Year: 2013

January 16, 2013
January 15, 2013

This meal was a collaboration between Milo and me; lately he’s been making dinner on Fridays (with varying amounts of help) and this time around the inspiration came from his coining of the word gordolini. Since gordo is Spanish for fat, it seemed logical to use Spanish flavors in both filling and sauce, so that is what we did.

January 14, 2013

Just a quick one, because I have a lot to do today. This is a cocktail I invented the other night, and I’m pretty happy with it. Like my cooking, my mixology tends to be improvised and unmeasured. The results are usually quite good, occasionally not so much, and once in a while they’re superb. This one is an excellent aperitif, since it doesn’t have any hard liquor in it; everything is around 18 percent…

January 11, 2013

This may not have been the most elegant meal ever made, but it was very good to eat, and it illustrates a useful principle of home cooking that can, when applied properly, make homemade food taste more interesting than restaurant food.

January 10, 2013

Upon returning home from the store with a nice mahi-mahi fillet, I was greeted by a big box on the front porch. The last in the four-part deliveries of free food for the Lambs and Clams contest, which I am quite decisively not winning, this particular box contained two pounds of ground lamb and 25 clams. I’m going to use the lamb for the contest post, so I just incorporated the clams into the evening’s fish dinner, transforming it into a two-course delight.

January 7, 2013

We invited some friends over for New Year’s Eve dinner, and I was setting forth to procure something celebratory when I bumped into my neighbor getting his mail. “Hey, I’ve got something for you,” he said. We had given them assorted homemade things (ketchup, salsa, jelly, etc.) and he wanted to reciprocate, so he led me to his freezer, from which he pulled out neatly wrapped and labeled white paper packets of frozen venison and bear meat. He had had an excellent hunting season, unlike the previous year when he got nothing. And thus was my search for exotic vittles complete before I even got in the car.

January 6, 2013

There’s nothing more useful than stock. Apart from the fact that it makes maximally efficient use of all your leftover bones—cooked or raw, depending on what you made—and that it can be tweaked and inflected every which way based on what you want to make next, it allows for so many options come dinner time. Soup, obviously, is pretty straightforward, but risotto is also only about twenty minutes away if you have stock on hand and some rice in the pantry. Sauces, reductions, gravies, stews, braises, and deglazing all require or at least benefit greatly from the application of a little or a lot of it.

Save the week’s bones in a container in the fridge or freezer and then give them a simmer with some aromatics every Sunday afternoon. Strain and freeze the result in quart containers and you’ll be set for any weeknight culinary eventuality that presents itself. Case in point: this dinner.

January 1, 2013

For January’s Chronogram, I visited the Hudson Valley Seed Library to talk about their rapid growth and plans for the coming year. If you live in the area, they offer a full range of seeds that are bred and selected to perform well in this climate. Even if you don’t, theirs is an important story if you prefer to have your food dollars support local small businesses rather than huge multinational corporations.