Saturday morning started with a water main in one of the western suburbs rupturing. This doesn’t sound like a big deal until someone tells you that it was a 10’ wide water main that connects the Western Mass water supply to the water supply for the greater Boston area. The practical upshot of this was that from Saturday morning through Tuesday morning all of the Boston area – 30 communities, 700,000 homes and 2 million people were under a boil water order. Read the rest of this entry ?
I’m having a moment of schadenfreude at the recent backlash I’ve seen at the organic foods/eco movement. Or well, not precisely schadenfreude, but the warm glow that comes with seeing someone get a little of the comeuppance you’ve thought they’ve deserved for several years. Read the rest of this entry ?
I like old cookbooks for the same reason that other people like horror movies. It’s that frisson of terror you get at the thought of what might be waiting at the bottom of the stair, or what fresh culinary horror could be lurking at the turn of the page. I find Norman Bates’ smiling slyly and saying, “Mother isn’t quite herself today,” and recipes that call for cans of condensed cheddar soup to be equally terrifying. Read the rest of this entry ?
What I wanted was asparagus, so what I bought was a pineapple. No wait, I swear this makes sense. Maybe it doesn’t make strictly logical sense but there was a train of thought that lead from one to the other. Read the rest of this entry ?
Sometimes you come across a recipe that involves every ingredient in the kitchen and has seventeen steps and you know it will be fantastic because in the end you’ll have created something rich and decadent with layers upon layers of flavor – for example Coq au Vin requires marinating and straining and browning and braising and straining the sauce again, just about every dish in the cupboard and the end result is like liquid sin. Read the rest of this entry ?
Dear Editors of food magazines:
Please stop taunting me with your Spring ingredients and Spring menus. I know that America is a large country and that it’s probably Spring somewhere – California perhaps? But for those of us who are laboring in the frozen North, for whom the crocuses have only just this past weekend bloomed, Spring is still a long way away. Read the rest of this entry ?
I’m not the kind of cook who invents recipes. If I want a specific flavor combination I tend to go in search of a recipe that will provide that for me. I edit recipes on the fly sometimes – more cinnamon, less stock, a little heavier on the paprika – but I don’t do a lot of wholesale inventing. Usually if I think a recipe needs that much help I’ll go find a recipe that I think will actually work as written. However, this week I was well into my recipe before I realized how unworkable it was, and what I ended up making bears so little relationship to the recipe I started with I might as well have started from scratch. Read the rest of this entry ?
I acknowledge that I am not sane about the Oscars. I don’t mean about caring who wins – although I’ve seen more than a usual number of the movies up for awards this year and hoo boy did I have firm opinions about who shouldn’t win Best Picture/Best Director. Mercifully, the Academy chose to reinforce my faith in humanity this year rather than crush it like they did in 2006 so four years from now I won’t still be grousing about what should have won but didn’t. Sadly there were very few really entertainingly terrible dresses this year – which, let’s face it, is the real reason I watch the Oscars. There was far too much pale pink, and flesh-tones, and Miley Cyrus needed to stand up straight (apparently Lauren Bacall agrees with us on this, which is reassuring because it means that I could be turning into a classy dame and not just channeling my father) but nothing that approached the cheerful insanity of Bjork’s swan dress from 2001, although that is the gold standard for insane Oscar dresses and would be hard to beat.
All that being true, the reason I like entertaining for the Oscars is because it’s an excuse to experiment and make things I’m not entirely sure people will like (b’stilla), things that are just too rich for everyday (cauliflower tart), and things that are just fun (pickled grapes). The Oscars are a chance to fiddle with appetizers and try things in small quantities because I’m not entirely sure what they’ll taste like, and if they’re not entirely successful it won’t be disastrous because there are other things on the table to eat. Read the rest of this entry ?
I firmly believe that there should be a vegetable on the table at all meals. I don’t think it count unless it’s a green vegetable – or tomatoes, because tomatoes are totally a vegetable in my book. But, when it comes to eating them I tend to smother them with something else that’s on the plate to mask the taste – the sauce that came with the meat, or a forkful of mashed potatoes. I know I’m supposed to like my vegetables, and I’ve never served a meal that didn’t include a green vegetable (unless I’m cooking on a weekend and have run out of salad, in which case it’s possible that I’ll count tomato sauce as a vegetable). I just wish I liked them more, but honestly just not so much. Read the rest of this entry ?
I can feed two people without leftovers, and I can feed 6-8+ people with minimal leftovers. But ask me to feed 2-6 people and I’m flummoxed. It’s like I’ve completely forgotten how to scale for groups of less than six. Last night one person was off in Vancouver for the Olympics, one person was sitting at Logan airport attempting to fly to Virginia, one person had class and one person was running a book club, which meant we were down to a total of four people for Dinner and I spent 15 minutes trying to work out how much rice four people would eat. Read the rest of this entry ?
Monday Night Dinner 
