contribution to pre-Thanksgiving potluck for twenty, Brooklyn

my friends came back from Barcelona and all I got was this lousy sausage

One glance above, and those of you who know me best will understand that I am in a state of torment. Lovely N&D came back from their holiday in Spain and brought me a glorious packet of Joselito chorizo Iberico. I mean, look at this vision: pimenton-dyed oil threading through those mylar wrinkles, the unctuous slivers of fat, the deep deep red of the meat… I don’t know whether to invite everyone over to share the love with a dry rosado, furtively scoff the lot myself, or hang it on the wall and just gaze at it all winter.

Yes, I’ve been back for a month… oh okay, six weeks if you’re being, y’know, exact and stuff… and finally I’ve unearthed all my photos. This delay probably means they now fall into the same category of chronological etiquette as the postcards I meant to send you but somehow overlooked, and then didn’t even mail from the airport and blame on the Royal Mail like everyone else does when I saw you before they arrived. I got a little snap-happy, especially in my gran’s vegetable garden, so I think I’ll post them in albums and then if you’re at all interested in what a raspberry patch looks like after a gale (gory), but less intrigued by the original cockle shop in Berwick, you can peruse at your own pace. Coming soon, therefore, in installments: What I Did Last Summer.

supper of left-overs for three, Brooklyn

dinner for eight, Manhattan

glorious wall of canned meat products courtesy of chotda

Dear lovely spambots who left me 387 comments while I was away in France,
I’m tickled pink to come back to such a mountain of feedback and you’re all just darlings to take the time to write. I’m going to mention a couple of things, though, just so you don’t get your feelings hurt if your little comment doesn’t quite make it through the approval process. Don’t be discouraged: it’s an overcrowded field, and these pointers are just to get you on track about the sort of thing that makes us more ‘particular’* types just sparkle with delight.

Things I am not:
• an acne sufferer
• a World of Warcraft player
• susceptible to generic “you go” exhortations
• an Apple geek or any other form of software engineer
• able to translate arabic, but thank you for thinking I might be
• the owner of an iPhone (™ and please note the capitalization - details matter, dears)
• an erectilely disfunct gun enthusiast yearning for bondage gear and dog clothes
• German
Just in case you think I’m being a bit beastly, here’s an anonymous gem that came oh-just-so-so-close to hitting the mark:
“In his fissure donnybrook, San Mateo County Chief Deputy Neighbourhood [sic] Attorney Steve Wagstaffe painted Alvarez as a deleterious felon who basic brutally worn out another teenaged man at the Villa Taqueria, shot at May minutes later to avoid wealthy aid to penal institution on a parole breaching and then stood over the fallen gendarme and executed him. Cheers.”
It’s quite enchanting really - as if Kerouac got extra drunk and churned out a dime novel. But sweetie, can we try and stay a little more on-topic? I’m having a hard time relating this to a post on the perfect frying pan. I’ll give you an E for Effort, with a side of Must Try Harder.

Keep at it, kids. You’ll get it!

(*This is a play on words. I can do this, you cannot, unless it’s very, very clever, which this example obviously isn’t. It’s my blog and I decide.)

wheeeeee…

Remember our little anarchist chum? Well here he is rushing down to the shops, ready to take his righteous place on the shelves. July 1st is d-for-democracy day, when all vegetables shall be equal in the eyes of EU regulation. Well, almost all, and almost equal - some are still more equal than others. But it’s progress, citoyens.

yep, feeling pretty pleased with myself right about now

There is something incredibly satisfying about making preserves. I’m usually not one to challenge my elders and betters, but when it comes to home-made marmalade, I had - I thought - a slight logistical problem: my elders and betters, along with the preferred citrus, were all on the wrong side of the Atlantic. The original e&b in my version of this provenance was Mrs Miller, a neighbor in Scotland and a warm and smiley lady whose enormous, slavering black labrador knocked small unwary children flat on their bums every chance he got. (This, no doubt, was considered character-forming for me and endlessly entertaining for him.) Her marmalade was Dundee style made with Seville oranges, the stuff that launched a thousand breakfasts and that to this day my littlest sister spreads directly on her bacon, much to my father’s horror. Mrs Miller gave her recipe to Miss Richardson, another formative influence from my childhood, who is still, at 99 and counting, making a batch of it every year. Having tried the allegedly ‘bitter’ marmalades available in the shops over here and finding them all way too sickly or too redolent of floor cleaner, I started wheedling any friend or family member coming over from the UK into smuggling some of the good stuff in; this got old fast for all concerned. Then a Honduran friend’s chance remark led me off on a wild google chase that ended with the discovery that a naranja agria is just a Seville orange in a Gators cap. (It’s well worth a trip here for the full fabulous history.) I had seen piles of these lumpy, black-spotted ‘agrias’ hanging out in my local C-Town - I just hadn’t realized that I was looking at America’s oldest and least overpriced heirloom fruit import. Having checked that Ritchie wouldn’t consider it insufferable cheek if I gave marmalade-making a shot myself, I boiled up a pot of old jam jars and went for it.

