Grit Came From Above
January 26, 2008
[To everyone who came here looking for "kittens" on Google, welcome. You should go here. Never let it be said that we here at HtoM stood between the people and what they came for.]
Hailing from Georgia as I do, I find it hard to believe that there are people, going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it, who actively hate grits. Surely, I figure, they haven’t been introduced to a properly composed bowlful of the stuff. Who of right and stout mind could resist its considerable, cheesily substantial appeal?
Perhaps (although it seems like its own form of craziness) it’s in the butter and the cheese of it all that the problem lies. After all, several of my friends in Atlanta, a number of whom were Georgians born and raised, invariably opted for the healthier charms of cornbread, toast or fruit when we’d go to brunch on Sundays. I thought of them when tinkering with this Epicurious recipe for butternut squash polenta. Read the rest of this entry »
Potato Soup with Peas
January 4, 2008
Bitter, disgusting winter weather plus a latent cold? I wanted soup, of course, but not the usual suspects — chicken noodle, tom yum goong or any others in their brothy company. I wanted something hearty, but silky; starch-laden but still brightly seasoned and flavorful. Wandering through Fairway, mittens in pockets, I decided potato soup would be just the thing, but that I’d have to do some thinking to leaven the blandness. I eventually picked up some peas, a pair of lemons and a bunch of thyme, ingredients my mother likes to use in a summery buttermilk soup.
The last of Canada: Toronto
November 21, 2007
Question:
What do you do with 26 green heirloom tomatoes harvested early to protect them from frost?
Sunday Suppers: Grilled Lamb, Spinach Gratin and Heirloom Tomato Salad
September 19, 2007
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.
Party Pooper Pea Crostini
August 11, 2007
So last weekend we had a party, and of course, I made some food. However, I didn’t actually want to have a party. I wanted to come home and fall into a coma and forget that anything beyond my bedroom existed. You see, right now I’m working 2 jobs in addition to an unpaid internship, obsessing over this blog (aka my precious) and I just ended a very important if slightly dysfunctional friendship with someone very important to me. So I wasn’t so much in the lampshade- and toga- wearing mood when Saturday night arrived. However, my flatmate had been wanting to have one for months, she had invited people weeks in advance, and she really asked nothing of me except that I show up.
Euskadi (Basque) Artichokes
August 4, 2007
I am broke. I mean, normally, I am quite poor and I must be careful with how I spend my money – but it rarely requires my budgeting to move beyond entertainment and into pure subsistence. I thought those days had passed after my first round of university studies. But alas, my visit with N, my reckless calculations of dollars to pounds and my travel around Canada have left my bank account brittle, weak and a little cranky. My diet seems to be suffering as well.
To rectify this I decided to try to clean out the strange remnants and scraps of food that are hanging around my cupboard to put off a trip to the grocery store as long as possible. That tin of white asparagus from Spain? No longer to be saved for that potential pintxos/tapas party – it’s part of dinner. My forgotten frozen bag of peas will soon be blended and blitzed into funky crostinis for my loaf of frozen bread. And in the dustiest corner of my kitchen, I found a long forgotten can of artichokes. I had bought them to recreate another one of my favourite Spanish dishes – and I decided to consume them posthaste.
The Temperature Worm Turns
July 21, 2007
It was cold yesterday—delightfully, autumnally windy and crisp.
So I made soup after all!
Lens Romana
July 19, 2007
“Lens” is allegedly Latin for lentil or bean, a fact I didn’t know until I began my usual pre-post* Googling. It makes sense, when you look at the shape of a typical glass lens, like those in the more owlish kind of spectacles. Beat up a dweeb today and find out for yourself, ladies and gentlemen! That’s science.
*Pre-post. Ha.
So, food! I bought a welter of Roman beans at the market the other week, and they are beautiful—gloriously spotted and streaked, as though there are messages in Morse code tracing their way across the surface of each bean.
I soaked them overnight, and then I realized that I had no clue how best to use their flavors. The predominant Google yields for Roman beans, recipe-wise, seemed to be soups. Many of said soups were fragrant with sauerkraut, which one can smell through the Internet, no foolin’!
It wasn’t what I wanted. It’s unbearably hot these days. I wanted something light, or at least as light as beans can manage.
Avgolemono
July 13, 2007
I hate summer. I hate its heat, its dankness, its sticky horrors. I grew up in Atlanta, and my parents are from one of the world’s hottest cities, which I visit against my will frequently in their company. This is all just a long way of saying that summer and I have had our seven minutes in the closet. I’ll pass on a second round.
Of course, living in New York, it’s not my call. I hate what summer does to this city. I hate the steaming subway platforms, and the heightened smell of excrement, and how all my favorite parks foam with mosquitoes. I hate pressing my face into a neighboring armpit on an overcrowded bus. Sure, there are things that leaven it—ice cream, afternoon thundershowers, barbeques, tomato season, half-frozen beers pulled from the cooler, and the beach—but they don’t bridge the gap.
What I hate in particular is how hard summer makes it for me to cook in my apartment. Every meal involving the stove or oven is an ordeal. A boiling cloud of heat rolls through the air, and no amount of fans suffice. Even with the unit set to polar capacities, the air will not condition. Guests sweat, and sigh, and don’t come back next week for dinner.
But I have triumphed. For at least one evening every few days, I have a dish that passes muster. A dish that doesn’t take too long to make, and is refreshing when served chilled or hot from the pot. The ingredients and methodology of its making are, respectively, hilariously cheap and wondrously fuss-free. Even its name is a feat of linguistic economy (as words for food around the world often are).
Presenting avgolemono, the eponymous Greek soup. Avgo, meaning ‘egg,’ and lemono, meaning ‘pineapple.’ [Oh, how I tease]. The egg-lemon tincture is a marvelous emulsion, rich with sunny yellow colour from the yolks, and buoyant with soft, peaky whites. Tasting it, you find four layers: chicken, if your stock is of any pedigree; silk, from the rice or orzo simmered in the stock; the luxe taste of barely cooked eggs; a lovely sharpened spike of lemon.
In making this recipe, I have to credit the person whom I first watched make it; Mrs. K., the mother of my friend E. Having grown up in Istanbul, she calls it terbiye, but it’s the same idea. Avgolemono is a generous enough umbrella.
I liked it best the day after its making, plucked from the fridge, with a salad of roasted asparagus, baby lettuce, and pine nuts, a cold-brewed iced coffee, and a functioning air conditioner.
The recipe follows after the jump.
