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 [...]
Archive for the ‘Ingredients’ Category
Raclette, No Fancy Equipment Needed
Posted in Farmers' Market Cooking, Food History, Ingredients, Traditional Foodways, recipes, tagged Food History, Raclette, Swiss Food, cheese, Raclette without a machine on June 23, 2010 | 3 Comments »
A Mixture of Several Things in No Particular Order: Chimichurri Sauce
Posted in Food History, Ingredients, Traditional Foodways, recipes, tagged argentinean food, Chimichurri sauce, Food History, recipe, using leftover parsley on June 21, 2010 | 1 Comment »
It has happened to all of us. You buy a bunch of parsley so you can chop up about a tablespoon of it to use for garnish, and the rest languishes forgotten in the fridge, where it eventually turns to sludge. Well, dear reader, it doesn’t have to be that way anymore. The gauchos of [...]
Baked Cucumbers with Cream
Posted in Farmers' Market Cooking, Food History, Ingredients, recipes, tagged Food History, recipe, Baked Cucumbers with Cream, Julia Child, Julie Powell, Julie/Julia Project, cooked cucumbers 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, Traditional Foodways, recipes, tagged Food History, recipe, jewish food, kosher dill pickles, homemade pickles, cucumbers, Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2010 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 Food History, recipe, English Pea Soup, garden peas, green peas, English peas 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 [...]
Scottish Shortbread: Gluten-free Baking Ahead of Its Time
Posted in Food History, Ingredients, Traditional Foodways, recipes, tagged gluten-free, oat flour shortbread, recipe, Scottish shortbread on June 7, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
The current popularity of gluten-free foods has prompted the creation of many wheat-free versions of traditional baked goods, including Scottish shortbread. It turns out that this actually isn’t an innovation at all. Historically shortbread was a food of the poor in Scotland and was made with oat flour, which is (usually) gluten-free. While looking for [...]
Is Slow Food Really Slow?: Cooking with Dried Beans
Posted in Farmers' Market Cooking, Food History, Ingredients, tagged recipe, dried beans, beans, cooking dried beans 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 [...]
Is Slow Food Really Slow?: Vinaigrette
Posted in Food History, Ingredients, recipes, tagged homemade vinaigrette, recipe, salad dressing, vinaigrette on May 10, 2010 | 2 Comments »
“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. I challenge you to find a bottle of commercial salad dressing that is [...]
The Sydney Fish Market
Posted in Farmers' Market Cooking, Food History, Ingredients, Travel, tagged Travel, fish, Sydney Fish Market, abalone, australian fish, sydney, australia 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 [...]
