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...

Oy vey. No one tells you that as you age you stop staring at your navel and start slowly looking at the world around you through the lens of experience. Which is making me into a complete Debbie Downer. Ugh.  I love Thanksgiving and I am not sure exactly why I should still. It signaled the brutal eradication of an entire civilization which we mark by stuffing ourselves stupid.  Can you imagine if in Germany there was a national holiday to give thanks for Kristallnacht? Maybe now is too soon, but in two or three hundred years? Who can say. What I do know is I can't discuss this with most people because pretty much no one wants to talk about sh*t that happened in the past, especially if they think they are going to be made to feel guilty about it. Everything ugly gets swept under the rug and we hope for better tomorrows.  You see where I am at with this kind of thinking? Debbie Downer City.  However I can't bring myself to not have some k...

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...

I love my Nook. Yeah, yeah, everyone has a Kindle, but I am in love with my Nook (thank you Evil Twinster) and I use it everyday. Which is why I will never be able to save up for the moped I want. I love to read and instant access to an online bookstore is exactly like an unlimited supply of crack to a crackhead. Sometimes on Mondays I will look at my bank account and be like "oh snap! I bought WHAT?" Eh, I suppose it could be worse, I suppose I could be addicted to actual crack. Well so here is what happened on Friday - I downloaded Tamar Adler's amazing book " An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace" and then stayed up all night and read it. Seriously. Remember how last post I was all like "a-wah-wah-wahhhh I waste so much foooood wah"? Well this is the book that fixes that problem for me. I woke up on Saturday and started cooking everything in my fridge. I made braised short ribs for Sunday lunch, two batches of beans, roast...

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 old Super 88 at South Bay has been replaced by Kam Man. Which basically means I still have somewhere to go and giggle like a school girl over things like this: These are the two least raunchy "supplements" available. Please note that the first ingredient in Stud Sex Power is "strong back". Which is the first thing I'd look for quite frankly. If none of those work, maybe try this tea.  It's a bietary fupplement*. *Probably not FDA approved though. 

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 finally, FINALLY, got around to making those Swedish cinnamon rolls ("kanelbullar") that I have been so obsessed with lately. It was totally worth the effort. I used this recipe from the Scandinavian Kitchen which is a shop over in London because a) the recipe is in English, and b) the measurements are metric. Also partly because the recipe called for fresh yeast which I prefer for no other reason than that I love the texture. If you have trouble with the measurements, try the converter at Food.com but also keep in mind that most kitchen scales have an option to measure in grams and most measuring cups have milliliter (ml) marks on the opposite side of the cup marks. Lastly, the recipe tells you to bake them at 220 degrees - this is not the Fahrenheit number. You want to cook them at 425 F and in my oven it took about 12 - 15 minutes to get them to the lovely golden color. As for using fresh yeast, well I love it. I was introduced to it years and years ago when I...

Look what I inherited from La Mamma! Two Dansk enamel pots. These are the most versatile pots. Before scoring a maslin pan for short money, I used the big one for making jam. I use it for making soup and stew and pasta sauce. The nice thing is is that it can go from the stovetop to the oven to the table. I've made casseroles in it and it works beautifully. It also doesn't hurt that I find them really good looking. Probably because I am going through a phase of loving all things Scandinavian. PS: The minute I buy reindeer jerky is the minute before I need an intervention.