Saturday, 13 November 2010
Ya venture into the international market with your eyes peeled, reading labels and inspecting pictures, and you never know what you’ll come across. I can just bet that this is a “one-step recipe sauce,” and I think it might have been over the edge before that step. Cola-flavored? Yick.
Of course, this doesn’t hold a candle to multi-colored, multi-layered (homemade) sandwiches….
Tuesday, 26 October 2010
Last weekend, Piedmont Park hosted the smallest festival I’ve ever seen there—with no banners listing sponsors. I saw only maybe a half-dozen food booths, so this one offering a long, multi-cultural menu was standing in for what is usually a dozen vendors. The one to the right outside the photo listed “DEEP” FRIED OREOS (yes, with the quotes), which sounded positively gross to me.
One group of booths looked like pure low-end carny, with tosses for the most hideous stuffed creatures I’ve ever seen—because they were made with the fewest production steps possible (for example, hands were stuffed blobs with several lines of sewing to delineate digits).
I leave you to muse on the name of the booth to the left….
Saturday, 18 September 2010
Several times I’ve enjoyed puffball steaks, and it looks like it’s time to do so again. Ya just pick the globular beast, remove non-edibles (leaves, grass, soil), and sauté thick slices in a skillet—in butter if you can go cholesterol deluxe, creating fungi fun!
In figuring scale, remember the model has size 15s.
Tuesday, 7 September 2010
Night-day and day-night changes can yield tremendously compelling skies. I was surprised the camera pulled out the flag colors in the low light.
For a non sequitur: today was vegetable day. Tomatoes, green beans, red and green sweet peppers (all from the Botanist’s garden). Not a tremendous variety, but, ooooh, some tasty eating!
Friday, 27 August 2010
I met The Best Summer Drink™ the day before I saw this.
I hereby bestow, at least for the time being, the title The Best Summer Drink™ on, tahdah!, the Dark ’n’ Stormy.
The Dark ’n’ Stormy requires two unusual ingredients and one (optional but recommended) easy one (lemon or lime juice—fresh!). The unusual ingredients are black rum and ginger beer. Black rum is not dark rum. Ginger beer is not ginger ale.
Well, plus ice. So: four ingredients.
I’ve had only one Dark ’n’ Stormy so I’ve only embarked on the pathway to Dark ’n’ Stormy connoisseurship. My first one had the black rum and the ginger beer, with some lemon juice. I’d like to try it with lime juice. I wouldn’t include the sweetening recommended in the link’s recipe.
And I’ve never even thought about making ginger beer, but it does sound tasty! Well, if you overlook the “symbiotic glob of lactobacillus and yeast.”
Tuesday, 24 August 2010
The website says:
A Camembert-style bloomy-rinded cheese, Green Hill is the shining star of the Sweet Grass Dairy line.
We must agree that it’s a lovely, rich, fresh cheese. Not having tasted the rest of their line, I dunno about the comparative, but we sure enjoyed our celebratory wee wheel of Green Hill.
Saturday, 21 August 2010
The sign said guinep.
I saw green ovate-roundish yellow-green fruit somewhat like squished pingpong-ball-sized limes loosely clustered on woody twigs.
Against the rules, I nabbed a snapshot.
Thanks to online reference materials, I have learned that I was looking at Melicoccus bijugatus, which has a plethora of common names, with mamoncillo perhaps more familiar than most (I’ve seen it in Mexico). Guinep is the Jamaican name. I guess the species is native to the New World tropics, maybe mostly the Caribbean.
Inside it’s not at all like a citrus, but has a salmon-colored or yellowish pulp around a hard kernel/seed. And the skin is thin and leathery.
Apparently, there are sweeter kinds and not-sweet ones.
I’m lame, I didn’t buy any to try.
Sunday, 8 August 2010
We enjoyed a celebratory dinner with family this evening. It was specially marked with these lovely tarts—strawberry/blueberry, fresh fig (yummmm!), and blueberry crumble.
I took “my” potato salad….
Tuesday, 3 August 2010
I don’t know what to eat anymore.
We went to a new seafood restaurant around the corner that makes noises about how they’re doing the right thing with the ingredients they buy/serve.
Then I looked at this review, of a new book called Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food (Paul Greenberg, 2010, Penguin), which discusses current issues regarding bluefin tuna, cod, sea bass, and salmon (that is, overfishing and depopulation). (I’m on the hold list for a library copy.) I didn’t see cod or salmon on the restaurant’s chalkboard of specials. They served yellowfin, lobster, Apalachicola oysters, and, get this, the waiter went on about this Mediterranean fish they had had the previous week that was really good, and I swear what he called it was branzino, a term I’d never heard before. From the review, I learn that branzino is the northern Italian term for sea bass. Hrrumph. (Or maybe I misunderstood.)
Even sticking to beans and rice isn’t good. You don’t want to know about rice farming. Even if you buy organic, that doesn’t avoid the habitat destruction involved in field construction, etc.
Still, I very much enjoyed my meal. The gustatory part.
And, from our windowseat, we had wonderful bonus entertainment: watching the evening’s pop-up shower become a downpour. Twice.
Note: I LOVE scallops. I know how destructive it is to harvest them. I only indulge rarely. If I buy them for my kitchen, yes, I play the premium and get the more environmentally friendly diver scallops. I only buy them from restaurants that I expect are also using diver scallops. Like this one. (I hope.)
Get your seafood dos and don’ts here, including an iPhone app version.
Monday, 26 July 2010
While the signature vegetable of Sicily is the eggplant (especially the smallish white ones), the signature dish, I have read several places (although I’ve also seen it ignored), is peperonata. Peperonata is sauteed sliced peppers (various colors) stewed with onions and tomatoes, a few green olives, and flavored with basil and red wine vinegar (salt and pepper, too, of course). Well, that’s one version.
Vegetable stews that are heavy on tomatoes, onions and peppers are big all around the Mediterranean. Add eggplant and you’re headed toward puttanesca or caponata….