Enjoying and (Sort of) Preserving the First Strawberries

5|27|10

By Edward Schneider

Not only was a favorite grower/vendor – Maxwell’s Farm, from Warren County, New Jersey – back at our local farmers’ market for the first time since last year, but they had brought strawberries with them. So had another vendor, but Jackie and I could smell Maxwell’s berries from yards away. We bought two quarts. Were these May strawberries as good as the ones we’ll get a little later in the season? Of course not. But they gave us a little thrill.

Rinsed, immediately drained, and hulled, they served two purposes: that day’s dessert (about a third of them, lightly sprinkled with sugar and eaten with cream) and future desserts, in the form of a quick, liquidy kind of jam that Jackie tells me Russians call varenye. Continue reading →

Fish, Steamed over Vegetables (or Samphire!)

5|26|10

If you forage for something, it tastes much better than when you pay $12 a pound for it. This is why talk of ramps always seems to annoy me, I guess. Fiddleheads too – they’re not meant to be bought but found.

The same is true of samphire. I’ve never bought it; I always forage it. I’m so addicted now I might buy it if I had to, but I’m lucky enough to know a place on the Cape where it grows like mad and, from roughly now until mid-July I can pick as much as I want. (Now, the pickings are slim, but super-tender; it takes ten minutes to gather a pound; in a month, I’ll be able to gather three pounds in that same time.) Continue reading →

Just in Time for Memorial Day… Burgers the Bittman Way

5|26|10

Today’s Mini has a curious history: we decided, back in the winter, to do a piece about making a sausage-like burger (or a burger-like sausage), like the one I used to eat in Southport, CT, at a place I could drive to with my eyes closed (well, not really, but it’s right off Exit 19), but one whose name I can’t remember. (It’s probably something like Southport Lunchette.)

When I made it, twice, and we shot it, I said to Pete Wells (the Dining editor), “Why would anyone eat a regular hamburger when there are things like this in the world?” he proclaimed (yes, he did) “You need to make that a bigger piece.”

So we went to work on more burger alternatives… and here they are.

Let’s Move Needs to Get Real with the Food Industry

5|26|10

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By Tom Laskawy

Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity initiative has kicked into high gear. The Presidential Task Force on Childhood Obesity released a landmark report documenting the scale of the problem complete with a list of 70 recommendations and a set of benchmarks, including the goal of returning the childhood obesity rate to its 1972 level of 5% by 2030.

And last week a new industry partnership called the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation, which includes most of the major food companies, agreed to reduce the number of calorie in its members products by one and a half trillion calories by 2015. Continue reading →

The Thieving Cook

5|25|10

By Suzanne Lenzer

I have a secret: I steal food. From myself and from anyone else who happens to be over for a meal. It’s one of the lesser known and certainly more furtive perks of being the cook in the house. I surreptitiously snack as I cook; an olive here, the crispest bit of skin off a roast chicken there.

Perhaps it’s a commitment issue: I’m more comfortable nibbling on lots of small bites rather than committing to any one single plate. (When it comes to a meal, monogamy is not my thing.) I’m sure this is why I love tapas and mezze so much; grazing is more fun than a full meal. Continue reading →

Of Pork and Fat

5|25|10

Forty years ago, I began to take learning to cook seriously. And one of my earliest memories was of a pork roast, a loin, seasoned with rosemary, cayenne, sugar, white wine, and garlic. I learned it, in fact, from Craig Claiborne’s still useful New York Times Cookbook.

What Mr. Claiborne did not do in that recipe (at least as far as I recall), was poke holes in the pork and shove that herb-spice mixture in there. That was left for my friend Andrea to teach me, a dozen or so years later. Andrea, who is from Rome and remains one of my closest friends and most adored cooking partners, took a pork roast and laid it on a bed of potatoes, then prepared a mixture of sage (or was it rosemary? either will work), garlic, salt, and pepper, and shoved that mixture into the pork, poking holes with a sharp knife. (There is, of course, a complicated French way of doing this, called barding.) He rubbed it on top, too, and sprinkled it over the potatoes. Then he poured what I then considered more-than-generous amounts of olive oil over all and roasted the thing.

The recipe, as they say in the music business, goes kinda like this (but please – read on afterwards; I’m just getting to the point here): Continue reading →

Politics of the Plate

5|25|10

By Barry Estabrook

Sustainable Seafood Counters

A major supermarket chain has announced that it initiated a program to stop buying seafood that failed to meet sustainability standards.

Publix Supermarkets, Inc., whose stores are ubiquitous in Florida and much of the Southeast, will begin to rank the 300 seafood items it carries according to sustainability. The program will unfold over the next year, and will involve categorizing seafood into three groups: Sustainable, Needs Improvement, and Needs Major Improvement. Publix officials told the Tampa Tribune that they intend to apply pressure on fisheries with poor rankings to improve. If there is no sign of improvement over time, the company will stop buying.

It’s an encouraging trend in Big Retail. In January, Target adopted similar policies on seafood, including the elimination of all farmed salmon from its stores. Continue reading →

Smokin’ Hot White Pizza

5|24|10

By Edward Schneider

Saturday was pizza night at our house. One regular Margherita (we even had basil in the house), and one not so regular, but delicious if you like smoky flavors. Onto a semi-baked crust (I find that this initial pre-baking is necessary in a regular oven with a maximum temperature of 500 or even 550 degrees F), I spread a mixture of about 1/4 nice fluffy, not watery, ricotta and 3/4 smoked mozzarella cut into little pieces, into which was mixed a generous ounce of chopped speck (smoked dry-cured ham, in this instance from Italy), a few slivered leaves of sage, some olive oil and salt and pepper. Watch out for the salt – there’s no predicting how much will be in your mozzarella.

The only danger with this – as, come to think of it, with any pizza – is that, for safety’s sake, it needs to cool a bit before the first bite. So pour a glass of wine, eat an olive or some of that mozzarella and be patient.

This #$!% Has Got to Stop: Part Three

5|24|10

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbYp_XY-jBQ?wmode=transparent]

[Barbra Walton, our first outside contributor to This #$!% Has Got to Stop, is a software engineer in a small town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. One of her grandmothers cooked at early 20^th century logging camps, and the other started her local food co-op. She has cooking in her bones, and is expecting her dry-cured chorizo to be ready any minute. Meanwhile, she sent us this piece. – mb]

I couldn’t help but think of your two “This has got to stop” articles when I saw the current Wendy’s commercial for their “Spicy Chipotle Boneless Wings.”

The catch phrase at the end of the Wendy’s commercial for their Spicy Chipotle Boneless Wings is “You know when it’s real.” Well, yeah, I do. And I know that chicken wings aren’t made of white breast meat, nor are “real” chicken wings boneless. And, in reading over the ingredient list (below), I know that I don’t’ need to add “chicken flavor” to chicken to make it taste good, nor do I need to add the volume of salt, sugar, and flavorings to make “real” chicken. Continue reading →

Pot Lucky Birthday

5|24|10

By Pam Anderson

When my daughters Maggy and Sharon were growing up, I always let them choose their birthday dinner. Sharon frequently requested Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings. I was always happy to oblige, but on the 20^th of July, even with the AC blasting, we were all stuffed and sweaty by the end.

Last night we celebrated Maggy’s 27^th. Since she and husband Andy live in NY now, we decided this year would be different. We were going out for a change. I was thrilled. Continue reading →

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