We had a Swedish feast. I don't remember why...I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time. We had no lutfisk, but I had acquired some Swedish potato sausage and the rest became self-evident.
We had:
Here's a Yankee classic, submitted by long-time reader Sue Sullivan.
What a treat is fresh pasta! When we toured Italy in July 2015, our most memorable meal was a plate of fresh ravioli in Rome. The story is rather longer than this page requires, but the bottom-line result was that fresh home-made pasta is work exploring, so I did.
In this case, it was for Annette's Genoese Birthday, so I made silky-smooth, super-thin Genoese Mandilli de Saea (Silk Handkerchiefs) with fresh pesto. It was fun and delicious!
This beautiful, light sponge cake works well in a fancy mold, and it accompanies berries, preserves, or chocolate sauce wonderfully. Unlike the similar Genoise Butter Cake, this one uses no butter.
There is something to be said for a restaurant where you order your favorite dish every time you go, and it always tastes the same. It’s as comforting as the pillow upon which you lay your head, but Bondir isn’t that sort of place. Oh it’s comfortable enough, and the staff is welcoming, and there are no snooty waiters peering down their noses to see which fork you choose. We entered the premises at 279A Broadway in Cambridge on a chilly evening and were offered a seat by a warming fire. We sipped Spanish cava and enjoyed the homelike atmosphere.
But as soon as they brought the bread basket, what we thought of as reality began to twist and bend. There was “sea bread” in which black squid ink ranged across the slice like the negative of a photo of the Milky Way. The bread also contained shrimp and seaweed. I think the shrimp may have been dried and ground to a powder. The bread had the heartiness of wheat and a briny flavor that reminds you of the scent of the ocean when you walk in the froth of waves in the cool of a summer sunrise. I ate it in fascination tinged with disbelief.
One of our favorite breakfast or lunch dishes on a cold rainy day is this old Scottish favorite made from smoked haddock in a white sauce, with the white sauce made from milk in which the fish was cooked.
Finnan haddie is smoked haddock. You can sometimes find it frozen at your fishmonger. That's OK - Finnan haddie is said to have been invented by a penurious Scot who wanted to salvage a load of haddock damaged by smoke in a warehouse fire. Rather than let it be discarded, he claimed it was the Irish ("Fennian" or "Finnan") style and sold it for food. So this recipe was never developed to use the purest, freshest, local ingredients - it came from a salvage operation!
Finnan Haddie can be a tricky dish. In general, people that like it the way they like it (follow that?) and any deviation is simply wrong. For example, one of our favorite restaurants used to make it one way, and Lorna loved it. Then the new chef changed the recipe and she won't eat it any more. It wasn't a big change - he didn't add pickles or substitute mussels for haddock - he just makes it thinner.
So this recipe is for a thicker version. It's easy to thin it by adding milk or cream, but it's a little more work to thicken it up again.
This is an easy recipe, good for when you have a cabbage from your CSA and you really don't want any more cole slaw...
It's a savory dish, good with homey fare like meatloaf or hamburgers. The flavors mingle over two hours of slow cooking to become something unexpected and delicious.
I did this in a heavy Le Creuset braising pan. If you do not have one of those expensive kitchen luxuries, don't worry! You can do this just as well in a glass or enameled baking dish covered tightly with aluminum foil; the secret is to confine all the flavors in a small volume with enough area to spread out.
This easy crowd-pleaser is known variously across New England as Blueberry Buckle, Blueberry Cobbler, Blueberry Slump, and Blueberry Grunt. The basic idea is simple: a bed of berries topped with sweet biscuit dough and baked until the berries burst into a delicious sauce for the tender biscuits.
This is great hot with ice cream, or cool with whipped cream. Make it with wild Maine blueberries if you can, especially while they are in season in August.
Blueberry slump is very easy to make; this one was made at work in the Actifio Food Truck by my friends Debbie Goswami and Chandrika Venkatraman.
This is a delightfully light celebration of late spring.
It's easy, and it's a good choice when strawberries go on sale at the supermarket because you have to use them fast before they spoil.
This one was made by my friends Debbie and Sonali at work. We used a frozen pie crust because rolling out a homemade pie crust is not very difficult, but it is a good way to get your work clothes dusted with flour!
The second discovery meal of the trip was in Sirmione, a beautiful resort town on a skinny peninsula that juts northward in gorgeous Lake Garda somewhat like Nantasket juts into Massachusetts Bay.
We had not planned to visit Sirmione, although a drive to Lake Garda was one of the optional drives we had hoped for. But we slept late after the opera and the preceding night's late dinner, so a long drive in the mountains and lake would have taken too much time from Venice.
Sirmione is a resort town, with basically one road in and out, little parking, fine hotels, beautiful beaches and a castle at the end of the peninsula. The northern half of the lake is surrounded by great mountains, and the eastern shore is covered with vineyards growing grapes for Valpolicella, Bardolino, and Amarone wines. It reminded us of a cross between Provincetown and Santa Cruz, with the wine country and a castle thrown in for good measure.
This was our first locavore meal in Italy. It was at the Hotel Sole in the town of Busseto, in the province of Parma, in Emilia-Romagna in north-central Italy's agricultural heartland. Busseto was the hometown of my favorite composer, Giuseppe Verdi.
Emilia-Romagna is dominated by the rich agricultural flatlands around the Po river valley. The climate is mild and the growing season is long. This long-settled region is home to a lot of familiar foods that we see in supermarkets all the time: prosciutto and Balsamic vinegar, Reggiano-Parmigiano and Grana Padano cheeses, Lambrusco wine, and many pastas.
What a treat! This early summer dessert is easy to make and it looks and tastes like something special.
There's not much to this, so the focus must be on the berries and cream. The flavor can really sparkle with fresh local berries, but more than that is the problem of watery berries. A pint of those enormous supermarket strawberries has less flavor than six or ten natural berries, the flavor is simpler, and the berries are full of water too.
This simple dish responds well to a variety of garnishes, from chocolate sauce to mint leaves to sour cream and even balsamic vinegar.
It was a June Sunday and I had some nice produce from farmstands in Maine, so I made this nice old-fashioned Sunday dinner with all local and seasonal ingredients.The haul included three pounds of fresh peas in the pod, a pound of new red potatoes, broccoli raab, strawberries, and a pint of super-fresh local heavy cream. That would surely inspire any cook!
We opened with the delightful Chilled Mint & Pea Soup. That recipe has French roots, but so did some of our colonist forebears and everything in it was local to New England and it's great for June when the peas are just ripe, so I included it.
We had:
Here's another gem from Jasper White's Cooking From New England. I love to make this every June when the peas come available at the farm stands and farmers markets.
This can be made a few days ahead. Like many soups, it improves with a day of rest so the flavors come together.
The mirepoix is a fancy French name for the aromatic vegetables at the base of a great many sauces and braises. It's simply 2 parts by weight of onion to one part each of carrots and celery.
You use a mirepoix when making any brown sauce (Escoffier's Sauce a l'Espagnole and its many fine children), many red sauces, and most white meat demiglazes. You also use it when braising meat, as in a Pot Roast, and in many stews.