Like many young cooks, I learned to cook with a Dutch oven by my side (here, always and forever, Le Creuset). We learned to sauté onions together. We simmered Better Homes’ spaghetti meat sauce after school. On weekends, we watched tough cuts of beef magically morph into tender stews and stroganoff when those Junior League cookbook dreams of righteous recipe perfection came true. But even when they fell short, it didn’t really matter. Better to learn now.
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18 Dec 2012, Posted by admin in MEET, 0 Comments
How do you, how does anyone, define the term artisan today? The answer, less than five years ago, was an independent food crafter of various genres, ages, types and vastly different production yields.
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“Making dinner shouldn’t be fatal. But four million people in the developing world die each year from illnesses linked to smoke spewing out of crude stoves — a scourge that has frustrated experts for decades.”
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What to bookmark this week:Virginia Tech archivist Kira Dietz’s blog, What’s Cookin’ at Special Collections, sharing her discoveries as she ferrets through recipes housed at the University Libraries.
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Cooking is often about remembering — actively, looking forward and without regret. You might be inspired by a family member, an incredible vacation, a certain farmer’s produce or a neighborhood restaurant dish that you loved.
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I’ve always been a bit wary of a cookie that looks too perfect. You know, the ones with the razor-sharp edges, or crafted in circles so symmetrical they induce geometry class yawns. The worst offender this time of year: Those holiday cookies all dressed up for magazine covers with the ornamental icing piped so meticulously, it surely took all the fun out of making them. The flavor of that sticky-sweet icing laced with Red Dye #5? No comment.
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“The true yam, or ñame (pronounced “ny-AH-may”), is a starchy tuber that originated in the tropical regions of both the Old World and (to a far lesser extent) the New. Extrapolate from this and you may presume that it was brought to the North American mainland by slaves, along with other staples like okra, pigeon peas, and sorghum….
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The cottage food law buzz is a timely reminder: Not all good books come in glossy, high-dollar commercial packaging. Now’s as good a time as any to fine tune your inner Davy Crockett and Minnie Rose Lovgreen. Consider two new releases from Canadian publisher Firefly Books’ “Made at Home” series….
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That was the intro sentence to an article in Sunday’s New York Times. It worked, I read it. And the story isn’t exactly a new one, though we absolutely need more farmers like Bob, “who has figured out how to make a good living running a farm that is efficient but also has a soul.”
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Among the shoe boxes behind my desk filled with thousands of Prudence Penny recipes, the “celebrity” section is curiously rather slim. The recipes are not from the earlier days of Ms. Penny’s nationwide cooking advice column, but almost entirely from the late 1940s and early 1950s. And they’re as entertaining as the actors who provided them (a “crazy mixed up stew” from Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis; “My favorite Dagwood sandwich” from Penny Singleton, a.k.a. Blondie; check back from the recipes).
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