All Things Food
Holidays are meant to be special, and yet now we have had almost a full year of altered celebrations. I know that Christmas looks a lot different for everyone this year. Even though we don’t celebrate Christmas, I really miss our traditional dinner at a local Chinese restaurant with friends, when we also run into many other Jewish families we know…So, of course, today, on Christmas Day, since we aren’t going out for Chinese, I decided to take on a project in the kitchen.
Read MoreThe first of my regular Berkshire Eagle columns was in the paper this past Wednesday, and, thanks to a college friend who posted it on Facebook, I learned it also was in the Vermont papers that are under the same ownership!
The online version introduces me as the new food columnist, which was pretty cool, and I received much congratulations from friends and family. I’ve even had several people tell me that they already tried the recipe and loved it! It makes me so happy when I hear that people are trying my recipes!
Read MoreJust before Thanksgiving, we got into a conversation in one of my classes about food for the big dinner (albeit smaller for many of us this year). I happened to mention my absolute favorite cider gravy (which can be found at the bottom of this blog post), and one of my students asked me for the recipe. I was so happy when his mother sent me an email with pictures of him making it for their Thanksgiving dinner!
After the break he told me that not only did he love the gravy, but he also made the sandwich I described in my first Berkshire Eagle piece (republished at this link), and told me he really liked the addition of stuffing and cranberry. Which led, not surprisingly to a mention of the cranberry chutney I’ve been making for more years than I can count, the recipe for which I have given to so many friends and family. In fact, one of my colleagues texted me a photo the day before Thanksgiving to show me how she’s still making it, year after year!
Read MoreAlso known as “I love beets, one of many in a series!”
Most people either love beets or hate them. When I met my husband he was definitely in the I-hate-beets camp, but now that I’ve made a convert of him, he was sad that there wasn’t enough for seconds when I made this. I’m still hoping that one day – when we can actually see each other once again – I can tempt my friend, Robin, into trying beets one more time, to see if there is some preparation that she might like!
Read MoreIt is always a happy day when we go to pick up our CSA farm share at Woven Roots. Because we are now empty-nesters, we only bought a half-share and pick up every other weekend. I love walking into the tent and seeing what’s on the tables each time, and then, of course, I start to come up with recipes in my head for my treasures.
This weekend we got leeks (among lots of other veggies). I adore leeks! We also had some refrigerated gnocchi and some High Lawn Farm heavy cream that were nearing their expiration dates, and so I knew exactly what I was going to make for dinner!
Read MoreAlthough Joanie and I hardly ever see each other anymore, especially now due to the pandemic, she follows my blog faithfully. Several days ago, she emailed me with a request. A friend had Concord grapes, she told me, and she remembered a delicious Concord grape pie she had several times, a specialty of the Finger Lakes region of New York State. If she got the grapes to me, she wondered, could she pay me to make her that pie?
Joanie went on to explain that she used to cook a lot, but her eyesight has been diminishing and she really cannot cook anymore, but would really love to taste that pie again. I told her I could give it a try. But then it turned out there weren’t enough grapes.
Read MorePerhaps the most famous pasta dish with eggplant is Pasta alla Norma, which includes tomatoes and cheese. That recipe, Pasta alla Norma, is practically the official pasta dish of Sicily, at least it seemed that way to me when I visited Sicily during my Rome semester at the Centro (the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies). In the middle of my semester, we had a two-week trip to Sicily and southern Italy, staying at a different hotel practically every night as we toured numerous archeological sites. At every new hotel where we arrived in Sicily, they served our group Pasta alla Norma, to highlight this famous pasta dish of the island. I’ll admit I was a bit tired of that dish by the time we left!
So this post is not really about Pasta alla Norma! I do love the dish, but there is another way I love to enjoy pasta with eggplant. I like to cook slices of eggplant in olive oil until they become brown and practically melted inside, and then toss the eggplant with the pasta and a bit of heavy cream.
Read MoreWe all have our weaknesses, those items that when you see them in the store or on a menu, you just cannot resist. One of mine is fresh figs.
Our local specialty store, Guido’s Fresh Marketplace, always carries the most luscious figs when they are in season, and pretty much every time I see them I buy a container, even if I have no idea how I will use them.
Read MoreAs much as this may be Daniel’s favorite pasta, pasta itself is also Daniel’s favorite. He ran two seasons each year in high school and three each year in college and he still runs about 8 miles every day. You can imagine how much pasta I’ve cooked for him over the years.
So when Daniel and his girlfriend, Greta, made plans to come and visit this summer, this recipe was the first one he asked for, and the one I made for our first dinner together.
Read MoreIt should come as no surprise that I follow various cooking groups on social media (as well as chefs and restaurants, of course). How often do I see someone post a less-common vegetable from a CSA or an online produce subscriptions asking for help and suggestions!
Well, today it was my turn, when I got something called piracicaba from our CSA, Woven Roots Farm in Tyringham, MA. At the farm, I spoke with Jen Salinetti who described it as a Brazilian type of broccoli, and indeed it looks like it. But when I got home and Googled it, I only found a couple of recipes (although I found many more mentions of the plant itself).
