A bumper crop of summer vegetables, fruits and herbs might well take us into early October this year, and there is no more inspiring guide for enjoying it than Canal House Cooking Volume N°4
food
canal house cooking Vol. 4 for summer’s bumper crop
tart-o-matic…improvising fresh fruit tarts
Years ago, I learned a wonderfully simple method for making a rustic freeform fruit tarts modeled after French galettes, whose charm lies in their rustic imperfection. The recipe involves little more than rolling flaky pie dough into a rough free-form round, piling cut-and-sugared fruits into the middle, and folding the dough up around it. It is the quickest method I know of creating a delectable fresh fruit pastry – about 20 minutes once you make the dough – akin to a pie but without the bother. Made with lush summer fruits like apricots, peaches, nectarines, plums and berries, it is the perfect summer house dessert. read more…
a manifesto about dry-cured pig and life
One of the reasons we’re hot to try Boccalone‘s prosciutto on our next trip to San Francisco – aside from the fact that Jake Godby features it as an ice cream flavor at Humphry Slocombe – is the manifesto we found buried deep in Boccalone’s website. We love manifestos because we know the people who write them to be generally crazed and passionate about whatever their manifesto is about. The Boccalone people clearly are, because they’re addressing essences and serious life principles when they write about salumi (Italian for cured meat), like
Fine salumi teach us to live a patient life in pursuit of flavor, rather than a relentless hunt for ever-increasing quantity – to seek better, not more. This approach is not only good for the individual, it’s better for the world.
Were with them!
Here is Boccalone’s An American Salumi Manifesto: read more…
prosciutto as resource (w ones to try + a recipe)
We saw some fresh figs in the market the other day and were reminded of the simplest of dishes: prosciutto – ham that’s been carefully dry-cured for 8 to 24 months – and lush, gently-perfumed fruit like figs, melons, peaches, apricots or plumcots in summer…comice pears, fresh or roasted, in fall. We love this classic combo for breakfast, midnight supper, lone-lazy-dog supper, light lunch, and of course, appetizer.
There is a secret to a marriage of only two or three ingredients like this: that they be at their best. The fruit should be truly ripe and fragrant. The prosciutto should be of fine quality and sliced to order – NOT pre-sliced who-knows-when? and sealed in plastic packages which seem to suffocate its flavors and cause its creamy texture to turn rubbery. This means planning ahead a bit in order to have an ingredient so delicious and complete it requires hardly any effort at to serve or eat. Once you understand how prosciutto works, you can make it work for you. Here’s what you need to know… read more…
midnight snack: homemade peanut butter cups
After 10 pm, I am driven by a sweet-tooth so fierce, I never keep actual sweets like ice cream or cookies on hand; I’m afraid of what would happen. Then I find myself foraging through the cupboard, looking for something that will satisfy my craving. When I stumbled on the milk chocolate disks I usually use for dessert-making, I had a vision: peanut butter cups…chunky organic peanut butter sandwiched between really good chocolate…instant and brilliant to my mind.
I tried out the idea with both Valhrona chocolate and Guittard (which has a more overtly peanut-butter-cup shape) in a side-by-side tasting to discover how much better Valhrona really is: more deeply flavored, creamier, stunningly good. Then I swapped out the peanut butter for read more…
kitchen ‘tools for smashing’ + recipe: warm crushed olives (olivada)
One day, I devised a coarse olive paste as a way of using up several kinds of olives that were a little past their prime. I spread them on the counter and pitted them by tapping them lightly with a rock, one of the many pounding devices I’ve collected over the years to mash garlic, make pestos and aiolis, crush spices…The olives’ flesh broke open making the pit easy to remove. Then I kept gently pounding to smash the olives further and worked in a scrap of mashed garlic and some fresh herbs and orange zest. I use this versatile olivada as a topping for rustic bread, pizzas, and focaccias, as a sauce for pasta, even stirred into mashed potatoes When heated, the flavor of the olives becomes more complex and aromatic.
