Until I started shopping regularly at my farmers’ market I was never a big fan of celery. Sure, it’s important as an aromatic vegetable to build a flavor base for soups or sauces, but on it’s own I always found it pretty insipid; pale and watery in both appearance and flavor. All that changed when [...]
Archive for the ‘Farmers' Market Cooking’ Category
Now This is Celery!
Posted in Farmers' Market Cooking, Food History, Ingredients, recipes, tagged Braised Celery, Celery, Food History, recipes on October 20, 2010 | 2 Comments »
A Plum by Any Other Name…But is it a Greengage?
Posted in Farmers' Market Cooking, Food History, Ingredients, recipes, tagged Food History, Greengage plums, Greengages, Reine Claude on September 16, 2010 | 6 Comments »
Somehow foreign names for ingredients always sound exotic. Wouldn’t you rather make aubergine Parmesan, than just plain old eggplant? Or creep away after leaving baskets of excess courgettes on your neighbor’s doorstep in the middle of the night instead of secretly gifting them with zucchini? One mysterious ingredient I always wondered about in British cookbooks [...]
Raclette, No Fancy Equipment Needed
Posted in Farmers' Market Cooking, Food History, Ingredients, recipes, Traditional Foodways, tagged cheese, Food History, Raclette, Raclette without a machine, Swiss Food on June 23, 2010 | 5 Comments »
In the past, I have expressed my withering disdain for single-use kitchen gadgets like garlic presses, shrimp de-veiners, and pineapple slicers. Today I’m adding another one to the list, the Raclette Machine. I’m bowled over that people are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for an appliance that makes a dish created by Swiss livestock [...]
Baked Cucumbers with Cream
Posted in Farmers' Market Cooking, Food History, Ingredients, recipes, tagged Baked Cucumbers with Cream, cooked cucumbers, Food History, Julia Child, Julie Powell, Julie/Julia Project, recipe on June 18, 2010 | 2 Comments »
You know those recipes you hear about and then tuck away in your mental “must try that” file? Today I’m pulling one out from way back in 2003. At that time I was an avid reader of Julie Powell’s groundbreaking blog, the Julie/Julia Project, in which she cooked all 536 recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering [...]
The Kind of Pickle You Want To Get Into
Posted in Farmers' Market Cooking, Food History, Ingredients, Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2010, recipes, Traditional Foodways, tagged cucumbers, Food History, homemade pickles, jewish food, kosher dill pickles, Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2010, recipe on June 15, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Next month I’ll be attending the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery in the UK. Each year, this conference on food, its culture, and its history focuses on a different theme; this year it’s Cured, Fermented, and Smoked Foods. Living in a New York City apartment, the temperature and humidity of which is difficult to [...]
Fresh (and Fashionable) English Pea Soup
Posted in Cocktails, Farmers' Market Cooking, Food History, Ingredients, recipes, tagged English Pea Soup, English peas, Food History, garden peas, green peas, recipe on June 10, 2010 | 1 Comment »
What was the latest fashion at court of Versailles in 1696? Why English peas of course, hadn’t you heard? The ladies of Versailles knew a good thing when they tasted it. In the late 17th Century fresh, green English peas were all the rage. It may seem odd to us, since today peas are seen [...]
Is Slow Food Really Slow?: Cooking with Dried Beans
Posted in Farmers' Market Cooking, Food History, Ingredients, tagged beans, cooking dried beans, dried beans, recipe on May 20, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
“Is Slow Food Really Slow?” is a series here on Comestibles in which we explore the hypothesis that some of the processes many modern home cooks have declared too time consuming are a lot easier than the admen would have us believe. Unless you’ve come up with a way of folding time and space in [...]
The Sydney Fish Market
Posted in Farmers' Market Cooking, Food History, Ingredients, Travel, tagged abalone, australia, australian fish, fish, sydney, Sydney Fish Market, Travel on May 3, 2010 | 2 Comments »
As proudly announced in its national anthem, Australia is “girt by sea.” That makes for bountiful fresh seafood, ranging from oysters, to coral trout, to pricey greenlip abalone. One of the best places to sample this briny harvest is the Sydney Fish Market, the largest in the southern hemisphere. Unlike the “New” Fulton Fish Market [...]
Farmers’ Market Shopping in Queensland, Australia
Posted in Farmers' Market Cooking, Food History, Food Zen, Ingredients, Travel, tagged Brisbane Farmers' Market, photos, tropical fruit on April 29, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
One of the most exciting parts for me about my recent visit with Janet Clarkson in Brisbane was our trip to the local farmers’ market. Brisbane, being in the southern part of the state of Queensland, is sub-tropical, but much of the rest of the state lies squarely in the tropics which means, exotic fruits [...]
18th Century Prawns
Posted in Farmers' Market Cooking, Food History, recipes, Travel, tagged 18th Century recipe, Australian prawns, Food History, recipe on April 26, 2010 | 2 Comments »
While visiting Australia I had a chance to catch up with one of my favorite food history bloggers Janet Clarkson of “The Old Foodie”. We had a great visit, diving into her terrific collection of historical cookbooks, including her latest work: Menus from History: Historic Meals and Recipes for Every Day of the Year. I [...]
