food
photo: sally schneider
Just before Christmas, I posted my best-ever butter cookie recipe: Ethereal Brown Sugar Butter Cookies, along with many variations. The versatile cookie dough recently inspired yet another improvisation on the basic theme. Actually, it’s an improvisation on my Tuscan Herb Salt Recipe, that I then used on the butter cookies, to make a double-improvisation: Brown Sugar Butter Cookies with Thyme-Rosemary-Lavender Salt…
I used the essential Herb Salt method to make a fragrant salt using classic Herbes de Provence: rosemary, thyme and lavender (instead of the usual garlic, rosemary and sage). After I cut out the raw cooky dough, I sprinkled each disk with some of the aromatic salt, hoping that the combination would make for a subtle, surprising and delicious cookie. It did, and has become a new favorite.
That’s what happens when you start improvising: one idea links and layers with another, until you have improvisations made of improvisations…
The basic method is simple… read more…
01.27.12 |
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in celebrations, copy this!, d-i-y, entertaining, food, how-to, recipes, strategies |
photo: maria robledo
For all the wonderful ice creams that are commercially available, I find myself turning to a simple approach I devised years ago for whipping up vividly-flavored tropical fruit ice creams with much less cream and sugar than usual. When pureed, ripe bananas, papayas and/or mangos achieve the creamy silky texture that quantities of cream and egg yolks normally achieve. The resulting faux ice cream reminds me of the tropical-flavored ice creams I’ve bought from stands in Chinatown or when traveling in Mexico. They make a great antidote to winter blues as well as a fine midnight snack.
The method is simple: read more…
01.20.12 |
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in d-i-y, food, recipes |
photo: susan hochbaum
We love things that change our view. With the wind howling and the temperature cold, we found ourselves delighted with a little book that has taken us on an armchair trip through Paris, showing us the city through new eyes: the eyes of a pastry-o-phile. Pastry Paris: In Paris, Everything Looks Like Dessert
grew out of a teeny film graphic designer Susan Hochbaum created a couple of years ago, which we posted here (sadly, it has since been taken down.) It was perfect, with a sweet story behind it: “I came to Paris middle-aged, divorced, and newly in love. Granting myself a sabbatical and renting out my suburban home, I moved with my beau to this romantic city for a year of living shamelessly…Abandoning restraint, and with the appetite of a teenager…”
Hochbaum ate her way through the pastry worlds of Paris, seeing pastry everywhere she looked…
read more…
01.18.12 |
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in food, gifts, outside, paths + processes, people, road warrior, sightings, travel |
Cobalt Violet
One of the biggest rewards of writing recipes is discovering the pleasure they’ve given people, or how folks have taken the recipes and made them their own. I was delighted last month to hear from reader/blogger Lucinda Keller of Cobalt Violet, who has been making my Chicken, Corn and Pumpkin Soup in Chipotle Lime Broth since she first cut the recipe out of Food and Wine Magazine in 1999. She wrote:
“It is my hearty, go-to soup for fall and winter. You can substitute pumpkin for butternut or another sweet squash. It is also hearty enough to skip the chicken (I usually do) or even make it vegan/vegetarian soup with vegetable stock.” Lucinda adds extra garlic and avocado.
It’s a great winter soup so I’m glad to hear it’s resonated over the years. The chipotle lime broth is a fine thing unto itself; you can use it as a base for improvising other soups – say leftover roast pork, spareribs or chicken with grilled onions… or shrimp with fine egg noodles. I’ve been known to poach an egg in it. Here’s the original recipe and the story behind it: read more…
01.09.12 |
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in community, eating, food, recipes |
photo: maria robledo
With the holidays soon upon us, I thought I’d post one of my very best cookie recipes. Or perhaps I should say cookie dough recipes: in addition to being able to fashion it into all sorts of cookie shapes and flavors, it also makes a great bake-ahead tart crust. Fleur de Sel Cookies, Earl Grey Tea Cookies, Coffee Vanilla Bean Cookies, Shortbread Pastry Lids and Shells for Tarts, and Brown Sugar Lime Curd Tart are just a few of the creations it easily morphs into. Once you know the basic thinking behind it, you can improvise endlessly with it. read more…
12.21.11 |
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in celebrations, cheap + great, d-i-y, family + friends, food, how-to, recipes, resources, share |
When I saw ‘the improvised life’s recent post about christopher niemann’s fab color-tiled bathrooms, I immediately thought of the Metro Wine Map of France, created by architectural historian and wine buff Dr. David Gissen, which was introduced this past summer by De Long, a favorite resource of mine for beautiful wine region maps and clever viticultural charts.
I love how it riffs on the classic city subway map, and neatly organizes the mind-numbing number French wine regions and their myriad subregions, shown clearly in their relative positions. It also features major grape varieties shown in context with their corresponding appellations (think: place names, i.e. Rhone, Condrieu, St-Joseph), as well as major geographical features and architectural landmarks, too. read more…
12.17.11 |
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in celebrations, family + friends, food, gifts, resources blogs + sites |
ellen silverman
We switched over to homemade food gifts for the holidays many, many years ago, and each year we find ourselves in the kitchen with the same tried-and-true recipes. But the repetition doesn’t come from a laziness or a lack of inspiration—over the years we’ve found that our friends and family look forward to these gifts, enjoying the tradition rather than hungering for something new. We’re getting ready to make this year’s batch, and hope some of these recipes and ideas serve you (and your loved ones) well, starting with our favorite: alt-malted milk balls (above)… read more…
12.16.11 |
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in celebrations, d-i-y, eating, family + friends, food, gifts, recipes |
(Video link here –sorry about the commercial). We long been a fan of working subtle smoky-pig flavors into our cooking by using a good wood-smoked bacon – even using it to perfume chocolate cakelets. And we’ve always LOVED Maialino‘s margarita made with guanciale-and-sage-infused reposado tequila. Recently, we came across a recipe we’d bookmarked from New York Magazine some time ago, for PDT Bar’s Bacon-Infused Old Fashioned. It gives the method for infusing spirits – bourbon, tequila, whatever – with bacon. Perfect for making special holiday cocktails (and we just though of eggnog spiked with a slightly smoky dark rum).
