Last week, while I was making some new plates at the ceramics studio the owner showed me some of the amazing variety of mushrooms that are growing on her property. I am very, very far from qualified to ID fungi, but black trumpets are an easy spot and she has a couple of big, fat patches growing on the sites of long-ago cut hardwood stumps. In exchange for my eye, and for a follow-up email…
cookblog Posts
Complaining about the weather is about as pointless as activities get, I know, but the amount of rain we’ve been getting is beyond ridiculous. The temperature barely cracked 70˚ all weekend in Vermont- though it didn’t actually rain there- and yesterday it pissed down all afternoon. Poor Milo shivered through his first swimming lesson. Today the sun is actually somewhat visible, but it’s cold out. I’ve lived in England, so I can handle it- I’ll…
We went to Vermont for the weekend, to check on the progress of the repairs being done there and to revel in the perfection that Vermont in high summer exemplifies. The raspberries are coming in, and the wild strawberries carpet the meadow- especially around the tree where my Mom’s ashes are buried. Milo loves it there, and we invited a friend and her daughter who is as close to a sibling as he has. The…
You know those precooked chicken sausages that hang out in the freezer section? The organic ones with 1990s-era flavor combinations like sundried tomato and porcini mushroom? Well, because our grocery options up here are limited, occasionally my wife goes a little crazy from the limitations of a couple of small stores and grabs at anything that we don’t normally buy. And so it was that these things were in the fridge. Because they’re pre-cooked, and…
The near-constant rain is impeding the growth of the heat-loving plants, and if it keeps up it’s a safe bet that most of our tomatoes and peppers won’t ripen and our cucurbits will succumb quickly to a plague of powdery mildew. And the slugs are as big as schnausers. But the greener things are thriving- roots are getting fat, and our salad isn’t bolting like it normally does. This month will tell whether we are…
The garden is really hitting its stride now, offering a wider array of perfect options for organizing a dish around. The beets have been getting me excited, not least because they go with so many different flavors. They’re also beautiful. John’s birthday party offered me an excuse to monkey around with some of the different directions a beet can go, and try to combine them in an interesting way. Inspired by the bite of foie…
Not bad for a first try. It came out a little salty, because I forgot about it and left it on the cure for a week. Next time I think 4 days will be about right. Now I just have to go the the deli and get them to slice it like this- it’s just too much work to keep doing it by hand. Isn’t it pretty? It almost makes me want to make stained-meat…
In Palazzo Spada, near where I lived in Rome, there’s a cute little Architectural folly by Borromini called La Prospettiva: a corridor built in forced perspective to appear much longer than it is, that opens onto a garden with a statue in it. There’s a nice moment that happens as soon as you enter, when you see that the ceiling slants down, and the floor slopes up, and you realize that the whole thing is about…
Blogging is a funny thing, really. I like doing it, and it landed me a magazine writing job (which is also mostly fun) but I never quite get around to doing most of the requisite things that others do to boost traffic: getting all up in the MyFace and TwitSpace and BoobTube with quick ubiquity, and commenting far and wide like a tweaker cheerleader suffering from simultaneous Prader-Willi and exclamation point-specific Tourette’s syndromes. And God…