Kristin Janz

Category: Food and drink

  • Childhood cookbook memories

    Last weekend, Donald and I were in Nova Scotia for my 20-year highschool reunion. It was a lot of fun! I attended a tiny highschool in rural Nova Scotia, and our graduating class was somewhere between 40 and 45 students. So there wasn’t anyone in my class that I didn’t know; although, embarrassingly, I had trouble recognizing some people at the reunion. Not as many people made it for the 20-year reunion as for the 10, but it was still great to see everyone who showed up.

    Never mind that, though! I’m sure you’re all dying to hear about the cookbooks I acquired on my trip.

    My parents are thinking of moving again (for the 3rd time since I graduated from highschool), so when I was there, my mom had been going through all the stuff she’s accumulated over the years and deciding what she really wanted and what she was going to try to sell in a yard sale.  She had a big box of cookbooks she’d decided she didn’t want anymore, and invited me to go through and see if there was anything I wanted. (Of course, she’s still keeping most of her large cookbook collection; I come by my love of cooking and cookbooks honestly.)

    To my horror, she was planning to get rid of this gem from 1970, James Beard’s How to Eat Better for Less Money (a revised edition of an original 1954 publication).  (The dust jacket was long gone by the time I was old enough to start reading cookbooks, so I’ve only ever seen this cover.)  I can’t tell you how many hours I spent poring over this masterpiece as a child.  It had a chapter on cheese, with descriptions of all sorts of cheeses too fancy for us to buy in Nova Scotia in the 1980s (and too expensive for our limited food budget–I think the emphasis is on the “eat better”, not on the “less money”).  There are suggested menus for various occasions (“Summer Terrace Dinner for 6”,  “Winter Brunch for 4”).  There’s even “A helpful supplement on budget wines and spirits” at the end.  I used to fantasize about cooking all the different menus for dinner parties I would have someday (yes, I was an odd child).  I’m not sure how many of the recipes from this book I actually made as a teenager, but there was the notorious granita di caffe that I made for dessert when I was about 14, and that turned my brother, sister and me off coffee for years (I like coffee now, but I still can’t drink iced coffee or eat coffee ice-cream, in memory of that dessert; though I think that the problem was not so much that it was a bad recipe, but that children aged 9-14 who aren’t used to caffeine and suddenly eat a whole bunch of coffee slush drowned in whipped cream are likely to make themselves sick to the stomach, and that’s what happened to us.).

    Ah, memories.

    The sad thing, though, is that the Suck Fairy appears to have waved her magic wand over this cookbook, because, looking through it, I can’t imagine I’m ever going to make any of these recipes.  They’re not all bad, exactly (though there’s a disturbing section on ways to cook hot dogs); I just think that the recipes that sound decent are pretty close to similar recipes in better cookbooks (like the America’s Test Kitchen ones).  And the wine and spirits section!  Oh dear!  I’m sure the wine section is reasonable, though it’s no longer quite as useful for me to know which vintages of the 1960s will be a good investment for future drinking (unless I want to raid my friend Bob’s cellar).  But how about this tip:

    “To serve a superb premium Scotch at low cost, buy six bottles of a low-priced blended Scotch and one bottle of Smith’s Glenlivet or Glenfiddich unblended all-malt Scotch.  Pour the contents of the seven bottles into a container and mix them.  Refill the seven bottles and put on your own label, which might read, ‘John Smith’s Personal Selection.’  We promise you the result will be as good as any $9 Scotch on the market.”

    Well, that may be true.  But somehow I don’t think they’re talking about a $9 Scotch in 2011 prices.

    A lot of the advice in the book is outdated.  It suggests using “hot-roll” mix to make quick pizza.  Apparently this book was published before you could buy those cardboard tubes of pizza dough at every grocery store.  It warns that shallots are hard to come by, and that you might be able to find them “in foreign markets in most large cities” (try Stop and Shop).  It suggests buying your meat from a knowledgeable neighborhood butcher instead of the grocery store (these days, it seems that you have to live in a large city for there to even be a neighborhood butcher, the decent ones all seem to be pretty high-end and not a place to go to save money, and at a lot of the chains pretending to be neighborhood butchers–like the Meat House in Arlington–you end up having long, frustrating conversations explaining to them where on the animal the cut of meat you want comes from if it’s anything more obscure than a brisket (can they not use Google?)).

    It’s sad when a beloved cookbook is cursed by the Suck Fairy (the magical entity who points out to you that the books you loved as a child really aren’t that good).  I’m almost afraid to look too hard for a copy of another out-of-print childhood favorite, The Larousse Treasury of Country Cooking (to be distinguished from the far more famous and not out-of-print Larousse Gastronomique).  This wasn’t one my mother owned, but one I used to borrow from the bookmobile over and over (a bookmobile is what you have, at least what you used to have, when you attend a tiny rural elementary school without much of a library).  I think the bookmobile must have gone to more than just elementary schools, otherwise it had a weirdly high number of cookbooks.  But I digress.

