Sure, It’s Confiture
January 3, 2008
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.
Add a Pinch of Inspiration, Stir.
August 25, 2007
Being wholly and completely original in cooking is a rare thing. The foundations of good, tried-and-true flavour combinations are so well-laid it often takes silly measures like making cubic watermelons or beet-root sorbet to truly surprise and shock people.
Personally, my cooking ‘innovations’ tend to be inspired and based upon the ideas of others (I always try to give credit where credit is due!). I mix things up with my own ideas in order to create a brand new little baby/mutant dish that can go on to grow up and become a moody teenager like all my others. This is the story of one of those little dish podlings.
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.
Green Tomatoes Tickle Me Pink
August 9, 2007
The tomatoes in my garden are beginning to ripen!!!
Look at those little nubules of amazing sweet flavour with their baby peach fuzz. I want to hug and kiss them and sing to them before bed.
In reality, I’ve ignored them, planted them too close together, diddled them with excessive force to ensure pollination, and let them get droopy from too much sun and too little water.
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.
Congratulations
July 31, 2007
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!
Confit Fi Fo Fum
July 6, 2007
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?