naranjas agrias, aka amargas aka bigaradas

Click through for the recipe. more »

My fingers and fingernails are stained dramatically purple-black, which earned me some strange looks in the bodega this morning when I went to buy milk; this is the result of an escapade instigated by Miss Ashley of macaroni and monogram fame. An email from her friend Michael asking for volunteer fruit pickers inspired her to sign up for a backbreaking stint of manual labor at the Queens County farm this past saturday. Well, that was the theory, but in practice she got there just a wee bit late and all the picking had been done. Oh dear, oh dear, quelle dommage (ahem). Undeterred, she called me and uttered the magic word (”mulberries”) and so yesterday we toddled off to the Unfancy Food Show on South 6th to show support for the farm’s stand there.

mulberries and salad cups fresh from the farm

As well as the spectacular berries, they had lettuces, cucumbers, gorgeous baby fennel, free range eggs and pork for sale, all products of the farm’s 47 acres - New York City’s “largest remaining tract of undisturbed farmland”, according to their website. As I’m in the middle of a marmalade making marathon (more on that later), I wanted something other than jam to do with the mulberries. Mulberry wine seemed to be another popular option in my older cookbooks, but I wasn’t sure this was the time to freak out the neighbors and tackle home fermentation either. In the end, the indomitable Constance Spry came up trumps. more »

*sigh*

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i wanted a Viking funeral

This is the stove I grew up with, an all-gas titan of a thing made - fittingly for my Atlantic-crossing mother - by New World and installed in our house well before I was. The clock and timer died fairly promptly, followed over the years by various pilot lights, and finally, last autumn, the remaining viable oven.
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If I’d planned this properly, we’d have had Guiness to drink. Happy Belated Bloomsday. (And yes, you’re right, that’s not James Joyce, it’s my great great great grandfather Charlie, invited because his beard goes so well with the toast rack.)

devilled kidneys, scrambled eggs, toast and marmite and tea

Click through for Fergus Henderson’s recipe for putting hairs on your chest. more »

zombies: cucumber, watermelon, mushroom, patty pan squash, tomato - all pickled until they reach the desired level of undead deliciousness. Pass the vodka.

Lured by the idea of a cheap night out, Natasha and I went to the 3rd Annual New York Food Film Festival last tuesday. Free admission, free mutton barbecue and cornbread, and a string of short films about food all selected, as the MC pointed out, to entertain rather than lecture. We laughed, we clapped, we text-voted, we ate barbecue, and we froze our butts off on the water taxi beach in Long Island City. (I for one refuse to give up my seasonally appropriate outdoor pursuits in the face of this ark-buildingly wet abomination of a summer.)

barbecue pit to the left, big screen to the right, and frostbitten foodies between admiring the view

There was one educational note for me: I’d never had native wild ‘rice’ before, and the team behind “The Sacred Food” handed round samples; it was delicately delicious, with none of the husky, chewy texture I associate with the genre. It’s under threat as a natural resource from ‘improvement’ measures (eye roll), so watch the film and then buy some from the people fighting to protect it.

“The Sacred Food” by Jack Pettibone Riccobono (dur: 6 mins)

On the flip side, I’m guessing from what I overheard around me that the mutton was a new experience for many others. If the Dynamic Duo of Jamie Oliver and Prince Charles (ye gods) have their way back home, it’ll be the Next Big Thing - that is, as far as the Brits are concerned, in the category of “everything old is new again”. According to my favorite film of the night, “Mutton The Movie”, mutton in America is pretty much the geo-specific preserve of northern Kentucky church barbecues and their tourist-luring spinoff festivals; we ate as many portions as we could get away with, which, thanks to the nice relaxed people dishing it out for RUB. was a lot. It was delicious, and if you want to explore further, why not have a look at His Royal Highness’s helpful hints on the Mutton Renaissance web page. Also, talk to your friends from India, Pakistan, Morocco, Egypt, the (ahem) Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region… you get the picture.

