This Moment.
Posted: May 25, 2012 Filed under: Table Talk: Rachel – posts by Rachel, This Moment | Tags: good partner, sick, tea, This Moment Leave a comment »
A Friday ritual. A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. Pause, savor, remember.
This Week In My Kitchen
Posted: May 23, 2012 Filed under: Farm to Table – sustainable food/locavore/organics, Table Talk: Rachel – posts by Rachel | Tags: blueberry pancakes, cooking from the hip, homemade chicken stock, homemade peanut butter cups Leave a comment »
One of the perks to having parents who work in a restaurant (I imagine), is having parents who can throw together delicious buttermilk blueberry pancakes with neither recipe nor measuring device. John put some handfuls of dry ingredients into a bowl, and I poured some liquids together, and then we combined the two and, voila! Pancakes. The super fluffy, ever-so-slightly-sweet kind.
I sprinkled some flax meal on top for good measure and a little bit of nutty flavor. The blueberries around here are enormous orbs these days, and they pop when you bite into them. I tried to place them so there’d be one per bite. These pancakes were so wonderful we didn’t even eat them with butter and syrup. Mmm mmm mmm.
Our Cookbook Winner and a Great Bruschetta
Posted: May 21, 2012 Filed under: Table Talk: Janet – posts by Janet | Tags: baguette, bruschetta, contest, cookbook giveaway, giveaway, pesto, sundried tomatoes Leave a comment »First congrats to Patricia, who is the winner of our I Love Corn cookbook giveaway. Thanks to all who entered and stay tuned for more great cookbook giveaways coming your way.
On to today’s recipe, which I put together after attending a really fun mixology class that a friend of ours bid on at a charity auction. It was in this historic home in the Berkshires that I would kill to spend the night in. (Lucky Rachel. She and John did spend two nights there for their honeymoon. Yes, you’re welcome.) Anyway, we got to hang out at the beautiful estate as the sun was setting and then moved indoors for this class. I am not a drink maker — ever, not at all, never. It’s a long story that I’ll share some day but now just know that any drinks that I consume are made by my husband, who is, fortunately, a superb mixologist.
As we sipped the first drink — a white Cosmo that was quite lovely — the innkeeper brought out some bruschetta, which, I’m not going to lie, were tasty but not fabulous. It got me thinking: I should make these someday. Someday happened on Saturday when we were going to a friend’s house for dinner and I was in charge of the appetizer. But before I go to the recipe, let me show you one of the drinks I made. It was a watermelon margarita and it was damn fine. So today you get two recipes, and I guaranteed this bruschetta will satisfy.
Corn: A Love Story and Cookbook Giveaway
Posted: May 18, 2012 Filed under: Table Talk: Janet – posts by Janet | Tags: Andrews McMeel Publishing, cookbook giveaway, corn, Dougy Center, food, I Love Corn, Lisa Skye, Martha Stewart, summer, summer cooking 9 Comments »Are there two foods that scream summer more than corn and tomatoes? Not for me. The first bite of either one — and on really perfect days, both — fresh from a garden is part of summer’s most amazing allure. So I was pretty very excited to get a review copy of Lisa Skye’s new book, I Love Corn — first because I am totally with her on this love and secondly because I wanted to get some new corn ideas. Oh, because we are going to give one of you lucky readers your very own copy for FREE!
Right now my main corn plan is sticking it in boiling water for about two minutes, salting it and chomping down. I know there’s waaaayyy more to it than that, as Lisa shows in spades. Get ready to be inspired….and of course enter our little contest.
Mother’s Day Tastes Good
Posted: May 16, 2012 Filed under: Farm to Table – sustainable food/locavore/organics, Table Talk: Rachel – posts by Rachel | Tags: cheesecake, Chez Panisse, Chez Panisse Cooking by Paul Bertolli with Alice Waters, cilantro pesto, garden eating, marsala, Mother's Day, pine nuts, raisins, ricotta, steak Leave a comment »
What’s this? Oh, it’s only THE BEST CAKE I HAVE EVER EATEN IN MY ENTIRE LIFE.
Like, all caps good. Like, I’m tempted to freeze some of it and defrost it on Father’s Day and serve it up to John because there’s no way in hell I’ll make a cake that even begins to rival this one. Like, I’ll definitely not be doing that, though, because I have such strong feelings for this cake that it will simply not be possible for me to consume it in its entirety.
Mexican Grilled Shrimp Caesar Salad
Posted: May 14, 2012 Filed under: Table Talk: Janet – posts by Janet | Tags: Caesar salad, grilled shrimp, Mexican, pepitas, salad, salad for dinner Leave a comment »Warm weather is gloriously here in the Northeast — or close enough to have me itching to be outside just about every moment I can. This is the time of year of great hope for me. Enough of my gardens are blooming that I (delusionally) think my thumb is just the slightest hint of green and that I will accomplish great things this year. By July, the insanity of this thought is always clear but for now I am hopeful and so when the day is warm and sunny I want to be outside playing in the dirt.
