Panzanella – the bread soaks up the tomato’s juices and tastes like distilled summer. And we had possibly the best trifle ever, with cherries, apricots and yellow and ginger cakes, for dessert. Recipes to follow.
So I had this idea to do a series of summer dinners, featuring “the fleeting tastes of summer”.
The first one was last night. It was quite pleasant - a congenial group – one of my “girls” – a young woman who lived at the co-op dorm where I was the head cook from 1981-1986, when [...]
Last night we had dinner at a place called PS7. The guys – Mark & his son Ethan – liked it a lot, but I thought it was the kind of menu where all the dishes had too many ingredients, and none of the food looked like what it started off as.
Like the bread – [...]
Last night I did a benefit for Environment for America, called Gumbo for the Gulf.
There were about 20 people. I used Susan Spicer’s recipe for duck & Andouille sausage gumbo – but I made it with chicken thighs and a local Andouille – this is Wisconsin, after all. I left the okra out, too.
I made [...]
Earlier this week, while I was at my day job, but thinking about serving dinner that night, I got this message about Vicky & Lysander’s month-long dinner party, at a store front gallery in New York.
It’s dinner for 12, every Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday during the month of March – sitting in the storefront, [...]
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Deborah Madison just did a new book, What We Eat When We Eat Alone. The overall conclusion of the book is that when we eat alone, we don’t have to follow the rules – we can eat what and where we want – standing over the sink, in bed, in front of TV, and we [...]
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
My plan for superbowl food this year was Buffalo chicken tenders and baked beans. I made the beans overnight in the oven on Saturday, and thawed out the two packages of tenders I’d had in the bottom of the freezer for who knows how long. But best laid plans … I had to attend the [...]
I’ve been trying to keep the pantry pretty bare, except for buying ingredients for the dinners. It’s been working surprisingly well, except for the times I’ve kinda hung onto a little bit of this or that for too long – like the salad dressing I put on my work lunch salad last Friday. The greens [...]
Soup, bread and salad for dinner sounded good to 24 grownups and 5 kids under seven, on a frigid night in late January, last Thursday’s dinner. But did I take a single picture? Nope.
I tried to plan things so that people could be as acetic or extravagant in their food choices as they wished – [...]
Thursday, January 28, 2010
…. must have been a busy week, since I have not written since last Friday. We’re into the grinding down part of the winter, we had rain and fog, and now it’s really cold, that cheery sun actually indicating that’s it’s clear enough to be cold. And because of the rain, we lost a lot [...]