The recently announced Split Banana in Staunton is, we hear, a smashing success. Their ice cream is too good for words; great enough to make people return multiple times and once more; people line up on the pavement all the way to Waynesboro - okay, only half the way. The story of the day that came through the phone punctuated by attacks of howling laughter is the creation of Read the rest of this entry »
My recipe for meatball-cigars has been waiting in my private recipe archive for a year. Today I gave it a new try in the kitchen, allowing for a few improvements, and here are the results.
Ingredients for two:
- 400g (0.9 lbs) of ground, fresh and wool-smell-free lamb. If you’ve got a meat grinder, try finding assorted bits of lamb-for-cooking, cut the meat off the bones, deep-freeze the latter for some future soup-orgy, and mince the meat. Otherwise, some butchers offer decent (albeit often greasy) minced lamb. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the classical methods to braise vegetables (as, for example, taught by Marcella Hazan) is to put them into a wide pan with olive oil and/or butter, water to cover, and salt, and to cook them until done. At the end the water should have evaporated and the vegetables just begin to hiss in the fat. Here is a refined version of this technique. Read the rest of this entry »
If you are in Staunton Va. one of these days, make sure to visit the new ice cream parlor The Split Banana on 7 West Beverley Street just beside the Baja Bean Co. They’re opening today, March 17.
I was one of the first to put a crowbar between some planks on the first renovation day last October. That was about all I ever did at the Split Banana. (Look. I was on vacation.) Being snowbound in a side street of West Sweden at the moment of writing, I’m not there to test their products and to make snarky hands-in-my-pockets remarks about their work flow.
Split Banana’s ice cream was presented for the first time yesterday at an open house of Taylor & Boody, organbuilders (here’s the page). Private rumor has crossed the ocean that it was “wonderful.” Today it is 43 degrees F in Staunton and sunny, good enough for some real-ingredients shop-made ice cream, no?
Labskaus belongs to my childhood food. As I learned to know it, it was a mishmash of potatoes, red beets and some other fillings a child is unable to analyze, and it came with a pickle wedge (or is it wedge of pickle), a pickled herring of one or another sort and a fried egg. This is, more or less, how my mom makes labskaus. She’ll chime in and protest, I’m sure: labskaus is, in fact, not a recipe: it is once through the pantry and back. Of course, we’re talking a ship’s pantry.
My thoughts keep returning to Daffy Duck and the line “Thea picture, eh? I alwayth wanted to do a thea epic,” (which is delivered about half way through the movie at the link above). So, yes, when I looked on the web for orrriginal labskaus recipes, fantasies of twenty hungry sailors, of a stiff breeze and of shrieks of greedy gulls started forming in my mind. Here’s a list of ingredients with which someone’s father used to cook true navy-style labskaus forty years ago: 5 kilogram (11 lbs) of salted pork, same amont of salted beef. 8 kg (17 1/2 lbs) potatoes, the non-fluffy kind. 2 1/2 kg (5 1/2 lbs) onions. 1 1/4 kg (2 3/4 lbs) butter. Pickled herring and eggs to serve.
The author of this writes that those recipes that add red beets to the mash are Not Authentick; the red color of labskaus comes from the salted meat. I have an issue with red beets: they upset my stomach and give me a headache. One day shortly after a lunch with warm beets, a neighbor’s kid split my head open with a huge enameled green pan that functioned as a toy in his sandbox (I was about five years old). I saw too much red on that day. A good reason to test the sea picture mash. Since there are no twenty hungry sailors here who have been scraping rust or done whatever else sailors do in the cold for a whole morning I scaled the total amount down a bit, as can be seen on the pictures.
The meats are boiled in separate pans, “until firm to the bite” (I wonder what they were before boiling, but okay…), as well as the potatoes.
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Another one of the conventions that apply to TV cooking shows (see my previous post) is clearly that things need to look nice, and that everyone should sound like they taste nice as well. On this German show a few days ago, one person fried slices of liver.
There was a pedagogical episode where he pared off the skin and the (as Marcella Hazan calls them) “large gristly tubes.” This is an absolutely necessary, and rather fiddly, administration. One of the common horrors of liver consumption is one’s bite-for-bite confrontation with tough bits of membrane. The meticulous cleaning is the very thing that makes liver possible.
Then came a rather more dubious episode where the slices entered a frying pan and stayed there altogether too long. Read the rest of this entry »
Prologue: I am making a batch of crêpes or pancakes. I am using a cast-iron frying pan that has been around for a while, so it behaves almost like a non-stick pan. I’m using whichever oil or fat I have - no, I actually use sunflower oil. The first pancake sticks to the pan. After that, no pancake ever sticks to the pan again.
There is this German cooking show, where Johannes B. Kerner jogs around and breathes down the assorted necks of a couple of chefs and cooks, who are preparing a joint dinner, and says “ist ja toll” and “hmmmm!” and other friendly things. Luckily, Kerner doesn’t sign up to the tradition of making painfully distorted faces every time he tries something. German TV is improving. Read the rest of this entry »
This recipe from my secret private archive was originally planned as an ingredient to a Nice-style mixed vegetable salad, private brand. Because I wanted the mushrooms to assume a vinegary garlicky character before adding them to the salad, I prepared them ahead of time. Then there was no Nice-style mixed vegetable salad. I decided to have the mushrooms as a dish of their own, and this is how:
Prepare a bowl big enough to hold the mushroom slices after cooking, with a mix of nice vinegars, such as half red, half white wine vinegar, chopped garlic to taste (without the green inner part - they say it’s hard to digest and keeps you awake at night; an effect that is probably caused by some sort of ancient voodoo charm), Read the rest of this entry »
Ithaca, NY. One grey October Sunday morning in 1999, I was shockingly out of supplies for breakfast. After an hour or so of mental dry-spinning - a consequence of my yawny hungry-ness - I fetched my coat and went down the hill to see where I’d find some food. First I meandered through the whole downtown without much success. When I finally entered the DeWitt mall, the cafe was just about to open, and completely empty.
Cafe DeWitt lies right across the world-famous Moosewood restaurant. Read the rest of this entry »
Robin tells me that I have to post tonight’s recipe, which is another one of those that don’t seem to be anything special at all, but in reality are true kitchen alchemy (make gold with…youknow)
The idea is to combine Spaghetti aglio e olio with olive-oil fried spinach. Read the rest of this entry »