    My mother was also getting rid of Fields of Greens: New Vegetarian Recipes From the Celebrated Greens Restaurant.  It looks pretty good, though it’s also a little out of date (1993).  The author keeps telling you that you probably won’t be able to find Meyer lemons if you don’t live in northern California (and then tempting you with recipes that require them–so cruel!).  But they’re pretty common in Boston, when they’re in season.  I mean, they’re common if you shop at Whole Foods or Russo’s or Wilson Farm (i.e., with all the other yuppies).  Maybe not at the Stop & Shop.

    I also acquired Great Good Food: Luscious Lower-Fat Cooking, by Julee Rosso (one of the co-authors of The Silver Palate Cookbook).  This one I’m a little more iffy about.  It looks like it has good recipes, but they’re organized by seasonal menu or event rather than ingredient or type, and the seasonal menus are a bit idiosyncratic.  For instance, I just opened the book at random to the Spring chapter and found a menu for “Dinner After Ballooning”.  Apparently the author likes to go up in a hot air balloon in the spring when it’s nice, which is kind of cool, though of course not as cool as if it were a zeppelin and she wore steampunk garb (did I mean cool or dorky?).  Anyway, Herbed Bruschetta, Monkfish Medallions, Baby Zucchini with Pesto, Red-Hot Radishes, and Strawberry Sorbet sound lovely.  But it’s kind of a pain to think, “okay, I need a recipe for monkfish”, and not to be able to turn to a nice, convenient chapter entitled “Fish.”  This might be why this cookbook is apparently out of print, and Fields of Greens is not.

    I poked through my mom’s box of craft books that she no longer wanted, too, and didn’t find as many prizes, since I like cooking best.  I did find Parties and Projects for the Holidays (Christmas With Martha Stewart Living), which is mostly crafts, but has some recipes too, for holiday menus.  They’re my favorite sorts of menus to make, the ones where the suggested timeline starts off with “One week before” (i.e., you can’t possibly make all those things in one solid day of cooking alone).  They’re not the favorite menus of friends and family who have to put up with me while I’m cooking, though, since I tend to get just a little bit stressed out (i.e., impossible to put up with) when I’m cooking a long, complex menu.  Of course, Martha Stewart’s book is not just about cooking.  There are also step-by-step instructions for making Christmas ornaments from tinsel made out of real gold and silver.

    Finally, although this is a cookbook only in the sense of having recipes, not in the sense of telling you how to make food, I acquired The Complete Soapmaker.  I’m probably not really going to start making my own soap, but it’s one of those things I like to pretend to myself that I’ll have time to do someday (like gardening, knitting, sewing my own clothes, making cheese, brewing beer and wine….).  The book gets very mixed reviews on Amazon; some people say it makes great soap, others say it makes terrible, useless soap.  But the recipes sound cool.  The book does make the mistake of telling you to add water to the lye when you’re mixing it, not the other way around (which is much, much safer).  This error has apparently been corrected in later editions, but since I worked as a chemist for 13 years, I sort of already knew this.  It also seems like a lot of the reviewers on Amazon are inordinately afraid of lye.  I mean, it’s corrosive and can be dangerous, don’t get me wrong.  It’s just that when you’ve worked in the lab with materials that can burst into spontaneous flame upon exposure to moist air (and seen them do it, and had to put out the fire with an extinguisher), lye doesn’t seem so scary anymore.

    My sister was quite concerned that I might have gotten our mother’s copy of Your Country Kitchen, but Mom isn’t getting rid of that one yet.  And besides, I already have my own copy of this out-of-print treasure that I picked up at a used bookstore a few years ago.  Despite the fact that this is a British cookbook, many of the recipes are quite good (especially if you have a kitchen scale, since a lot of the quantities are given in weights), and the cheese fondue recipe is my “go-to” version.  So Lisa can have this one, if Mom ever decides she doesn’t want it anymore.

    I still want the Purity cookbook, though!

  • Highland Kitchen

    No, this post isn’t about haggis.  Before going to see Cowboys and Aliens the other night at the Somerville Theater, Donald and I went out for dinner at Highland Kitchen.  I’d never eaten there before, but it seemed to get good reviews, particularly for its cocktail menu.

    It’s a little out of the way, about a half hour walk from either Porter or Davis, but the 88 bus goes right by the restaurant. Here’s a picture of the apple tree in someone’s front yard along the way, that I resisted the temptation to poach from.

    Mmm, apples!

    I really liked the restaurant, and can confirm that they serve “real cocktails”. I had the “Rarely Eagle”, with bourbon, St. Germain, lemon juice and orange blossom water, and it was very tasty and not too sweet. For an appetizer, Donald and I shared a serving of grilled artichokes with some dipping sauce. I wasn’t too impressed by these, but I think roasting in a hot oven with olive oil or deep-frying is probably a better preparation for baby artichokes. The grilled ones we had didn’t really have much grilled flavor, and no crispy caramelized bits (which I think you need a good amount of oil for, with artichokes, if you don’t want to just burn them). It was like eating vegetables or something!

