Category Archives: food and cooking

The bird announces a pie.

family, food and cooking, pie,

Christmas before last my three daughters gave me a set of six matching Le Creuset items that also pretty well matched the blue in my kitchen curtains.

I had completely forgotten to use the pie bird until I saw him in a drawer yesterday, and putting him together in my mind with last summer’s peaches in the freezer, and scraps of pie dough also in the freezer, I came up with a pie plan for this morning. Here’s the result in the very lacking two dimensions.

I already ate a piece this afternoon, and found that the peaches did not make it through the winter with much of their flavor intact, even in the deep freeze.

The scraps of crust, some of which were even older, fared much better even though they were in the freezer section of the refrigerator.

All in all, it was a good use of things already on hand that might otherwise have been thrown out long ago, so I don’t feel too bad about the ho-hum-ness of the finished product.

Ho-hum?? The dear bird is announcing anything but that. A pie of any sort around here is an event!

radishes

food and cooking

Here’s something different, which my CSA box inspired this week, with the inclusion of a bunch of beautiful and plump radishes. They are of course as pretty as Christmas to look at, but I wanted to make something yummy to eat with them, and not just scatter them for color into a green salad.

As you can see, the tops were large and in good shape, too, so I was happy to find a recipe on Epicurious.com that included them.


The only real change I made was to cook one bunch instead of four, but that was plenty for the two of us, because in this case we had two other vegetable dishes.

The greens and garlic added a lot to the flavor of the radishes, which after being sautéed were a very mild reminder of their turnip cousins.

We ate them all up!

 

From the box to the pot to the bowl…

agriculture, food and cooking

Recently we subscribed to a CSA (community-supported agriculture) service, one that delivers to our door a box of organically grown vegetables in the wee hours of the morning, in our case every two weeks. This morning I opened the front door to find the second box sitting on the step, full of my favorite kind of goodies. I spent a while thinking about which things to use immediately and which to put away in the fridge – also I had to browse recipes for beech mushrooms, which I found are too bitter to eat raw, and for radishes, which I didn’t feel like eating raw.

The two big bunches of broccoli immediately suggested a cream soup, so I worked on that while munching the sweetest Nantes carrots and washing some spinach leaves, which Mr. Glad put into his sandwich at lunchtime. After I poured the soup into a bowl I wanted to sprinkle a few chives on top, so I visited my huge clump next to the patio only to find that they had disappeared in the hard winter we had, and only a few short scapes (I just learned this name for the stems) were venturing forth at so far. I sprinkled some nutmeg instead.

The ingredients in this batch were: broccoli, onions, garlic, butter, chicken broth, black pepper, nutmeg, salt and cream. When the vegetables were tender I put almost everything into the blender, but I kept back some soft chunks for texture. After taking the picture, I ate the bowl of soup, and I’ll likely have another tonight for dinner. It might be my favorite way to eat broccoli.

Food for the Poets

food and cooking, poetry, quotes,

The literary-foodie blog Paper and Salt has a newsletter from which I gleaned this tidbit of history: T.S. Eliot’s Culinary Weakness: Hot Fudge

In his letters, T. S. Eliot wrote that his favorite food memory was of duck à l’orange, but he didn’t dine on fancy French fare around the clock. Sometimes there’s only one thing that will hit the spot: a hot fudge sundae. According to his second wife, Valerie, a healthy scoop of vanilla slathered in chocolate sauce made this modernist poet a very happy guy.

If you have doubts that someone who wrote The Wasteland could enjoy the simple pleasures of a sundae, you’re not alone. In an interview with The Independent, Valerie recalled Eliot’s succinct response to his dessert critics. “He was eating it in a restaurant once and a man opposite said, ‘I can’t understand how a poet like you can eat that stuff.’ Tom, with hardly a pause, said, ‘Ah, but you’re not a poet,’ and went on eating.”