Category: Always use a condiment

January 8, 2012

There are dozens of posts out there about preserved lemons, so to avoid redundancy I thought I’d take the idea one step further and share an idea I had a while back. Preserved lemons are an item that my pantry is never without. They’re easy to make and keep forever, and their bright, unmistakeable flavor is essential to a variety of dishes, particularly Moroccan. What I love about them is that to the nose, they smell candied; it’s impossible to tell that it’s salt that has concentrated their flavors rather than sugar. That sweet, lemony aroma permeates any dish they’re added to, but when the lemons are gone the salt that worked its osmotic magic on them has accrued a great deal of interest in the process. This may already be a thing, but I haven’t heard of it before: preserved lemon salt.

September 12, 2011

Right before Irene hit I went into the garden and preemptively picked all the ripe and semi-ripe tomatoes and peppers, figuring that the winds might bring down the trellises and damage the fragile fruit. It turned out to be prescient, since though the paste tomato trellis is still standing, the other one took the brunt of the tree’s impact and there’s not much left but a few bright cherry tomatoes visible through a tangle of busted-up vines. On the plus side, I had a big pile of beautiful nightshades just begging to be transformed into one of my late-summer specialties: smoked salsa.

August 25, 2011

Before I get carried away with whatever the hell I’m going to write about, you should all head over to Diana’s to read my guest post about my Grandmother’s best of all time pie crust and make it for yourselves. It’s fast, easy, and is guaranteed to kick the ass of whatever recipe you’re using now.

So what am I going to write about? Well, I was going to write about something from a while ago because it tasted good and the pictures are pretty, but instead I’ll cover tonight’s dinner while it’s still fresh in my mind. It also tasted good and you can let me know if you think the pictures are sufficiently attractive.

August 15, 2011

So this month’s binding project got me thinking about the head terrine I made with Rich a couple of years ago, and how I wanted to try it again with my new knowledge and aim it at a specific goal: bánh mì entirely from scratch. It’s one of the great sandwiches of the world, and since it’s a bastard offspring of French colonialism with many established variants, it’s ideally suited to remixing and tinkering. Ironically, it was my new level of comfort with baking bread that actually spurred me to choose this project; head cheese by itself is not something I would make just to have around since it takes a fair amount of work to yield something that to me is less sensually delightful than a good pâté. But in combination with crusty bread, roast pork, mayo, and pickles, it attains greatness. And since I had all those things on hand–all lovingly homemade–I knew these were going to be winners.

July 11, 2011

As I settle into a routine here at Bachelor Central, I finally treated myself to the sort of caveman meal that my wife assumes I pretty much always eat when they’re away. It’s not true, of course; lately I’ve been eating bread and cheese and salads, with nibblings of chorizo thrown in for balance. But today saw a bunch of errands run, and a long-neglected repair project finally crossed off the list, so my reward was taking myself in to dinner for a thoroughly decadent treat.

June 2, 2011

My culinary spring fling of 2011 was with spruce. Last year I determined that this year would be the one in which I tackled edible conifers, and my initial nibblings have determined that spruce is by far the most interesting to me. They have a distinctly limey quality that piqued my desire to find persuasive local replacements for citrus (which is part of what fuels my continuing vinegar obsession). So I picked a ton of tender tips from a spot I pass frequently and set about converting them into various useful forms.

April 28, 2011

I had a hankering for Korean-flavored beef skewers grilled out on the porch, but lateness as always altered my plans a bit. The result was less elegant than it could have been, but sure tasted good. Plus, it’s a safe bet that nobody has ever made Korean-flavored water buffalo meatball sandwiches with ramps, charred green onions, pak choi, and homemade feta-yogurt-ramp sauce before.

March 30, 2011

The blackcurrant vinegar took six months to fully ferment. Today I bottled it; with some evaporation, what started as a half gallon ended up just filling two 20-ounce former soy sauce bottles (I left a little in the jar to give a head start to the next half gallon, which I poured right in). After tasting it, admiring the bottles, and reminding myself to make labels for them–it’s a pity that there’s no F in either word, because I had a hankering for some ye olde maple fyrup type font–it came time to figure out what to do with it.

March 21, 2011

With the warmer weather (leaving aside the inconvenient truth that it snowed today) comes the urge to light fires and char large pieces of animal on them, or at least let said slabs of flesh languish in hot proximity to the fire, bathing in the fragrant smoke until tender and orgiastically satisfying.

February 17, 2011