    I thought my entree–sea bass with roasted potatoes, summer succotash and pinot noir butter–made up for it, though. The fish was perfectly cooked, and the summer succotash (summer squash, lima beans and corn) was a nice complement to the fish. I do think they could have improved the potatoes with a bit more oil and a hotter oven, but then, I’m not really a big proponent of low-fat cooking, and I understand how some people might prefer them just the way they were. And anyway, it’s hard to go wrong with potatoes (unless you mash them–yuck!). Donald had the blackened catfish po’boy sandwich, which came with a huge pile of delicious hand-cut fries, and he said his was good, too (I can attest to the goodness of the fries!).

    We were too full for dessert (or popcorn at the movie, for that matter), and there wasn’t anything on the dessert menu that either of us found terribly compelling (though had I been less full, I might have tried the plum shortcake).

    Another nice thing, although we didn’t take advantage of it, is that if you want a non-alcoholic cold beverage besides water, you’re not limited to the usual Coke/Sprite/ginger-ale spectrum; they also have a couple of IBC sodas, ginger beer, sparkling limeade, and fresh lemonade.

    There’s not a ton of vegetarian options, but they have a vegetarian soup of the day, and one each of the sandwiches and entrees on the regular menu are vegetarian (and, of course, all the desserts). So if your vegetarian friend isn’t too picky (or just wants to eat dessert!), you could probably bring them here.

    I heartily recommend this place, and would certainly go back!

  • Low fat, schmow fat!

    Just for a change from boiled corn on the cob, I decided to use this week’s corn from my CSA share to make creamed corn for lunch.

    A bowl of creamed corn, with fresh corn off the cob and heavy cream. And butter. Because heavy cream just doesn’t have enough fat.

    It was yummy, though I’m feeling maybe I ought to have a double portion of salad tonight, with no dressing, to make up for it. (In case you’re wondering, I didn’t only eat corn and heavy cream for lunch; I also had leftover Greek vegetable stew and salad (with dressing). And a peach.)

    Maybe next time I’ll try the variation with blue cheese and bacon.

    On the writing front, not such a good day. I was working on the novel, and only got about 1800 words written. Considering that Donald can write 800 words just in the evening after coming home from a long day at his regular job … well, not so good! This is why I need to be a stay-at-home writer in order to accomplish anything, because I’m so slow. Though today was especially bad. I just wasn’t into it, and in the morning I kept dozing off at my desk. And I didn’t have any caffeine in the house. I took a 20-minute nap, which was probably a better idea anyway, and actually helped a lot. (My theory is that using caffeine to stay awake is like curing a hangover with the hair of the dog; it only prolongs the inevitable.) I did force myself to sit at my desk for 6 hours staring at the file of my novel, though. So discipline was okay, just not inspiration.

  • Careful what you wish for!

    I’m sure it’s a coincidence, but last week I complained about all the vegetables we were getting each week in our CSA share, and this week we didn’t get as many.  Here’s what we got this week:

    1 head red leaf lettuce
    2 cucumbers
    1 bunch salad onions (3)
    1 bunch scallions
    1 bunch beets with greens attached
    baby beet greens
    green beans
    6 ears corn
    2 yellow summer squash
    2 zucchini

    Last week we got an extra lettuce (romaine), and more summer squash, and both Romano beans and wax beans instead of regular green beans. We didn’t get beet greens or beets, but we got an eggplant, and some basil.

    I suppose this week’s take is a more reasonable amount of food, but now that I’ve been trained to expect ridiculously massive quantities of produce every week, it doesn’t feel like a good deal if we’re getting less.

    I’m also a little annoyed that the “full share” people are always getting the special vegetables when the “half share” people like us aren’t. Maybe this is to be expected, but we’ve only gotten kale and Swiss chard once, and the full share people are getting one or the other (or both!) every week. And this week the full share people got tomatoes. Tomatoes! Possibly the most desirable vegetable, and we didn’t get any. Hopefully it’s just that the tomatoes are only starting to come in, and they didn’t have enough for everyone. But I’m certainly not joining this CSA again if I don’t get some tomatoes at some point.

  • Why I probably won’t join a vegetable CSA next year

    Although the title might suggest the opposite, I love the CSA I’m in.  CSA stands for community-supported agriculture; you pay the farm a set amount before the start of the harvest season, and each week you get vegetables.  You don’t get to pick which vegetables you receive.  I like all vegetables, so this is not a problem for me.  (My husband Donald, however, has been introduced to all sorts of new vegetables he hadn’t even known he disliked.)  And the vegetables are very good.  I won’t even buy fresh green beans except at Russo’s and occasionally Whole Foods, and even there I have to pick through the bin bean by bean to find ones that haven’t started to rot.  The green beans from my CSA share, on the other hand, are the freshest beans I’ve seen anywhere since my childhood, when we used to grow them ourselves.  Same for the beets, and Swiss chard, and zucchini, and lettuce, and corn, and pretty much everything else.  I like to support local businesses when I can (read:  when it’s not too inconvenient for me), and I don’t like how centralized all our agricultural production is becoming (it makes sense for some crops, like grain, and less for perishable vegetables), and I especially don’t like the crappy quality of the vegetables that I see at most supermarkets.  I feel that the value of what I’ve gotten each week is competitive with supermarket prices, and as an added bonus, the farm whose CSA I joined (Wilson Farm) has a store and they offer a 10% discount to CSA members on their pick-up day, on anything else in the store.

