This homey lunchpail classic is really a nice cookie when prepared with good ingredients, and it's a nice change of pace and a welcome addition to many cookie-platters.
The texture is light and crumbly, never tough, and the toasty-peanut flavor is wonderful when they are fresh. In my opinion, this cookie does not store well, but if you make them with good ingredients that should seldom be a problem!
The distinctive look could be trademarked.
This is a main component of a New England-style St. Patrick's Day corned-beef-and-cabbage dinner, a New England Boiled Dinner, and the Plymouth Succotash, as well as Corned Beef Hash and some wonderful sandwiches.
This recipe is to cook and cool the beef to be used for hash or sandwiches.
You can start with corning the brisket yourself with the recipe in Salt Beef, where you will also find some interesting lore about this old favorite.
This is great sliced thin and served with almost any kind of cheese, especially farmhouse cheese and local ale!
I made this one with King Arthur Irish-style flour and NH buttermilk, but the supermarket stuff makes good bread too - this is an excellent recipe.
Here's a version of the New England and Canadian Maritimes classic, often served for breakfast with Baked Beans (but they're great with fried eggs, too!
You can buy fishcakes in a can. It's easier than making your own. But they're disgusting.
Some restaurants, especially clamshacks, sell fishcakes. In many cases they're no better than the canned ones. Sometimes they're 9-parts potato with a hint of fish essence.
These are not hard to make, and you get enough servings that it's worth your while. The mixture keeps in the fridge for some days so you can fry up a few fishcakes when you want them.
For a simpler, more historical version, see Yankee Fish Cakes.
Another New England classic, easy to make, with a wonderful old-time flavor!
This is good to make on a snowy winter evening when you've had just about enough of January or February and a little something special is in order, especially if it's not too complicated.
Sometimes I sprinkle some sugar on top before baking it, or some chopped up crystallized ginger, but honestly it doesn't need any of that claptrap - this is a fine classic recipe for a winter's evening!
I was preparing a recipe that called for a fowl. That's not so unusual; fowl are tough old birds, stringier and better suited for the stockpot than for roasting or frying. Fowl are used instead of younger birds when flavor is important and tenderness is not.
But I encountered an unexpected complication. At Compare Foods in downtown Worcester, I found Fresh Heavy Fowl and Fresh Light Fowl - what to do? The heavy fowl was much more expensive per pound (although still cheap), but I had no other clues. So I came home and did some more research. Here's what I learned.
Chickens are raised for meat or for laying eggs, and the birds that are bred to be good at one are not so well suited for the other. Of course, the ones bred for meat come from eggs, too, but those eggs are laid by big meaty mamas.
When either type reaches the end of her laying life, it is slaughtered for fowl. The meat-producer chickens become heavy fowl and the egg-producing chickens become light fowl. Since you're looking for flavor, the heavy fowl is the superior choice for stocks and stews.
Have you seen the listing of cookbooks in What's on my Shelf?
If you're the sort to enjoy whiling away a winter evening with a few good cookbooks and dreams of great ingredients and friendly farmers' markets...Well you could do worse than the two dozen+ books on that section of this site.
There is a broad variety of books listed there, with links to Amazon pages for the same books. Most (all?) of them feature in recipes on this site. And they have writer's insights about the books, and more. It's not a comprehensive list of the best cookbooks in the world, or even of the best in New England. Honestly, who has the presumption to tell you what's best? Why would you listen to that presumptuous fool?
This list is randomly generated from the sources of the recipes on this site, and the few books that simply could not be ignored - This is what's on my shelf. What's on yours?
Two international organizations cooperate to help ensure quality and production of maple syrup and the health of the often very local, small-farm maple syrup production industry:
The IMSI is all about the quality standards, espousing the mission:
(These three bullets and the two above are quoted from the IMSI website, linked above)
In early colonial times, before the molasses trade established that sticky black substance as the sweetener of choice in Boston and much of New England, maple syrup and honey were the only sweeteners available to most kitchens. Many recipes were adapted to use maple syrup, and those old versions are still worth exploring.
There's a good overview of maple syrup in cooking at the maple syrup page, with links to recipes.
So in March of 2013, we made a series of trips deep into the sugarbush country of northern New England. We wanted to learn more about maple syrup and how it gets from tree to table. There's a good, detailed overview of maple syrup production in the Exploring Maple Sugaring in Maine entry.
This event was strictly about the flavors of the syrups, both different grades and any evidence of terroir or of other geographical effects between Maine and Vermont. We set up the array shown in the first photo above. The samples were:
The title of this post is Christmas Mexican Lasagna. Why would I call this Christmas Mexican Lasagna?
