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.