Month: October 2009

October 30, 2009

My article in this month’s Chronogram mostly consists of a few recipes designed to make the traditional feast a bit less stressful and a bit more tasty. There wasn’t room in the piece to cover all the dishes mentioned or photographed, so I’m doing it here. Anybody with a question about any of it should leave a comment and I’ll try to help. First, the poached pears. I bought some local, organic Seckel pears at…

October 27, 2009

I’ll keep this quick, since I have a date with my mattress. For my November article in Chronogram (out on the first) I did a Thanksgiving recipe piece that sort of remixes the traditional dinner in what I hope is a more interesting and lower-stress way than many people are used to. A central ingredient is phở made from the turkey carcass and used to flavor several other components of the meal. The intensely aromatic…

October 23, 2009

I placed an order for a pork belly (half, really) and it weighed in at 11 pounds. It’s hard to tell in the picture, but it’s at least two inches thick- more in places. I cut it into two large pieces that would just fit in the two biggest vessels I could stack in the fridge, and rubbed it well with miso, ume paste, maple syrup, and a bunch of spices. There it sits, slowly…

October 21, 2009

Sunday and Monday I did a heap o’ cookin’ for the November article, and Jen the photographer was scheduled to come Monday evening to shoot the results. The article will be a Thanksgiving thing, showing some ways to make the preparation easier and flavor richer than the normal version without going completely off the reservation (as it were). And John was around. Like waterboarding Dick Cheney, it was a no-brainer. Jen came early, and shot…

October 20, 2009

Nobody got very sick, but it was dicey for a minute. And it was very cold this weekend, so soup was in order. I picked up a good chicken, and very unusually decided to make soup from the whole raw bird. Normally I like to roast them and make stock from the carcass later on, but for maximum medicinal impact I thought that doing it this way was the right call. And the soup was…

October 17, 2009

So this isn’t about the excellent shellfish-kielbasa stew in Vermont. I’ll get to it later, though I don’t actually have a picture of it. Maybe some fall foliage instead for atmosphere. This is about a wife coming down with something, and the lack of anything easy to prepare in the house. A quick trip later, we were the happy owners of some lovely short ribs. And since we have a pressure cooker, shreddy, falling-off-the-bone-ness was…

October 15, 2009

We went to Vermont last weekend, and there was some good eatin’- most interesting was a shellfish stew with local kielbasa that I’ll describe in the next post. This afternoon I got busy trying to turn the last of the season’s tomatoes- bought at the farmers’ market yesterday because ours are done, and now dead from frost- into a couple of kinds of salsa to compensate for the complete lack of home-canned tomato sauce this…

October 9, 2009

Yesterday was the weekly market, so I went over to poke around- grabbing a couple of huge nappa cabbage for the next batch of kimchi, since ours got either eaten by slugs or are too small- and to pick up some fish. Gerard actually took the week off, but did bring John and me some lovely sardines because John is famous and I am, well, special. So I ran home and put some dinner together.…

October 7, 2009

I’ve been lax about blogging, obviously, but not about cooking; I just can’t find time to do any writing. I even busted out a pretty nice 6-course dinner for a couple of friends up from the city last Friday, but the only picture I took was a repeat of the gravlax with corn-avocado ice cream and pickle sauce. Other courses were grilled chicken-miso soup, a sort of frisée aux lardons- curly endive tossed with a…

October 3, 2009

As inevitable as dawn, the beginning of a new month means another comestible-themed missive from yours truly.