Category Archives: food and cooking

RFC is the man we need.

books, church, food and cooking, quotes,

A few months ago I read The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection by Robert Farrar Capon, and knew before I’d got halfway through the book that I’d want to write a series of posts on this man’s extraordinary perspective. But then the Nativity Fast arrived, and it was unhelpful during that period to focus on food and its delights, so I put off the project until the new year, which for me seems to have begun in earnest only this month.

At the speed I customarily do anything, if I begin now I still won’t finish before Lent has arrived, but I am going to start anyway. For me the recipes and food itself are not the main thing in Capon’s book, and there are parts that tie in very well with transcendent aspects of food and even with fasting.

His thoughts and words are often so charming in themselves, I might not always have anything to add to the quotes I share. But the topics collaborate with a couple of other books that I find very provocative as well, so I’m hoping to bring more writers into the discussion. In the blog titles I will refer to Robert Farrar Capon as RFC so as to make room there for words other than his long name.

Though the first chapter starts right off with a list of ingredients, for me the recipes included in the book serve primarily to illustrate and demonstrate the author’s philosophy and love. He was an Episcopal priest who wrote other books as well, but this is the first one I have met, and I just now discovered that he died last fall, probably when I was just coming to the end of The Supper of the Lamb.

Also in the first chapter, he answers critics who might disregard him because he is not a professional cook, by pointing out that amateur is not exactly the same thing as non-professional. And he clarifies here at the outset that he is, more than anything, a Lover:

The world may or may not need another cookbook, but it needs all the lovers — amateurs — it can get. It is a gorgeous old place, full of clownish graces and beautiful drolleries, and it has enough textures, tastes, and smells to keep us intrigued for more time than we have. Unfortunately, however, our response to its loveliness is not always delight: It is, far more often than it should be, boredom. And that is not only odd, it is tragic; for boredom is not neutral — It is the fertilizing principle of unloveliness.

In such a situation, the amateur — the lover, the man who thinks heedlessness a sin and boredom a heresy — is just the man you need.

And I ask you, with an intro like that, how can I not love him?

 

More posts on this book:

RFC begins with the meat. 

RFC considers blood and sacrifice. 

RFC makes one of nature’s marvels.

RFC drinks in graces.

 

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.