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 »

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 »

la belle Florence serving soupe au pistou for dinner in Le-Revest-les-Eaux.

And so we return to a familiar theme: authenticity and provenance, this time with soupe au pistou, which I ate three times while I was in Provence. In terms of pedigree, I suppose only two of those occasions counted, since the third was made by me (not French) following the recipe of an American (ditto, see after the jump). In any case, all three were distinct and different and I’m sticking to my usual rationale: make it any way you like, make it delicious, and remember why it exists in the first place – to make the most of what you have around you. (And to allow you to accommodate unexpected extra guests with ease. Thank you, Françoise!)

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Samphire, that spiky green stuff that used to be strewn all over the marble slabs at the fishmonger’s and be given away with your nice bit of haddock, was apparently the it vegetable of summer 2008. No longer “the poor man’s asparagus”, it sells in New York for around $9 per pound. You can still pick it for free along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts in the US; as with all potentially dangerous coastal exploration (fast tides, rocks, quicksand, and all that), I don’t recommend it unless you know what you’re doing. If you do, then of course you will make sure to leave the plant’s woody stems in place so it can regrow, won’t you? And avoid sewage outflows.

samphire: plate and bowl

After seeing it in the upper west side Fairway labeled “sea beans”, I experimented with samphire a couple of times in May and June before I left for France, but I never felt that I had really gotten to grips with it. So when I saw it for sale in the St Tropez fish market, I jumped at the chance for another tête-à-tête.

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What do you get when you cross a stoop sale, a leaving party, and a prize-winning cocktail recipe?

the stoop set

As a long-standing fan of the gin and tonic, I am both amused and delighted that apparently this hails the resurgence of gin over vodka as the ‘it’ cocktail ingredient. I am also happy to see that James Scarito, the BLT cocktail maestro who created the Wild Blossom, uses Plymouth Gin. Plymouth’s PR/sales elves are doing a great job with them in New York recently (as did St Germain’s last year), and I’m all for it: the higher their profile in the US, the more likely I am to be able to buy their sloe gin to cook venison in. But that’s a secondary benefit; I’m also all for anything that distracts the bartenders always trying to push Tanqueray and Bombay Sapphire, which make frankly hideous G&Ts. In my opinionated…um…opinion.

Back to the matter at hand: take various friends, a surfeit of old clothes, a brownstone stoop, and a vague sense that to have gin cocktails early on a Sunday morning requires at least the semblance of a justification. I bastardized Mr Scarito’s highly lauded pretender to the Cosmo’s crown, because I felt like it, and I hope he will accept my assurance that no disrespect was intended. And the quantities are very approximate, precisely because it was early on a Sunday morning. Experiment with the original, and the remix, and enjoy a little sidewalk society of your own.

The Blooming Lovely
2 ounces gin
2 ounces seltzer water
1 ounce Belvoir elderflower cordial (available here)
1 ounce pink grapefruit juice
Lots of thin slices of lime, green apple and cucumber

Oh, and I made $5.50 from the stoop sale, thereby nicely maintaining the semblance of the justification.

Shado beni (Trinidad), chadron benee (Dominica), herbe à fer (Martinique and Guadeloupe), fitweed (Guyana), koulante (Haiti), recao (Puerto Rico), ketumbar java (Malaysia), pak chi farang (Thailand), ngo gai (Vietnam), culantro, racao or recao (Central America), bhandhanya (India), long leaf or spiny or sawtooth coriander (North America)….. no wait, there’s more….

the Lamont Cranston of herbage

So one of my very favorite things about living in this city is that conversations with strangers tend to unfold like this:
stranger: Your accent is weird. Where are you from?
me: London/Scotland via Texas and Louisiana. You?
stranger: Oh! I’m (insert appropriate ethnic/geographic denomination). What are you doing here?
me: Well, I’m a cook….

…and at this point, with great glee, they share with me a special recipe, or a tip on where to buy some unusual ingredient, or the address of the ONLY place in the tri-state area that will make, just like mama used to, the-thing-with-the-name-I-have-to-ask-them-to-spell. You get the idea – it’s a universal language. Food equals home, and food equals identity, and with each of these encounters, I learn a little more about what makes the world go round.

I had never heard of “shadow benny” until the A train got stuck one day and the only other person in the car with me was a lady from Trinidad. After we got the formalities out of the way, she described her favorite sauce for grilled meat, and I grabbed my notebook. She even gave me her phone number in case I had trouble finding the herb, and I promised her if I ever wrote a cookbook, it would go in there as “Lana’s A-Train Sauce”.

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fried fresh whitebait with saffron aioli: crisp, salty, fishy, garlicky and impossibly more-ish

A trip to Jackson Heights scored us deliciously light jalebi, snacks for t&t’s Bollywood party, a brilliant new bhangra CD (Punjabi Vibes, for Promotional Use Only) for $1, and, randomly, a glass bottle of nam manglak – a Thai drink of honey, water and sugar with germinated basil seeds; I’ve always loved the look of it – think frog spawn – but never tried it before. It’s very sweet, and the texture of the seeds is wonderful. They pop if you can catch them between your teeth, followed by the tiniest crunch in the centre. But there’s no denying that visually it appeals to my inner six-year-old, and all I could think of was spring pond-hunting expeditions with nets and jelly jars. So I added rice vinegar, mirin and salt to make a sweet and sour dipping sauce perfect for spring rolls filled with watercress, pea shoots, cucumber, green onion, sweet lettuce and plenty of whole leaves of basil, mint and coriander. Fresh, delicious, simple…. and you can still torment your more squeamish friends. (If you try this, beware of cans of Golden King nuoc hot e, the Taiwanese version, which has banana flavoring in it. Now that’s squirm-inducing.)

The spring in my step isn’t just a Spring thing. It’s because it’s rhubarb season.

rhubarb snow with ginger and black pepper crumble and prickly pear

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This is a veritable UN of green leafy goodness. So there’s only one way to ensure world peace.
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I’m feeling the need to be braise-y, so I can get warm again. Pork, apples, quinces*, onions, leeks, shallots, thyme, lots of black pepper, all into the oven for as long as it takes, with mashed potatoes and kale as companions. The nice thing about braising is that the smell from the oven all afternoon makes you all feel warmer psychosomatically, so by the time you eat, you’re already half defrosted. A full plate, a grateful room mate to do the dishes and two extra blankets on the bed when you fall in to it are the last part of the prescription.

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