Posted in Salad, tagged local produce, watermelon pine nut salad on July 6, 2010| 4 Comments »
Man is it HOT out. Heat wave hits the East Coast.
See my temperature barometer?
The 80 degree F. tag is floating close to the bottom. That means it is hotter than 80 degrees in my apartment even though the a/c has been blasting all day.
Turning on any electrical appliance to cook is just not an option. A watermelon salad is a perfect refreshment for a heat wave. Keep it in mind for your next backyard cookout.
Posted in Main dish, Recipes, tagged black bean stew, Brazil, feijoada, travel on June 29, 2010| 7 Comments »
Meet Evelin. (Pronounced ‘Eva-leeen.’)
She wanted me to show you what she looked like “normally,” right away. Because, as you’ll see, she looked pretty unusual the day she came over and cooked a full Brazilian meal in my tiny kitchen. Make that 2 days. Actually, the whole event spanned 3 days. More on that in a bit.
Evelin is from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She’s been living with our mutual friend Ana Paula here in Boston for the past month taking English classes and visiting our inferior beaches (my words, not hers!). Anyway, during one of our adventures, maybe it was after suffering through “Sex and the City 2“, we came up with the idea of cooking “a real Brazilian meal” together. I would take notes and pictures, and she would do everything else. It turned out I was also on fan duty.
This was to happen on a Sunday afternoon. At my house. “Sure, no problem!” (I’ve picked up this phrase from Evelin). (more…)
Posted in Baked goods, Recipes, tagged baked goods, banana bread on May 10, 2010| 5 Comments »
For Mother’s Day I headed down to the Cape for a quick visit with Mom and the sea. I feel pretty fortunate that Mom relocated on the Cape a few years ago so I can zoom down for a few hours to escape the city and then zoom back up again.
The lilac bush behind her old Cape house was in full bloom, the first time I’ve seen it. Mom told me I should take back as many blossoms as I wanted. This is pure joy for me, being a city dweller. The lilac display in the arboretum is just a couple of blocks from my apartment and I can go sniff them anytime I want but to pick them would be criminal. So I settle for paying way too much for fresh, cut flowers at Whole Foods. Driving down to the Cape means I can have my pick of whatever Mom’s garden is offering.
I arrived with a hydrangea bush and a couple of paperbacks, good for beach reading. Mom has two great loves: Gardening and books. As long as her house has enough room for all of her books and as long as her back garden is big enough to dig around in, she is happy. If for any reason a Christmas or Mother’s Day goes by without a new book for Mom, we hear about it. “That was a lovely holiday,” she’ll say, “but I didn’t get any new books.” (more…)
Posted in Main dish, Recipes, tagged butternut squash and hazelnut lasagna, dinner, pasta on April 8, 2010| 3 Comments »
This is a delicious lasagna that is rich with both sweet and nutty flavors. Sage is the perfect complement to butternut squash and the hazelnuts. This vegetarian dish is excellent without tasting like it’s trying to be a “meatless” version of a classic dish.
Posted in Main dish, Recipes on March 1, 2010| 2 Comments »
I have been glued to the Olympics coverage for the past two weeks and now that the Vancouver Winter Games are closed and the medals have been counted I’m feeling adrift.
To extend the Olympic spirit just a bit longer I embellished fettuccine alfredo to evoke the slopes of Whistler complete with metaphorical splashes. Think cream of the crop. (I know, bear with me. The winters are long in Boston.) I sautéed onion and mushroom with yellow (gold!) pepper and ringed the plate with (a laurel wreath!) baby spinach. Every athlete knows how important it is to eat your spinach. So slide your fork down this white-coated mound of pasta, twirl it in the air, and deliver it to your winner’s podium. Taste the gold. Give it your all. Do it for your country. You earned it. Smile.
And for desert? Hannah’s Gold, for sure. (more…)
Posted in Cookbooks, Soup on February 23, 2010| 5 Comments »
My friend Nate has what I call a kitchen ministry. He gathers people around his table and showers them with affection and food on almost any night of the week. More than once I have gotten a “dp?” text message (meaning “dinner party”) that has pulled me out of the grooves my routine and into his kitchen just a few blocks away. It’s warm in there. The walls are painted reddish orange. And we always say grace before we eat. People depart transformed.
If there are more people than soup spoons, 15 was the count one night, Nate hands out measuring spoons as substitutes. I gave him a shoebox full of extra silverware for Christmas but I am pretty sure this box sits under his bed. He admits he likes the spontaneous creativity that comes with solving the problem of too many friends and too few spoons.
