I’ve been keeping it pretty clean lately, taking a break from red meat, alcohol and other things as required by my occasional shamanic tune-ups. Some of the limitations- especially on soy and all fermented things- make cooking interesting food a challenge. The key has been to go the small-plates route, and let variety compensate for the quieter flavors. And I LOVE multi-course meals. Love them. First up, the finally-ready duck prosciutto, with perfectly ripe local…
Year: 2008
I just picked these up today, though they got fired last week. I had a hard time deciding how to glaze them; there’s a big tension between my desire to play with colors and patterns and my desire to have simple dishes that allow the food to shine. This batch is sort of an attempt to split the difference. Some I love, some not so much, but they all inspire me to keep pushing ahead…
I went to buy some fish, since I had scallops on the brain, but they had some good ahi, so I got both. The challenge then became how to turn four scallops and a smallish tuna steak into enough dinner for all three of us. I had intended to tea-smoke the scallops in the wok, but when I was ripping out the frost-ravaged basil stalks in the garden, I realized how aromatic they still were…
After the decadence of the steak frites, we were in the mood for something cleaner. I had a bunch of ideas swirling around, so I got to work and let them take shape around the ingredients at hand. To begin, I wanted to make a simple broth to warm us up at the end of a raw fall day. So I simmered some soba-cha, dried shiitake, and toasted walnuts in water for about an hour.…
We went to Vermont for one night, which wasn’t enough, but will have to do for the time being. Driving up we got to experience the steepening gradient from still-luminescent foliage in our area to the more austere landscape that latitude and altitude combine to bestow upon the Green Mountains at this time of year. The bases of most mountains still had some color, but it faded up to the browns, greys, and dark greens…
Lousy with leftovers, and more than annoyed that I couldn’t take a walk this afternoon- it was another perfect fall day, with an impossible cerulean sky making all the crimson, yellow, and vermillion leaves pop like mad- I cobbled together a two-course fake Indian meal that ended up better than I expected and used up most of the various remnants in the fridge. Besides soup, which is clearly the best leftover vehicle there is, I’m…
I did another guest post over at TNS last night, so go there if you haven’t been yet. For the sake of some content over here, and because Zoomie asked nicely (and gave me my first and only blog award a while ago) I’m putting up a shot of the sunflower labyrinth that I did at a sculpture park in upstate NY this summer. It’s 82 feet in diameter, so if you draw a square…
I finally got around to turning the chicken carcass from Sunday into broth, and turned half the broth into risotto. The other half I froze. We got a call from Sirkka, so we invited them over for dinner since Chris just left for another tour. And risotto is nothing if not scalable. To begin, since Milo was hungry and it was going to take me a while to get everything ready, I tried a recent…