    So what’s the problem?

    Mainly, that Donald and I are having a hard time eating so many vegetables.  Here’s what I received last week.  This is a “half-share”, the smallest size offered, suggested as an appropriate amount for 2-3 people.

    1 head red leaf lettuce
    1 head romaine lettuce
    2 large cucumbers
    1 large bunch of scallions
    1 bunch of salad onions (3 onions)
    2 zucchini
    3 yellow summer squash
    1 enormous bunch of basil
    6 ears of corn
    1 pound wax beans
    1 pound Romano beans
    1 eggplant

    Is that it? I think that’s it. Is it just me, or is this a lot for 2 non-vegetarian adults who don’t eat every meal at home to get through in a single week? Some weeks we get 3 heads of lettuce. We’re eating salad at every meal except breakfast (in addition to another vegetable side dish and sometimes a vegetable main dish), and we still end up with lettuce left over when it’s time for the next CSA pick-up.

    I think part of the problem is me (I do almost all of the cooking in our household, because I like cooking and Donald doesn’t). I like to cook from cookbooks. I like to find an interesting recipe, then go out and buy the ingredients, and cook it. I’m not a spontaneous cook. I can’t say, well, I have beans and eggplant and zucchini, I’ll make a vegetable stew with them. Well, I guess I can say that. But I’d rather find a recipe for a bean/eggplant/zucchini stew, because experience has taught me that a reliable recipe is probably better than whatever I’m going to make up off the top of my head (I’m a pretty boring recipe-inventor, and also always add too much oil if I don’t have a recipe to keep me in check). Wilson Farm has recipe print-outs that you can pick up, and they included a free cookbook with the first CSA share pick-up, but a lot of the recipes they make available call for extra ingredients (including additional vegetables!) that weren’t actually in my share and that I probably don’t have at home, so they’re not that useful (at least not to me).

    (Fortunately, Wilson Farm posts the week’s share contents on their website the day before you pick it up. It’s subject to change at the last minute, but it’s usually roughly accurate, and immensely helpful in menu planning, so that I don’t have to pick up my share on Tuesday and then go to another grocery store on Wednesday once I’ve seen what I’m getting, found some recipes, and figured out which additional ingredients I need.)

    I have been making pesto with the massive amounts of basil we’re getting, and putting it in the freezer. But a CSA share isn’t really great for “putting up” food. For one thing, there’s all that lettuce. For another, although you get too much food each week, you don’t actually get enough for it to be practical to freeze, can or pickle it. I’m just not going to freeze two pounds of beans, or pickle 3 beets.

    Oddly, if we were getting fewer vegetables for the price we paid, I wouldn’t feel like we were getting a very good deal. I wonder if it would make sense for farms to start offering quarter-shares. The most common complaint I hear from friends in CSAs is that they can’t manage to eat so many vegetables, so I think there would be a demand for it (assuming it was half the price of a half-share, and it wasn’t all lettuce). Or, if Donald and I could find another couple to split our weekly take with, or maybe even 1 other person … we are actually getting through everything in our share each week, except for the lettuce, but just barely.

    So, I might just not be the best person for a vegetable CSA (the meat CSA is easier, because everything is frozen when you pick it up, and then you have plenty of time to figure out over the next several days what you’re going to do with it all). It’s been a really good experience, and has encouraged (nay, forced!) me to cook more seasonally. I still look to cookbooks for inspiration, but at least now I’m saying, “Okay, I need a recipe with beets or zucchini; butternut squash soup can wait until fall.” I’m sure I can continue to do this sort of thing even if I don’t also have beans, eggplant, cucumbers and basil to deal with.

    A friend of mine said that she had tried a CSA in the past, but been similarly defeated. She started thinking how great it would be if she could just go each week and buy only the amount of vegetables that she actually needed … and then realized that she had just invented the grocery store.

    But what am I saying: “It’s been a really good experience”? Ha! It’s Week 8 of 20. We’re not even halfway there.

  • Roman Holiday, Day One

    It’s been almost a month since Donald and I got back from our honeymoon, and I’m just getting around to blogging about it now. Donald has already written about it here and here.

    In case you haven’t read Donald’s posts, I should start off by saying that we took an overnight flight to Rome from Boston on Tuesday (May 10th), and arrived in Rome early Wednesday morning. I think Donald may have gotten a bit of sleep on the flight over, but I didn’t.

