ugh, it sure is annoying to spend a lot of money on little bottles of spices when you want to try a new recipe), mom, grandma and I got to work in the kitchen. First I made the spice rub for the ribs, while they started peeling all those potatoes for the potato salad.

The spice rub smelled very strong, but the recipe exlained that you needed a strong spice rub to be able to withstand the hour and a half in the oven and then the time on the grill. To be on the safe side, we left a quarter of one of the racks of rib with no spice rub.

Then the ribs went into the oven at 400 degrees for an hour and a half. We cooked them in tightly covered lasagna pans. This way, we made sure no grease went over the sides of the pan.

While the ribs were baking, we went to work on the sauce.

My brother M seems to have enjoyed our bbq sauce.

While the ribs were in the oven and the sauce was cooking down, we used the time to start putting in some plants. Here's mom and grandma at work on the deck.

For our first try making ribs, I thought they came out pretty good. Next time, I try ribs I think I would use brown sugar to sweeten the sauce instead of honey. I also think I'd like some vinegar in the sauce.

We had two full ribs to serve six. It was just enough meat. One rack of ribs had a lot more meat on it than the other. Maybe there's something you can say to the butcher to get more of the meaty ribs?

I got the grill heated up to 400 degrees before I lowerd the heat down to medium and put the ribs on the grill. Heating up the grill that hot was a mistake. The ribs got just a bit too browned, but I saved them before they were burned. Pshew.

Maybe a little too spicy for some in the crowd, but they didn't mention it.

And their potato salad was excellent, one of my favorites. Happy Mother's Day, Mom and Grandma!

$2.99 lemonade and other summer drinks

2006-05-09T18:56:00.001-04:00

When I was 9 or 10, spending weeks of the summer with family in upstate New York, my aunt made us homemade lemonade by mixing Crystal Light lemonade according to the package instructions and then adding fresh orange slices on top. I still distinctly remember the way that lemonade tasted - the refreshing sour of the oranges and the super strong sweetness of the Crystal Light. That's the taste of summer to me!

She also made "sun tea iced tea" by putting tea bags and cold water into a cleaned-out mayonnaise jar and sitting it in a sunny spot on the back porch to brew. I don't know how the brewing method alone could leave a signature taste in the tea, but I sware you could taste the "sun" in that sun tea. My family called it "sun tea iced tea" to differentiate it from iced tea made with the store-bought Nestea powder. Like the Eskimos who have multiple names for snow because they have so much of it, our family created multiple names for iced tea since we drank so much of it.

All last weekend I had the perfect glass of lemonade and iced tea on my mind. I had some lemons left over from the tuna nicoise I made the weekend before, but I never took the time to juice the lemons and make a lemonade. CQ and R* aren't huge fans of iced tea, so I didn't try that either -- but maybe I can woo them with "sun tea iced tea" made on my fire escape, once the summer really heats up.

Yesterday, I had a lunch time doctor's appointment in Chelsea. This gave me the chance to pick up lunch at the Dirty Bird To Go. They've received so much buzz so I had to see what's up. I got the fried chicken, the dirty rice and a lemonade. I almost canceled the lemonade when I saw they charged a Starbucks-like gouging $2.99 for the lemonade, but their menu promised "homemade" so, though I don't think my aunt would of approved of the purchase and she would have been even less happy with how long I had to wait to get my food, I decided I would hold out. The chicken and rice were okay, way too much pepper for me, but the lemonade is the real story for me: the best lemonade I ever tasted. Strong fresh lemon flavor and sweetness that could somehow be luxuriously syrupy without being sicky sweet. How do they do it and, well, must they really charge $2.99 for it?

I think they used either turbinado sugar or brown sugar in their recipe. That must have been the source of the rich "down home" flavor in their lemonade. I wonder if they cooked the syrup or just blended the brown or turbinado sugar right into the water without heating it. Does anyone have their recipe or suggestions of other lemonade recipes to try?

Also, I've reached a small personal goal and I wanted to say thank you. The 1,000th visitor stopped by the Electric Stove today. So thanks for visiting the site and a big cheers (in the spirit of this post, we can use lemonade instead of champagne) to A Chicken in Every Granny Cart , Apartment Therapy: The Kitchen and Food Porn Watch for linking to me and introducing some new people to my Electric Stove.

Pennsylvania "Cookbook Empire"

2006-05-08T10:38:00.000-04:00

You'd think that most best selling cookbooks would come from New York City, home of Food Network and all the publishing houses. Instead, as today's the cover of today's NY Times points out, Phyllis Pellman Good has started successful "Fix-It and Forget-It" series out of her home in Lancaster, PA -- which is not so far from where I grew up and very close to where one of my brothers now lives.

Congratulations to Phyllis for making the front page of the Times.

I love cabbage noodles and make them at home using my own recipe that I made up as a I went along: egg noodles, cabbage, onions, butter, salt and pepper and lots more butter. I wonder of she has a cabbage noodle recipe for me?

In the article Christopher Kimball from Cook's Illustrated dresses down the sizzling new world of food media:

"I think the food media has been responsible for creating this whole world of faux food, and this is a media largely consumed by people who eat out six times a week," he added. "We are not all served by thinking of food as a special-occasion product."

