01 Jul 2011 3 Comments
in Recipes Tags: broccoli, estate, Italy, pancetta, pasta, penne, primavera, summer, sun gold tomatoes, tomatoes
Sometimes I’m pressed for time and have to come up with a meal quick. And often, without the leisure to peer at my fridge or sit around thinking about the possibilities, I make the best food. This is one such dish, breathtaking in its simplicity.
Penne l'estate with glass of rosé
28 Jun 2011 12 Comments
in Recipes, World's Best Sandwiches Tags: chickens, deviled, egg salad, eggs, mayonnaise, recipes, sandwich
Chickens are mercurial creatures. Sometimes they lay like crazy, and other times they appear spooked and go barren. Then they like to play little tricks on you. One of our hens hadn’t seemed to be laying in weeks. But then I saw her emerging nervously from within a shrub. I looked beneath the leaves and found 11 eggs.
Chicken behaving suspiciously.
When they’re laying like gangbusters, I’m always looking for interesting ways of using our eggs. I massage them into flour and make homemade pasta, I boil them for Nicoise and Cobb salads, I crack them into congee and over the top of chilaquiles, I fry them and plop them onto a pile of spaghetti. I even do a groovy Spanish-style deviled egg with chorizo, pimenton and lots of olive oil (let me know if you wanna know how to make that one!) More
24 Jun 2011 3 Comments
in American Series, Recipes, Video Tags: Anchor Steam, butter, crab, crab feed, Dungeness, Old Bay, recipe, salmon, salt and pepper crab, Sierra Nevada, video, zinfandel
On the east coast, you have clam bakes. I’m jealous of you. In Alaska, you have salmon bakes. And I’m jealous of you, too. But on the West Coast, we have crab feeds. And you are jealous of us.
Sure, our friends around Baltimore will point out that they, too, have a crab tradition — spending frustrating hours picking and sucking miniscule bits of meat out of piles of Old Bay-seasoned blue crabs. But to those of us in the West, used to big mountains and wide open spaces, that’s the equivalent of eating a meatball when you could have a rib-eye. I’m talking about beautiful, abundant Dungeness crab, pulled from the Pacific bursting with snow white meat. Up where my mom lives in Sonoma County — where some of the best crabbing waters are — you’ll see signs during crab season inviting you to local crab feed fundraisers. $15 for all you can eat. That’s my kind of community event.
21 Jun 2011 17 Comments
in Pork, Recipes Tags: Ardeche, blood sausage, book, cookbook, France, paté, pig, Pork, Pork & Sons, rillettes, Stéphane Reynaud
My wife, a woman of astute intuition when it comes to gift giving, bestowed me with a new book for Father’s Day: “Pork & Sons,” by French chef Stéphane Reynaud.
Published in 2007, it was at the fore of an entire genre of pig-focused cookbooks such as “The Whole Beast”, “The Complete Book of Pork”, “Pig Perfect” and “Pig”, a trend which culminated in a glut of restaurants with names like Cochon and The Spotted Pig and our own Animal here in Los Angeles. More
17 Jun 2011 6 Comments
in On the Road, Recipes, Video Tags: bangers, black pudding, brown bread, butter, eggs, Guinness, Ireland, Irish breakfast, mushrooms, roasted tomato, soda bread, Spiddal, white pudding
Around a decade or so ago, my friend Dan and I were tooling about Ireland in a little Spanish compact. We stayed mostly in bed-and-breakfasts, and it didn’t take long before we were waking with a craving for the Irish breakfast.
Irish breakfast
What was not to like? A couple of eggs, some Irish sausage, black and white puddings (i.e. more sausage), Canadian bacon, a roasted tomato, a couple cooked mushrooms and plenty of Irish brown bread spread with fresh Irish butter. Of course, you can have too much of a good thing — as we discovered was the case with both Guinness and the Irish breakfast. More
skinny girls & mayonnaise 