    We spent 7 nights in Rome, staying at the Hotel San Pietrino in the Prati neighborhood of Rome, north of the Vatican. I liked the location, as it was far enough away from the Vatican that it wasn’t crowded and touristy. There was a great coffee shop across the street where I could have my morning espresso or cappucino and a pastry, and a gelato shop a few doors down. I found the hotel in the Lonely Planet guidebook, and I agree with the authors that it was “a fabulous choice”, but have to disagree most strenuously about the “comfortable beds”. I don’t think I’ve slept in a harder bed since my trip to Japan, where I mostly slept on not-very-thick futons on the floor. Donald liked that the hotel had wi-fi.

    We ate lunch at a place called Hostaria dei Bastioni, just outside the Vatican walls. In fact, you can see the walls in this picture, behind Donald.

    You can see the walls on the right-hand side of the picture, across the street from the restaurant

    The restaurant was okay, but nothing special. Despite what Donald implies in his post, I don’t insist on eating only at restaurants I found in a guidebook. I do think it’s good to have a destination in mind when you’re going out to eat in a strange place; then, if you find something that looks better along the way, you can go there instead. Also, if you’re in a very touristy area where most of the restaurants have big menus out front in 4 different languages, it can be good to know where else to go instead. Restaurants in Rome can also be kind of expensive, so the guidebook was helpful in identifying places that were more moderately priced, since I kind of wanted to have a reasonably decent sit-down meal at least once a day, rather than just grabbing pizza or a sandwich whenever we got hungry, and Donald kind of wanted to not spend over a hundred dollars on each of these meals.

    In any case, I did find this lunch restaurant in the Frommer’s guidebook, which tends to have better restaurant recommendations than Lonely Planet, though they’re still kind of hit or miss, especially in the “inexpensive” category.

    Speaking of guidebooks, this was my first international vacation since getting a Kindle, so instead of lugging around big paper guidebooks (or photocopying selected pages), I bought both the Frommer’s and Lonely Planet guides for the Kindle. The Kindle editions are definitely better than trying to carry around a thick guidebook when you’re already trying to find room in your purse for a bottle of water, a camera, a wallet, a wrap for the evening in case it gets cold, and maybe an umbrella, and your husband doesn’t want to carry any more of your stuff in his backpack. However, the maps in the Lonely Planet guidebook are completely useless in the e-book edition, whereas they’re somewhat useful in the paper books (you still need to buy a more detailed map of whatever city you’re in, especially if it’s a city like Rome with confusing streets). Of course, the Frommer’s maps are useless even in the paper edition, so no change there. The Lonely Planet e-book is better organized overall (the Frommer’s doesn’t even have a Table of Contents! For shame!). But I found myself using the Frommer’s more, not just for restaurants, but also for more useful and detailed information about various attractions. (Lonely Planet is better for hotels though, if you like to stay at cheaper places like we do.)

    After lunch we went to the Pantheon.

    You can't see the dome part too well from here

    The streets around here are very narrow and confusing, and very crowded, as this is the historic city center, full of tourist attractions. On my last trip to Rome, I spent quite a bit of time wandering around in this area, getting lost, seeing whatever I happened to come across. But Donald’s not quite as much of a fan of wandering aimlessly through strange cities, so we didn’t do that as often on this trip.

    We had walked to the Pantheon from our hotel, but on the way back we decided to take the metro. I dragged Donald past the Trevi Fountain on our way to the metro. It was sort of on the way. And it’s famous.

    The famous Trevi Fountain

    For dinner, we went to another restaurant I found in the Frommer’s guidebook, this one a Sicilian place called Sicilia in Bocca (which I think means something like “Sicily in the mouth”). I had a fava bean and greens soup, which I liked, and something else I can’t remember. Donald had a seafood salad, and then beef rolls (thin slices of beef that were breaded, fried, and rolled around a filling). I liked the food here a lot better than at the place next to the Vatican. It was also more expensive, even though it was listed in the “Inexpensive” section of the Frommer’s guidebook.

    On our walk back to the hotel, I noticed a nearby pizzeria that looked good, and made a note of it for future evenings, even though it wasn’t in the guidebook.

    This may have been an ambitious schedule for our first day in Rome, with almost no sleep the night before. But the next day would be even more tiring.

    (to be continued)

  • Coffee Table Cookbook

    I recently bought this cookbook. It’s a gorgeous hardcover with a colorful cover, and many beautiful pictures of delicious-looking food inside. It was an impulse purchase. I’d been shopping for a dress for my wedding (yes, yes, the store at which I purchased the cookbook also sold dresses!), and the book was just so lovely, and the recipes sounded so good (at least to read about) that I just couldn’t resist.

