Fire up the rice cooker with rice and water and a wee bit of salt. Preheat the oven, with your marvelous cast-iron skillet inside, to 425 degrees. Put a hunk of lovely wild salmon caught by your friend Chris Beaudin (who promised to scope next season’s crews for a husband for yours truly) in a piece of tin foil with some leftover fennel fronds, a few rinsed salted capers, a splash of white wine and a little butter. Seal up the tinfoil. Snap the ends off some asparagus, and roll them around in some olive oil and sprinkle with salt.…
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I have a perfect bowl. My cousin Elizabeth made it for me many years ago. It’s exactly the right size for a single-girl meal, and tonight, after a very blinky day brought on by one of those nuits blanches a full moon sometimes brings, I made some dinner in the Perfect Bowl. It was very monkey-brain in my house last night — I have a totally different job at my Real Job, and I don’t really know how to do it yet. So, it was one of those nights where one thinks about everything including many things one has no…
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My grandmother is ninety four today. Ninety four! She’s still got all her faculties, although she’s got a glass eye, and an artificial hip. She started a lending library in her little farm town in Illiniois at ninety because she’d “retired” and she needed a project. So she got a lot of people to donate books, and she got a donated building, and she catalogued all the books. If you want to borrow a book from my grandmother’s library, basically you just write it down in the notebook, and you bring it back when you want. It’s a great little…
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Argh — I feel like the Bad Blogger. I’ve been so consumed by the Tsunami, by the subzero weather, by a rousing game of UpWords with Maryanne last night, and by getting my New Year’s resolutions organized ( a:sitting again in the mornings, b: writing writing writing the second and third sections of the memoir and c: reading Virginia Woolf’s novels in order [as opposed to the letters and diaries which I love]), that I haven’t gotten around to blogging. As for cooking — I made a bomber bolognese sauce with hot italian sausage and ground antelope the other day…
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Here it is! In the back of my car on it’s way to the first of the three parties it graced over the weekend (yes, the car is dirty — I have two dogs, but that’s why I put the newspaper down). Part of the reason I made a croquembouche this year is because one of my all-time favorite Martha Stewart episodes was the one where she and Julia Child made croquembouches together. Martha was over on her side of the counter carefully and precisely arranging her cream puffs, while over on the other side, Julia was sort of flinging…
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Patrick was the pastry chef in the family. He was a little dyslexic and so he loved the precision of pastry recipes — if you follow the recipe exactly, pastry usually works. A few years ago, he made a Paris Brest for our Christmas dinner. The first few years we lived together, we had these great, impromptu Christmas dinners — one year, Patrick called me from the fancy butcher shop at the Stanford Mall and said “What do you think about Guinea Hens for dinner?” So Guinea Hens it was … The year of the Paris Brest, I was off…
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Well, this isn’t really a recipe, since I don’t have any measurements, but sometimes a girl looks in the freezer, and feels a tiny flame of inspiration. So, here’s the deal — I had some ground lamb and ground antelope left over from last year. I took a pound of ground lamb, two packages of antelope (they didn’t have weights on them, I think they were about a half pound each) and two mild Italian sausages, and decided to make a meatloaf. I started by sauteeing two ribs of celery, a couple of carrots and a medium yellow onion with…
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I caught an old episode of Martha Stewart Living this afternoon. She was making a cranberry gelatin mold, and after taking it out of the fridge, she said “You can immerse it in warm water to loosen, or you can use this.” At which point she picked up an ENORMOUS propane blowtorch! And used it on her lovely copper jelly mold to loosen the dessert. I laughed for five minutes. Out loud. Oh we miss her, our domestic goddess with her two foot tall blowtorch. For a jelly mold. I’m still gasping for breath.
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I grew three brussels sprouts plants this year — they take a lot of room in the garden, and they’re really slow, and frankly, I wasn’t sure they were worth the time or the space. It’s been cold — small freezes on and off for six weeks or so, but last weekend when the weather said a real cold spell was coming in, I went out in the near darkness to pick my brussels sprouts. I grew them in part because when I lived in New York City in my 20s, I loved watching the little boys carry their spikes…
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So this morning, I wandered across the back yard and pulled up a medium-sized spinach plant (one that was crowding several others), and a spring onion. Then back inside for a little omelette — I don’t want to sound like one of those Alice Waters/Richard Olney cranks, but I have to say, growing my own produce has entirely changed my cooking. All that emphasis on freshness, and not mucking with the flavor of the ingredients — it makes much more sense when you’ve got produce so fresh that it was growing two minutes ago. (For instance, the French recipe for…