As always- slave to peasant efficiency that I am- with the carcass of a roasted bird in the fridge, I wanted to make a brothocentric meal based on the remains of our Christmas duck. Heather made turkey pho after Thanksgiving, and then Hank, inspired by her post, made wild duck pho, so it was only a matter of time before I caught the faux-Vietnamese virus (get it?) and did the same. The interweb: it’s like…
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We kept it very simple this year, with no travel and no guests. It’s a pretty nice way to do it, actually, especially given the weather-related mayhem all over the place. Yesterday Milo and I walked into town to see Santa arrive, and then came home in time for me to finish dinner. Sous-vide is genius for this, because I was able to leave the meat in the bath while we were out with no…
There’s honestly not much to say about this meal. A perfectly roasted free-range organic chicken on roasted (mostly) roots- carrot, parsnip, turnip, onion, garlic (an entire head) and fennel, with gravy made from giblet broth with turnip and celery plus a duck/chicken fat roux and a perfect winter mesclun salad. I tried a 2004 Andromeda, and while it’s pretty much unrecognizable as pinot noir, it’s pretty wonderful with this kind of bad-ass home cooking. Milo…
Liz had her annual holiday party on Saturday, and there was a good turnout despite the recent heavy snow and slick roads. I spent most of the day making components of what I hoped would be a great appetizer: duck prosciutto on lotus root chips with butternut gel, green tea pudding, and peanut butter powder. It turned out all right, but needs tinkering to balance the flavors. All of the individual components were really good,…
We learned something interesting about the relative freshness of fish this evening. The black cod we’ve been enjoying was off-the-boat fresh on Monday. I picked it up on Tuesday, and cured most of it yesterday for smoking. But there was part of a side that I forgot to make last night, so I pulled it out tonight. It was clean, firm, and had no bad smell. With a simple broil, it was flaky and perfect,…
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…
I had planned to make the black cod with miso tonight, with some rice and greens probably, when I get a call and before you know it I’ve got three sides of beautiful fresh black cod to work with. Most of it will get a smoke for the party on Saturday, but I cut off two nice pieces and upgraded my dinner plans to compensate. Milo is going through a not-loving-the-fish phase, just in time…
I was in the city for the weekend, doing a bunch of errandy things, and having a nice dinner with Kris & Ken. They very kindly gave me the Alinea cookbook as a late birthday present, and I was overjoyed. Other weekend highlights included picking up a whole lot of wine- details to follow shortly- dropping off my La Pavoni to get fixed, and, best of all, finally getting the bug Milo had last week…
I have to say at the outset that we are lucky; despite our recent travails with the heat (and the panic, the vomit) we got off easy with this last storm. While people all over the Northeast have no power, I’m basking in the glow of the internets. We ended up just South of the freeze for most of it, and the ice turned to plain old rain, though in Biblical quantity. Last night, because…
So our water heater decided not to die, but to continue producing hot water per normal while quietly leaking for an unknown length of time so that we wouldn’t notice anything until the heat stopped working, by which time all the water had done some unknown amount of damage to the subfloor and the downstairs heat crapped out entirely. I only discovered it because the plumber didn’t fix the heat, so I went down into…