Hand To Mouth

It’s difficult to imbue fried foods — even the best ones — with freshness and snap, to shear away that natural feeling of overindulgence that goes hand-in-hand with eating them.

Except, I’d argue, in the case of fish tacos.

There are also dishes that wring richly intricate tastes from a few ingredients: Shirred eggs and preserved lemons come to mind, although there are many in the worldwide running — and again, I’d say fish tacos are definitely among the pack.

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If I’m ever caught slacking at work, it’ll be because I wasn’t vigilant enough to cover my tracks as I scrolled through my favorite food websites.

I’m most likely to get pinched while reading the Dinner Tonight posts on Serious Eats. I tend to fixate on what I’m making for dinner in direct proportion to how hectic work’s gotten that day, and why I like DT so much is that it helps clear my head and focus on what really matters—you know, the evening meal. (I ascribe this to the fact that the featured recipes are always precise, contextual and simple to execute.)

So this past Monday, J and I made this DT recipe for poblano tacos. Missing the char of summer barbecues, I’d zeroed in on the description of the roasted poblanos as being “chocolatey” in flavor; a minute later I was clandestinely on the phone with J, who gets off work much earlier than me, dictating a grocery list to him in sotto voce. Read the rest of this entry »

Homemade strawberry jam is one of those things that, when you announce to friends that you’re planning to make some, elicits several comments that are — for my part — not so accurate. Most of these comments drop neatly into the category “Time and Hands,” as in “look who’s got too much on theirs,” and it’s with that observation that I take issue. (With the runner-up, “That Sounds Rad,” I have no contentions. More toast?)

Truthfully, I haven’t had much time these days. To spend hours on a Saturday afternoon gently skimming froth from a saucepan growing gummier by the minute would be impossible for me. That’s why this recipe is such a find: within half an hour, with minimal effort, you have jarfuls of deeply satisfying, garnet-colored jam. As a spread, it’s tailor-made for toast, cookies, cakes and — as was the case with my mother — gifting to the neighbors.

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iStockphoto via NPR

My sweet-natured mother sends me sheer tons (or tonnes, as B gets to say. Lucky duck) of articles via email. They generally fall into one or two categories I have chosen to call Look, The President is a Dangerous Moron and Look Who Has a Rhodes Scholarship! Not You.

Many of these come from npr.org, and since my mother haunts the website, I wasn’t surprised to see another article from it in my inbox last week. But this, dear readers, was different.

“Something Old, New, Pickled and Blue,” reads the title of Molly Wizenberg’s July 25 column. Some of you hoarier internetters may know Molly from her blog, Orangette, which I’ve always thought exudes a vintage kind of sweetness. I mean that wholly as a compliment: reading Molly’s thoughts on food, love, and life, not to mention seeing her photographs, makes me somehow wish that I was a wholesome soul who ate hoarhound candy and wiped my face with gingham handkerchiefs.

The article concerns Molly’s discovery of all things pickled and briny, and the person who helped her do so: her new husband, Brandon. There are recipes tacked to the story’s end, including one for pickled prunes with orange zest that I can’t wait to try. Each of the recipes is from a dish Molly and Brandon prepared themselves and served at their wedding—yowza.

Heartfelt congratulations to the both of them!

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Now aren’t these some of the most dramatic tomatoes you’ve ever seen? Slathered with tenebrism equal to Caravaggio, they’ll make you want to pull a Mike Teavee and pluck one from that green slick of olive oil.

Too bad they’re impostors! O day of pestilence and fraud!

I know the correct rules for making tomato confit; Chez Pim has a lovely post about the process (it’s also rife with gastroporn—NSFW, if you work at Sizzler or something), as does David Lebovitz. I’ve made it a couple of times before, with their respective guidelines in mind. The process has never disappointed me, as it fills my apartment with softly ripening tomato scents, leavened by marjoram or thyme or whatever’s cheapest at the market—er, I mean, whatever’s moldering in the crisper verdant and fresh in my fridge. It leaves you with tomatoes that melt their way into dishes you choose to bless with them: perfect, red-and-amber distillations of summer. Most importantly (this being a blog about cooking while indigent), it tastes richly of the good life despite the everyday ingredients needed for its making.

But slow-roasting and oven-drying tomatoes is labor-(and hyphen-)intensive, and in summer, my oven takes a truculent attitude towards being used. Usually, I imagine my oven as crochety but essentially good-humored, like Fyvush Finkel. In the summer, however, my oven is Lewis Black. On Tax Day. I can’t even set it at 250° without the apartment roiling in heat waves.

What’s a gal with an insatiable jones to do?

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