“Mutton The Movie” by Joe York and Matthew Graves (dur: 17 mins)

There was also a hilarious animated short called “The Food Hypnotist” by Orrin and Jerry Zucker; it’s not viewable online, sadly, but their website is here.

I’m three weeks late to the party on this one, the result of bookmarking things that interest me with abandon and then having to go back and wade through them all. But more importantly, this is wonderful news from Albany: New York State money will no longer be spent on the insanity that is bottled water. The nail on the head:

“Taxpayers have spent billions of dollars to ensure that we have clean drinking water supplies,” said Governor Paterson. “If we are going to make such significant investments, we should reap the benefits and use that water. Our efforts will serve as an example for local governments, businesses and residents to follow.”

The press release as a whole is well worth reading. And just to hammer that nail home, here’s one of my favorite images.

There’s full information about the genius of the q-drum and its designers on their website and on the Cooper-Hewitt Museum website.

(Image hoiked entirely without malice from the newspaper article where I first read about the q-drum, details of the source lost without trace, and no disrespect intended in its totally unauthorised use.)

fruit and veg, pickled eggs, and shoppers (hi Mum!) in Sarf London

Maybe it was because I’d been deprived of Real Bacon for over a year (don’t start - it’s a cultural thing), but I may have met the love of my life while I was in London. Ladies and gentleman, allow me to introduce sandwich perfection:

the chef d’oeuvre of Maria’s Cafe: liver, bacon, onions, rocket and mustard on a bap

When the lady working the flat top asked me if I wanted onions, she fixed me with a look that would have made Vinnie Jones stand up straight. I said “yes, please”, and added an “of course”, at which point she smiled and proceeded to chat with my mum about god-knows-what for the next ten minutes while I wolfed down this piece of culinary perfection. Dazed and delighted, I went on to buy Arbroath smokies, black and white pudding (see after the jump), some Real Bacon, and … I dunno, there were probably some vegetables in there too.

Click through for pictures of Henderson’s Butchers, but be warned that they are Not Safe For Vegetarians:
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woof: birthday not-really-cake for the fabulous GiGi and her dachshund* obsession

Left-over experimental brownies (v2.8.1) taking up space in freezer: $0.
Chocolate, cream cheese and Bonne Maman cherry preserves lying around: $0.
Crabby mood in need of light relief: $0.
Squeals of delight when she finally opened the cake box at 3am: priceless.
(Overworked meme: because you’re worth it.)

*Don’t ask me to call it a wiener dog - that just makes me want to head to Gray’s Papaya.

I was stocking up on basics when I spotted an amazing selection of organs and offal, fresh from Peter McDonald’s farm in Romulus, NY. Tongue is one of the few offcuts that can make me a little squeamish; it lies in a no-man’s land between the basic tenets drummed in to me by my dad (”If you kill it, eat [all] of it”) and the kind of intriguing colloidal chemistry that some dishes require you to exercise.

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Recipe for success: a bunch of friends, a sunday afternoon, a four bar crawl with mac’n'cheese cook-off, and free samples. Who won? Who knows. But I’m looking forward to the next one.

Miss A demonstrating with her usual élan the perfect balance of macaroni and monogram during the Great Greenpoint Mac Off.

Just over a year ago, I got to taste a mille crêpes for the first time. I had missed all the hoop-la about this being the uber-chic dessert of 2007, and so my expectations were uninflated by anything other than the enthusiasm of the client who gave me some to try. It was delicious, and I’ve wanted ever since to try and make one - not out of any sense of egomania, but just because I like making crêpes and thought I should probably conquer my morbid fear of pastry cream at some point. Carrot, stick, etc.

26 crêpes layered with green tea pastry cream and gianduja…. oh, ok then, Nutella

I made this with a friend for her boyfriend’s birthday party, following this recipe and it was damn tasty. I’m rather fond of its blatant brag of a name, and I’m not scared of pastry cream any more. It also travels particularly amiably on the B61 bus, which is a major plus in my world.