Month: June 2009

June 30, 2009

The garden is really hitting its stride now, offering a wider array of perfect options for organizing a dish around. The beets have been getting me excited, not least because they go with so many different flavors. They’re also beautiful. John’s birthday party offered me an excuse to monkey around with some of the different directions a beet can go, and try to combine them in an interesting way. Inspired by the bite of foie…

June 29, 2009

Not bad for a first try. It came out a little salty, because I forgot about it and left it on the cure for a week. Next time I think 4 days will be about right. Now I just have to go the the deli and get them to slice it like this- it’s just too much work to keep doing it by hand. Isn’t it pretty? It almost makes me want to make stained-meat…

June 24, 2009

In Palazzo Spada, near where I lived in Rome, there’s a cute little Architectural folly by Borromini called La Prospettiva: a corridor built in forced perspective to appear much longer than it is, that opens onto a garden with a statue in it. There’s a nice moment that happens as soon as you enter, when you see that the ceiling slants down, and the floor slopes up, and you realize that the whole thing is about…

June 21, 2009

Blogging is a funny thing, really. I like doing it, and it landed me a magazine writing job (which is also mostly fun) but I never quite get around to doing most of the requisite things that others do to boost traffic: getting all up in the MyFace and TwitSpace and BoobTube with quick ubiquity, and commenting far and wide like a tweaker cheerleader suffering from simultaneous Prader-Willi and exclamation point-specific Tourette’s syndromes. And God…

June 12, 2009

This will be quick, because I’ve been writing all day and desperately need a shower. Wednesdays we have the Farmers’ Market in town, so we wandered over to get a few things. Wild Hive has a table there, so we said hi to Don and grabbed some beans and a bag of his 10-grain mix. I like making it into risotto-y things, and since the wife had stopped at the fish market earlier for scallops,…

June 11, 2009

With the warmer weather, I’ve been craving pâtés and terrines; a slice or two with a salad and crusty bread is as good as lunch can get (at least until the cucumbers and tomatoes arrive) and the archetypal combination of potted meat, mustard, and pickles can find expression in many forms along a spectrum from humble to elegant. In this case, humble: a 5 lb. pork shoulder from Fleisher’s became two pâtés de campagne (though…

June 7, 2009

We had this venison roast in the freezer, and the seal had broken so it was getting a little ice on it, so I pulled it out. Once defrosted, it was clearly more than we needed, so I cut three small steaks off of it and put the rest in the fridge. I rubbed the steaks with salt, pepper, and some herbs and let them sit while I cubed red potatoes and a turnip and…

June 5, 2009

The bones from the boar ribs- simmered for a couple of hours with an onion, carrot, and parsley- turned into a nimble yet hefty (think Chris Farley) stock which we have been putting to good use in the ensuing days. In this case the smoky, umamilicious elixir was the happy medium in which some udon found themselves, accompanied by burdock simmered with dried shiitake, blanched kale (I usually do it in the noodle water pre-noodle)…

June 4, 2009

No time for a real post right now, but here’s a shot of the herb and fruit garden that’s just about done. It looks a little corporate right now, but as things fill in the mulch to green ratio should reverse. The post title courtesy of Milo, who just started saying it for some reason.

June 2, 2009

Last week I had a vague hankering to make a chicken cacciatore-type thing, but after taking stock of what we had lying around I decided on a kind of chicken saag instead. Our turnips are getting really big, so I took chopped leaves and root and cooked them with onion until soft, then added some leftover bitter green pesto, yogurt, and a little wine and puréed it until smooth. The root really helps thicken the…