Entries from February 2008 ↓

I went to college in Gainesville, GA. At the time, Gainesville was the poultry processing capital of the world. I once attended the Annual Poultry Festival. I stopped eating chicken when I lived there because of gut trucks. I still don’t eat chicken. My motto became: Fowl is foul. (I confess that I accidentally ate the turkey gravy at Thanksgiving, though, and it was pretty tasty…)

No more chicken noodle soup for me.

Gainesville is a 45 minute - 1 hour drive from Athens, GA. For various reasons I ended up spending a fair amount of time in Athens, though I never did learn to find my way around the town.

One of my favorite things in Athens was The Grit. The “indie-rock Moosewood.” One of my favorite things at The Grit was The Golden Bowl: browned tofu cubes sauteed with soy sauce and nutritional yeast served over brown rice. Now, you can get vegetables and in your Golden Bowl, but I always preferred them on the side, leaving a perfectly beige, perfectly delicious mix of the best tofu you have ever eaten, brown rice, and cheese. Umami and yet just bland enough without being boring. A perfect comfort food.

After I moved outside of easy driving distance to Athens, I was compelled to figure out how to make a Golden Bowl at home because the meal is an addiction. I succeeded. My home-made Golden Bowl hit the spot.

A couple of years later, The Grit published their cookbook. Sure enough, I had nailed the recipe and technique except for that second frying of the tofu that creates a little extra crispiness.

I make mine with tamari instead of soy sauce, and with mozzarella cheese. It is what I’ve been eating for the past couple of days. With veggies on the side, of course.

Here is the recipe: Continue reading →

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A wonderful time for strawberry/balsamic vinegar sorbet.

Next time, I’ll use a little less sugar, but overall it is amazingly yummy. And pretty.

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This is as far as I got on the sorbet today.

As you can see, one is made with orange bitters (instead of the Kirsch called for in the recipe) and the other is made with balsamic vinegar.

As they are now, they are both far too sweet, but I’ve read that freezing takes the edge off of the sweetness. I hope so.

I’ll probably freeze the balsamic one first.

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Weaver Street Market had strawberries on sale today so I got a bunch.

I think tonight I will make Strawberry Sorbet.

But then, the next attempt simply must be Salted Butter Caramel Ice Cream.

David Lebovitz really is brilliant, and I could use a copy of his book Perfect Scoop: Ice Creams, Sorbets, Granitas, and Sweet Accompaniments

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Oh wow, Warner and I whipped up the best dinner I’ve had at home in a very long time.

He made tomato pudding. I made sweet potato curry and lemon-roasted asparagus. It was all so good and pretty on the plate–red and orange and green and yellow.

I made up the sweet potato curry as I went along, so I’ll jot it down before I forget…

• Peel 4 small-to-medium sweet potatoes and cut into 1/2 inch cubes.
• Cut one onion and one green pepper into approximately 1 x .25 inch strips.
• Heat up a generous pour of vegetable oil in a large-ish heavy bottomed pan.
• Fry onion and green pepper over medium-high heat until getting a bit soft.
• Add a tablespoon or two of jarred curry paste (I had vindaloo on hand, but others I have tried would have worked just as well.)* Stir to mix well until the fragrance seems to peak.
• Lower heat a bit and dump in a can of coconut milk. Stir to mix well.
• Add sweet potatoes and bring to simmer.
• Cover and simmer, stirring occasionally, about 20 minutes or until the sweet potatoes are cooked through.
• Serve with rice.

I’ll write up the lemon-roasted asparagus later. It is one of my mottoes that roasting is the best way to cook nearly anything…

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* I get these on the cheap at the Indian grocery and they are very handy.

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So, if you can’t get a photograph of some food item you have made before the food item has almost disappeared, the food item might have turned out well.

The cheesecake, while not up to being a real food model, turned out very well.

Here is the recipe… Continue reading →

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My beautiful friend Maria’s lovely husband gave her a box of Vosges Collezione Italiano truffles for Valentine’s Day. Lucky girl. Maria was kind enough to give me two of the truffles, as we have been lusting after these particular confections together for years.