Christopher "Killjoy" Kimball is right that cooking every day is a certain kind of discipline and home cooking isn't all about stainless steel appliances and impressing your friends with your wine selections. Still, I don't see what he gains -- besides being quotes on the cover of the Times -- from being such a wet blanket.

The patchwork potholders and kountry kanisters featured on the covers of these cookbooks have been enough to scare me away from them in the past, but I do like the easy to cook with spiral binding. The title also confused me since Fix-It and Forget-It sounded like it was related to Ron Popeil's "Set It and Forget It Rotisserie."

Tuna nicoise with some help from Trader Joe's

2006-05-03T11:13:00.000-04:00

Tuna nicoise salad is the first thing I ever cooked for R*. He came over to my apartment for a week night dinner, so I needed some that felt fancy and fitting but would also be flash-in-the-pan fast to serve since I would be racing home from work to get my impressive dinner together. I guess the tuna salad worked since we’re still together, but I hadn't made it since.

On Sunday I decided to take a second try at making tuna nicoise salad. I wanted a light and clean-tasting dinner so that we had plenty of room for the chocolate cake desert. Since I had a busy Sunday, I wouldn’t have a lot of time to cook and I wanted to focus most of my energy on the cake.

The tuna, of course, is the main draw of tuna nicoise. Finding fresh tuna is difficult and expensive. As I did when I first made it for R*, I got the tuna at Whole Foods. Buying the lettuce, lemons, olives, potatoes, Dijon mustard and all at Whole Foods got to be a pretty pricey dinner.

This time, I had Trader Joe’s on my side. I went to TJ’s first and picked up excellent baby roma on the vine tomatoes (I usually don’t like raw tomato at all except for hand these were delcious!), Dijon mustard, some decent haricot verts, and real nicoise olives. Feeling French, I picked up some cornichons too. TJ’s did have one pack of fresh tuna left in the meat section, but it looked a bit brownish-grey. I passed. I still needed little potatoes and lemons – I had seen both at our new TJ’s in the past, but the store was packed and picked over by the time I got out of brunch.

No worries. While waiting in the long but fast-moving line at Trader Joe’s, I figured out what else I needed. With Whole Foods right down 14th Street, I could get a great price on some parts of my salad from Trader Joe’s and then pick up the rest at Whole Foods. I ran through Whole Foods to get $25 fresh tuna, a bag of baby fingerling potatoes and a bag of organic lemons and got back in another line, feeling slightly weird about having three Trader Joe’s bags.

Nearly every subway to Brooklyn was out on Sunday, but I eventually found a cab home. I got in my apartment and got right to work blanching the haricot verts and boiling the potatoes and eggs. I got all the vegetables in the fridge and freezer, secret weapon of super cold salad construction, and got to work on the chocolate souffle cake. Our guest arrived just as I popped the cake into the oven.

We put our big platter out on the island and the three of us had fun art-directing and assembling our salad while the tuna seared away. By dredging the potatoes and haricot verts through the dressing before adding them to the salad, we made sure the whole salad was flavored with the dressing without drowning the fragile farmer's market greens.

Some notes I’ll remember when I make a tuna nicoise next time:
-- Take the hard boiled eggs out of the water faster, so they don't get that ugly dark edge around the yolks.
-- If you leave the olives in the freezer too long, they freeze rock solid.
-- There’s a lot of pit and not so much meat in TJ’s nicoise olive. Research olive options. If you don’t use nicoise olive, is a nicoise salad still nicoise?
-- There’s something so great about Hellman’s mayonnaise and the tuna. Instead of hiding the jar on the floor, I’ll incorporate mayo right into the design of the salad. Maybe some dollops on top of the eggs.
-- Some of the other recipes I’ve seen incorporate fresh herbs like chervil and tarragon. This could add some fun spark to the salad, but I wonder if it would break the great saline/clean/refreshing taste from just the tuna, olives and a little Dijon.

I love Edy's lemonade Fruit Bars

2006-05-02T11:46:00.000-04:00

Last night, walking home from the subway, my lemon craving took me over and wouldn't let go. I had to have an Edy's lemonade fruit bar popsicle. I ran to the grocery store -- hoping they would still be open -- and went straight to the frozen case. I saw what looked like a fresh shipment of Edy's. I saw Edy's Grape, Coconut, mixed berry flavors, Lime, Tangerine, but where was my favorite flavor lemonade?!?

I'll admit it. I dug into the freezer case, shuffled the other flavors around because sometimes the lemonade gets hidden behind the other flavors. No such luck.

I think my lemon craving was rooted in a post I read on Chocolate and zucchini about lemon curd earlier in the day.

Here's an email I sent to Edy's last night:

Hi Edy's,

I wanted to let you know that I am completely addicted to your Lemonade Fruit Bars, but they are all but impossible to find in my area. There are two grocery stores in my area that carry your fruit bars, but the Lemonade flavor always sells out. When I see them in the store, I stockpile and buy three or four boxes at once.

