Calamity Shazaam in the Kitchen

This was an impulse order at the Dumpling Cafe on Washington Street in Boston. (True story: when I was telling my Mom where it was, I used the Naked i as a point of reference.) I'd actually gone for the xiao long bao (broth filled dumplings) also known as "Juicy Buns", which they are famous for apparently. Hey, better late to the party than to not party at all, right? Because I did my homework, I knew to load one on to the spoon and then to nibble a little hole and suck out the piping hot broth. That is a tip that you will thank me for later, I promise you. There is no time that biting down enthusiastically into a bun filled with scalding hot filling and broth will reward you in any way. Also I knew from my homework that the key was to order everything at once while the waitstaff was near you. So in a panic I ordered the braised chicken meatballs. What a treat! They come with baby bok choy and a plate of rice. I totally think you should go eat them righ...

Did you know that you can buy wine made in Vermont from grapes GROWN in Vermont? Incroyable! Back in December I was at the fantastic Eat Boutique event and was given a taste of this wine. My first taste was less than appropriate - I puckered up like a toddler who'd just had her first taste of a lemon. In fairness I am not a big wine drinker usually, and I'd just eaten a delicious maple and bacon donut from Union Square Donuts (you know the one I am talking about) so my tastebuds were all hopped up on sugar. Not ideal for wine tasting. But then I tasted the Vinu Jancu and all of a sudden I totally got it. It's the wine of my people. No seriously, my Meme was from the town of L'Etoile in the Jura and her people were wine people, vin jaune people: bakers AND wine makers. One taste of the vinu jancu (Sicilian for orange wine) and the French DNA in me lit up like sparklers. Fortunately I was able to share this moment with the maker, a marvelous woman by the name ...

Unless of course it is a macaroon made with coconut. That's not right. I love macaroons ( macaron  si vous êtes en France) but I love the almond ones that are just the cookie, not the fan-saaaay kind with the smooth tops, crinkly bases, and creamy fillings. No, I just love the plain old almond macaroon in all its chewy deliciousness. When my great-aunt passed, they ordered trays of almond macaroons from "The Club" for the reception afterwards. My grandpa and I filled our pockets up and made a slow getaway then ate them in the car and said nice things about Aunt Ruth. Man, that is how you want to be remembered, right? Anyway, I stopped by Baccos Wine & Cheese Shop on New Year's Eve for some thing savory and guess what they sell? Saint Emilion Macaroons . Handmade in Eastie. In a tub. O crap. Yeah, I bought a tub. Yep, you can totally feel free to judge me. Me and my pancreas will just be lying over here in a coma. A delicious, delicious coma. ...

As you may, or may not, have surmised - I will eat beans and rice at any opportunity.  Yesterday on our way to see K.D. Lang at the Hard Rock in Orlando we stopped for a bite to eat at this place: Spanish and Chinese you say? Well yes, but for me it was the Spanish part that was important. And as a side note, I think that the reason there are Spanish-Chinese food restaurants is because back in the days of yore when sugar plantations were in full tilt across the Caribbean they brought Chinese workers in to cut the cane. At least that is what I think was the deal, I could just be making that up... Of course I got rice & beans. I also got the roast pork. The pork was delicious - so tender and tasty, I completely pigged out. Oink oink. I ate it all up. At this point Jo & Jo must think I have a worm or something, given my capacity to inhale food... As I have the day to myself tomorrow, I just might go and find MORE rice & beans. Stay tuned. ...

Every town has one, a weekend open air market. The one in Boston closes (sort of) in the winter because of the cold and the snow. The one here closes in the summer because of the heat.  Now I am not a fan of crawfish and therefore not so much inclined to try a crawfish pie, but seriously, how awesome is that sign. Very awesome. I am sure I am not the only one who wanted to buy the sign. Vivian probably has a few of those signs for folks just like me. I really should have asked. C'est chouette, non? I ought to have gotten a better close up of the ginormo jar of Nutella on the roof. If it had been an actual jar filled with real Nutella, I would have fainted. Jo tells me this stuff is "amazeballs". Well, she would have used that word only I hadn't introduced it to her yet. I have never heard of this stuff so she bought some and I took a photo of the sign in case I love it and need to have it shipped to my mouth. Honestly, Boston needs to have an Empanada...

Since I read Tamar Adler's brilliant book I have been a one-night-a-week cooking machine. Which means I have been eating both well and more or less healthily.  Wednesday is my FTY delivery day so it makes sense to do most of the cooking as soon as I get home with the groceries.  In this week's order I got two bunches of ramps. The taste of ramps sends me back in time to when I was a kid and I spent hours outside down in Hull pulling up small spring onions and pretending to be a survivalist in "the woods" which was really just a wooded lot.  The ramps flavor is far more delicate, but then again, the spring onions I thought I discovered as a kid were probably not really onions at all and I really probably shouldn't have been eating them. But for better or worse, the scent of fresh onion means spring to me.  Oh I am ready for summer already. Anyway, I rinsed the leaves of the ramps and chopped them off. I sauteed them in a little oil to wilt them f...