    The gimmick for this one is that it’s divided into 4 chapters, one for each season, and the recipes in each chapter feature foods that are at their peak in that season (at least, in the northeastern US; the author is based in New York City). Within each chapter, there’s a 2-page spread highlighting what’s best this time of year, then a section for seasonal cocktails, one for appetizers, one for main courses, one for desserts, and one for breakfast foods (also a couple of sample menus at the end of each chapter).

    First off, I love that it includes seasonal cocktails, and most of them sound very tasty. Though the only one I’ve made so far, the rhubarb mule (a Moscow mule with the addition of sweetened rhubarb puree), was WAY sweeter than it needed to be. I made it a second time with extra lime juice, and it was still too sweet. There’s a preponderance of vodka cocktails, as well, which suggests that the recipes are tailored to the palates of those who like the idea of fancy drinks, but don’t actually enjoy the taste of alcohol. But I should try more of his recipes before I judge. Also, the author seems to feel the need to give a shout-out to every brand of premium vodka currently on the market. There are three vodka cocktails in the Spring chapter, and each one suggests a different brand of top-shelf vodka. I mean, really? Do you even need top-shelf vodka when you’re drowning out whatever flavor there is with fruit juice and sugar? Maybe I’m just not a vodka connoisseur, but I made the rhubarb mule with Level vodka one time, and Skyy another, and really couldn’t tell the difference.

    The only other recipes I’ve tried so far are “Mammy Louisette’s Ginger-Rhubarb Tart” and “Vermont Double Cream Ice Cream” (vanilla ice-cream with extra egg yolks and creme fraiche). The ice-cream is quite delicious. It seems pretty hard, but this is the first time I’ve made ice-cream at the new apartment, so I don’t know whether that’s the recipe or our freezer. I wasn’t quite as happy with the tart, but I think that might have been my fault. It had a puff pastry crust, and the center never baked through, even though the edges would have scorched had I left it in for longer. I think I wasn’t as careful as I should have been, though, scooping the sweetened and flavored rhubarb into the crust, and I added too much liquid. I also think the crust wasn’t cold enough when it went into the oven. That might be partly the fault of the recipe, though. It says to put the puff pastry in the tart pan, then chill for 30 minutes, then add the fruit, fold over the edges, and bake. My timing was a little off, because Donald needed the oven for French fries at the 30 minute mark. However, there’s no way, after 30 minutes in the freezer, that those rock solid pastry edges are going to fold over. Even after putting it in the fridge for a bit, they were still quite hard. I had to bring it out to room temperature for a while to soften them up enough. However, it might have been a good idea to stick it back in the freezer for a few minutes after I’d added the rhubarb and folded the edges over, because that might have kept the juices from soaking through the center of the tart as much.

    I do want to make other recipes in this book. However, it does seem to me that most of them are fancy dinner party food, and not really all that useful for helping me figure out what to do with all my CSA vegetables. Many of the recipes would just take far too long (and this is saying a lot, if you know how much time I typically spend cooking already). I mean, I just don’t have time to make “Aromatic Stuffed Suckling Pig” on a Wednesday night after work.

    Which brings me to another issue with this book. I’m an adventurous cook and grocery shopper, and I live in a major urban center in the United States. And a good number of these recipes call for ingredients that I don’t know how to get. Fresh porcini mushrooms? I’ve never seen fresh porcini mushrooms at a store in Boston. Ditto veal sweetbreads. Not to mention suckling pig. Maybe I could order suckling pig from a butcher. But, seasonal or no, these are just not common ingredients. Huckleberries? I don’t think I’ve ever seen fresh huckleberries for sale even at Russo’s. I think you have to live in New York City to make a lot of these recipes.

    I probably sound pretty negative about this cookbook, but I should also confess that I spend a lot of time reading it, and trying to convince myself that the recipes wouldn’t be that much work to prepare. They just sound that delicious! Maybe for a dinner party sometime….

    The best part, though, is Rachael Ray’s blurb on the back cover, which refers to the recipes as “simple preparations and easy ideas.” Which might tell you all you need to know about Rachael Ray’s so-called 30 Minute Meals.

  • Don’t fear the eggnog

    I used to be afraid of eggnog when I was younger. I don’t like either eggs or milk, and as I’m sure you’re all aware, both feature quite prominently. You can get soy eggnog these days, but I doubt that it’s the same thing. And I have weird food issues. Bananas, for instance. My hatred of bananas is, I am certain, more psychological than anything else, and many people (including Donald, who also doesn’t like bananas) have told me that plantains taste nothing like bananas. People who do like bananas say that plantains are gross, and that they taste nothing like bananas. And yet, I can’t bring myself to try one, because they look like bananas.

    Eggnog was always the same. I liked chocolate milk, because the chocolate overwhelms the milk flavor. But eggnog? How could it not taste like egg? It says “egg” right in the name!

