Indian Food

So, given the amount of vegetables from the Schader-Flaherty CSA, we decided on Indian food tonight. The menu is Chicken Tikki Masala from Food and Wine, Baked Indian Rice from Epicurious, and from a lovely little Indian cookbook (5 Spices, 50 Dishes)  that Peg got from the library:  Sweet Potatoes with Ginger and Lemon, a cabbage [...]

Thomas Keller’s Roast Chicken

First of all, we were sent a beautiful gift by our young relatives from NYC: Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc at Home. On their recommendation, especially after I had been raving about Keller’s  Simple Roast Chicken , I decided to try the “Roasted Chicken with Root Vegetables.” I couldn’t find rutabaga and couldn’t manage to put [...]

Simple Roast Chicken

The trussed bird cooked up nicely, although some felt that the trussing needlessly limits the amount of skin that is crisped through roasting at a high heat. Valid point, but the fact that the breast meat is almost as moist as the dark meat makes it seem worthwhile.  We shall have to have a chicken [...]

Trussing the bird

This is not something I normally do, but it does seem to help the chicken cook more evenly, plus it looks more dignified. Here is a great video on trussing that is also quite funny:

Frittata

There is a lot of leftover ham in the ‘fridge and one can only eat so many grilled ham and cheese sandwiches.  Tonight, we opted to try out a frittata. I’m not an egg-eater (quite the contrary, I assure you); however, I have fond memories of the frittata Jeff made on the canal boat in [...]

Ode to Mrs. Schreiner

I’ve been making Split Pea Soup for years, every time we have a ham, which isn’t really that often.  I use Mrs Schreiner’s recipe from Epicurious with a few changes.  I cut back on the bacon as 8 slices seems excessive.  Two or three slices give you the essential bacon fat and some to crumple [...]

Soup time

In the Autumn, the cook’s fancy turns to soup.  I’ve been making Susanna Foo’s fabulous Hot and Sour Soup which was great for the nasty fall cold that was going around.  Last weekend, one of the Junior chefs made some fresh pumpkin puree and left about 2 cups in the ‘fridge.  Naturally, I thought of [...]

Pita time again

For the Fourth, we tried pitas again, this time using two recipes, the Whole Wheat pitas from Epi and a recipe that Mary wanted to try, adapted from The Bread Bible via Smitten Kitchen. The only weird thing about the latter recipe is that it calls for instant yeast, which I don’t have, so I proofed the [...]

Sometimes you just feel like a burger!

Mother’s Best

I was just reading an article from the April 19th New Yorker called The Memory Kitchen by Elif Batuman. It’s about a Turkish chef who is obsessed with reclaiming and reinvigorating Turkey’s food heritage. Batuman has a Proustian moment at his restaurant, remembering her grandmother’s stewed dolmas and kisir (like tabouleh). Apparently Turkish cuisine in [...]