The ugly secret in my kitchen is that I buy ingredients with more ambition than actual execution. This is something I am trying to change because frankly it is a really sh*tty habit to have. My resolution has been to try to eat everything I buy, a hideously first world resolution, and because it makes me uncomfortable, I am breaking the habit. I will buy dried beans and think "oh I will make a big pot of baked beans!" Or pick up a giant squash and think "ahhh squash and curry soup!". But the fact of the matter is I live on my own and I can only eat the same thing for three days, tops. On the occasion that I make soup, for some reason I make enough for seven people to eat for three days straight, which if you do the math means I am eating that soup for 21 days (I think, I am not great at math and I was drinking wine earlier). This kind of gluttony and waste is getting on my nerves. So no more bullsh*t as La Mamman would say.  Basically this means that...

Today drained the energy totally out of me. I know what I am doing at work, just that some days I have to do everything all at once, oh and it all should have been done five minutes ago.  Five on the clock could not come soon enough. I trudged my sorry self home, until the end when I accidentally bashed my foot off the curb and hopped the last few feet, fueled by pain and f-bombs.  I was just too tired to make dinner and contemplated going right to bed with a cup of tea. Which is a terrible idea in reality, unless you have a sad-faced stomach and then a cup of tea is the best idea. As a compromise I made a dinner that required the same level of effort as making a cup of tea.  As you can see from the photo above, it was just potatoes and an egg. Big whoop. A couple of chopped up potatoes, roasted them with a bit of olive oil in a 375 oven until soft on the inside and crispy brown on the out. Then I poached an egg, which is about the easiest way to...

I like to have my family over on Sunday for lunch. It motivates me to clean my house and to cook for pleasure. Like I mentioned before, I usually get home and just want to park myself on the couch to read Scandinavian murder mysteries and eat popcorn seasoned with Old Bay, garlic powder, salt, pepper, and smoked paprika. If it's been a particularly tough day, I will treat myself to a Miller High Life in a pony bottle. Ahhh life.... Anyway, for lunch today I made "lasagna". The reason I put this in quotes is because there is a world of difference between the lasagna that shows up on a plate in Italy and what you will get in America. According to La Maman all the lasagna here is crap. Sorry, le crap. Noodles, greasy meat, too much cheese, and drowning in tomato sauce - too heavy and fatty for her European sensibilities. And while she and I will just never see eye to eye on the merits of Lucky Charms and of diet sodas, we are in complete agreement here.  Per...

The recent spell of gorgeous summery weather has put me in the mood for salad. Not leafy salad because I cannot make a leafy salad to save my life, but more along the lines of a shredded root veg tossed with a vinaigrette kind of thing. A simple vinaigrette dressing is perfect for shredded fresh carrots and dried cranberries. I make mine with a finely minced clove of garlic which I mix with a spoonful of grain mustard, a large pinch of salt, a few grinds of pepper, and some white wine vinegar. Then I whisk in some olive oil until it looks like, well, vinaigrette. I have no clue about the proportions because I grew up watching my Maman make this and I am just copying her. I will say that you want to put in more oil than vinegar and you can leave out the garlic if your guests have tender digestions. Or add in more garlic if it's just you. This dressing works well with chopped roasted beets, and with leafy salads (if you know how to make them). Made with carrots from Farmers...

I was the most awful kind of American child. My mother is from the South of France so growing up she was all about olive oil, garlic, and eating natural foods instead of processed foods. This was the direct opposite of how I wanted to eat. I wanted Oreos in my lunch, not an apple; I wanted American cheese and baloney sandwiches on soft white bread; I wanted snack sized packs of Doritos and Fritos; in short, I wanted to be just like everyone else in the lunch room at a time when conformity was key to acceptance. Which I just never was able to achieve, but not because of my lunches. But that is a whole other blog post, or something... Summer would roll around and my grandparents would come over from France for three months. Three months of everything made from scratch, catered to our desires and preferences, with no trying to conform to anyone else.  My Meme would ask us every morning what we wanted for breakfast - perhaps un coup de fruit ou peut-etre des crepes? Meme loved my...