Read MoreEggplant and tomatoes pair so well, there’s no shortage of recipes that use them together. This super easy recipe is one of my favorites. The only drawback this time of year is that it cooks for an hour in a very hot oven, and that’s not ideal on a hot summer day. But once you make a pan of this, you’ll be able to keep it in the fridge to serve at room temperature over several days. Sometimes I use the leftovers for a sandwich, other times I’ll toss it over hot pasta.
We especially love this dish with the Middle Eastern flavors of za’atar and tahini, but at the bottom of the recipe, I offer a version that uses Italian flavors.
Read MoreIt is an old New England tradition to eat salmon and peas for the 4th of July. Before we damaged the rivers where they used to run, salmon were a great source of protein during the summer, and right around the end of June or beginning of July the first peas were ready for harvest, even in northern New England. So a tradition evolved to celebrate the seasonal bounty, which also often included new potatoes just dug from the earth.
Read MoreI am so lucky! I buy my eggs locally from my principal’s assistant’s mother who raises chickens just a few miles from our house, and they are phenomenal! I’ve had people who taste my challah and ask if I’ve used extra eggs because the color is so rich. Every time I get a carton, I can’t wait to see the beautiful colors of the shells from the various breeds she raises.
In our CSA farm share from Woven Roots Farm, one of our recent items was a beautiful head of frisée, which meant we would definitely have Salade Lyonnaise with our dinner. I love how the egg yolk enriches the dressed greens, and how the salty lardons (chunks of bacon) and crunchy croutons complement the flavors.
Read MoreAmong the many items in our CSA share last weekend from Woven Roots Farm were garlic scapes. I used some in a recipe for pork chops with a rich caper-lemon sauce from the new cookbook Jubilee: Recipes from two centuries of African American cooking, in place of garlic called for, and it was a phenomenal dish. This is a ground-breaking cookbook that presents the wide-ranging cuisine of the African-American experience, beyond the better known, and oft stereotyped, soul food. A couple weeks ago I made a wonderful sweet potato and mango bundt cake from this cookbook, and there are many more recipes to explore!
Still, after the pork chops, I had plenty of garlic scapes left. So I bought a couple zucchini (not ready yet at the farm) and concocted this recipe – perfect for a warm summer evening!
Read MoreBlueberries are pretty much Hank’s favorite fruit. If a dessert doesn’t have chocolate, he’d like it to have blueberries. He likes blueberries so much that every summer, after I pick blueberries with one of my former students whose family owns a blueberry farm, I make a large batch of blueberry barbecue sauce and keep it in the freezer in small containers to use throughout the winter. (I use Vivian Howard’s recipe, which I have dubbed “Blue-B-Q,” and I use it on much more than just chicken, which is what’s given in her recipe.) I also freeze the blueberries themselves to make any number of other items during the year, such as my grandmother’s blueberry crumb cake.
Read MoreI saw it was going to be getting hot this week. Hot, humid, and sticky. So I decided I could use the oven while it was still on the cooler side and make a quiche to have for a few lunches.
In the recipe below I give the basic custard part of the filling, along with the extras I made this time. Be creative about whatever else you want to include! Many, many years ago, the first time I was in Chicago, a friend took me to Lou Mitchell’s the famous diner in the West Loop Gate. On their menu is an omelette with sausage, Cheddar, and apples. Perhaps that seems unremarkable now, but back then, adding the apple to a sausage and cheese omelette was pretty interesting and innovative, at least to me. I kept that idea in mind, and began to play with the combination of meat and cheese and fruit in quiche.
Read MoreAlthough I am by no means a food historian, I think a lot about culinary stories and the formation, transformation, and transmission of culinary traditions and even of individual recipes. Some people may think fajitas come from Mexico, but they are rather from the Tex-Mex kitchen. The dish is an offshoot of Mexican cuisine, to be sure, but Tex-Mex is a distinct and legitimate food tradition. In fact, the new cookbook Amá is specifically Tex-Mex.
Read MoreFor Thanksgiving 2019, I sent out a Google Form to our kids and their significant others that asked:
1. It’s not Thanksgiving if we don’t have ____________.
2. My favorite kind of pie is ____________.
It was going to be the first time Daniel’s girlfriend, Greta, was spending Thanksgiving with us, so I wanted to be sure to make her choice of Dutch apple pie (as well as her request for mashed potatoes, but that’s another post). But that’s never been a request before in our family! So I began my research and found some guidelines for the apple filling, but then I decided to try using the topping I had made when testing the blueberry crisp recipe* for The Berkshire Farm Table Cookbook. Everyone agreed that was an inspired idea!
Read MoreWe love to make this easy, flavorful sauce when we grill swordfish. I am never sure what to call it, because listing all the ingredients would be cumbersome, but individually and collectively they are all so wonderful and deserve top billing!
Read MoreThis is not “real” paella for several reasons. First, there’s no shellfish because Hank is allergic; second, I don’t have a paella pan; third, we don’t have the special rice for paella. The last two are probably why we will never get a real socarrat when the rice at the bottom of the pan gets a nice crust.
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