This weekend, I decided to make some fresh French onion dip to eat during the Alabama and Auburn games. You have to caramelize the onions, which takes about twenty minutes, so it’s a little time consuming. I wouldn’t have considered doing this on Saturday if I didn’t have a TV in my kitchen. Thankfully, I can wheel the island into the middle of the room and chop onions while I’m watching the game. What could go wrong?
It took me years to perfect my chicken carnitas recipe. Some batches came out dry, others came out greasy, but most were just bland. What’s funny is that the best-tasting version I eventually settled on is also the easiest to prepare.
The wife and I have been making carnitas for years. My recipe has evolved over time. It’s based on one I saw in Bon Appetit. It’s really easy and makes a great meal.
I’ve been craving fish for a while, so I decided to pick up some grouper. We had some zucchini and roma tomatoes that were getting a little ripe, so I wanted to incorporate them into the dish as well. As part of our attempt to eat healthier, I decided to bake everything. I ran across a recipe from Steamy Kitchen that included a helpful YouTube tutorial on how to steam fish and vegetables in parchment paper, so I thought I’d give it a try. It was a huge success.
Ever since I started making my own noodles, I’ve come to realize that pasta sauce should be more like a gravy than a soup. I’ve been experimenting with thinner sauces lately and this one came out really good. It’s cheap and easy, but you have to take your time or it’ll come out bland.
I ran across a great essay titled “In Praise of Fast Food” that poked a few holes in one of the driving tenets of the slow food movement – the belief that taking ripe, organic, locally grown ingredients and preparing them in traditional ethnic and cultural fashion is a more natural, time-honored process. Here’s a sample:
My culinary style, like so many people’s, was created by those who scorned industrialized food; culinary Luddites, we could call them, after the 19th-century English workers who abhorred the machines that were destroying their way of life. I learned to cook from the books of Elizabeth David, who urged us to sweep our cupboards “clean for ever of the cluttering debris of commercial sauce bottles and all synthetic aids to flavoring.”
I rush to the newsstand to pick up Saveur with its promise to teach me to “savor a world of authentic cuisine.”
Culinary Luddism has come to involve more than just taste, however; it has also presented itself as a moral and political crusade—and it is here that I begin to back off. The reason is not far to seek: because I am a historian.
As a historian I cannot accept the account of the past implied by this movement: the sunny, rural days of yore contrasted with the gray industrial present. It gains credence not from scholarship but from evocative dichotomies: fresh and natural versus processed and preserved; local versus global; slow versus fast; artisanal and traditional versus urban and industrial; healthful versus contaminated. History shows, I believe, that the Luddites have things back to front.
I’m ashamed to say that I’ve never really cared for the typical Southern version of cheese grits. The grits are tasteless, the cheese is lumpy, and the eggs dry everything out. When the casserole cools down, you have to cut a cube out of the solid yellow mass and smash it down with the back of your spoon. That’s about as unappetizing as it gets. My version makes a rich and creamy dish that actually tastes like cheesy grits instead of a corn-based custard.
In the latest Bon Appétit advice column, a reader described a scene where her dining companions flummoxed the wait staff by wanting to divide the check six ways for different amounts. She asked for advice on the best way to split a check among a group. This was the answer she got:
Unless you’re with only one other person (okay, maybe two–I’m feeling generous) or you’re 17 years old and out with a group of friends at a local chain, splitting a check is lame. […] So the next time you go out with a group of friends who want to divide the check every which way, be a thoughtful, considerate person and put the whole thing on your credit card. If they’re your friends, they’ll pay you back. If not, well, then you need new friends.
I skipped a bit there for copyright purposes, so click here if you want to read the whole thing.
I mentioned a while back how much I enjoyed reading Frank Stitt’s cookbook. I actually lugged the giant tome to and from the beach over a few days. For my recent birthday, the wife bought me Soby’s New South Cuisine Cookbook so I could keep learning. Who could blame her? She eats the food.
After my successful experiment with homemade linguine noodles over the weekend, I decided to make some spaghetti. Over the years, I’ve learned to experiment incrementally to see what my flavor limitations are. Like with bread, pasta is 95% flour. That means that you’d have to add a lot of another ingredient to be able to taste it. I thought I’d roast some garlic and mix it with some olive oil in lieu of an egg in the basic dough recipe. I figured even if we couldn’t taste the garlic, the noodles would be healthier.
