We had an excuse for another of our famous potluck lunches at Actifio, so we did it!
This menu was vast, as usual. I think we had 36 contributions, almost all of them home-made or made in the office (we have a pretty good kitchen!)
I don't have all the recipes, but I have a lot of them:
Fiddleheads are an exceptionally simple and exceptionally seasonal dish, great for a spring brunch.
After steaming them and chilling them, you can do all sorts of things with them. They are decorative, but they have enough flavor to be the vegetable accompaniment to a significant spring meal (maybe with shad roe?).
This dish is simple to prepare and delicious!
It takes longer to preheat the oven than it does to cut and prepare the onions for roasting - it really is simple.
These can be served hot or cold, and they are fine served cocktail-party style with toothpicks and small plates. The flavor is rich but complementary to many savories.
I served these at a wine tasting event at the Old Colony Club. They went well with a good Cabernet Sauvignon and a good Merlot.
This tasty treat with an unappetizing moniker is a variation on the old Bronx cocktail, with added bitters... I guess that's where the name comes from!
Try this with a citrusy gin like Plymouth Gin, or else with one of the softer New England-made American Gins like Barr Hill Gin, Karner Blue Gin, or Wire Works Gin
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.
