All Things Food
We all have our weaknesses, those items that when you see them in the store or on a menu, you just cannot resist. One of mine is fresh figs.
Our local specialty store, Guido’s Fresh Marketplace, always carries the most luscious figs when they are in season, and pretty much every time I see them I buy a container, even if I have no idea how I will use them.
Read MoreI recently got a head of radicchio in my CSA farm share from Woven Roots Farm. Although I love radicchio and have used it often, I was quite perplexed when I picked up a head of green leaves. The radicchio I’m used to is magenta and white.
Then I cut into it! Gorgeous! I cut the head into four wedges, and also cut four figs in half. I grilled the radicchio and the figs, and served them as a side dish/salad with my favorite maple Dijon vinaigrette from The Berkshires Farm Table Cookbook. So easy!
Read MoreFor the second summer in a row I’ve been able to score some zucchini blossoms! This year, as I posted earlier, I made one bunch into Nidi di Rondine, at the suggestion of my friend, Romina, who lives in Gubbio, Italy.
Another Italian favorite is fried, stuffed squash blossoms, and now, on my third attempt, I think I’ve really figured it out! The first two endeavors were delicious, but this last one really came together so much better!
Read MoreAs much as this may be Daniel’s favorite pasta, pasta itself is also Daniel’s favorite. He ran two seasons each year in high school and three each year in college and he still runs about 8 miles every day. You can imagine how much pasta I’ve cooked for him over the years.
So when Daniel and his girlfriend, Greta, made plans to come and visit this summer, this recipe was the first one he asked for, and the one I made for our first dinner together.
Read MoreI think I’ve got a new blog category, that I’m going to call “Hardly a Recipe.” When everything is in season, you hardly need anything to bring out the brilliance of fruits and vegetables.
Corn on the cob is one of Hank’s absolute favorite summertime treats. If I didn’t stop him, we would probably be eating it 8 days out of every week! Seriously, though, we do eat corn quite often, and even though it’s usually only the two of us now that our kids are all adults, we always get half a dozen ears.
Read MoreToday was my annual blueberry-picking date with one of my former students at what I like to think of as my secret blueberry orchard.
Read MoreRomina, one of my dear friends from Gubbio, Italy, posted zucchini flowers on Facebook a while back, long before we were ever going to see any here in the Berkshires! And I told her how jealous I was, not only because they were months away, but also because it is not easy to obtain zucchini flowers here in the States. (Yes, I know I could grow them, but our property is on a hill of ledge, with solid rock just below the surface, so growing is a challenge.)
Romina responded with a link to a recipe for Nidi di Rondine, swallow’s nests, filled with sausage and zucchini flowers. I bookmarked the link waiting until I might be able to acquire some fiori di zucca.
Read MoreIt should come as no surprise that I follow various cooking groups on social media (as well as chefs and restaurants, of course). How often do I see someone post a less-common vegetable from a CSA or an online produce subscriptions asking for help and suggestions!
Well, today it was my turn, when I got something called piracicaba from our CSA, Woven Roots Farm in Tyringham, MA. At the farm, I spoke with Jen Salinetti who described it as a Brazilian type of broccoli, and indeed it looks like it. But when I got home and Googled it, I only found a couple of recipes (although I found many more mentions of the plant itself).
Read MoreI love shellfish, but Hank is allergic. It’s not so severe that he can’t be near it – whenever we’re in Maine, after he quickly finishes his fish ’n chips, he waits patiently as I work my way through every bit of my lobster – however it does mean that I rarely cook shellfish at home.
But when we have a guest who likes shellfish, I sometimes like to treat myself, and not too long ago I was able to do so, and I served soft shell crab sandwiches for lunch and grilled octopus for dinner!
Read MoreMy good friend, Rafi, accomplished pizzaiolo and sourdough master, again has a pizza pop-up this summer! So, friends in Berkshire county and neighboring areas of New York State, if you are looking for a delicious and different evening activity that’s still feasible during this time, head on over to Katchkie Farm in Kinderhook, NY for some wood-fired sourdough pizza! The pop-up will be open this Saturday, July 18, and then Thursday-Sunday beginning July 23 through mid-September.
Read MoreEggplant and tomatoes pair so well, there’s no shortage of recipes that use them together. This super easy recipe is one of my favorites. The only drawback this time of year is that it cooks for an hour in a very hot oven, and that’s not ideal on a hot summer day. But once you make a pan of this, you’ll be able to keep it in the fridge to serve at room temperature over several days. Sometimes I use the leftovers for a sandwich, other times I’ll toss it over hot pasta.