And so I came into the possession of the Balsamico truffle (12-year aged balsamic vinegar + dark chocolate + Sicilian hazelnuts) which I have not yet tried. And… the Rooster, described as follows:

Your tasting begins with the Rooster truffle, a mélange of Taleggio cheese, organic walnuts and Tahitian vanilla beans draped in bittersweet dark chocolate. A bit salty, slightly tannic and rich in mouth-feel with an undercurrent of sweetness.

And it may be one of the most exquisite things I have ever eaten. On par with the pink grapefruit sorbet at Berthillon, which stopped me in my tracks on the rue saint Louis en l’ile so that I could lean against a building and taste…

sigh.

After that truffle, I had to pour a glass of wine–the cheapo Alcion Malbec I get by the case at Weaver Street Market that is actually very delicious, especially for being so ridiculously inexpensive. If I were a smoker, I might have had a cigarette…

And, speaking of Berthillon, the ice cream making is so far successful. I am trying the coconut recipe from the previous post. I have succeeded in not boiling the cream or ending up with chunks of egg yolk floating in the cream.

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For a friend with dietary restrictions, I’m looking for ice cream recipes that have no added sweetener. Tomorrow is her birthday. I’m not having much luck, since I am not adding 2 teaspoons of Nutrisweet to anything. Besides, I don’t think cavemen ate Nutrisweet.

Anyway, I did find this recipe for Garlic Ice Cream. I might just have to try this at some point.

And then there is grilled potato ice cream. I don’t think I’ll try that one.

Not so adventurous, but cardamom ice cream sounds delicious.

Here’s a coconut ice cream recipe with no sugar that might just work…

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Last night I had dinner at Il Palio with Diane Kelly and a faculty position candidate, Jenna Hartel. Jenna’s dissertation was on information behavior in the hobby of gourmet cooking. At one point during dinner, she explained that there are two categories of food hobbyists: the gourmets and the down-home cooks. The latter are concerned with simplicity and low cost, while the former love the exotic and the complicated, which tends to translate (in my experience) to the more expensive.

Anyway, last night at Il Palio, I ate:

• Local Bibb Lettuces - Oven Dried Tomatoes, Radishes and Parmesan Dressing
• Bucatini all’Amatriciana - House Cured Guanciale, Onion and Spicy Tomato Sauce
• Bailey’s Crème Brulée - Bailey’s, Kahlua, Vanilla Bean Custard

The crème brulée was probably the best I ever remember eating, but the rest was just ok.

And I actually got ill when I got home. Blech.

Tonight is a much more down-home night.

Actually the truth is that I’ve had too much going on to feel like I can stop and figure out what to cook at home, so I don’t have a plan and I don’t have supplies. Sometimes it seems too overwhelming to think about what to eat for the next week and I just blank on it and ignore it. Then nights like tonight happen.

I had a bag of pre-soaked kidney beans in the freezer, so I put those in a pot, covered them with water, brought that to a boil, covered the pot and stuck it in the oven at 250°F for 45 minutes while I made a phone call to a friend and folded my laundry.

When the beans were cooked, I drained them. Diced an onion. Sauteed it in veg oil until it was soft. Threw in the beans. Threw in a couple of cups or so of mixed frozen vegetables, a frozen tablespoon lump of tomato paste,* and a jar of spaghetti sauce. Added some salt, a healthy amount of dried oregano, and a bit of red pepper flakes. Cooked until everything was hot and cooked through.

I cooked a couple of potatoes in the microwave.

Then a big pile of the mush from the stove was piled on top of a potato and that whole mess was covered with shredded “Italian style” cheese, and popped back into the microwave to melt the cheese.

I’m eating it now as I type. Actually it isn’t terrible. It isn’t good, but I’ve thrown together much worse.

And so it goes. After dinner I’ll make a menu for the next few days. And a grocery list.

I’m thinking some sort of curried winter squash. I have a surfeit of coconut milk and basmati rice. Yum.

* I freeze the leftover tomato paste when a recipe doesn’t use a whole can. I wrap individual lumps in plastic wrap and put all the lumps in a storage bag in the freezer.

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Hot white basmati rice.
Add a large dollop of a mango pickle heavy on the methi (fenugreek) (extra points for mango pickle in which the mango is shredded).
Mix well.

Devour.

This makes a wonderful lunch. Never mind that it is pretty much nutritionally devoid and full of salt. It is delicious.

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