Sorry about the mess on the website.. Upgrades, cobbler’s children.. Anyway, the recipes navigation link now connects you to an index of all the recipes posted on the site. I also got around to recategorizing everything as well, and those are searchable. Kudos to GrandSlambert and his powerhouse RecipePress plugin.
I’m a tomato soup junkie. It’s been a comfort food of mine since I was young. The finest tomato soup I ever had was at Le Marais in New York. It was a Tomato Fennel Soup. I tried for years to recreate it, until I realized they had lied. So I make a Tomato Star Anise Soup that is on my list of restaurant recipes.
I was paging through Mollie Katzen’s Still Life with Menu when I came across her recipe for tomato soup with coconut. A quick search in the pantry revealed that I had all of the ingredients, so I made the recipe.
I want to like cumin. I really do. It has an earthy bass that balances brighter flavors. but so help me, I can’t get over the fact that it tastes like armpit. (more…)
Parsley Fennel Salad Niçoise
This was a simple put-together salad. So what makes it a “Salad Niçoise?” I tend to name things if I put several signature items into the dish. I’m not a purist when it comes to Salad Niçoise, so if it has tuna and olives (preferably niçoise, of course) in it, I’ll ‘abbreviate’ it so people can get what the recipe’s about more quickly.
Rather than using lettuce as a greens base, I used parsley. Added the bright fennel to counterpoint the earthy parsley, and punctuated it with slivers of red onion.
The dressing was equal parts low-fat mayonnaise, capers, vinegar, lemon juice and two parts water.
In honor of the return of iceberg lettuce, I came up with a salad dressing that would add a bite to counterbalance the cool crispness of the lettuce.
Then I added horseradish.
There are a surfeit of cookbooks on the shelves, everything from pretty books that rattle off lists of ingredients whose duplication in the styled photos is next to impossible, to classic tomes that assume a complete apprenticeship to a master chef and years of professional experience.
I own both kinds.
Having cookbooks is a way to explore worldwide cuisine without leaving your reading chair. It mixes the exotic with the familiar and ignites the imagination. Cookbooks, for me, are a way to kick-start my creativity. I process kosher substitution in my head to see whether milk can be reasonably substituted or whether just plain water will do, or if veal or turkey can stand in for pork. It’s well past the point where I flip past a recipe simply because it’s not intrinsically kosher; anything can be kosherized. (more…)
