Category Archives: food

Food share and the cold

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Zucchini fritters are one of my new favorite dishes. They’ve entered the rotation. It’s basically a pancake made delicious with feta and tons of scallions and garlic (and shredded zucchini, of course). Here served with crème fraiche and a tangily-dressed Romaine salad.

Plus scallions!

Also from Ripe Figs, here’s a spicy cabbage dish with roasted hazel nuts that I tried out this week.

I don’t know if it’s the Irish blood, but I generally have cabbage in the fridge, so it’s nice to have some alternatives to coleslaw or simpler sautées.

Another thing I’m big on these days is making my own croutons. Iron skillets are perfect for this task. Usually I only add garlic, S&P, and thyme, but oh how tasty they are! And they keep of course.

In my effort to cut down on meat consumption, I find adding a handful of cashews to a salad to be an easy way to add protein and hearty flavor.

It’s been COLD here. Wear-tights-under-my-pants cold. Two scarves. Hood up.

Just the teens, so I’m not complaining. I know plenty of others are experiencing much colder temperatures and deadly windchill.

I’ll end by saying what a great investment my calf-length down parka was. Makes so many dog walks possible!

Ice, writing, soup, and whales

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1/8 HAIKU
A salt shard turns Finn
into a tripod — hop! hop! —
‘til I can remove.

Three writing workshops start back up this week, two I run, one attend. The structure is good, the connections, friendships. The break was really nice too. It was one week longer than planned on account of losing the internet right before going to California.

I didn’t make soup yesterday but did today. The addition of fennel and a dollop of freshly-made pesto made this batch a little different from my usual bean/tomato concoctions. Plenty by Ottolenghi the source.

His didn’t include sausage while mine used up some ancient andouille. Have no fear! I’ll survive. And if I don’t, Finn’s going down too!

Painting by Ginny Mallon (so love it!) and just received this week — two of her incredible cigar-box portraits. That’s Herman Melville on the left (with a whale inside) and Mark Helprin on the right (cats inside). I have read almost all of Helprin’s novels but never managed (shame on me!) to get through Moby Dick.

If you don’t already follow Ginny on Instagram, you should (@ virginiamallon).

*****

Lastly, two more screenshots from 2023

Winter Salad

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It hardly feels like winter here in New England but a winter salad is nevertheless in order.

It mixes: shaved radish, shaved fennel, thinly sliced cabbage, and hearts of romaine. It’s dressed in a buttermilk dressing.

Tang and crunch. Slightly bitter components. It’ll partner beautifully with salmon and Brussels sprouts.

What’s for dinner in your house?

Food as ballast

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Food as sanity. Food as pleasure. Food as ballast, continuity, novelty. To prep food is to focus. That’s benefit enough, but there’s also how assembling ingredients performs a kind of magic, a magic that is at once artful and one of the most pedestrian domestic chores going. How is that possible?

Furthermore, because we get hungry over and over again, there’s no scrambling for motivation. It’s built in. How great is that?

This year has found me regularly trying out new recipes. Nothing as disciplined as working through a cookbook, but still . . .

4 garlic cloves, sage, mint, oregano, S&P, EVOO, and lemon juice

Sage and mint from the garden, oregano from the cupboard. I cooked the quinoa with a little saffron. The recipe didn’t call for that but one a few pages later did and I don’t know about you, but I often fudge things that way.

Since I don’t always have some of the more exotic ingredients, I apply a loose standard and that’s fine, since it’s not about perfect replication but rather about stretching my palate and experimenting a little, getting out of my domestic ruts.

For example, this Ottolenghi dish called for Persian dried lime powder and sweet potatoes. I used fresh lime zest for the former and left out the latter. I can see how sweet potato chunks would be a tasty addition, but the salad was PLENTY good without them (see what I did there?)

I gushed over this one in my usual over-the-top way. Oh my god — this one’s restaurant worthy! [Moan] Wow, this is good. Too bad we don’t run a B&B! Served a little bit warm, rice on the toothsome side, the feta adding a luscious creaminess, trust me when I tell you it was outstanding.

A few cherry tomatoes gifted from a friend’s garden added a perfect dash of color and acid, tasting like summer and sunshine.

My husband doesn’t say much (and I guess I gush enough for the both of us), but when he gets up for seconds, his opinion is clear enough.

Season and ancestors

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SEASON: Two weeks from midsummer and already we see signs of fall. This, at least, is nothing new. But the ordinary rain falling on an otherwise ordinary Sunday tamps down extraordinary Canadian smoke. It still plagues the Northeast.

ANCESTORS: It’s always befuddled me, this notion of wanting contact with dead relatives. Kind of spoiled the idea of Heaven too. You don’t need to ask why. But here’s what I’m trying. It’s so simple.

When I make dough now — always a tricky proposition for me — I channel an unnamed ancestor from the west coast of Ireland — County Cork, let’s say, where my MGM Alice Healey’s family resided. I feel the dough though her hands. Sometimes I close my eyes. She knows what to do even if I don’t. How to fold the dough. How much flour to shake on the counter. When to stop.

I don’t know who she is but I can imagine her — wry-humored, stout, with grey eyes. She grieves the loss of her sons and daughters before they even set sail for America. She can milk a cow and jerry-rig a fan. Her name could be Bridget or Mary.

This morning, the result? One of the best batches of buttermilk biscuits I’ve ever made!

Notes:

I used Elizabeth Germain’s recipe from one in a series of small books published by Cook’s Illustrated.

Somewhere I recently learned NOT TO TWIST your cutter. It wrecks the air flow or something.