Hand To Mouth

The Guardian describes St. John as “profoundly edible”. This is an interesting description of a restaurant known for having ox heart, squirrel or bone marrow on the menu. However, St. John is by now a London institution, with two locations, and from the moment I read about it in Anthony Bourdain’s A Cook’s Tour, I knew it had to be my first London fine-dining experience.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of my favorite new reads is à la carte. From the tidy precision of Peter Hertzmann’s writing to the Art Nouveau flourishes in the site design, two things are breathtakingly clear:  à la carte is a monument not only to a man’s deep love for French food, but also to his painstaking commitment to documenting the things he discovers. Baked apple pudding with fresh thyme, shrimp with an egg poached in tarragon vinegar and salmon in a chervil marinade with fava beans are a few of the recipes I can’t wait to try.

What do you do when your friend O. sends you this text on a Thursday?

Lets make pesto this sunday. ive got yards of basil

Read the rest of this entry »

There are certain holes in anyone’s culinary talents — things we weren’t taught, or haven’t had the energy to research … and then there are things we didn’t even know we didn’t know, if you will. Making omelettes is one of those skills I didn’t even realise I didn’t have. I thought I could make perfectly acceptable, passable omelettes, folded and fluffy, until I saw a video on Serious Eats explaining how to make a folded omelette and my eyes were opened. It was a whole new technique to explore — I was excited to try something new. And when I did, I realised I could never return to what I had previously defined as an ‘omelette.’

Read the rest of this entry »

J. and I were eating this for dinner tonight, and we began to talk about what we were eating as it disappeared with frightening speed from our bowls. He voiced best what I think many people find so compelling about chilaquiles: the texture is comforting, but the slowly fiery blurts of flavor surprise. Unlike mashed potatoes or macaroni and cheese, there isn’t anything neutral about the dish.

I think that’s why I make it so often.
Read the rest of this entry »

Sunday dinners should be the best ones, I think. They should undo the working week’s headaches and the weekend’s debauchery. I’ve been fortunate to have a great group of friends in New York with whom I cook most Sundays. Our “Sunday suppers,” as we (so very creatively) call them, often unfold in a Sunday afternoon walk around town. One of us throws out an idea, like a kite, and we buffet it around until it’s something that excites us all. Everyone brings something interesting to the table—O., who worked in a Southern California taqueria, calls the shots on fish tacos; R., also known as “The Knife,” dresses greens with the same pumpkin-seed oil he used in Austria—and the results are equal parts ambitious and delicious.

This particular Sunday, we made the eponymous foods above. It’s the caboose end of the tomato train, so the idea for a salad was a quick yea. Our two experiences grilling steaks prepared Jaden’s way had been so juicy, so perfectly medium-rare and flavorful, that we decided to try it with lamb. The gratin? I’m not sure I remember the thought process behind it. I think it had to do with our collective love of butter, as well as a sneaky feeling that mashed potatoes would gild the fatted lamb lily.

Recipes after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

I love that almost all cultures have their convenience foods, the foods that hungry students, flurried mothers, lonely clerks and old married couples can all make with pantry and refrigerator staples. Kimchi chigae and thayir sadham, avgolemono and chilaquiles—all of these sprang from their respective cultures’ bulwark ingredients.

Convenience foods don’t present a challenge to put together, but they aren’t necessarily dishes that are swiftly made: some of the very best ones I know bubble for close to an hour before they’re just right. Shakshuka, one of my favorite discoveries, falls into that camp.

I first discovered shakshuka last year, when I lived in South Korea. There, every morning before walking to work, I made myself a cup of bori-cha — barley tea — and read The New York Times online. Wednesday mornings were my favorite, for obvious reasons. One Wednesday, I read an article about the entrance of Israeli street foods into restaurant menus, and stopped at a picture glowing arrestingly with red, yellow, and white. I had it for breakfast Thursday.

Read the rest of this entry »

I live relatively close to a slightly more upscale area of London than my own neighbourhood – Queen’s Park. It has a lovely park (duh) in which I jog, the nearest Starbucks, lovely tiny bookstores, my doctor’s office, a Pilates studio, and all the other necessities for a neighbourhood of upper middle class Londoners.

Certain lazy Sunday mornings, I love to walk over to this area of London to browse the cookbooks in the bookshops, have a lazy coffee with the paper at Baker & Spice, and visit the tiny weekly farmers’ market they hold in the yard of the local primary school.

Read the rest of this entry »

That’s right. Green pea puree! This is a slightly different incarnation of your recipe. A cousin, shall we say, but I think they’ll get along at the Puree Family Reunion. I didn’t set out to change anything, but when I came home too tired for the market, I had to make do with what I had. So the herb du puree became cilantro, and I added two brined jalapenos and a snift or two of their escabeche to offset any soapiness as a result of the switch. The cheese I had on hand was a pecorino redolent with barnyard funk.

I was a little nervous about the changes, especially the pecorino, which tends to steamroll all other flavors into ghostly echoes of what they once were. I cracked my knuckles before I tasted it, as I am wont to do before testing things. [Sidenote: This is among a number of my obsessive-compulsive habits, all extremely endearing and not at all strange.]

It was really quite excellent. Am I allowed to say that? It really was. J and I spread it on toasted sourdough points, and ate the lot with tomatoes, more pecorino, and assorted charcuterie. Hear hear, B!

From poultry.baytril.com

Sorry, I couldn’t resist the title.

Our blog’s name “Hand to Mouth”, has meant that occasionally (actually, quite often) we see people who used … interesting search terms to arrive at our site (let your imaginations run wild). We joke that the modern era of attention deficit disorder renders them easily distracted in their search for smut; in other words, the lure of cilantro lime-hummus diverts them from their path.

But back to food - I’m going to make coq au vin this weekend, but I never know exactly what kind of wine to use. Buy the wrong red, and you get yourself some bright purple chicken. Some say a burgundy, others say côtes du rhône. Nigel Slater advocates using the remnants of red wine leftover in people’s glasses. I actually think this would be really good. Last time I made it I used a nice medium-priced beaujolais (at the advice of Mr. Slater) and was pleased with the results. But the point of this post is to ask, dear readers, what wine do you think I should use? Have you had terrible experiences with any wines?

And also, does serving red wine with coq au vin seem like overkill to anyone but me? And yet - what else should be served?

The first time I made this dish was maybe the second culinary shindig I ever did with N. We were living in Seoul at the time, and our palettes were craving the buttery, dry wine- and thyme-laden taste of French food. It’s a nice memory. I also like to say I once got lucky when I cooked this dish for a boy - but perhaps that’s an entirely different entry altogether.

Anyways, I usually use a variation of this recipe. Do let me know your thoughts!