In the video, you can see how to infuse spirits with bacon at .55 secs. The recipe for the bacon-infusion AND the Old Fashioned are below, along with our method for rendering bacon fat and notations. read more…
12.15.11 |
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in d-i-y, family + friends, food, how-to |
(Video link here.) Last year around this time, we wondered “WHY NOT make a modernist gingerbread house, rather than the usual Victorian style?” Making gingerbread houses and structures allows you to act out your architectural and sweet-tooth fantasies, and are a perfect holiday activity to do with friends or kids; they invite collaboration and the pushing of limits.
We have never seen anything that nailed gingerbread-building better than this video of the making of a geodesic dome gingerbread house: from the creation of a structure to the baking of walls to the final, wild, decorating with sugary delights of all kinds. It’s a way to vicariously experience the magical process…but…
…if you want to build your own geodesic dome and feel you need a little help, you can order a kit from Scout Regalia, with a template and complete instructions. (We’re thinking you could make a six-sided template to cut out gingerbread “tiles” and then use an inverted bowl to give the dome structure…)
Buckminster Fuller would have loved it. read more…
12.13.11 |
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in celebrations, d-i-y, family + friends, food, projects + play, video |
maira kalman: 'food rules' by michael pollan
We have a lot of respect for writer Michael Pollan’s writing about the food industry, and heard that his 2009 book Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual
presented a sane approach to eating. But we’ve been so bombarded over the years with”scientifically proven” strictures about what to cook and eat that were later proven WRONG, that our skepticism kept us away from his book. Until now.
Last month Pollan re-released the book with a set of fabulous illustrations by Maira Kalman, and we were hooked. Pollan’s rules are totally sensible, easy to follow ideas for maximizing the good stuff in your diet, most of which we can definitely get behind. But it’s the great images that really pull you in and make the rules come alive. Here are some of our favorites, starting with the one, above, whose simple rule is “Cook”: read more…
12.01.11 |
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in food, gifts, health, resources, resources books + zines, rules for living |
photo: p.r. hovland
The northeast had a surprise snowstorm in late October which left a lot of people without power. Our good friend Pamela Hovland sent us pictures of her family’s improvised living arrangements: mattresses arranged around the fire place with an array of colorful quilts and pillows made for cozy, impressively stylish indoor camping. But best of all was Pamela’s makeshift refrigerator, tucked into the snow in her yard. read more…
11.28.11 |
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in family + friends, food, inside, outside, paths + processes, people, reimagine, strategies |
photo: maria robledo/trunk archive
If ever a meal were improvised it’s Thanksgiving, where cooks from tested to terrified face off with one common ingredient and end up with something completely different than practically everyone else’s. That’s because turkey challenges our sensibilities and confidence, from its oversize anatomy that cooks at different speeds, to its flavor spectrum that ranges from chicken-like white meat to pheasant-like dark meat. How to dress it? To brine or not to brine? Deep fried? What kind of gravy? How many sides? Just thinking about it either excites or exhausts most cooks, depending on their sense of adventure.
I look at pairing wines with Thanksgiving feasts as an Olympic downhill ski run with lots of obstacles; a herculean effort that, if done well, should be both fun and exhilarating. To keep it fun, however, is to know that it’s not really the Olympics, and the choices far outweigh the obstacles. The place to start is understanding the universal truth that food and wine belong together, and that it’s far better to have them alongside each other than to be caught without one or the other. On their own, each should be delicious, but together they should make each other taste even better.
Pairing is essentially all about either complementing or contrasting tastes. read more…
11.18.11 |
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in celebrations, family + friends, food, gifts |
photo: helvetia west virginia archive
I know of very few people who don’t get anxious at the prospect of roasting a turkey. Because the breast cooks more quickly than the dark meat thigh, it is often dry and overcooked by the time the bird comes out of the oven. Nobody seems to be certain of what, exactly, the best roasting method is, whether high heat or low, tented with foil, or roasted breast down.
Brining, submerging the bird in a salt-and-sugar solution before roasting it, is one of the most foolproof ways I know of to insure a succulent, flavorful roasted turkey. And the best brine I know of for turkey was created by Alice Waters, the inspired, inspiring founder and guiding light of Chez Panisse in Berkeley California, from whom this recipe was adapted (and published in A New Way to Cook
.) The seasonings in the brine bring out the turkey’s natural flavor, and make it taste more like a farm bird with subtle herbal overtones.
The only problem with brining are the logistics: read more…
11.17.11 |
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in celebrations, family + friends, food, recipes, strategies, tools |
Today we got a Comment from a reader about a riff she did on our Roasted Chestnut How-To from last year’s Thanksgiving. OMG, we thought, it’s next week!. If you’re still mulling over what to make – or bring – for your Thanksgiving day…here are are our greatest hits.
As for the inspired chestnut riff, it’s here:
“Well, nearly a year later and I’ve finally tried smoking chestnuts. I scored them sort of randomly (wherever I could get a purchase on the skin- some on the flat side, some on the round, always a crisscross), soaked them, and smoked them on the stove top over apple wood chips and a few dried sage leaves. It took about 45 minutes before the skin peeled back. They’re delicious!”
(To rig a stove-top smoker, read more…
11.16.11 |
comments (1) |
in celebrations, family + friends, food, recipes |
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