Year: 2013

December 13, 2013

I’ll be on WPKN radio in Bridgeport, Connecticut tomorrow morning at 9:15, talking about regional spirits and drinks for holiday gift-giving and numbing the anguish of spending extended time with family. Down below there’s a list of links to producers I will likely mention.

December 9, 2013

Going back to 2008, I have made 10-course extravaganzas for Thanksgiving: balls-out, unfettered freestyling wherein my imagination runs wild and my skills try their best to realize the perfervid visions and tie it all together. They’re all documented here on the blog, including the one that won me a trip to France. I have enjoyed cooking every one of them. But this year I wasn’t feeling it, so I took it easy. No manic list-making, no frantic days of prep beforehand, no careful curation of the trajectory from course to course. I bought a goose, and I used the homegrown produce on hand to round it out into a meal.

November 27, 2013

This summer, a farmer I know had a box of these little plums on sale. They made for good fresh eating, but their size and rusty purple color made me think instantly of umeboshi. They’re not the same fruit—ume plums are more like apricots, and are picked yellow-green and not fully ripe—but I figured it would be worth giving them the same treatment.

November 4, 2013

Just a quick note to mention that my piece about the process behind the opening of Fish & Game for Edible Manhattan, a revised version of the one I wrote for Edible Hudson Valley, is featured in Best Food Writing 2013. It’s gratifying to see my name alongside those up there on the top, as well as many others inside. I look forward to reading through it once my copy arrives.

October 29, 2013

Sometimes a meal just comes together, like George Peppard’s plans always did on the A-Team. This almost always happens as a result of careful listening to what the garden, fridge, and pantry have to say. Ignore them at your peril.

October 12, 2013

After a sublimely warm and clear September, October’s colder and wetter demeanor imparted an urgency to my hitherto lackluster gleaning in the garden. It’s nice again now, but in my tizzy of frantic autumnal gathering I did manage to get a fair amount of food harvested and arrayed on various surfaces to dry out for storage.

October 8, 2013
October 1, 2013

For the October Chronogram, I wrote about the nuns at the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut and the cheeses they make. It’s a remarkable community that produces great artisanal cheese, especially their Bethlehem, which I had the pleasure of eating yesterday; Mother Noella gave me a whole wheel to take home on the condition that I waited a few weeks until it was mature before eating it. I brought it with me on the residency I’m currently doing, and we all demolished it with great enthusiasm last night before and during dinner.

I took the pictures, too; see another one I’m fond of after the jump and be sure to click the shots in the article to embiggen them.

September 13, 2013

Behold, the finished episode: Many thanks to Craig and Staci for their top-notch work. Stay tuned for more; in the next one I’ll be making a tongue sandwich with Miley Cyrus.

September 10, 2013

I was taking pictures at Fish & Game on Sunday, and they had a giant puffball in the kitchen that they were running as a bar snack: brushed with olive oil, grilled, and served with lamb sausage and a scallion-chili salad. Zak gave me a couple of slices to take home, because as I ate one of the soft, slick slices it occurred to me that the mushroom could out-wonder Wonder bread as a grilled cheese substrate.