Our grocery stores in Brooklyn are so small. I bet they don't restock with your products all that often. The strawberry, grape, coconut and tangerine flavors are always there, but there is never enough lemonade. I've tried the tangerine in the past and it was okay -- with a taste very true to that of a real tangerine -- but I am not a big fan of tangerine. Last night, I bought a box of lime flavor and I had one (ok, I had two!) and they were pretty good. The flavor reminds me of a refreshing margarita, but still, nothing comes close to the Lemonade flavor.

I'm going to try Pathmark next since the store locator on your site says they carry the Lemonade flavor. I hope so.

Summer's about to start. Please send more lemonade flavor to your fans in Brooklyn!

Thank you.

My new favorite chocolate cake

2006-05-02T08:41:00.000-04:00

Ever since I bought our standing mixer, I've had ants in my pants, just so excited and anxious to use it. I've been searching for recipes that require a mixer, jumping from food blog to food blog to recipe sites and fast-forwarding through Tivoed episodes of the Martha show. For my first use of the mixer, I made pizza dough. The pizza dough came out great, but it was only in the mixer for a couple of minutes and really, though it would have been a big chore, I could have kneaded it by hand. This time I wanted something that really required the mixer's power.

I found this dark chocolate souffle cake on Well Fed and waited for the weekend to have enough time to cook it.

Whipping up the eggs (first the yolks and then the whites) for this dark chocolate souffle cake was the perfect test for our new mixer. I got to shift the mixer into high speed, listen to it make a satisfying noise and watch the egg whites beat into soft peaks. This is also the first time I've ever cooked with good chocolate (Ghiradelli from Trader Joe's) using a double-boiler. I used my cleaver to chop the chocolate into smaller chunks to help it melt faster.

Since I don't have a double-boiler and -- in spite of my addiction to all things All-Clad, don't really want one since it would be one more thing to store in my small apartment kitchen -- I jerry-rigged one from a glass mixing bowl and a four quart pot.

The recipe said you could melt the chocolate and butter right in a heavy bottomed pan, but this way I was sure not to burn anything, and since I could mix the cake right in the bowl I used as the top of my double-boiler, there was no extra clean up. Since I'm not a very confident baker, it was great to work from the recipe's excellent step by step pictures.

The cake is delicious. It is light and spicy from the cinnamon and Khalua with a very complex chocolate flavor. The thin crust has a meringue-like crunch and the eggy, gooey center melts in your mouth. I served it with a side of Trader Joe's cherry preserves. I'm wondering if red pepper or other flavors could be added or replace the cinnamon to build on that complex Mexican Hot Chocolate taste.

I've been searching for my signature chocolate cake and this might be it. It definitely de-thrones my previous favorite -- the recipes from the back of the Hershey's cocoa can. And it is much better than Shirley's Tunnel of Fudge and the dusty strange-colored chocolate cake I made for my grandmother's birthday from a Cooks Illustrated recipe. My only criticism is that it surely is "rustic" as Well Fed explained, rather than beautiful. This isn't something you can bathe in icing and write Happy Birthday on, but with full on flavor and a total baking time of under an hour, who cares?

Kenmore goes pro

2006-04-27T19:36:00.000-04:00

Sears is a little late to the professional appliance party. Long after Wolf, Viking, Blue Star have issued pseudo-professional lines for home use, here's the Kenmore entry.

I have a Kenmore Elite electric stove in my newly re-done kitchen. Reading the announcement about the new Kenmore Pro line in the New York Times this morning made me re-visit the decision I made last summer to go with a Kenmore Elite stove.

I am reasonably satisfied with my Kenmore's oven features, including a convection mode and the warming drawer, but the stovetop has a lot to be desired. My stove's ceramic-glass top lost its show room shine after I cooked with it just one time and, though I am not the most tidy cook, I think it is difficult to keep the stove top just passably clean. It is also takes a long time to get hot.

I chose the Kenmore line because it was recommended by Consumer Reports. My mom didn't think the Sears stove was a wise move . . . and she was right.

I can't help but to be a little bit annoyed since I bet that means they aren't making my stove anymore, so my new kitchen is already starting to get outdated, but maybe I should be happy I don't have the uber-industrial look?

If professional styled appliances will now be avilalbe for everyone at Sears will the high-style kitchen crowd start to move away from the restaurant kitchen look?

Trip to the Farmer's Market for pizza toppings

2006-04-23T10:52:00.000-04:00

After watching Wolfgang Puck make pizza on Martha Stewart's show earlier this week, I started getting excited for the weekend and my first chance to use our new Kitchen Aid mixer: pizza dough! R*, CQ and I are having our regular Sunday dinner together tonight and I thought it would be great to pick out a bunch of spring vegetable toppings.

Yesterday, after a stop at Tom's Diner for crab cakes and fried eggs, I headed out to the Grand Army Plaza Farmer's Market, between Park Slope and Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, determined to find what I would need to top four eight inch pizzas.

I was hoping for ramps, but the first thing I came across was spinach and scallions at the Phillips Farm stand. The rain-wet air had kept them looking springy crisp and green.

Next, at another stand, I found beautiful but picked-over Jersey asparagus. The one crate of asparagus, carefully wrapped in moist burlap, was definitely the star of the market: the Park Slopers were lining up to get at it, so I couldn't snap a photo of it. I don't know why people pulled all the thicker stalks out and only bought the pencil thin pieces. I think the thicker pieces of asparagrus will best stand up to the heat of the oven when I bake my pizzas. You should have seen how happy the woman behind me was when she saw I was going to leave her the last of the thin pieces.

