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 on Sunday, so I’ve been thinking about what to cook.There’s going to be a bunch of us (the Sweetheart is fleeing to his cabin, not a…
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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VJgb2bCfzE Michael Ruhlman started a meme a couple of weeks ago where he asked people to blog about why they cook. Above is his TEDxCLE talk about why cooking is essential to making us human, to making us families, and to making us reasonably healthy human beings. It’s well worth the fifteen minutes (and he’s sort of adorably nervous, as one would be). He says in the video, and on the follow up post on his blog, that we need to make cooking an imperative. With which I agree. But I guess one of the things I’ve been trying to…
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My new cookbook slut column is up at Bookslut: Greece is the Word. It’s been a delightful month of lemon and garlic and lamb around here. Several new recipes/techniques going into regular rotation from How to Roast a Lamb: New Greek Classic Cooking by Michael Psilakis, Vefa’s Kitchen by Vefa Alexandiou, and Michael Symon’s Live to Cook: Recipes and Techniques to Rock Your Kitchen.
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My new column at Bookslut, After Julie/Julia: The New Generation of Food Blog-to-Books, is up: I take on The Foodie Handbook: The (Almost) Definitive Guide to Gastronomy, Jam Today: A Diary of Cooking With What You’ve Got and The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove.
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We’ve been cleaning out the freezers to make room for some incoming elk and lamb, and we found several packages of “soup bones.” They were far too meaty for the dogs, so I made a batch of stock. First I roasted them all off in a hot oven with three or four onions cut in half, and half a dozen carrots until everything was nicely carmelized. I was thrilled to discover the tail in the treasure trove as well (when it’s wrapped in butcher paper, it’s sometimes a surprise when you unwrap it). After everything browned up, I put it…
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We were lucky enough to be the recipients of several large roasts that came from a tiny herd of cattle that one of Chuck’s friends raises. Last year, we had a roast beef from one of their steers, and it was the best piece of meat I think I’ve ever eaten. There really is something about meat that hasn’t seen the inside of a feedlot. So, yesterday, being grey and rainy and full of football and all, I cooked a five pound chuck roast. While it was searing the house filled up with this amazing beefy smell. I don’t think…
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I made a batch of meatballs the other day which were delicious, but interestingly enough, also stretched just under two pounds of meat into at least four meals if not six. I’m looking at a lot of cookbooks right now for BookSlut, and this recipe is very loosely adapted from the one in the A16 cookbook. I used buffalo because it’s readily available here, and because this story in the New York Times (and this one about how Costco actually tests for E. Coli) only amped up my deep suspicion of all ground beef, even when I know the butchers…
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Hi folks — the heat finally broke and since my sweetheart has been longing for a Lasagne! for a while, and since yesterday I had a big pot of brand spanking new tomato sauce on the stove, I took a flyer at it. This lovely lasagne was brought to you not by any of the many authentic Italian cookbooks I have on my shelf, not by Mario or Marcella or even Patricia Wells (Trattoria), or even by my beloved Dom DeLuise (Eat This .. It’ll Make You Feel Better). No, this gorgeous, gooey, wavy lasagne that is all brown on…
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I made a really gorgeous no-knead bread this week. Even with my crummy point-and-shoot camera, you can see the tiny bubbles along the surface of the crust. This bread not only sprung up like you see, but the entire crust was shattery when it came out of the oven. This one took two days. It’s been so cold, and I’m such a miser, that my house has been hovering between 57 and 62 all week. I mixed up the regular old no-knead recipe in the middle of the day Monday. Three cups flour (I use half bread flour, half all-purpose,…
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Cooking in clay is one of those things that you read about in cookbooks and wonder what the fuss is all about — or at least I did, until my mother gave me this funny little pot one year for Christmas. I have no idea where she found it, it was an odd gift, even for her. For the first few years I had it, I assumed you could only use it in the oven. It wasn’t until I was at a party during one of the Squaw Valley Writers workshops and saw Barbara Hall using hers on her stove…