This stew reminds me of a dp at Nate’s house. A lot is crammed in and it exudes warmth. It’s from Deborah Madison’s “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone.” I’ve left out a few fancy things below such as a bread crumb picada thickener and a romesco sauce to add zest. You don’t really need them, and if you think you do, you should just go out and buy the cookbook because it is full of great recipes. (more…)
Posted in Baked goods, Dessert on February 7, 2010| 6 Comments »
It’s Superbowl Sunday and I’m tasked with bringing the brownies to the party. Usually I rip the top off a cardboard box and mix the contents for a chocolate win. But this year I made a little extra effort.
Fair Trade Brownies
For Christmas gifts I gave fair trade chocolate from Taza Chocolate, and having a few bars left I thought I’d try their brownie recipe. Taza is a small company just over in Somerville, Mass. I toured their factory before the holidays with my friend Jessica. It was no Willy Wonka experience. It was crowded and the highlight was watching an old Italian-made cacao bean grinder painted fire engine red do its work.
But what makes fair trade special is all the stuff you can’t see. Taza’s beans are grown in the Dominican Republic by local growers organized into cooperatives. The business is financially and environmentally stable and community-oriented. Basically, no mean people or practices are involved. It’s stone-ground chocolate that has a heart. (more…)
Posted in Main dish on February 6, 2010| 5 Comments »
In order to reach the highest heights of creativity, cooking should really be seen as if it were a kind of a travel adventure. Sometimes traveling requires careful planning and the consulting of travel books with big glossy photos and maps to entice you out of the comfort of your routine. And other times you just follow your whim and intuition and push off, hoping for the best.
I did this kind of travel recently when I decided with hardly any premeditation to go to Panama for a week in December with a friend. Now that I’m back and faced with winter’s quiet days I find myself remarking out loud from time to time, “Well, at least I pushed off for Panama. That was fun.”
My friend Rebecca heard me saying this the other day. Without missing a beat she said, “It was more like you jumped into a cannon and blasted off!”
Yes. It’s really true.
So anyway, sometimes cooking means poring over cookbooks, carefully planning a menu, budget shopping, and inviting a few select friends to come enjoy a meal.
Rebecca’s no-recipe chili
Or you can do what Rebecca did the other night when she rang. “Come over right now! I’m making chili!” Soon there were three of us around the table as we waited for the pot to simmer. “I didn’t follow a recipe,” Rebecca said as she stirred and banged the ladle against the side of the pot. It was delicious. (more…)
Posted in Baked goods on February 2, 2010| 18 Comments »
At the center of my Boston neighborhood sits the Loring-Greenough House, a historic mansion. It was the home of a wealthy British naval officer Commodore Joshua Loring. Loring, a Loyalist, followed his good intuitions and abandoned the property in 1777 right before the Revolutionary War broke out. The house was confiscated by colonial forces, served as headquarters for Gen. Nathaniel Greene, and eventually as a hospital for soldiers wounded in the Battle of Bunker Hill. It is local legend that George Washington paid the hospital a visit.
That’s a lot of history for a place that I consider one of my bus stops. Despite how badly things turned out for the British in my neighborhood, I have the courage to admit that when it comes to scones, I am a bit of a Loyalist. America may be about bigger, faster, better, but this unfortunately has resulted in scones that are much, much too large and heavy – colonial one might say.
Proper English Scones
When researching a recipe for this essay I wrote about superior English scones for the Monitor I called my good friend Glenda who has years of professional baking experience in England. She told me the secret is in using self-rising flour and working very quickly and lightly so that the dough doesn’t get too dense.
She was right. I swear my tea kettle whistled a Tory tune when the scones came out of the oven in my Boston kitchen. (more…)
Posted in Main dish on January 5, 2010| 2 Comments »
Sturdy fuel is what we need around these parts as the snow drifts get older and wind pants are a necessity for the daily commute. (In Boston, we walk everywhere.) Enter kale, a vegetable that is part spinach, part cabbage, and with enough leafy self-assurance that it could stand up on the kitchen counter by itself if you wanted it to.
But with a good knife and enough heat you can tame an unruly bunch of the green stuff into a stir fry or soup. And all your foodie friends will applaud because you are serving a dish that is fresh and seasonal even in the deep, dark winter.
So, overcoming my usual trepidation of vegetables, I grabbed a bunch of kale from the corner market and sprinted home before I could talk myself out of it. (OK, I did pause to pay.) The other reason I thought I could tackle kale is because I received my very first wok for Christmas this year (thank you, brother). I followed a recipe from one of my favorite foodblogs, 101cookbooks.com, for Asparagus Stir-Fry that includes the option of including kale. I did.
Asparagus and kale stir fry
I invited my friend Rebecca over for lunch and she didn’t even bother to take off her snow pants because the smell of toasted cashews parked her right down at the table. Despite my plans, there were no leftovers, and we were well-fueled for a frosty walk through the arboretum amid the cross-country skiers. (more…)
Kitchen Report 