To pit the olives,tap them with something heavy-ish that has one flatish side: a pestle, a stone, a tin can, a hammer, rolling pin… read more…
how to grind nuts without a food processor (moroccan-style)
Our friend Peggy Markel just got back from months of Culinary Adventures – her own, and facilitating those of the intrepid guests that embark on her “underground” tours of Tuscany, Elba, Sicily, Morocco. Peggy seems to know everybody, that is, anybody who is seriously into food in all the places she travels. She has a nose and and eye and an openness to find her way into the heart of a place, through its food. We love her reports on her Facebook page and on her blog, often in the form of teeny unedited videos that offer a glimpse into the rest of the world. (It was Peggy who sent us the clip of the Indian Water Music and the Sardinian Women Singing while they washed dishes.). Here is one of a Moroccan cook named Baijah crushing almonds for a traditional chicken pastilla at Jnan Tamsna in Marrakech, Morocco (one stop on Peggy’s Moroccan Adventure). Baijah just folds the almonds into a clean piece of cloth (or a dish towel) and whacks them with a rolling pin, a method she refers to as the “Berber food processor”.
It is a perfect strategy for when you’re staying in a bare-bones kitchen (like a summer rental) and have big ideas. read more…
italy for the gourmet traveler (+how to hack a guidebook)
In 1996, when I was about to take an extended trip to Italy, Fred Plotkin’s Italy for the Gourmet Traveler
“In season this is the place to buy freshly picked mushrooms. If you have any fears, you can look for the police officer who is the designated mycologist on duty. This piazza also has orderly stands selling cheese, meats, fruits, vegetables, beans, honeys, and flowers.”
In Plotkin’s guide, you will find essential bits of history and architecture and opera, as well as terrific, insightful writing. His chapter on Napoli begins:
“Fasten your seat belts! One can stand absolutely still in Napoli and feel like a spinning top.”
The guide has been so good and so reliable that it has gone through several printings; an updated edition was just published by Kyle Books. Like its predecessors, it suffers from only one problem: it is heavy, a 3-pound brick of solid information, particularly daunting in these times of overweight-luggage fees. Unwilling to travel Italy without Fred’s book, I improvised a solution (and figured out how to hack a guidebook): read more…
new music from the vegetable orchestra
The Vegetable Orchestra in Vienna, Austria performs original music made and inspired by instruments made of vegetables. Cucumberophones, celery bongos and leek violins might seem like something out of a Max Fleischer cartoon, but they are very real. They yield original sounds and music, with an ephemeral quality because of the living – and fleeting – nature of vegetables…
“The reason why our music is kind of fresh is…because we are forced to make something new on stage to improvise …our musical instruments don’t stay the same…”
Members of the Orchestra forge original instruments using knives, drilling machines, and various other tools. Their work is really about unleashing the possibilities inherent in the most ordinary of things around us.
“You can make music out of nearly everything, each thing contains a very specific acoustic quality and represents an intricate universe of sound…each thing could be a tool to open up that point of view”. read more…
4th of july reprise: warm fresh cherries (with leaves)
Sally Schneider
Since it’s high cherry season, we thought we’d reprise last years recipe for Warm Fresh Cherries (with Leaves), in honor of the Fourth of July. Too lazy to pit and stem some fresh cherries, a friend and I tried quickly sauteeing them as-is with butter and sugar, to discover the the stems and leaves provided unexpected delights:
“You picked a cherry up by the stem with your fingers, dunked it in crème fraiche and popped it in your mouth, working the fragrant flesh off the pit and stem; we dropped the spent leaves, pits and stems into little bowls set around the table, as you would olives pits or mussel shells. We ate the sublimely messy, almost primal dessert like children, savoring the cherries one-by-one and licking our fingers.”