He also had one lonely leek left. I grabbed it before anyone else could. Leek pizza? Sure, why not.

As I paid, the farmer (and this guy was the real farmer, who really grew the stuff he sold, it's great when that happens) who was running the stand said that he would have brought more asparagus, but that he thought that it would rain and close the market early, so he didn't bring too much of the good stuff with him.

I started to see that there wasn't going to be a large selection of vegetables for my pizza.

This week, the market was mostly about flowers and those apples they've been pushing all winter. (Nothing against apples, but I want the spring stuff!)

And the fish stand was out of shrimp, clams and scallops. I grabbed some potatoes -- I could use up the pesto I bought for ministrone soup a while back and make a pesto and potato pizza similar to what I discovered when I was interning in San Francisco.

I realized I needed some color, so I picked up some peppers. They aren't really a spring vegetable and they seemed a little over priced, but I went for it.

I started to head home, but then I decided I'd check the organic greens stand. I don't stop at their stand that often because I think the people who run the stand aren't friendly. Part of the fun of the farmer's market is talking to the vendors and learning from them. In the spirit of my pizza project, I thought I would give them another try.

I saw this elegant Red Russian Kale. The leaves are so finely detailed, each outlined in purple. I didn't think they would do well in the oven and the woman running the stand coldly agreed. Instead, I got some baby broccoli rabe and headed home to make the pizza dough.

Now, how best to combine these into three pizzas?

#1
Broccoli rabe
Roast garlic
Pancetta or prosciutto?

#2
Potato
Leek or Pesto?

#3
Spinach
Peppers
Scallion

Would the asparagus go better with #2 or #3 or should I make more than three pizzas? And what cheeses will work best?

Trader Gross

2006-04-20T13:57:00.000-04:00

It's been a wild week at work, so I haven't had time yet to take my new Kitchen Aid mixer out for a spin. Its sitting there on my kitchen counter, quietly, shining away.

In the mean time, with no time for real cooking, I've been raiding my stockpile from our new Trader Joe's, here in New York City.

On Tuesday night, I got home late. Walking up to my apartment, I smelled Indian food. I think someone had just had Chicken Masala delivered and I was jealous. I was too hungry to wait for delivery and then I remembered: I had Trader Joe's Palak Paneer in the freezer. I tore open the package and it got scary right away. The palak paneer was inside a long thin metal envelope, like astronaut food. I couldn't tear into it with my hands and it was even some tough going for my kitchen scissors.

Once I it out of the package, I knew I wouldn't be happy with this dinner. It was a disgusting brackish green color with little chunks of cheese sticking out. The long thin ice cube of curry was a weird shape too: too wide for any bowl I had handy and I thought if I microwaved it on a plate it could drip all over the inside of the microwave. Also, there wasn't any rice! I've learned that you need to pay careful attention to the frozen "meals" sold at Trader Joe's. Some come with rice or other sides and other's don't. Maybe selling curry without rice is part of what helps them keep the prices down.

I went ahead with microwaving it on a plate. I followed the directions on the packaging. It was still frozen solid, which is odd for my microwave since it's super strong. I keep microwaving away until the flat spinach iceberg gave up and melted.

It looked terrible and tasted worse. I've grown to appreciate super hot currys. R* grew up eating them at home in the UK and he's sweetly coached me on how to enjoy the spicy stuff. This palak paneer is not that. From the one tiny taste I could swallow it was just burning pepper hot with no nuance and no creaminess from the cheese. Just one look at it and R* said he didn't want to taste. Maybe some rice could have tamed it a bit, but I wasn't going to bother. I flushed it.

Next up: Since I bashed TJ's here, come back soon and I'll post on how much I love their brownie mix (see photo).

Carrot Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Icing

2006-04-17T15:42:00.000-04:00

Carrot Cake is my brother B's favorite and Wegmans makes a great one. This Easter, I decided to try to make my own, instead. I used this Everyday Food recipe. I like the baking recipes from Everyday Food because they are straight forward and don't require too much precision. My other brother M and I had fun making these and taking photos every step of the way.

I lost the bag of coconut somehow, but we went ahead and baked these without it. I think they came out okay. They seemed a bit eggy, where they might have been more cake-like. Also, since the only spice in them is allspice, their flavor is a bit one note. Some pineapple chunks or cinnamon or ginger might make these more exciting.

While we were baking M said he never knows how much batter to put in the cupcake papers to make the cupcakes look pretty. I agreed. I think I underfilled the cups this time. I should have baked one test cupcake first and then filled the rest of the cups according to my findings, but instead I just filled up the rest of the cups with extra cream cheese icing.

The icing -- just cream cheese mixed with powdered sugar with some vanilla -- was delicious.

Thank you, Easter Bunny

2006-04-17T12:51:00.000-04:00

R* and I went to my hometown of Lower Nazareth, PA this weekend to visit my parents and two brothers for the Easter holiday. Just as we had done for Black Friday and After-Christmas, we stopped by Kohl's to see what's on sale. They, again, had a big tempting display of Kitchen Aid mixers on sale. Just before I got to Kohl's, I had read that two other food bloggers just bought mixers and I read about this tour that David Lebovitz took.