    As I’ve gotten more and more into old-school cocktails, though, I have–cautiously, at first–extended my experiments to cocktails including raw egg. Initially I only tried the ones that used egg white but no yolk (such as the pisco sour, or Ramos gin fizz). Gradually, I worked up my courage enough to try the flip and the coffee cocktail, with their generous portions of whole egg. And you know what? You really can’t taste the egg. Honestly. They’re good cocktails. The egg adds richness and body, but it’s not gross and slimy. Or “eggy”. Not at all. And so, only in the past year or so, I’ve been able to ignore that word “egg” in the name of that favorite seasonal libation, and bring myself to drink eggnog.

    Everything is better with alcohol, right?

    Last night my roommates and I decided to have a pajama party. It’s sort of a running joke with us. One of my roommates was at a party where she overheard some women talking about an imaginary reality TV show they’d like to see, spoofing “Rock of Love”. From what I understand (I’ve never watched it), “Rock of Love” is about these women who go around bar-hopping trying to pick up random guys? Anyway, the joke was that there should be a show called “Cock Block of Love”, about women who are in their pajamas and ready for bed by 10 pm each night, and my roommate, who was eavesdropping, thought to herself, “Hey! That sounds like our apartment!”

    Then, one of us found a retro card with the cover of a 1960s pulp fiction novel called “Pajama Party”, showing three women in various states of pajama-cladness, drinking cocktails and the tag line “Five campus cuties on a no-holds-barred spree!” (I guess they couldn’t fit enough skin on the cover if they put all five of the cuties in the picture? I don’t know.) Of course, the three of us tend to spend most of our time at home reading, writing, playing classical music, or studying; but we do sometimes enjoy a round of cocktails together in our pajamas. So we couldn’t resist putting the card up on our fridge. And we started talking about how we should have a real pajama party. Where we would stay up and eat junk food and watch chick flicks and paint our toenails. And drink cocktails, of course. Since it was mid-December by the time we got around to it, we decided that the most appropriate cocktail was eggnog.

    I used the eggnog recipe in Dale DeGroff’s excellent book The Essential Cocktail: 3 eggs, 2 cups whole milk, 1 cup heavy cream, 1/2 cup sugar, 2 oz bourbon, 2 oz rum, freshly grated nutmeg. This was actually only half the recipe, which was supposed to serve 6. I suppose the amount I made does serve 3, if everyone wants seconds. And thirds. And maybe fourths. (If you divide the total amount of alcohol by 3, it is actually less alcohol per person than a typical serving size of alcohol; way more calories and cholesterol, though!)

    How festive!

    The pumpkin pie was made by my roommate Aubrey. We were supposed to eat it (or at least some of it) at the pajama party, but we felt too full after drinking all that eggnog! Ditto on the popcorn we’d been planning to make. So we’ll have to try the pumpkin pie today! Looks good, though, doesn’t it?

    Clearly Dale DeGroff has been consulting with Rachael Ray on portion size

    This is what was left in the bowl (of the theoretical 3 servings) after ladling out an initial cup for everyone.

    It was very tasty, almost like a cold latte, with a liquid layer and a thick foam on top (I beat the egg whites separately and folded them in at the end). You couldn’t taste the eggs or milk at all!

    We exchanged gifts, only I, um, hadn’t gotten around to buying any yet. (There’s still time!) Cory got me Ted Haigh’s book Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, which is very awesome. I’d never even heard of many of these cocktails, and some of the ingredients are almost impossible to find, which is my favorite sort of recipe! And Aubrey got me a beautiful mortar and pestle. I don’t know what I’m going to get for them, now–the bar is set pretty high!

    As far as our pajama party went, we watched the movie “Love, Actually”, which I’d never seen (though they had). It was good, though Donald and I had just seen the new Harry Potter movie the day before, and they have some of the same actors, which is always weird.

    We didn’t have enough energy for any of our other grand ambitions for the pajama party, like home pedicures or crank-calling Donald upstairs. When the movie was over, we concluded that the best part of a pajama party is getting to go straight to bed afterwards without even having to change.

  • Cardoons, Roman mayonnaise and Facebook. And some writing.

    I’m always excited to try a new vegetable, and I’d been noticing cardoons for sale at Russo’s, where I buy most of my groceries. Cardoons look sort of like a big bunch of celery, though they’re actually more closely related to artichokes and thistles. Apparently the ancient Romans ate them fairly often; Apicius has several recipes (the ancient Romans also had mayonnaise, but that’s a different post!).

    Well, let me tell you, they’re a whole heck of a lot of work to prepare! First you have to separate the stalks, like you would with a bunch of celery. Only the stalks are about 4 times as big as celery stalks. Then you have to trim the leaves off each stalk with a paring knife, and remove the strings from the bigger stalks. Only then can you cut them into eating-sized pieces, and cook them.

    I only found one recipe for cardoons, though I haven’t looked through all my cookbooks yet. Stewed cardoons, from Moosewood Restaurant Celebrates. You boil the cardoons first in salted water with a bit of lemon juice, then stew them for an additional 20 minutes with canned tomatoes, olives, sauteed onions and garlic, and other herbs.