It is the perfect dessert for however-many-people you may have to serve: easy to make, with a summery hang-out-and-spit-cherry-(or watermelon)-pit thing going on. Here’s the recipe, with our wishes for a wonderful Fourth of July:
anthony giglio’s secret weapon: a china marker for home entertaining
At a dinner party at wine writer Anthony Giglio’s house one evening, we saw him scribble the name of each guest on their wine glass with a white marker: a chic way of helping guests keep tab of their glass in a crowd (and avoiding unnecessary pours – and washing – of fresh glasses).
There’s a brilliant idea, we thought. So we asked Anthony what that marker was and where to get it.
Here is the story of his big fat improvisation, and the many ways you can use it :
“The China Marker is my secret weapon: I bring them to dinner parties as host gifts.
It is not really a marker; it’s a wax or grease pencil - sort of tacky when you write on paper with it – and writes perfectly on glass or china.
The idea was born at our office for the Food & Wine Magazine’s Wine Guide 
recipes: strawberry-rhubarb confit and syrup for improvising
I was playing around with with rhubarb and strawberries which are in season now and discovered two delicious “base materials” for improvising. Simmering strawberries and rhubarb briefly in a sauterne-like white wine syrup released their flavor to make an intensely-flavored “juice”. When I strained it, I discovered that I had not only made strawberry-rhubarb syrup, but the leftover solids were in fact a delectable cross between a sauce and a compote – a velvety confit. Each inspired other improvisations… read more…
how to serve fresh cherries…
Maria Robledo sent this photo from her iPhone with a short, expressive email: “Holton served these cheeries w the empty glass for the pits . Liked the improvised moment”
We like the improvised moment, too and the fun, useful little solutions that mysteriously come…
We’ve noticed that once we started thinking about the idea of improvising, we began to see it happening all around us; we began to DO it ourselves a lot more. Just a slight shift in view, really, turns it into a practice…
We discovered that improvising is really about following ideas as they connect one to another, even with the most ordinary things…like a blog post pointing in many directions – to a recipe for warm fresh cherries, or where to buy the glass, or Holton’s or Maria’s artwork, OR maybe your own brilliant, unexpected idea…
(BTW, you can click here to find out where to buy the swell, thin $3 glass that Holton used for cherry pits; it is useful for many things…we often use it as a vase for a small bunch of flowers, and for individual rice puddings…and Amontillado milkshakes…)
Related posts: The Perfect Glass: Thin, Cheap, Well-Designed
Warm Fresh Cherries with Leaves
Thanks Maria and Holton!
hacking a kitchen island + sally on splendid table
This weekend, public radio’s The Splendid Table will be airing host Lynne Rosetto Kasper‘s interview with Sally about modular kitchen cabinets. Sally has been an inadvertent proponent of the European practice of owning your kitchen, installing it in a rental apartment and taking it with you to your next space. Years ago, she designed a kitchen in a space she thought she’d be in forever; when things changed, she took the kitchen with her. After all, a kitchen is really just an arrangement of individual cabinets bolted to the wall. (Click here to see check out the kitchen-related posts below. )
Since her new space was smaller, Sally also hacked the center island, read more…
strategies: fresh fava beans (or soy beans or peas) + recipe
Although we’d tasted many wondrous dishes in restaurant-going lives, there is only one that we felt compelled to order three times during the same meal, eating it as appetizer, main course, dessert. Fresh fava beans, dressed with extra-virgin olive oil and a fine dice of young Pecorino cheese, were offered as a “special appetizer” one warm spring night at a Tuscan-style restaurant in New York City. We knew that such a dish is a rarity on restaurant menus because fava beans are work to prepare in quantity; they require both shucking and peeling.”We’ll start with the favas” we said, “and then figure out the rest.”
We were stunned by that first simple dish of beans with their buttery, slightly bitter, “green” pea-like taste. So we ordered it for the next course, and then the next, without restraint or care for propriety. THAT was the dinner we needed. (When we returned the following evening hungering for more, we were told by our waiter that the favas were no longer available: “They were a losing proposition; the staff kept eating them…”)
This is the season for favas and it’s worth the effort to mine yourself and your loved ones a plateful. A fine solution to their laborious-in-quantity prep is read more…
