Category: Grain

June 12, 2009

This will be quick, because I’ve been writing all day and desperately need a shower. Wednesdays we have the Farmers’ Market in town, so we wandered over to get a few things. Wild Hive has a table there, so we said hi to Don and grabbed some beans and a bag of his 10-grain mix. I like making it into risotto-y things, and since the wife had stopped at the fish market earlier for scallops,…

May 18, 2009

Having the grill out on the screened porch means that even when it’s bucketing down rain in a torrential fashion we can still enjoy those flavors which evoke sunny, carefree afternoons with the frolicking and the skipping and the frisbees and such. Though I have recently been informed that the grill is no longer welcome on said porch and needs to be trundled out to sit next to my studio until winter. Clearly my wife…

April 1, 2009

My newest article for Chronogram is out in the April issue. Click here to read it.

February 19, 2009

As if on cue, we got three inches of snow last night. But it doesn’t matter; it’s 40 degrees now, and melting away at a good clip. This time of year the sun moves five sun-widths higher in the sky every week. I didn’t even mind shoveling this morning. There wasn’t much in the house yesterday, but I did spy a pot of chicken broth (from the carcass of dinner a couple nights ago) mixed…

January 23, 2009

As inevitable as dawn, pursuant to a now-in-regular-rotation roast chicken (because we all love it so) came chicken broth. And lacking anything that screamed inspiration from within fridge, freezer, or cupboard, risotto thus seemed like a pretty good idea. I mustered spinach, leeks, and a surprise bag of frozen corn that Milo insisted upon to make what looked to be a decent complement of flavors and got to work. Working at home does allow for…

December 29, 2008

The duck pho gave us one more meal before being used up (not counting the quart in the freezer.) I kept it simple tonight, because I was working to finish a new piece and didn’t have a ton of time to cook. So I made sushi-rice risotto with a sort of Greek slant: a little lemon juice, lots of woody herbs, spinach and dandelion pestos, and crumbled feta. The underlying hearty, deep, and slightly exotic…

December 18, 2008

Milo has been getting hungry earlier lately, which puts some tension between our respective ideal dinner times. I’ve been trying to adapt by making multiple courses so that there’s something for him to nosh on a little earlier but we still get to eat at a reasonable hour. There’s still some work to be done, but I refuse to make separate meals; I think it’s important for kids to eat the same food as the…

October 16, 2008

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…

October 5, 2008

Christine finally caught The Cold, so Milo and I let her sleep and went apple picking. It was another perfect, crystalline Fall day where the impending doom of Winter sharpens our appreciation of the bounty that still surrounds us- and makes us load a metric ton of fruit into the back of the car. And then we get home and realize that we have to do something, sharpish, with said fruit or it will rot,…

September 2, 2008

Just as we brought some excellent raw and cooked materials to Vermont, we also returned home with leftovers that have been enriching the meals back here. In this case, I used the fennel risotto, the end of the seared duck breast, and some local blue cheese that I can’t remember the name of to make supplì- or arancini- to go with a little of the first batch of sauce from our plum tomatoes that I…