Category Archives: recipe

How do you like your chocolate chip cookie?

Posted on by
4

What is it about cookies with a bit of chocolate that’s so comforting? When I lived in England, a cup of tea and a choccie biccie could cure almost any woe. In America, it’s chocolate chip cookies, which in my house we call “natural antidepressants.” There are a million ways to make them! You can make them fat and soft and cake-like. Or crispy and crumbly. You can add nuts, or oats, or fruit. You can use white chocolate chips or add butterscotch chips. I like mine thin and dark and intensely flavored – crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside. More like candy in some ways!

How do you like yours?

Here’s The Coup’s Wear Clean Draws. A tenuous connection, I know, but he calls his daughter his “cookie,” so this song has been in my head since I started thinking about cookies this morning. And I love it so much!

My recipe for my perfect chocolate chip cookie after the jump…
Continue reading →

Green tomato tarte tatin

Posted on by
2

green tomatoes

I made a green tomato tarte tatin at the very end of summer, about a month ago, with big, plump green tomatoes from our garden. (We had so many this year, and so few nice ripe red ones!) It was surprisingly delicious – the tartness of the tomatoes offset by the touch of caramelized brown sugar. I made another last night with the very last of the green tomatoes – small, hard, very green tomatoes, and I have to tell you, it was almost too tart, this tart! No amount of sugar or cooking would sweeten these little tomatoes. I’m going to tell you how I made it, because it was so tasty, but I’d use the bigger, slightly softer tomatoes, that are more likely to succumb to your sweetening advances.

Cooking with green tomatoes signals that bittersweet time of year when summer fades into autumn, so we’ll let Booker T’s Summertime melt into Jackie Mittoo’s beautiful Autumn Sounds.
Continue reading →

Black bean & tomato soup

Posted on by
3

This is basically a two-can soup (can of beans/can of tomatoes), but it’s got a deep rich flavor, and a lovely, deeply richly colored broth (black bean soups can be so drab-looking sometimes, but this has a warm mahogany hue). Simply made, but complexly flavored.

Here’s JJ Allstar’s Soup. I found a surprising number of songs about soup. Can you think of any that you like?

Continue reading →

vegetarian cornish pasties

Posted on by
13

Turnips!

We got some beautiful little turnips from our CSA, so I decided to make vegetarian cornish pasties. I’ve made them in the past, and I keep tweaking the recipe a bit to add more flavor. Potatoes and crust are both very understated and comforting, but I add some sharper flavors. I add shallots, mixed with herbs and sweetened with balsamic; and turnips, of course; and gruyere cheese, which is pleasantly sharp and nutty. And I added some greens this time, because I love them. I tried to maintain the uncooked-filling rule, though, because it intrigues me.

Here’s Le Pastie de la Bourgeoisie, by Belle and Sebastian. I have no idea what they mean by it (and I’m not sure they do, either!) but it fits this blog, if by pastie you mean savory pie (no, Tom Waits, not those kinds of pasties) and by bourgeois you mean thoroughly ordinary.
Belle and Sebastian – Le Pastie de la Bourgeoisie

If you’d like to see how it is really done, watch this video. It’s of Kay Bolitho, who cooks at the Port Eliot estate in Cornwall. I love everything about this video! The kitchen is beautiful, and I love the strange little objects around and about. And I love her gentle, measured voice.
Making Pasties in Cornwall

Continue reading →

The best tapenade in the world!!

Posted on by
4

Okay, so it’s probably not the best tapenade in the world, but it is really good! Most tapenades (all, maybe?) include olives and capers. These are bold and briny flavors. This tapenade tempers those flavors with roasted garlic, smokes it up with some paprika, spices it up with green peppercorns and cayenne, and mellows it out with nuts and honey. Complex, but really tasty, and oddly addictive.

This song, Bob Marley’s wonderful Hypocrites, might seem an odd choice, but I swear, every time I hear it, it seems to me he’s saying “Tap for tapenade.” So when I think about tapenade, I get this song stuck in my head!
Bob Marley – Hypocrites

Recipe after the jump…

Continue reading →

How I dress a salad

Posted on by
8

“…people got too many things on they lettuces…”

(this is a quote from K’naan’s wonderful track Wash it Down. Give it a listen while you toss your lettuces)
K'naan – Wash it Down

simple salad

I love salad. I make a salad almost every night of my life. I almost consider the salad the center of the meal, and everything else as a side dish that goes along with it. I have a very simple way of making salads, I like to let the flavor of the greens speak for itself. So here’s what I do.
Continue reading →

Butternut squash/red lentil soup…

Posted on by
2

…with a berbere spice!

Roasted B-nut Squash

Berbere is a spice mix found in Ethiopian food. This isn’t the real thing, it’s a simplification and an approximation, but it is tasty and does go well with red lentils and butternut squashes.

Here’s the meltingly beautiful Tezeta, by Mulatu Astatke to listen to while you stir your soup.

Mulatu Astatke – Tezeta
Continue reading →

Oatmeal pepper crackers

Posted on by
2

oatmeal-pepper crackers

I had mentioned that a pastry crust should be so delicious on its own that you can make it into crackers. Well, I had some oatmeal-peppercorn crust leftover, so I did just that! Light and crispy – worth mixing up a whole batch of dough just for these.

Here’s Johnny Flynn’s Leftovers, to listen to as you make them.
Johnny Flynn and the Sussex Wit – Leftovers
Continue reading →

How it all fits together.

Posted on by
Reply

These are small galettes with an oatmeal – peppercorn crust, and filled with french lentils, mushrooms, sauteed greens, and sharp cheddar cheese. A nice autumn dinner – a little earthy/smokey – warm and comforting, but not too heavy. Easy to put together with the recipes already posted! See! They all work well with each other – that’s the plan! You can make them throughout the week, and use them one day for a pie, and toss some in a salad the next.

Here’s a song that’s not really about food, but I love it. It’s very hopeful about trying something, and I’ve had a very nice week starting this blog. I promise to slow down on the posts!

So…some Nigerian funk…SJob Movement – You Only Live Once

Details on construction after the jump…
Continue reading →

roasted mushrooms

Posted on by
41

My favorite way to prepare mushrooms is roasted with shallots, garlic, sage, rosemary and thyme. They’re delicious as a side dish, wonderful on salads, with pasta, on toast, or as a filling for a pie, which is how I most commonly use them lately. They’re easy to make, and your kitchen will smell like a holiday while they’re cooking.

Recipe to follow…
Continue reading →