Month: November 2012

November 27, 2012

Consistent with the tradition in this house, there was no turkey for Thanksgiving. Turkey is boring and hard to cook well unless you take it apart. We did, however, have Milo’s awesome Lego turkey as part of the centerpiece. Also keeping with tradition around here, the meal was a seven-course exploration of whatever perfervid visions had swum into my insomniac mind during the preceding week. It’s funny; I was listening to the radio as I made the dough for the foie gras oreos—one such idea—and the guest was saying something like “The key to a stress-free Thanksgiving is never to cook something new for the first time when people are coming over.” I think that takes all the fun out of it; three out of the seven courses were things I just made up and figured wouldn’t suck.

November 16, 2012

This soup is one of the great peasant dishes of all time, I think, transforming a bunch of humble roots into a profoundly satisfying bowl of complex and nourishing pleasure. It’s fun to imagine the first starving farmer who had nothing but a bag of onions, some stale bread, and a heel of cheese and came up with this miracle of frugal virtuosity. Some good beef stock obviously helps, but it’s not necessary. Before I returned to carnivory, I made this using mushroom stock and it was a beautiful thing.

November 15, 2012

It’s always a joy to find sushi-grade tuna, especially out here in the sticks where the seafood is not renowned for its freshness. I do love raw fish, even though large pelagic species like tuna contain more and more mercury, courtesy of coal-fired power plants, making it less and less safe to eat with any regularity. Since canned tuna is thus more or less absent from our diet, the occasional indulgence in some number one ahi can be justified. But since it’s chilly, and cold food is not indicated for such conditions, I put a little spin on it to make it seasonally appropriate, and followed it with a real winner of an accidental discovery.

November 7, 2012

For the second entry in the Charleston Wine and Food Festival contest thingy, the Rappahannock River Oysters company sent me a box with a big bag each of their oysters and clams. I had been thinking about what to do with them for a while, and worked out a couple of ideas that I was excited to try. Then, of course, Sandy hit, taking our electricity for most of a week, so I had to modify both recipes to require only the stove top and grill.

November 4, 2012

The November Chronogram is out, and within its august pages I present a primer on the new hard ciders that are proliferating throughout the region. Those of you who are especially attentive might remember that I wrote a piece about the Apple Exchange for Edible Hudson Valley last spring; the local producers learned a great deal from their French colleagues both here and in Normandy, and they are dedicated to returning cider to its original…