We especially love this dish with the Middle Eastern flavors of za’atar and tahini, but at the bottom of the recipe, I offer a version that uses Italian flavors.
Read MoreIt is an old New England tradition to eat salmon and peas for the 4th of July. Before we damaged the rivers where they used to run, salmon were a great source of protein during the summer, and right around the end of June or beginning of July the first peas were ready for harvest, even in northern New England. So a tradition evolved to celebrate the seasonal bounty, which also often included new potatoes just dug from the earth.
Read MoreI am so lucky! I buy my eggs locally from my principal’s assistant’s mother who raises chickens just a few miles from our house, and they are phenomenal! I’ve had people who taste my challah and ask if I’ve used extra eggs because the color is so rich. Every time I get a carton, I can’t wait to see the beautiful colors of the shells from the various breeds she raises.
In our CSA farm share from Woven Roots Farm, one of our recent items was a beautiful head of frisée, which meant we would definitely have Salade Lyonnaise with our dinner. I love how the egg yolk enriches the dressed greens, and how the salty lardons (chunks of bacon) and crunchy croutons complement the flavors.
Read MoreAmong the many items in our CSA share last weekend from Woven Roots Farm were garlic scapes. I used some in a recipe for pork chops with a rich caper-lemon sauce from the new cookbook Jubilee: Recipes from two centuries of African American cooking, in place of garlic called for, and it was a phenomenal dish. This is a ground-breaking cookbook that presents the wide-ranging cuisine of the African-American experience, beyond the better known, and oft stereotyped, soul food. A couple weeks ago I made a wonderful sweet potato and mango bundt cake from this cookbook, and there are many more recipes to explore!
Still, after the pork chops, I had plenty of garlic scapes left. So I bought a couple zucchini (not ready yet at the farm) and concocted this recipe – perfect for a warm summer evening!
Read MoreBlueberries are pretty much Hank’s favorite fruit. If a dessert doesn’t have chocolate, he’d like it to have blueberries. He likes blueberries so much that every summer, after I pick blueberries with one of my former students whose family owns a blueberry farm, I make a large batch of blueberry barbecue sauce and keep it in the freezer in small containers to use throughout the winter. (I use Vivian Howard’s recipe, which I have dubbed “Blue-B-Q,” and I use it on much more than just chicken, which is what’s given in her recipe.) I also freeze the blueberries themselves to make any number of other items during the year, such as my grandmother’s blueberry crumb cake.
Read MoreI recently read the novel Kitchen Chinese, by Ann Mah, which is the Cook the Books Club selection for June-July. (Cook the Books is a bi-monthly online book club for which people: read a book – often a novel or a memoir – that has a connection to food and cooking; cook a recipe either given in or inspired by the book; and write a blog post about it. I have twice participated so far, with The Temporary Bride and Pomegranate Soup.)
Read MoreIt is officially summer!
Around midday today, I signed out of my last Google Meet class for the year.
And then, I shut my laptop and made myself a special lunch to celebrate the official start of summer vacation!
Read MoreThe summer after 7th grade, my family spent a month’s vacation in Fano, an Italian town on the Adriatic. This was decided because the summer before 7th grade, my father had quite literally made himself ill from overwork and stress, spending every day of his vacation on the phone. My mother insisted that we go far enough away that no one would call him. (Of course these days, you’d have to go somewhere much farther, much more remote than Fano!)
It was truly a magical trip. In the days before Airbnb and Vrbo, there was the Vacation Exchange Club. The premise was that your family and another family would trade houses for an agreed upon time. There was a physical book to review the homes available, some of which were simply for rent, when the owner didn’t want to trade. This is how we found a home up in the hills above Fano that we rented for the entire month of July, along with a rental tomato red Fiat to explore the area.
Read MoreDad loved to cook. How often did he and my mom show up at our home for a visit, and he’d take out of his wallet a recipe, folded small, usually cut out from the New York Times, that he wanted to cook together. Or sometimes, ahead of a holiday, an envelope would arrive in the mail with several such clippings.
Because he loved to cook so much, he also loved to learn new cuisines and techniques, and he frequently took classes all over New York City. One summer, my son, Daniel, lived with his grandparents while he had an internship there, and I cherish the photo of Dad and his grandson from their pizza class, with what was surely my father’s favorite, the Nutella pizza!
Read MoreSometimes I hear about a recipe that just seems so strange and so outrageous that I have to try it. Such was the case when Hank found a recipe for chicken braised in chocolate milk on the Washington Post website. This actually comes from a Food 52 cookbook and is posted on their website, exactly the same as on the Washington Post. You can find the recipe by clicking on one of the links above.
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