Gumbo–I don’t get it

Cold weather means warm cooking. So yesterday, with the wind blowing another batch of dry, cold snow around, seemed like a great day to make some gumbo. Besides, I wanted to try the Alton Brown method of baking the roux. This is a great idea on so many levels. It gives you an excuse to […]

A half dozen oysters, please

Oyster knife: $14. Time watching an oyster shucking video: 5 minutes. A half dozen salty, succulent, sweet oysters after spending the afternoon knitting and chatting and knitting and waiting for your car to be maintained (did I mention lots of knitting?) and then realizing you have to rip out half of that knitting? Priceless.

Shurpa Lagman

On a cold day like this, you have to make quantities of steaming hot stew, and one of my favorites is Shurpa Lagman. It’s a dish from Bukharia, which may or may not be where the legendary kingdom of the Khazars was located, and definitely the kind of stew that could warm a whole caravansery. […]

We who are about to pie, salute you!

Ugly little suckers, aren’t they? These are Roxbury Russets, delicious heirloom apples that makes it worth haunting the farmer’s markets asking if those russeted apples have come in yet. “Russet” means they have a thick, coarse skin that might even look like scales, but what it really is is armor–keeps the bugs out and the […]

Farewell to Tomatoes

That’s it for fresh tomatoes. The last of the reddened tomatoes got cooked up. We got a couple of pizzas, a Khazarian lamb stew, and buffalo steak a la mexicana. The only picture I thought to take was this pizza. It’s inspired by this wonderfully obsessive page about the perfect pizza, but it’s not nearly […]

Sweet Potato Pie

As I commented yesterday, today I baked Sweet Potato Pie, using Alton Brown’s recipe. Here it is, fresh from the oven. This being my third pie, I had no problem making my own crust. I started with apple pie. And you can hardly fail to follow up on Thanksgiving without making a turkey pot pie. […]

Spatchcock turkey

You know summer is over when the bags of charcoal have migrated out of the meat department into hiding under the checkout lanes. Don’t they know Labor Day is your last chance to barbeque? That’s what I was thinking, looking at my huge Weber. It hardly seems worth firing it up for just a couple […]