So, after much thought (is there enough room in our small apartment kitchen? how much will I really use it? what color should I choose?) and a nudge from my mom, I bought my mixer in Onxy Black.

I wanted to tear it out of the box and start mixing at my parent's house, but I was quickly reminded that if I took it out of the box, I would risk loosing parts or scratching its perfect shiny finish. I had to content myself with the small cook book and brochures that came with it. Sadly, the recipe book that came in the box stinks. Most of the recipes in the book seem to be sponsored by food companies and none of them show pictures of the mixer in action. I surely wasn't going to make a Jif peanut butter and bacon pie as my first .

Its sitting on my counter, like a brand-new car in the garage, wanting for me to run it through its paces. I want first time using the mixer to be something exciting and fun, something that really shows off it's chops, but since this is a busy week at work, it can't be something that takes too much time or a lot of fancy ingredients.

Does anyone have some recipes to suggest? And, does anyone have any options about the pasta making attachments that can be added to the Kitchen Aid?

My Tuna Surprise

2006-04-13T14:00:00.000-04:00

It just wouldn't be Lent without the tuna noodle casserole. Growing up, my mom made this for at least a couple of Friday dinners each Lent. (She served frozen fish sticks some of the other meatless Fridays. Yuck!) Tuna noodle casserole is easy to make and fits perfectly somehow with the weather this time of year, the peas pointing toward spring, but supported in the gooey warmth of the egg noodles and mushroom soup. Still, after I moved from my parent's house, I stopped eating tuna casserole for two reasons.

First, I do not like cooking with pre-made meal starters, like Campbell's Mushroom Soup or Lipton Onion Soup Mix. Some people say I am crazy, but I think they have a strong chemical taste and have lots of salt and preservatives. I thought I might save money by cooking with these meal starters, but really they end up being more expensive than you think. When I made this last week, I paid about $2.50 for 2 cans of mushroom soup. For the same price, I could have bought fresh mushrooms and cream and butter to make my own. This is the approach they've taken at Cooking for Engineers.

And, secondly, "nothing says 50's housewife to me like tuna casserole" as Sarah at Slashfood says. Along with other mystery meats, tuna casserole has become the butt of a bad joke:
Guest: This casserole doesn't taste like tuna.
Cook: That's because there's no tuna in it.
Guest: Then why do you call it tuna surprise?
Cook: Surprise!

I made it for the first time last fall. R* and CQ were coming over for dinner and I was looking for something comforting and fast. I had a can of tuna hanging around and I ran to the store for some canned soup and noodles and voila -- tuna noodle casserole. I was a little awkward about serving it. Since they both grew up in the UK, they had never casserole casseole, though according to the BBC the UK's spin on tuna surpise mayonnaisemayonaise and red kidney beans. But, anyways, here's my tuna surprise: they both loved my tuna casserole. R* says this is his second favorite of all the dinners I make. His first fave is my meatloaf.

Here's my recipe for tuna casserole:
Put a pot of water over to boil for the noodles and hard boil 4 eggs. When the water boils, add 1 lb egg noodles. Boil them until just short of completely done, as per the instructions on the package.

While the water is boiling, there's time to put together the rest of the casserole:
In a sauce pan on medium-high, mix two cans of Campbell's Condensed Mushroom soup with 1.5 cans full of whole milk. (I tried using fancier canned soup and tried adding extra mushrooms. I didn't like these as well as the original.)
Add two cans of albacore tuna. (To me, this has a less fishy taste than the regular tuna and I like the larger chunk size)
Add one small box of frozen green peas.
Add fresh ground pepper to taste.

Mix the sauce with the noodles and layer it into a buttered casserole dish. When approximately 1/2 of the noodle mixture is in the casserole dish, quarter some of the peeled, hard boiled eggs and nestle them into the noodles. Top with the rest of the noodle mixture and nestle in the remaining quartered hardboiled eggs. Then, put a layer of breadcrumbs on top. I liked using Trader Joe's panko breadcrumbs for this.

Top with some pats of butter and panko breadcrumbs. Bake for about 30 minutes. If you need to speed this process and the noodle mixture is still piping hot, you can quickly broil the casserole and serve.

What's your experience with these meal starters? Do you cook with canned soup or Lipton dry soup starters?

Here's Campbells version of tuna surprise. I was suprised that they don't use hard-boiled eggs.

Mark Bittman's Brasied Pork + Beans 'n Greens

2006-04-05T12:26:00.000-04:00

I wasn’t sure if I would blog Mark Bittman’s Braised Pork with Red Wine from the New York Times food section (3.22.06) since my photos of it didn’t come out that pretty, but I’m posting it right now because:

(1) It’s snowing outside here in midtown Manhattan! A snow squall in the middle of the spring seems like the perfect time to make this dish. The pork braises in red wine; they gravy isn’t thick and wintery.