Christine and I are experiencing our first married Christmas together. In just a few short weeks we will be heading out on our postponed honeymoon. Between Christmas and the upcoming honeymoon vacation we are working at hoarding some extra money for gifts and our travel plans.
Like most people, we put stuff in the freezer and forget it. It is so easy to do! We are looking for ways to not spend money so I decided to go Freezer Diving. There is a lot of really "cool stuff" in there that really should be used up.
I found a pound of ground turkey sitting in there. What do you do with ground turkey?
Christine likes ground turkey and I find it very bland. We could spice it up with a chipotle rub and make burgers, mix it with some stuff and make turkey meatloaf but I have done that and still find it very bland. It is not really exciting.
Annette wanted a fancy French dinner for her birthday this year. Actually, she wanted a Diplomat Pudding and the rest of the menu developed from that idea. She had discovered the Hotel St. Francis Cook Book, from 1919. It is not a standard cookbook; it has three fancy menus for every day of the year, and recipes where needed. The menu for December 7th was not that compelling so we came up with this.
We had:
We started with three fine Vermont cheeses: A perfectly ripe Harbison from Jasper Hill, and the Verano and Invierno from Vermont Shepherd. These were followed by a French Onion Soup. Both the cheeses and the soup were served with a Chateau Haut-Beausejours St-Estephe Bordeaux 2005.
It got to be a joke. It seemed every time we passed the Oxford Creamery on Route 28 in Mattapoisett it was closed, and we speculated they saw us coming and had all the customers move their cars and hide. We'd heard rumors of good food, but had just about given up tasting it. The other day, however, we detected activity. We were headed for Turk's, and my mouth was watering for their shrimp Mozambique, but life stirred at the Oxford Creamery and it was an opportunity not to be passed up.
Having operated on the spot for eighty-two years, Oxford Creamery is the type of old time eatery I love. Brightly painted in blue and white, it evokes the past. The interior is festooned with signs that substitute for a menu. Their prices are old fashioned too, and with sandwiches starting at $2.50 and soft drinks at $1.25 you can easily get lunch for under $5.00.
Seats inside may be at a premium, but there are picnic tables just outside the door and in a grassy area on the far side of the parking lot. The food is available to go, and you could take it to Ned's Point Lighthouse, and eat it with a beautiful view of Mattapoisett Harbor.
We had enjoyed an absolutely stellar vacation, but it was nearly over. Everything had gone right, and we had even had a few serendipitous extras that were highlights of the trip.
The ride home was also a part of the vacation. We always enjoy riding the Southwest Chief. It has great views, it's a big, spacious train, and the vibe is the best of all the trains we have ridden.
That's no idle observation. Lorna and I have ridden virtually all of Amtrak's long-distance trains: the Lake Shore Limited, the Sunset Limited, the Crescent, the Empire Builder, the California Zephyr, the Coast Starlight, and the Southwest Chief. We have ridden a number of them several times, and we agree the Southwest Chief is the most fun to be on. This trip was no different.
When we finally left the broad western horizon of the Pacific Ocean behind us, we had good incentive to cross the rugged coastal hills to the valleys of the wine country. It's a gorgeous area everywhere you look, fine for driving and exploring down roads that barely appear (or don't appear) on the maps. Drive by hunch! This is no place for a GPS. GPS devices come with built-in serendipity destroyers.
We have been to the Wine Country several times, and each time we get better at it. The first time, back before the turn of the century, we drove up the Napa Valley, visited some wineries and tested their wares, and thought it fun. On the next visit we planned ahead and drove up the Sonoma Valley, dutifully stopping at whichever winery we had on our list, checking them off as if we were still at work.
After one more morning in Santa Cruz, we spent a wonderful day in San Francisco. We covered a lot of ground; fortunately we had a plan going in and we hit all of our objectives.
The weather was beautiful, and that's never a guarantee in the City by the Bay. We parked near Fisherman's Wharf in an all-day garage that was not as expensive as I had feared. Then we walked along the waterfront, looked out at Alcatraz, and did more people-watching than window-shopping.
One restaurant we passed proudly proclaimed itself "Home of the 60-ounce Margarita" or some such silliness. It was really crowded, so we headed off toward the famous Ghirardelli Square.
Along the way it was impossible to miss the fact that Fisherman's Wharf is still very much about the seafood. Seafood restaurants are everywhere, and fresh fish markets with Pacific seafood piled high on great glaciers of ice. It was lunchtime but we were not yet even remotely hungry, and there's plenty of foodie awesomeness in San Francisco to we continued our explorations.
