i am currently drinking a cup of hot, honeyed, milky (assam) tea, my break from the editing work i’m doing on a professor’s manuscript. mostly, with respect to food, i have an assortment of odds and ends: salty and sweet parmesan muffins. parmesan muffins, you […]
This article is really kind of saddening. People should listen to their stomachs and just make what they want – chances are, it’s what their friends want, too. This is from the NY Times: Dinner at the Foodies’: Purslane and Anxiety By KATHERINE WHEELOCK Published: […]
in the world of restaurant eaters, “leftovers” is a dirty word. it’s the moldy mac and cheese festering in a tupperware in the back of your fridge, pushed out of the way by pudding cups and beer. it’s the smell of mold spreading throughout your fridge as you put off cleaning it out. it’s the stuff you intended to eat, but then forgot about.
in the restaurant world, leftovers become family dinners: leftover chicken parts, excess inventory from a food order, etc. fewer people ordered a dish than you expected and now you have a lot of something leftover.
restaurant leftovers are a little more interesting: it’s the food you didn’t make that you have brought back with you. the fact that it’s from a restaurant – and thus “better” than what you can do yourself – transforms leftovers into a sort of secondary takeout.
but, my friends, if you think leftovers are horrible, then you are mistaken. i am eating my lunch right now: a “salad” of braised red cabbage, roast turkey, ricotta, and olive oil. all of these things are leftovers: the braised red cabbage was leftover from cod that we had last week, the roast turkey was leftover from my mother, the ricotta was leftover from something (…a long time ago but it was still good). the contents of your fridge, in simple combination with your staple kitchen ingredients, can be transformed into joy. combining leftovers is a different kind of thinking than shopping at the supermarket for specific ingredients; it’s a lesson in constraints. how can you put these things together so that they’ll taste good? and this journey often leads to new discoveries about things that go together. cooking with leftovers in a non-chop suey way will further your education in how and what to eat, and you will be happier for it.
they don’t! at least, the idea of a soft, chewy cookie seems to be a particularly american thing. i guess they’d be less attractive in china because they don’t keep well – although cookies nowadays have so many preservatives in them that they would probably […]
though none of us are irish, 24 and 44 joined forces on friday night for a st patrick’s day dinner party, i guess you could call it. mirms made colcannon, corned beef, and soda bread, and carrien and i brought beef stew and cupcakes. cupcakes, […]
yesterday carrien and i (mostly carrien, really) made “samosas” – basically a samosa crossed with spanikopita. the filling is red onions, yellow onions, cumin, spinach, garlic, roasted fennel, and red potatoes; the wrapper is phyllo dough. we were attempting to use our spinach and lettuce from boston organics, but succeeded only in using the spinach. still, the “samosas” were fantastic, if a little prone to shattering because the phyllo was fragile after having been thawed, then refrozen. to add to our eclectic mix, we had some fried chicken from the supermarket, gouda and brie with red grapes, and chocolate chip-craisin peanut butter cookies that i found on epicurious. i totally forgot to add the honey in the recipe to the dough, and that explains why it was on the slightly dry side. but the cookies were totally fine – not dry after they’d baked. probably they’d have been a bit better with more liquid of some kind, but the omission of the honey meant that the peanut flavor was underlined more.
ah, studio or cooking: which one is more important? well, seeing as a review is not a negotiable thing, but cooking is, i went with studio. for the past three or four weeks. in return, my body feels like it’s on its last legs, coughing […]
forgive me if you are reading this and you actually celebrate easter (as opposed to consuming large amounts of chocolate). neither jessica nor i are religious, but the allure of the mimosa resulted in an easter celebration. i’d never had a mimosa before, but it’s […]
jessica and i (or, to better describe it, jessica) decided to throw a chinese new year bash this year. we decided to celebrate the following weekend due to impending homework. on our ambitious, but not too ambitious menu: scallion pancakes, a lotus root salad, vegetable dumplings (with green har-gao-like skins), sticky rice packets (which have a name in chinese – maybe ‘joong’?), rice noodle rolls with chinese broccoli in them, tea eggs, a new year cake, red bean sesame balls, pineapple buns, clementines, and oh, there was one more thing, something sweet…but i’ve forgotten. i would love to describe each one of the things we made, but this will be a brief blow-by-blow because i don’t seem to be in a writing mood.
i’m always thrilled when something i make looks like it’s genuinely the thing i was trying to make. somehow it makes me feel more successrul, which i suppose is natural since i’m trying to emulate the photo anyway – but the feeling of success is disproportionate to the situation. anyway, the pineapple buns were an example of this – we even baked them on this huge pan that looks like the ones they use in the real bakeries. the filling could have been better, but they looked so pretty! as did the tea eggs and the red bean sesame balls; i was most excited about the red bean sesame balls, which puff up slightly when you fry them, and turn golden brown where there aren’t sesame seeds. they’re actually pretty easy to make – you just mix rice flour with sugar water and take balls of it to make little pods – but i’m mystified as to how the bakeries make them in an efficient way. (more…)
since i last posted. in fact, a few months. i thus have a long list of things to say, hopefully interesting things. unfortunately, i haven’t been able to keep up with my tech column, though this blog is more interesting anyway. food kudos for best […]