(2) I really appreciate the lesson Bittman taught in this article: “One of the great paradoxes of the modern supermarket is that the best cuts of meat are sometimes the cheapest.” I enjoy foraging around for ingredients and going from store to store for the best cuts of meat, but it was great to run to the Met Foods on the corner, pick up meat for about $5 and serve dinner for 3. Excellent. Hacking into a pork shoulder to make stew-sized pieces was great stress relief.

(3) CQ and I have a new favorite side: Beans and Greens, a recipe from Mark Bittman’s big yellow How to Cook Everything. They are in this photo too. I never cooked with kale until it started showing up in my kitchen week after week in my Urban Organic box. I had to find some way to cook with the stuff. The secret to making it taste so delicious seems to be boiling a single clove with the beans. The white beans and kale don’t look too photogenic next to the egg noodles, but try it you’ll like it . . . both recipes are perfect for one last snowy Wednesday. Just be sure to rinse the kale and the beans carefully first, since both can hide lots of grit.

My poor big red pot

2006-04-04T20:21:00.000-04:00

I heard from more people about my St. Patrick's Day post than another other post, so thanks for those.

Tonight, I wanted to share the not-so-good side of the story. Look what steaming the potatoes, cabbage and carrots did to my favorite pot.

I still can't figure out what went wrong. I thought I put in enough water to keep the whole pot steaming away. The lid was pretty tight and I added extra water a couple of times.

Is it that starches from the potato burned the bottom? Or sugar from the cabbage caused this to burn? Or is it just that I had to be more vigilant about adding water? Anyone know what I did wrong?

It's been a couple of weeks since this happened. Since then I've been scrubbing gently at it and runnin it through the pot cycle of the dishwasher. I realized that if I scrub too hard, the enamel chips.

Whisky, cheese and cold meatloaf sandwhiches

2006-04-04T16:21:00.000-04:00

Last night, R* and I took a class on Single Malt Whisky & Cheese at Murray’s Cheese Shop.

Of the five pairings they presented last night, there’s one stand-out winner, a cheese I can’t get out of my head: La Tur. The hand-out from the class calls it “a dense, creamy blend of pasteurized cow and sheep milk. Runny and oozing around the perimeter with a moist, cake-y, palette-coating paste. Its flavor is earthy and full."

I’d never tasted cheese with that kind of texture before – slightly wetter than a cheese cake without the sugar. Spring-like. I’m going to take some home to the family for Easter.

They paired the La Tur cheese with Scapa 14 Year Old whisky from the north of Scotland. It was smooth and sweeter than the other whisky at the tasting. When tasted with the cheese, it was like dripping some flowery honey down the edges of each bite. I’m wondering if I could find a honey to pair it with when I serve this cheese.

The last thing we tasted was Laphroaig 10 Year Old whisky at cask strength (115% proof) paired with Mrs. Quicke’s Cheddar from Devon. The smoke and sea-air taste in the whisky was a match for the dark earthy taste of the cheese. I thought the cheddar was oddly dry at first, but then Sasha the instructor for the cheese portion of the evening, called it “clay-like” and explained how the cheese crumbled up in the mouth but then came back together with the Laphroaig for a great finish.

When the class ended, R* and I walked out into an April shower, still tasting lingering smoke from the last sample, and took the subway home. I went right to bed, while R* got to work in the kitchen.

He made us meatloaf sandwiches, with what was left over from the Mrs. Kostyra's Meatloaf 101 I made for Sunday dinner. R* buttered the wheat bread and then put a nice layer of ketchup on top of the cold meatloaf. There was great balance between the garlic and the onion in it and the little specks of carrot made me happy. The browned bits of glaze, made from ketchup, dry mustard and brown sugar, went great with the rain and the super-long-lasting finish of the peaty Laphroaig. Maybe I'll serve Laphroaig on the rocks with my next meatloaf dinner and then a nice cheddar for dessert.

St. Patrick's Day Reclaimed

2006-04-03T15:55:00.000-04:00

Shortly after moving to New York, I stopped celebrating St. Patrick’s Day. After growing up always celebrating St. Patrick's Day, I stopped wearing green to make the holiday. I lmade fun of those green-dyed carnations delis push for St. Patrick’s Day. I made sure I didn’t go near the parade and I never cooked corned beef and cabbage. I decided that since gay and lesbian people were not allowed to march in the parade, I wouldn’t honor the holiday. Since they didn’t want me, I didn’t want them.

This year, something changed in me. I saw those plastic shamrock banners flapping in front of the Irish bars around my office and instead of feeling angry at being excluded from the parade, this year I felt excited, even proud of the bit of Irish heritage my family claims.

I started thinking about corned beef, steamed cabbage, Jameson’s Irish whiskey and beer. Lots of beer. I started thinking about the shamrock my grandfather had painted on his front door and about my grandmother and my mom making (or attempting to make) big steaming pots of corned beef and cabbage.

With our new city council speaker Christine Quinn protesting the rights of lesbians and gay men to march in the parade, I saw an opening. Speaker Quinn was doing such a good job of protesting that I could go ahead and have my holiday back. A few days before St. Patrick’s Day, I went to a pre-theater dinner in Times Square and ordered the corned beef and cabbage. It was much better than I expected.