Working for a cookbook publisher means that every now and then we get mysterious packages of food. Almost always this is a good thing, especially since we also publish books on birthing babies and so far no one has mailed us a baby. This is how I discovered delicious cherries from the Northwest (a 10lb bag no less), awesome red velvet cake from Daisy Cakes , stollen from Zingerman's that I could not resist, and most recently Palmetto Cheese . Sounds gross, right? Well it does if, like me, you think it is some kind of vegan cheese made from a palmetto plant. But no, this stuff is not that, not at all. It's a kind of cheese paste that comes in a plastic tub, a kind of melange of shredded cheese, mayo, and spices. The one I nearly ate entirely on my own was the Palmetto Cheese with Bacon. This stuff is the perfect blend of all the sh*t that makes a person fat: it's savory and unctuous, delicious cold or hot and melted over leftover rice.... Turns out that piment...

I am recipe testing a fruitcake recipe for a friend. Let me tell you that admitting to liking fruitcake is akin to admitting that you smoke crack twice a day and have a bottle of Hot Damn for breakfast. No one ever believes it. And if they do, they pity you. Love for fruitcake is the love that dare not show its face, it is the butt of every cake joke, the JuJube of the cake world, you get the point. So when a fellow fruitcaker asked me to test out a fruitcake recipe I jumped on it like white on rice. And then I waited two weeks to make the damn thing. Sometimes I wonder what the heck I am thinking. Anyway, I think the recipe is a smashing recipe! Well it looks beautiful anyway. I am supposed to wait an hour before I can cut into it and use that hour to saturate it with bourbon cherry bounce. Hmpf. We'll see how long I last. Clearly my cellphone is working against me, not with me!

I love kale. For the longest time I thought chard was kale and I do not like chard. Personally I think that this is true for a bunch of people. Between that and the fact that most people think of kale as the limp bit of greenery under the dried up slice of orange that is the garnish on a million diner breakfasts, I can see why so many of my friends are like "eh, meh, kale". But let me tell you, kale is DELICIOUS. I am convinced it is what Grimm intended for Rapunzel to crave like mad, only the word "rapunzel" was more exotic than the word "kale". Here is the excerpt from the Grimm story of Rapunzel: Through the small rear window of these people's house they could see into a splendid garden that was filled with the most beautiful flowers and herbs. The garden was surrounded by a high wall, and no one dared enter, because it belonged to a sorceress who possessed great power and was feared by everyone. One day the woman was standing at this windo...

Somedays it's just better to stay in bed and today was one of those kinds of days for me. For the record, I am completely ignorant when it comes to computers and networks and megabytes per second and subnets and proxies and firewalls. Which means that three days of trying to straighten out sh*tty, sloooooooow internet service at the office is about the same as taking an immersion class in Russian for three days straight. With a 87 year old teacher who has a big old beard and who mumbles. I am pooped and confused. I want something small, sweet, and delicious for dinner. I want affogato. A simple supper, that is exactly what I need. And a hot bath. And for it to be Friday.

I have gone way over my line of sleep credit this week and resolved to sleep IN today. Usually Saturdays I am up and at 'em to get everything out of the way for a lazy Sunday. But for some reason I was exhausted last night and decided to make today my sort of lazy day. Let me just say that my idea of sleeping in is usually until 8 or 9am, which is still early to actual sleeper-in-ers, but it's my idea of late. And what goes amazingly well with a lie-in?

Sometimes I just have to use everything up or throw it out. I call these kinds of dishes "compost salad" while La Maman calls them "plat unique". Last night I found myself in the kitchen with a bag of kale, a pint of cherry tomatoes, and half a container of mozzarella "pearls". The common denominator here was the fact that they were all within inches of their use-by date. And I cannot bear to throw away food, especially since so many people don't even have enough to eat.

I made socca the other night. Why? Well the other, other , night I went out drinking and then somehow found myself in a fancy food store buying $30 olive oil and $7 chickpea flour. I am nothing if not impulsive. And chronically broke.  Anyway, the one reason I buy chickpea flour is to make panisse and socca. As for the very expensive olive oil.... well that was beyond reason. Except for the fact that it is from Nice which is where La Maman is from and that's good enough for me. Socca is a baked pancake made from chickpea flour. When I was in Nice , I ate it hot with my fingers, dusted with black pepper, sitting outside in the old part of town. I still eat it this way, only now with a glass of red wine.

Remember what I said the other day about food randomly appearing in the office? Well let me present today's morsel of deliciousness: greek yogurt and almond cake.  The lovely person who makes this is a wonderful scratch baker and is so critical of her own handiwork, which is rubbish because everything she makes is excellent. Rest assured, it is divine!!! So divine, I had some for breakfast today. THANK YOU to ***** of the ****** ******* for making this and giving me some.

Eat them before your coworkers do! These were about the most delicious cherries I have had in a very, very long time. They were sent to the office from ChefShop.com and I am not sure if they were a gift or what (food has a way of turning up in our office randomly) but it certainly made my return to work after the holiday so much better. Aren't they the most gorgeous color? They tasted like sweet droplets of sunshine. *sigh* Tomorrow can only be a let down after this lovely treat.