27 Jul 2012
by scolgin
in Cooking Tips, Recipes, Video
Tags: butter, Delitia, Escoffier, France, haute cuisine, Land O'Lakes, Nobu, Parma, recipes, sea bass
Did you ever play that Desert Island game — you know, the one where someone asks you what 10 albums you would choose if you were marooned on a desert island? I like to play this game with food. Which 10 ingredients would I want if I was stranded on a desert island? And high upon my list would be that glistening, glorious gold of the dairy case: butter. I could make a palm frond taste good so long as I had butter.
I’d been meaning to put my infatuation for beurre to words for some time now. Sitting here eating my leftover grilled chicken from a few posts back — basted on the barbie with melted butter — I got thinking about just how important this simple, elemental ingredient is. More
20 Jul 2012
by scolgin
in Observations, Recipes
Tags: Campari, cocktails, drinks, Gertrude Stein, Giornataccia, Italian cuisine, Italy, recipes, summer, Venice
“The days were long and the nights were long and the life was good.”
—Gertrude Stein, Fiesole, Italy, Summer 1908
A few weeks ago, drinking and dining with my friends/neighbors/mortal enemies (envy is a terrible thing) Chris and Glennis before they left for a week in Venice, Italy, we got talking about Campari.
Chris was pontificating that Europe had an appreciation for bitter foods and spirits that you don’t see as much in America. That set me to forming theories and pontificating in turn about how bitter as an entire taste realm was absent altogether from American cuisine — we like our sweet (OH, how we like our sweet!) and our salty, we’ll dabble in sour. But bitter is completely unrepresented — replaced, perhaps, by fried. And more salt. More
03 Jul 2012
by scolgin
in Pork, Recipes, World's Best Sandwiches
Tags: bacon, barbecue, BBQ, burgers, cooking, grill, marmalade, recipes, summer, Tabasco
There is a condiment unlike any other — a glistening concoction that will transform your burgers from fine to sublime, and that will have your summertime guests kneeling at your feet in reverence, O’ God of the Barbecue. And I will share it with you, here, now, just in time for the 4th!
Bacon onion marmalade
This is not a condiment for vegetarians or the tentative. I call it bacon onion marmalade. And it is the anecdote to mediocre summer burgers. You may even want to bring a little stash with you when someone invites you to their barbecue. More
19 Jun 2012
by scolgin
in Recipes
Tags: food, Mexican cooking, Mexico, recipes, sopa, sopa de flor de calabaza, soup, squash blossoms, summer
I like to think of myself as an honorary Mexican. After all, where I was born was once part of Mexico, and we in California now have a population that is more Mexican than non-Mexican.
An edible summer bouquet
My two oldest brothers — twins, 20 years my elders — both married Mexican women. My earliest childhood memories are filled with large, spirited fiestas. Our live-in housekeeper, Angelita, and the brick mason Sisco who worked at our house were both like family. By the time I was six, I could eat the hottest salsa you could throw at me. More
05 Jun 2012
by scolgin
in Cookbooks, Recipes, Video
Tags: fennel, fritto misto, Greece, grunion run, ice fish, Italian cooking, recipes, sardines, smelt
I don’t know what it is about small fish that is so appealing to me.
I remember being in Italy as a child, and looking on in horror as my parents dug into platefuls of tiny fried fish, uncleaned and with heads intact! (Why this was more objectionable to my 11-year-old sensibilities than the squid tentacles I was gobbling with wild abandon that same trip I’ll never know.) Fast forward a quarter century of so, and I can’t get enough of the small fry.
Italian-style “fritto di mare” fried whitefish
I buy teeny, tiny “ice fish” — no longer than a nickel and pale white — at the Japanese market, coat them in a light tempura batter and make fish fries. I buy smelt or other little fish, and recreate the fritto misto that traumatized me as a child in Italy. I purchase silvery sardines to pickle or throw on the grill. I can’t remember when it all changed, perhaps it was the climbing-a-mountain/crossing-a-new-frontier aspect it. But whenever and however, I became a devotee of diminutive dabs. More
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