When grilling season starts, the simple act of being able to stand outside without a coat and cook a meal is thrill enough. But then, as the Summer progresses, it becomes old hat, and you start to look for ways to spice up your hot dogs, hamburgers and steaks. Enter the BBQ Sword!
This barbecue fork is designed to look like a swashbuckler's trusty blade, and harkens back to the days when men cooked their raw dinner by impaling it on the end of their sword and extending it out over the flames (much like Brazilian barbecue). The package is also printed with a cut-out eye mask, so you can pretend to be Zorro while grilling up your kids' turkey dogs.
No, it's not a new rap artist or the name of an old Burt Reynolds TV show*. It's a recipe from Shirley over at Mom's Best Recipes.
You don't get many recipes that include pasta, bacon, cream cheese, and Italian dressing, so this sounds intriguing. Basically any excuse to eat bacon and cream cheese I guess, though part of me thinks that the combo of bacon and cream cheese (plus Parmesan cheese!) could be a little overwhelming. It could be one of those situations where you love all of the ingredients individually but might not like them all together. But I'm going to give this one a shot this weekend.
For a couple of years in the 1990s, I drank ginger beer all the time. I can't even remember what brands I used to drink, but I was always experimenting with the stuff to see what cocktails I could come up with. I have to admit I never tried mixing it with apple.
This is the Apple Bomb, and besides ginger beer it features applejack, apple juice, and a lot of apple pieces on a skewer.
Everyone loves to taste and smell and experience food. And rightly so; it can be a very visceral experience. But to me, it's just as enjoyable to hear about food. To hear someone describe a great meal can be almost as satisfying as eating it myself (with none of the calories). I love discovering different words and terms and metaphors to describe my food. I love hearing beer described as "woody" or "nutty" or "golden." And I love the actual sounds that food makes when you play with it - crackling, bubbling, snapping.
Hence, why I get so much of my food information from public radio. Sure, there are better sources - but it's the way I like to get my food news: in words and phrases as gorgeous and robust as the dishes they describe. If you squeeze your eyes shut and listen to cooks speak about their latest creations, it's quite lovely and relaxing.
Obviously, nothing beats sitting down at a restaurant with a great plate of food in front of you. But if I'm lying in bed on Sunday afternoon, I'll take a plate of public radio, thanks, soup on the side. And then I'll get full on seconds.
Originally published in 1973, An Invitation to Indian Cooking was Madhur Jaffrey's very first cookbook. She moved to New York City from India in the early 1960's and started cooking when she started craving the flavors of her childhood. Later on, when people would ask her for Indian restaurant recommendations, she'd sadly tell them that there wasn't anything that appropriately authentic in the city and then, feeling bad and wanting to share the tastes of India with them, she'd invite them over for dinner. When throwing regular dinner parties became exhausting, she began to hand out her recipes. They spread across the city (and some all the way across the country) and eventually led to this book.
My copy of this book came to me in that load of cookbooks I acquired from my friend Fran's friend about a month ago. One of the delightful things I've discovered as I've gone through these books has been the unexpected notes and page markers that fall out when I start to leaf through. This edition is no exception, the recipe for Pork Chops Cooked With Cabbage is marked with a seed pack for wildflowers.
Back in April, I featured another one of Jaffrey's books, that time it was her volume devoted to Quick & Easy Indian Cooking. That book relies more heavily on pre-made spice mixes and short cut items that are available in the supermarket. This book has none of those short cuts and so while the dishes do take considerably longer to make, the rewards that come from toasting and grinding your own spices is quite high. Recently, Serious Eats spent a month cooking from this volume and, other than an unfortunate incident that involved a greasy, gristly goat stew, enjoyed the experience.
If you are a fan of Madhur Jaffery, your collection is not complete without this book.
The salad season has begun for me, and I noticed these new Wish-Bone Bountifuls salad dressings at the supermarket the other day. They're flavorful, low fat, low calorie dressings that have real pieces of vegetables and fruits in them.
Sound good? Well, you can go to the store and buy a bottle of the dressing, then log in to their web site and sign up to get a mail-in rebate. The offer is good between May 30 and June 1 only.
While you're at the site, you can also plant a "digital garden." It's part of Wish-Bones campaign to get people to eat more salads and get healthier. The nature sound effects at the site are rather relaxing...
Said to have aphrodisiac properties, this fragile species is suffering from drought on Southern European farms and will continue to suffer if predicted temperature increases come to fruition.
But as Southern farms are suffering, some Northern plantations are thriving from the increase in temperature (truffles are very sensitive to both frost and drought). But by the end of the century, scientists predict that in Toulose, France, temperatures will exceed 95 degrees F on 25-55 days out of the year (currently, it's only that hot about four days out of the year).
Do you have a personal blog? Yes. I write Cupcake Project. I am making cupcakes for a friend's wedding. Each week, I make them a new cupcake and in the end, they'll get to pick which three flavors they want at their wedding. Their wedding will be the second wedding I have baked for. The photo above is from the first one.
What is your day job, or rather, what do you do when you're not food blogging? I develop training materials for corporations. It has nothing to do with food, although I did work for Sara Lee for a while. All employees there got to participate in taste tests, which was a fun way to break up the day.
How long have you been blogging with Slashfood and what is your favorite post? I've been blogging on Slashfood for about two months.
My favorite post so far is, "What we eat may impact greenhouse gas emissions more than eating locally." I liked it because deciding which foods to eat is a topic that I personally wrestle with.
The first time I came across the term 'brown butter,' I was reading a menu at an Italian restaurant. I was 20 and functioned under the firm assumption that butter was bad. I couldn't imagine why any thinking person would create a sauce that was based solely on butter. However, one of my dining companions ordered that pasta dish and when the plates arrived, I was entranced by the sweet, nutty smell that was gently rising from her plate. She noticed my fascination and offered me a bite. The forkful of pasta instantly converted me from a butter avoider to a butter lover .
