18 Oct 2011
by scolgin
in Cooking Tips, Recipes
Tags: confit, cracklings, demi glace, duck, gazpacho, minestrone, nose to tail, paté, Tuscany, vegetables
I have an almost cellular aversion to wasting food. I don’t know if it’s the result of the steady drumbeat of “There are children starving in China!” I heard as a kid when I wasn’t finishing a meal (and which I now use on my own children, substituting a non-specific “somewhere in the world” for China). Or whether it’s just because I hate to see things wasted.
Wilted veggies from the Skinny Girls fridge
Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before — I’ve written on this subject many times already in this blog. But it’s an issue that comes up often in my life, as I remind yet another dinner host to save the bones from the chicken they’ve just served to make a homemade stock. (Recipe: throw bones in a gallon of water with an onion, salt and bay leaf, cook until reduced by half.) More
14 Oct 2011
by scolgin
in Cooking Tips, Observations, Recipes
Tags: bloody mary, entertaining, food blog, Jon Buck, mac n' cheese, queso fundido, recipes, single guys, Skinny Girls, vegetarian
When I was in my 20s, I wrote a cookbook called “The Single Guy’s Cookbook & Guide to Entertaining.” My friend Mark (you may remember him as “Sidekick Mark” from previous posts) and I were at sushi one night talking about how impressive and economical it was to cook dinner for a date. Recite to her a little poetry you’d written with a glass of wine by the fire afterward, and she was yours. The recipes were simple and good, the advice intuitive… a book that was basically a guide for all those guys who burn toast or ruin a salad.
Jon's dinner
So it is with our friend Jon. Recently separated from his wife, he’s the guy who invites us over for dinner, and then asks what we’re having. He’s the guy who sends me pictures of what he’s preparing for dinner so I’ll feel sorry for him and invite him to our house instead. When his parents are in town visiting, he invites them to our house. He’s one of our favorite people and we love his kids, so we don’t mind. But I feel an almost philanthropic instinct to feed him. More
10 Oct 2011
by scolgin
in Recipes, Starlets, Yoga Students & Quinoa (stories)
Tags: artichokes, asiago, Henry VIII, parsley, polo, rib eye, risotto, Seamus Conlan, Shakespeare, Topanga
My friend Paul lovingly calls me “Seamus.” But I know a real Seamus — how many people outside of Ireland can say that? (Do you know a Seamus??)
Our friend Seamus is a man with a lust for life. Once at a party at our home, I had grilled a Herculean pork shoulder. I was busy tending to guests, wine and so forth, and when I came out to the large table on our deck, Seamus was standing at the head in his flowing white cotton shirt, his long flowing dark hair and thick English accent — holding court, quaffing wine and gesturing grandly as he carved the pork shoulder, a scene that might’ve been pulled from the pages of Shakespeare. More
04 Oct 2011
by scolgin
in Recipes
Tags: breakfast, chorizo, margarita, Mexican, Mexico, potatoes, recipe, russet, tacos, tacos de papa
Breakfast potatoes — hash browns, if you prefer — have forever been a bit of a mystery to me. I’ve always been able to make passable potatoes, better if I added a bit of duck fat or lard. But that was kind of cheating. And they were still never as good as those little oblong potato pucks at McDonalds.
But try enough different things and every once in a while you stumble on something really good by accident. That’s how I came to discover the best breakfast potatoes ever. (Note: If you have leftover potatoes, this preparation also works beautifully for the traditional tacos de papa — potato tacos — of Mexico City. I’ve included a recipe for these below the potato recipe.) More
29 Sep 2011
by scolgin
in Observations, Starlets, Yoga Students & Quinoa (stories)
Tags: carnivore, France, Germans, harvey's guss, Italy, laboratory, meat, SPAM, vegetarian
Some friends of ours had German guests visiting, and were going to take them to In & Out Burger. “I hope they have soy burgers,” said friend Amanda. “Our friends don’t eat any meat.” I suggested she get them regular burgers and tell them that they were soy burgers, and that they’d made incredible advances in soy technology. Germans are gullible that way. Suffering a national cuisine inferiority complex with France and Italy as neighbors, they’re likely to act overly knowledgeable and tell you they already knew that.
Meat grown in a lab
I was reminded of one of my younger sister, Siobhan’s, bouts of vegetarianism when we were teenagers. I was trying to get her to eat a chicken breast, and she was protesting. “They don’t have to kill the chicken,” I said, “they just cut the breasts off and they grow back. Like a lizard’s tail!” She glared at me. She also wasn’t buying my contention that to get chicken broth, all you had to do was wring the live chicken out over a pot. (More like “juicing” a chicken.) More
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