The trick, I think, was that they made the vegetables and the meat in separate pots. This kept the vegetables from getting coated in grease and getting overcooked. Cooking them separately might border on sacrilegious to some (My mom reported that she cooked her corned beef and vegetables in the same pot, under my grandmother’s watch), but I did my research and found out that this boiled dinner isn’t authentic Irish food. It’s considered an Irish-American adaptation so I figured I could keep adapting.

I steamed the potatoes, carrots and cabbage in my stock pot while I boiled the corned beef in a dutch oven with peppercorns, two bay leaves and a clove. I didn’t cure my own corned beef, but I’m excited about trying that next time.

I had memories of corned beef dinners past where it all ended up as one boiled mass of mush, but by steaming the vegetables, they stayed bright and kept their shape. I made three rows on the planner: row of carrots, potatoes and cabbage. Then I laid the corned beef on top of the cabbage. CQ bought some Yuengling Lager – my favorite beer – and we were all set for dinner. I think we all liked it much more than we expected.

[Thanks to my friends at Apartment Therapy Kitchen for this post on 4 ways to cook corned beef. And thanks to [2] for reminding me to finish this post.]

Welcome to NYC, Trader Joes!

2006-03-17T17:49:00.000-05:00

The home of Two Buck Chuck and amazing Tiramasu is finally here, but they aren't selling either yet :-( I've never been to Trader Joe's, but am planning to go there tonight.

Gawker: "critical tiramisu shortages"
Apartment Therapy: "Mob. Scene." plus "photos from the inside"
Tracking Trader Joes: Yes, there really is a fanblog just for Trader Joes
Gothamist: "People really love their organic pre-packaged, pre-washed greens, don't they?"

And . . . Happy St. Patrick's Day.

Girl Scout cookies . . . sexy desserts

2006-03-16T15:02:00.000-05:00

Heidi from 101Cookbooks.com posted a recipe for Thin Mints, just like the Girl Scout cookies only minus the transfats. Baking is not my strong point, but I'll have to give these a try.

Top Chef, Bravo's latest reality show, challenged contestants to make sexy desserts. This episode was much better than the premiere. Click here for this week's winning recipe, a dessert called The Total Orgasm.

One liner recipes from LA

2006-03-15T12:42:00.000-05:00

I'm a loyal reader of the New York times Wednesday Dining In section, but it isn't doing much for me lately. The Times is stuck under a snow bank somewhere going on and on about winter squash and I need a change. Inspired by The Wednesday Chef, I wandered West to the LA Times food section and found a story that captures just the kind of cooking and recipe sharing I like best.

Amy Scattergun's story titled "Ridiculously simple and crazy good" talks about "one liner cooking." She explains that these are "Not a recipe at all so much as a little story, passed from one person to the next, about a few ingredients and what to do with them."

She offers these "one liners" for wine braised short ribs, sweet pea soup and more. Check it out.

Martha's Cooking School opens

2006-03-14T11:35:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, Martha launched the "cooking school" segement of her daily talk show with two important lessons: essential knives and how to pick a cookbook.

The knife advice was helpful and nicely delivered by John from the PBS cooking show Everyday Food, but I am sad to admit I still don't think I know how to cut an onion properly. I cut onions three or more times a week and I still don't know how to do it. Is it the onion, the knife, is it me? R* sweetly said he noticed that he has better knife skills than me and I agree with him. In the blood orange beet salad and minestrone soup I made for dinner this weekend and I was frustrated with how 'butchered' the vegetables looked. Still tasted great, but it could of looked better.

Martha's lesson on cookbooks was much more successful. It was exciting to see Martha talk about something with such passion. She tries to seem excited talking about soap operas and propogating begonias, but when she started talking about cookbooks, it was clear that this was where her passion was.

Martha gave a surprisingly heart-felt tribute to Julia Child and her two volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She also recommended Marcella Hazen's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. All of these books had been recommended to me before and I had read a bit about them on 101Cookbooks.com. She went on to recommend two soft-cover cookbooks by Elizabeth David (Italian Food, French Cooking). I'll have to look for them. Maybe I'll try to teach myself a more disciplined approach to Italian cooking through Marcella Hazen's book and the Italian Food book by Elizabeth David.

Martha also put one of her own cookbooks on her list of favorites. I was happy to see tat she didn't use this as one more opportunity to flog her new baking book. Instead, she said she "worked very hard" on one of the first books she published: Quick Cooks from 1992. I saw this in a used book store when I was in San Francisco and I passed it up in favor of her appetizers book. Half.com has copies in good condition for 75 cents plus shipping.

Project Pretty Plate

2006-03-10T17:08:00.000-05:00

Bravo's Top Chef is Project Runway's kitchen-bound step-sister. Chefs, professional and not quite so professional, from across the US and one from Ireland, gather in San Francisco to compete for a new kitchen from Kenmore, $100,000 to start their own restaurant and the privilege to be named Top Chef.

In the premiere episode, the contestants are asked to create their signature dish. The challenge started me thinking: what's my signature dish? Most of my favorite foods to cook are either home cooking staples like spaghetti and meatballs or meatloaf and mashed potatoes or inspired by someone else's recipe like the brined chicken from Cook's Illustrated brined chicken, the maple pork loin from Gourmet or Martha's mini meatball sandwiches. I want to design my own signature dish! Does anyone have a story about their signature dish?