Despite my affection for butter, I don't use brown butter in my own cooking frequently. However, since reading Nicole's post on Baking Bites that details how to make it, I'm thinking that I need to cook up a batch and find an excuse to gently toss some veggies or pasta in it.
It's always convenient when two different holidays that are related happen in the same month. Of course, I'm not sure why these two holiday months aren't later in the summer.
Maybe it's a Memorial Day thing. May marks both National Barbecue Month and National Hamburger Month. Mahalo has a great page with various links to bbq how-tos, bbq recipes, and where to find the best bbq in the country. As for hamburgers, Food & Wine has a recipe for an All-Time Favorite Hamburger. And here's a bunch of recipes from the Southern Food section of About.com.
There's also a new book and documentary out called Hamburger America that examines some of the great burger places in the U.S.
"I wanted to be The Girl Who Is Not Afraid To Order Tripe And In Fact It Makes Her Even Cooler And All The More Sexy Because She Enjoys It. Alas, it was not meant to be." Carol at French Laundry at Home
Hear, hear!* I don't know about you, but this sort of rationale is what made me a foodie. I was a fairly picky eater growing up. I wasn't so bad that I'd eat PB&J for every meal, but if they weren't like the usual meat-potato-veggie triumvirate, or something else I'd eat normally, I'd get testy. If you were at the Mexican restaurant about 25-years ago where a little blonde girl went nuts because her beef was shaved instead of ground, that was me.
But then I got older, moved to the big city, and shed many of my food inhibitions. I hated it when my friends gazed at me in disappointment whenever I wouldn't try anything. I couldn't say no when someone slaved over a hot stove to bring me a meal full of food I didn't like. Soon, eating became an adventure -- discovering new tastes, learning about the foods, making meals fresh and fun.
We all love Girl Scout cookies, right? I try to stay away from them or I'll a whole box at a time, but I love them all the same. Well so does one scout from Michigan, who actually broke sales records.
Jennifer Sharpe sold, I kid you not, 17, 328 boxes of cookies. That's a lot of Samoa's! I can't imagine selling even a fraction of that. Apparently, though, all that selling really helped Jennifer get over being shy. Not only that, the cookie sales (about $21,000) is paying for her troop to go to Europe this winter.
Just think about that next time you buy a box of Girl Scout cookies!
I've never made brioche. I've spent some time looking at the molds at Fante's (although I've never been able to justify the purchase) and I always enjoyed the bread when it's entered my life fully baked. But it's just one of those things I haven't attempted on my own. Given my tendency to become addicted to bread products, I do believe that if I started with brioche, I wouldn't be able to stop.
I do admire the attempts of others to make this noble, egg-y bread and the Tooknap Press has made some really cool examples of this delicious treat, including the mushroom shaped loaf you see above. I would like a bite right now.
We're gearing up for the big Summer Grilling Kickoff also known more formally as Memorial Day Weekend, shaking off grill covers, scouring down grill grates, and of course, flipping through collections of recipes for everything from barbecue meats to side dishes like potato salad and corn on the cob. Many of us will be turning to modern grillmasters like Steven Raichlen and Bobby Flay, but I'll have you know that the real secrets of barbecue are in a gem of a cookbook that came my way a few weeks ago: Better Homes and Gardens Barbecue Cookbook, published in 1956.
Now, I don't usually rely too heavily on cookbooks to begin with, and books from the likes of Better Homes and Gardens, even less so. However, when I started flipping through the pages of this book that my Mom gave me after salvaging from her neighbor's garage sale the week before, I told myself that at some point, I would have to fry corndogs, shove the ends of their sticks into a head of cabbage, hollow out the center and fill it with sauce, and serve the alien platter of "Broncos" to my family at our next "elegant tail gate."
All of course, while wearing a red and white dress with puffed sleeves wider than a doorway, to balance the 22" waistline.
There are photos of some choice illustrations, menus, serving suggestions, and recipes (for "Instant Coffee!") in the gallery:
The feature story this week is on the "greening" of Chicago, with farmers' markets returning to new locations with sustainable produce. The Tribune shares some tips for shopping at the farmers' market, as well as recipes from cookbooks that focus on market fresh produce: Scallops with three peas and prosciutto from Blue Eggs and Yellow Tomatoes, Savory mashed potatoes with garden herbs from Rosalind Creasy's Recipes from the Garden, Butter Lettuce Salad from Fresh, and Watercress, snow pea and shiitake mushroom stir-fry from The Farm to Table Cookbook: The Art of Eating Locally.
No, it's not a new rap artist or the name of an old Burt Reynolds TV show*. It's a recipe from Shirley over at 
For a couple of years in the 1990s, I drank ginger beer all the time. I can't even remember what brands I used to drink, but I was always experimenting with the stuff to see what cocktails I could come up with. I have to admit I never tried mixing it with apple.
Everyone loves to taste and smell and experience food. And rightly so; it can be a very visceral experience. But to me, it's just as enjoyable to hear about food. To hear someone describe a great meal can be almost as satisfying as eating it myself (with none of the calories). I love discovering different words and terms and metaphors to describe my food. I love hearing beer described as "woody" or "nutty" or "golden." And I love the actual sounds that food makes when you play with it - crackling, bubbling, snapping. 
The salad season has begun for me, and I noticed these new Wish-Bone Bountifuls salad dressings at the supermarket the other day. They're flavorful, low fat, low calorie dressings that have real pieces of vegetables and fruits in them. 
The feature story this week is on the "
May is National BBQ Month and National Hamburger Month
Cupcakes, not for dessert (unless beef is your idea of a treat)
Because eating French Fries in the car is so tough