    They were fine. Not delicious enough to warrant all that work, though! I suppose it’s just as well, because I don’t seem to have a lot of recipes for them, and I hate making the same recipe over and over again. If Joy of Cooking didn’t have some additional options, and it turned out I really loved cardoons, I was going to have to resort to Apicius.

    On the other hand, the main dish I prepared that evening was pina colada shrimp, from one of the Rachael Ray cookbooks: seared shrimp in a coconut milk sauce with fresh pineapple, tossed with shredded coconut, served over jasmine rice. Stewed cardoons in tomatoes might sound like an odd accompaniment, but the tomato mingled nicely with the coconut around the edges to give a flavor reminiscent of a Brazilian moqueca (a seafood stew with tomatoes and coconut milk). And that is a very good thing!

    On a completely different note, people who follow my blog might have noticed that I haven’t been posting much lately. They may also have noticed a precipitous decline in my posting frequency right around the time I joined Facebook. Hmmm…. I do have a few things I want to write about–interesting conversations and panels at the World Fantasy Convention, good books and magazines I’ve been reading–but it takes a lot of time to actually write a thoughtful post about something, rather than just rambling on about what I cooked for dinner earlier in the week, so those are all works in progress.

    In writing news, I’ve been working on rewriting an older story that has not yet found a home, about this guy who starts turning into a tree. I think the new version is working much better. But it’s frustrating. I spent several days plodding through a new scene, only to realize towards the end that the scene was totally wrong and I needed to throw the whole thing out. Blah.

    I’m also working on a novelette/novella (not sure how long it will end up) that’s a complete rewrite of another older story, this one about a swordswoman in a fantasy world without magic (or, at least, no more magic than our world), in an Empire that’s vaguely reminiscent of what you might imagine if a Chinese-influenced Mongolian Empire settled in European Russia, became decadent, and took over most of Europe and Asia (at least, that’s what I was aiming for). With some 18th century technology, but only rudimentary handguns. It’s also not-so-vaguely inspired by The Three Musketeers. Someone in one of my writers groups went so far as to call it Dumas pastiche. Or “When Athos Met D’Artagnan.” (There’s a romantic subplot, but don’t expect it to end well–again on a different note, will I start to write stories with happier romances now that I’ve been in one myself for the last year and a half? Or do I still have too much angst and bitterness to work out before I can get to those? Is this also something I should perhaps be pondering on Facebook rather than on my blog for the entire world to read? Questions, questions!)

  • Produce Heaven

    Now that my boyfriend lives in the apartment upstairs from me, in the same building, I get to borrow his car. (He even gave me my own set of keys, with a little Swiss army knife attached to the keychain.) This means that I get to shop at Russo’s.

    Russo’s is the best place to buy fruits and vegetables in the Greater Boston area. It’s in Watertown, about a 20-minute drive from my place, and it’s not accessible by public transportation, and not realistically bikeable (not unless you’re Jonathan Edelson, but that’s another story).

    I don’t know if the quality of produce in grocery stores has actually (as it seems to me) been getting worse, or if I’m just getting picker, as I get old and crotchety. A couple weeks ago, I went to Whole Foods, which is usually much better than Shaw’s (part of the Albertson’s chain); the fruit was fine, but the only vegetable I could find that didn’t look wilted and disgusting was cabbage (okay, the corn was fine too, but I was looking for a vegetable I didn’t need to cook the same day I bought it). In July! Are you kidding me, Whole Foods?

    Ah, Russo’s! An entire large bin of crisp, crunchy snow peas (instead of a small bin of wilted, droopy, brown-edged snow peas like at Whole Foods). Green beans so fresh that you could just take a handful out of the bin and end up with mostly good ones, instead of having to pick through and choose one bean at a time. Russo’s has vegetables I’ve never even heard of, and they consistently have any vegetable or fruit I might want, and decent quality, too. Last Saturday, they had fresh sour cherries. And quail eggs. I didn’t happen to want either fresh sour cherries or quail eggs, but it’s nice to know that I have the option.

    There are a few downsides. Although they have an excellent deli (way better provisioned than the one at the Fresh Pond Whole Foods), their fresh meat department is tiny. No fish. And, while they have a lot of dry goods, canned food and condiments, they’re all on shelves below eye level (under the produce bins), so they’re really hard to find. And the store is always crowded, even before 9 am on a Saturday.

    But if you like fresh fruit and vegetables, Russo’s is the place. They also have an extensive cheese department, a good selection of bakery items from local artisanal bakeries, a patisserie, and lots of fresh flowers. Plus a decent selection of dairy, prepared foods like hummus and olives … I could go on and on.

    I don’t like the idea of having to go to multiple grocery stores each week. But, since most of what I buy each week IS fresh fruit and vegetables, and since there’s a Shaw’s supermarket right on the way home from Russo’s where I can get all the dry goods I lost patience trying to find at Russo’s … well, it’s kind of worth it.

    Donald’s just glad not to be dragged along to the grocery store with me anymore.