The way this show is edited, I couldn't care about the contestants or the food. The winning signature dish was Harold's steamed Thai Snapper. How can there be no herbs in the recipe and no salt or pepper? The poor quality of the recipe and the food photography makes me think that Bravo left their passion on the (Project) Runway.

The show's kitchen set is filled with Kenmore Elite appliances. The illogical amount of identical microwaves is distracting, but since I just re-did my kitchen with a Kenmore Elite electric stove and microwave, I'll admit that I get a little thrill out of seeing my exact appliances on TV (Look mom, my microwave is on Bravo!). Still Kenmore appliances seem out of place in a professional kitchen. Shouldn't they really use Wolf or Viking ranges? They also use strange knives; the handles are covered with black rubber dots, like old-fashioned gardening gloves.

I was hoping that Top Chef would differentiate itself from the cookie cutter cooking reality shows we've suffered so far (Rocco DiSpirito's The Restaurant and Gordon Ramsay's Hell's Kitchen) by offering some practical information that would be useful for home cooks. Sadly, this show is setting up to be the least home cook friendly of the bunch. At the start of the competition, the Irish contestant dismisses the nice kitchen of the place where they are staying by calling it a "housewive's kitchen." Later, the guest judge from Fleur de Lys restaurant says that this show isn't really the place for housewife cooking. What kind of obnoxious putdown is that? Don't their realize it's home cooks and housewives and houseguys like me who are buying all those Kenmore Elite microwaves?

I want Tim Gunn! Since this show was built by the Project Runway people, I was expecting this show to be a platform for a lovable dork like Tim Gunn or at least a platform for a superstar like Heidi. Instead, we get this mushy critic from Food & Wine. I don't even remember her name.

In a blatant ploy to drive tune-in when the show is first broadcast and stop us from Tivoing their show, Bravo will send text messages to tell us what the contestants are really thinking. I've signed up for mobile alerts and will let you know what I think of them. The content can't be more boring than the extra video content they offer on their site (Tom: "a sharp knife is a safe knife", Gail: "thow down some pillows, light some candles, have some great cheeses on hand")

Links:
Look out! The Next Food Network Start starts on March 19.
Vote on your favorite plate (and gawk at how ugly their food photography is)
Scan the reviews of Top Chef on Metacritic

Sunday's Menu

2006-03-09T15:34:00.000-05:00

R* and I have some friends over for supper almost every Sunday. It's been a fun way to try new recipes and has given me a good excuse to stock up on some new equipment.

Winter is finally melting away and I smelled spring in the air today at lunch. It has been a very busy work week, so I was trying to come up with a menu that would be easy to make, use some favorite in-season ingredients as well as what's coming in this weeks Urban Organic shipment, plus point toward spring.

Here's what I'm serving:

Asparagus with Wasabi-Mayonnaise Dip

Minestrone with Pancetta (from Cook's Illustrated)
Bauguette
Roasted Beet and Blood Oranges Salad with Spicy Greens

Blood Orange Granita

Green Eggs and Kale

2006-03-01T19:05:00.000-05:00

Kale doesn't immediately come to mind as a breakfast food, but try this -- you might like it as much as I did.

Loosely following a recipe for Boiled Kale in the Zuni Cookbook, I removed the thickest parts of the stems from my kale and cut them into ribbon pieces. I cooked it down for about 15 minutes in a saucepan and then I added a couple of roughly chopped waxy skin potatoes. Once the vegetables were almost done, I transferred them to this saute pan.

Continuing to cook, I made little pockets in the kale and potatoes and dropped in some eggs. As the eggs cooked, I spooned some of the broth on top of the eggs so that I was sure the tops would cook as well. (Somewhere along the line, I added some onion or garlic. I have to learn to write these things down!)

What you end up with is a delicious, sloppy slurpy mess. Seems just right for laid back winter breakfast to me. I served this is latte bowl, careful to make a bed of broth, kale and potatoes in the bowl, topped with the egg. I added some bacon on the top for crunch and color. It would be great with some good bread to soak up the broth.

Anyone else have a kale for breakfast recipe? I dare you.

Mollie Katzen on Kale, "a superstar"

Book of Joe on another way to poach eggs

Nice to meet ya, Granita

2006-03-01T17:15:00.000-05:00

I bought the Zuni Cafe cookbook a few weeks ago. The first thing I made from the cook book was a delicous blood orange granita. Just fresh blood orange juice, some sugar, water and some time to freeze.

Today, I found these great step-by-step photo recipe over on Amature Gourmet. I have just one suggestion to optimize their recipe: As the Zuni cookbook suggests, rather than scraping the granita with a fork, chunk it up using two pastry scrapers. The edge is just sharp enough to crystalize the ice without smasing it down.

I just bought my pastry scraper at Cook's Companion two weeks ago, but I'm already finding a lot of uses for this tool. I use it for moving chopped vegetables from cutting board to pot, to roughly chop herbs for a marinade, to smash garlic. The ruler on the end is useful too.

Oddly, this jack-of-all-trades tool didn't make it to Martha's list of Top 22 Kitchen Tools. It would certainly make mine.