as you know, i love really involved recipes. as it happens, i’ve had a yen for spaghetti and meatballs for some time – comforting, savory but slightly sweet, altogether delicious. it is also, however, a cold-weather food, but luckily for me the weather complied […]
this gingerbread is nothing like a gingerbread cookie: it’s moist, dense, slightly sticky, and intensely gingery – everything you wish when you eat gingerbread, and more. this is the sort of thing that would be fabulous on a cold night, topped with whipped cream. it’s […]
it’s completely unremarakable that upon returning from taipei and also from palermo, i had dinner with my family. what is rather odd is the dinner itself – chinese takeout after taipei, and as it happens, italian after palermo. sadly for palermo, i rather think that the italian i had last weekend in somerville beats out anything i had in sicily. the sole notable exception would be that breakfast buffet in trapani, specifically the prosciutto and the cornmeal poundcake; even the best dinner in palermo didn’t really hold a candle to what you can get stateside. i was out at pescatore, and we had a salad (arugula and sundry other greens, grapes, caramelized pine nuts, fennel), seared sea bass (sauteed asparagus, saffron risotto), and chicken marsala (mushrooms, butternut squash agnolotti). there are not many fresh vegetables in either taipei and palermo, so i am fairly certain that i’ve been craving fresh vegetables and that this is why i so enjoyed pescatore’s vegetables. i will say that objectively, i was surprised by just how fine the vegetables were, especially for winter in boston, land of cranberry bogs. the sea bass was especially delicious, with good contrast in textures (the asparagus was perfectly tender-crisp), and the saffron risotto was notably not too heavy. pescatore has certainly upped its game since i was last there, maybe a year ago – before it used to focus more on quantities of seafood, but now the non-seafood entrees have been upgraded.
if you do go to palermo, check out santandrea for dinner. i did find the pasta to be a little thick for my tastes, but that could easily be chalked up to a cultural difference. i don’t know, readers; i’m pretty sure that every time i’ve made pasta or that my roommates have made it, it was better – the pasta was more supple, less coarse in texture, and more pleasurable to eat.
sometimes i wonder how we discovered that durians are a desirable food source: they’re spiky and hard on the outside, smell rotten on the inside, and the little white pods are stringy on the outside and custardy on the inside. i suppose that back whenever […]
restaurant openings in my neighborhood always cause me some pain along with the joy. i very much like craigie street bistrot, and am quite happy that now it’s around the corner on main street. at the same time, i really am not that happy that […]
yeah, that was just my ploy to get you to read this. while i did just take a swig of milk that turned out to be curdled (really, whole foods? after a week?), this post is really about caramel. but first, let me tell you – curdled milk is disgusting. look before you leap, i guess.
i have made five batches of caramel things thus far – two sauces (to find the recipe, search for “caramel sauce” within this blog), and two batches of caramel candy. what’s not to love about caramel? chewy but soft, sweet but not tasting completely of sugar. well, tasting of caramelized sugar. lusciously caramelized sugar. i hadn’t ever made caramel before last weekend, beyond the occasional batch of melted sugar for cake decorations or creme caramel. caramel is special because in addition to the sugar, it includes cream and butter. and, dear readers, after three tries, i have attained success with caramels. the first batch was delicious, but so soft that it refused to part from the aluminum foil i poured it onto without a bit of a battle. i won the battle, but the caramel won the war because it was all lumpy and unattractive looking. but i guess i won the meta-war because i rolled it out onto my leftover ganache, and now it’s all cut up in a tupperware, waiting to be dipped in tempered chocolate. so HA, soft caramel. i win. (more…)
i have never really understood the point of arraying things on a plate in separate areas, only to turn around and stuff it all into your mouth at the same time anyway. why not save your guests the trouble of cutting everything up? of course, […]
my feet are killing me because i just ran to school (ok, walked really fast; i don’t run) to get my computer – i’m having dinner at josh’s and i’m shamelessly using it as an excuse to have him help me extract my hard drive […]
i am exhausted. i have been sleeping poorly all week, probably from attempting to wake up well before my body really wants me to. so then i’m half asleep for anywhere from half an hour to three hours, and i’m sure it’s messing up my sleep cycle. i should really learn to leave well enough alone.
but more to the point, i was going to make the hainanese chicken recipe from mark bittman’s column last week, but decided against it because it would take too long. of course, i still ended up cooking for a good three hours or so, roasting pork v. nothing too fancy, just regular dinnertime fare.
i’m being facetious. it’s true that it wasn’t that fancy, but it also wasn’t regular dinnertime food. it was friday night relaxation cooking: roast pork tenderloin stuffed with sage and coriander seeds, and wrapped in bacon; roasted potatoes; sauteed spinach; and pumpkin pie. this sounds a lot more involved than it was, really, and i’ve made all of these things before so that’s where it’s not so fancy. nothing experimental, nothing i hadn’t tried before, because i really just didn’t feel like i had that much energy to expend. the biggest flourish of the meal was the pumpkin pie, which i decided to make as i was lying on my bed working during the day, since it was cold and rainy outside. (more…)
just to start with an aside: i added a pork tenderloin (one of the big ones, you know, ~2′ long or so) to the collection of frozen meats in the freezer. to date, i have: 1 pork tenderloin, in quarters; 1 lb bacon; 1 large […]