It’s also a time of lighter eating in general I think. A fresh salad and a little bread and cheese can really hit the spot when the temperature rises. And so on just such a day, I headed to my pile o’ magazine pages (HA! I bet you thought I had bailed on my little experiment already! Oh ye of little faith.) and found this grilled shrimp salad from a recent Real Simple.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve gotten a little depressed about what passes for Caesar salad these days. Ask for it in a restaurant and you’ll often receive a sodden mass of lettuce drowning in a dense dressing. It’s complete overkill. This salad is the exact opposite: light and zippy. Plus you can whip it up in about 20 minutes, leaving you plenty of time to play in the garden.
This Moment.
Posted: May 11, 2012 Filed under: Table Talk: Janet – posts by Janet, This Moment Leave a comment »
A Friday ritual. A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. Pause, savor, remember.
A Different Kind of Full
Posted: May 9, 2012 Filed under: Farm to Table – sustainable food/locavore/organics, Table Talk: Rachel – posts by Rachel | Tags: dinner party, lidia yuknavitch, lit reactor, litreactor, pivotal moment, rae gouirand, salad, the chronology of water, writing Leave a comment »It always amazes me how quiet pivotal moments can be, how lamplit instead of firecrackery they can come.
I started out taking pictures. Freshly torn butter lettuce. Walnuts steaming from their pan toasting seconds before. Oozing blue cheese. Apple slices so thin you can see through them. Oil emulsifying with a pool of fresh herbs and lemon juice and balsamic vinegar and a warm spoonful of honey. After a few shots, though, I just stopped. My mind was both intensely focused on making this simple salad sing, and wandering up the road to Sacramento. Sacramento was our shared destination, after all.
Over the winter holidays I was given a book by Rae Gouirand–one of my bosses at my internship, and also an intensely brilliant and beautiful writer and thinker–called “The Chronology of Water” by Lidia Yuknavitch. It is one of those books that I have a hard time describing with words because all that wants to come out of me are guttural cries of adoration and gratitude peppered with a healthy amount of holy crap. It is a book that makes it possible to be me. It is a book that makes it possible to be you. It is raw meat and choked throats and sex and sadness and forgiveness and fucking up and standing up and standing up and standing up over and over and over again. It is a book for the spaces in between, for the people in between. It is a warm hug. It is feminist-queer-praxis at its finest. It is and it is and it is and it refuses to not be. It is one of those books that you are terrified to close once you read the last word, that sits there in your lap holding you in the space of its kinship while you work up the stamina to carry it in your heart beyond its pages and into the world. It is a book that–for me, anyway–radically changes its reader. It absolutely radically alters both grammar and lexicon alike, sucks them into the body and refuses to parse.
More Mexican
Posted: May 7, 2012 Filed under: Table Talk: Janet – posts by Janet | Tags: ground turkey, meatloaf, Mexican food, Mexico, salsa, Tex-Mex, Tijuana Leave a comment »I’ll just say for the record I’ve never been to Mexico — an hour in Tijuana doesn’t count and it’s also a different story. But I am so obsessed with anything that smacks of Mexican flavors. Probably this is more Tex-Mex than bona fide Mexican, but I can tell you that it’s tasty so there it is. If you’re looking for a variation on meatloaf, here you go. I only wish I had come up with this while our kids were home. I think I actually could have gotten a black bean past two of them without complaint. So that’s my hint that you can potentially trick your kids into something healthy with this. And if they don’t eat it, that just means more for you. 
The proverbial win-win in my book. Read the rest of this entry »
Pate Cake, Pate Cake, Baker’s Man
Posted: May 4, 2012 Filed under: Around the Table – guest posts, Mike the Gay Beer Guy | Tags: charcuterie, cheese, epicurious, homebrewed beer, pate, pork Leave a comment »Howdy folks. As I said in my last entry, I’m making preparations to leave Kansas City. While I am saddened to leave a place I’ve called home for the past four years, I am extremely excited to pursue bigger and better artistic opportunities in the Northeast.
To go out with a bang, I’m drawing inspiration from the Aixois Restaurant here in the Brookside neighborhood of town. This French-Casual restaurant features all sorts of novel and innovative French cuisine. When I went there for dinner a few weeks ago, I was very impressed by the charcuterie plate, the central item being the house-made pâté.
What better way to integrate fine cuisine and the Midwest than to make a pâté, not of liver but of pork! When you review (and hopefully make) the recipe based on something I found on Epicurious, you will notice a lot of unhealthy stuff in there. Between the pork, cream, butter — and of course bacon — it sounds like a heart attack just waiting to happen. But it tastes so good. Just eat in moderation and all should be fine. This is definitely going on the menu for my first beer tasting party on the East Coast!
