Potato-Chipolte Love …

By cmf
0
March 11, 2010
Potato-Chipolte Love …

I had to go to Bozeman yesterday to do some errands, and I had lunch at my favorite little restaurant, La Tinga. There aren’t many things I miss from California, but taquerias and Asian food are among them. I had about ten minutes before my haircut, so I ducked in for a taco or two, including one that had chicken and potatoes and a mildly-hot red chile sauce. It blew my mind. I hadn’t really expected it to, but something about the plain mealy potatoes and the chiles, with a little chicken in the mix, it was delicious. On the way home, I was still obsessed with that flavor, so I broke out the Diana Kennedy and Rick Bayless cookbooks, and went to work. I wound up pretty much following a recipe from Rick Bayless’s Mexican Kitchen: Capturing the Vibrant flavors of a World-Class Cuisine for Smoky Shredded Chicken...
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To Can, or Not to Can …

By cmf
2
March 10, 2010
To Can, or Not to Can …

Jeez oh Pete, so spring is here, and it seems to have brought along the first “canning is dumb” article. This year it’s at Slate, where last summer, it was at Salon. I’ve addressed this subject once already, last summer, when Salon published a ridiculous piece “debunking” the “myth” that canning will save you money, but I guess if they’re going to write the same article over and over, I’ll have to keep throwing in my two cents. Canning is useful if you have an excess of something. It’s a method of preservation. If you want to make a hobby out of it, and get all “lifestyle-y” about it and spend too much money and annoy your friends with your esoteric jams, then that’s your business. The rest of us will just keep on keeping on. Because there are a lot of us out here who...
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Nori Lunch

By cmf
2
March 9, 2010
Nori Lunch

I’ve been obsessed with nori rolls lately. I got the idea from Cathy Erway’s delightful book, The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove, which I reviewed for Bookslut about a month ago. After this long winter, I’ve been craving crunch, and veggies, or maybe there’s something in the seaweed that my body craves, but it’s been nori rolls for lunch for a couple of weeks now. The thing is, nori rolls are actually quite easy. I like the rice warm, so I either make up a fresh batch in the rice cooker, or simply scoop out about a rice-bowl’s worth of leftover rice, add some rice vinegar, and heat it in the microwave. Then spread it out on the nori sheet, and add whatever is around. For a while, I was eating leftover steak, cucumber, and scallion nori rolls....
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“How I Fell In Love with a Fish”

By cmf
0
March 10, 2010
“How I Fell In Love with a Fish”

Although I have mixed feelings about TED, which too often seems very self-congratulatory, this TED talk by Dan Barber, of Blue Hill Farms, is both hilarious and really informative. Veta la Palma is a completely innovative fish farm in the south of Spain, where they’re growing fish for restaurants in a natural, clean, reclaimed wetland. Figuring out how to farm fish is crucial for those of us who want to continue eating fish, since...
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Lit News and Reading Roundup

By cmf
0
March 9, 2010
Lit News and Reading Roundup

I’m sure no one will be surprised to learn that my major decorating theme around here is piles of books. I have bookshelves, and even a wee library in my basement office, but the books, they still seem to pile up. So here are a few things I’ve been reading lately: This terrific article about how the David Foster Wallace archives found a home at the Ransom Center in Texas. We had our first glimpse...
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Old is the New Green

By cmf
2
March 4, 2010
Old is the New Green

The cover of Preservation Magazine proclaims this month that “Old is the New Green.” It’s an interesting concept on a lot of fronts, especially in the way it undercuts the idea floating around out there that we can shop our way to sustainability. Sustainability, and being green, aren’t about buying clothing made from bamboo (which is really just rayon, the manufacturing of which brings a host of problems) or changing the lightbulbs, or well,...
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Living

By cmf
0
March 8, 2010
Chickens and Dogs

Chickens and Dogs

It’s not quite the lions and the lambs, but pretty close — we’ve had a big breakthrough in the domestic realm this week. The dogs seem to have developed the ability to mingle with the chickens without killing them. It’s a fragile truce, and one that requires close supervision, since the poor bird dogs are fighting generations of breeding that tells them to get the bird, but so far, we’ve had several episodes of...

By cmf
3
March 5, 2010
Go-To Recipes?

Go-To Recipes?

So all this talk about cooking, just ordinary cooking, has gotten me thinking about go-to recipes, the ones you rely on and can do without really thinking. For Michael Ruhlman it’s a roast chicken. Which I’ve got to second. I use Marcella Hazan’s “recipe” which is nothing more than a roast chicken with a lemon stuck full of fork holes inside it. The lemon does wonders. I’m having the girls over for Oscar night...

By cmf
3
March 3, 2010
Eat Real Food

Eat Real Food

I’ve read several articles in the last few days that have me all het up about the food thing. There seems to be a new and annoying meme out there, that eating real food will make one a “slave” to one’s kitchen. That somehow, “cooking from scratch” is so difficult and so time-consuming that no one can really do it. It’s just too hard. Well maybe it’s too hard if you’re being an obsessive...

By cmf
0
March 2, 2010
Spring in the Paradise Valley

Spring in the Paradise Valley

There are new calves all up and down the valley — they’ve arrived in the past week or so. Not only are they incredibly cute, but they play — a reminder that even beef cattle once had a wild nature, before we bred it out of them. When I leave the cabin in the mornings they’re down there, nestled in the hay, goofing off, nursing, and one bold boy had a standoff with my...

Believing

By cmf
0
March 3, 2010
Roger Ebert, My New Hero Roger Ebert, My New Hero

If you haven’t read Chris Jones’ profile of Roger Ebert in the lastest issue of Esquire Magazine, go there now. It’s incredibly affecting. I remember my surprise a couple of years ago when I discovered how amazing Ebert’s written criticism is — like so many, I’d thought of him as the thumbs up/thumbs down guy, or as the guy my creative writing instructor at the University of Illinois, the unforgettable Rocco Fumento, used to...

By cmf
December 21, 2009
New Piece at Culinate: Croquembouche!

My new essay for Culinate was posted this morning. The Croquembouche that saved Christmas (faithful readers might remember): My inner Child — A Christmas to remember : Culinate.

By cmf
December 2, 2009
What Killed Jane Austen?

I have a personal theory about Jane Austen, which is that they should  immediately stop teaching her to high school students, and perhaps even college students. Jane Austen can only properly be appreciated when you’re old enough to have really messed something up, when you know that sick-in-the-pit-of-your-stomach feeling that comes from a truly missed opportunity, when you understand that you can, indeed, really mess up your own life. Then Jane Austen’s books open...

By cmf
May 9, 2009
Craig Arnold, 1967-2009

Craig and I survived the PhD program at the University of Utah together — it was a terrible time for me, a program that wasn’t a good fit, and in general, an experience that taught me that academia wasn’t a good habitat for me. But Craig, Craig was maddening, a provacateur by nature, but he was also one of the truly kind people I met at Utah. His loss, which is chronicled here at...

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