Reading & Writing » Cooking

Vegetable Explosion

jd — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 10:59:49 +0000

Our friend Amy came over last night and we constructed — “made” seems too tame a verb — a Vegetable Explosion. It was very good, though we would add more goat cheese next time and lose the citrus salsa, which tended to overpower the subtle flavors of the vegetables. It is a fairly process intensive dish, with a lot of bowls to wash afterward, but worth the trouble for a special occasion. It was good to see Amy, who has been spending all her time working on her tenure file. Seeing Amy and her pug Penny is always a special occasion.

Lunch (VN Diary No. 18)

jd — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 09:14:09 +0000

I had lunch yesterday with my friends Giang and Long at the publishing house where I worked when I was here on a Fulbright in 2000 – 2001. We ate in the rooftop cafeteria at their office, where the food is wonderful, though quite unlike what you would find in a restaurant. More like home cooking. The greens at the top are water morning glory, or convolvulus, which tastes like a more bitter version of spinach; then there is a little ommelet, and another bit of egg cooked as a kind of pancake with herbs, then some chicken in a savory sauce at the bottom, and as condiments some peanust and pickled cucumber.

Vietnam Diary 4 (Nhat Ky 4)

jd — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 01:14:14 +0000

I’ve been very calm up to now, but leaving tomorrow for VN after eight years away has me in what a nineteenth century novel might call “a state ofnervous excietment.” I can’t say I’m looking forward to the flight, which involves around 18 hours in the air, with a couple of longish layovers that stretch the trip out past 24 hours. I will be able to avail myself of the restorative effects of an excellent dim sum restaurant in the Hong Kong airport — I hope it hasn’t changed — which I will definately need at that point, just before I make the jump over to Hanoi, where I will arrive in the late afternoon. It’s a fairly long drive in from the airport, so my plan will be to drop my bags at the hotel, take a walk, have a light dinner and see if I am able to go to sleep. The next morning I’m going to go make some reservations at a cooking school and arrange for a language tutor — poetry will have to wait until Monday!

Protected: Pizza for Twenty

jd — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 00:32:46 +0000

BMC

jd — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 00:31:52 +0000

Writing from my secret internet connection at the Blue Mtn. Center — which I have because I’m teaching the last weeks of an online course. It is a fantastically quiet & beautiful place. I’ve been sleeping well — did I mention it was quiet? — and have begun getting my work organized: an essay and a book-length poem. I’ve taken these first two days to ease into a quiet frame of mind, but tomorrow is the first day of the work-week & I intend to start spending long stretches at my desk.

The food is wonderful at BMC & my fellow campers are lovely, an amazingly diverse & friendly & talented group. Sunday is the cooks’ day off, so we are responsible for getting our own meals together. Everyone improvises for breakfast & lunch, but dinner is a group effort. Tonight we grilled burgers — I volunteered to be the burger maker. Others made salads, cut condiments, toted trays of food down to the lean-to. Q. was the grill master & the whole thing came together without a hitch. Clean-up was just as easy: the food was put away & the kitchen spotless in twenty minutes. Just a remarkably sweet, cooperative attitude from everyone. Helping with dinner made me realize how much I love kitchens. Deeply human spaces. Maybe I can get a job cooking here when I retire from teaching.

Cutting Board

jd — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 13:25:11 +0000

I wanted to mention our new cutting board, custom-made by Matt Christie. Matt has his own blog, Pas Au-DelÃ & is also a contributor to Long Sunday. I found out about his woodworking skills because Scott McLemee, my favorite cultural critic, mentioned Matt on his blog, Quick Study. Confused? Doesn’t matter, just look at this beauty. You can contact Matt through his blog, linked above. The board, even with shipping & a bottle of oil to treat the surface, cost about half as much as would something similar in a retail kitchen shop. A rather woody picture, now that I look at it — oak cutting board on a cherry table in front of a pine chair.

Indian Dinner, Kashmiri Style

jd — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 14:55:07 +0000

I don’t know much about Indian food other than that I like to eat it; I’ve had a couple of Indian cookbooks for a while, but only this year began really trying to cook from them. Saturday night, I made Kashmiri style lamb kabobs in curry, potato raita (which I had never heard of until I found it in the back of the cookbook), snap peas cooked in a little ghee with sesame seeds, & chapati. Served with a little salad of cucumbers and coriander. This was the first whole Indian meal I’ve made — previously, I had just made individual dishes, usually a curry. Came out very nicely. Amy contributed a cherry pie for desert: not Indian, but excellent — the sweetness after the mild heat of the curry was lovely. We drank a couple of bottle of Riesling with the meal. All the recipes came from Camellia Panjabi’s Great Curries of India, a beautifully produced & well-written book with a lot of color photos & very good background information on the food & ingredients.

Southeast Asian Dinner

jd — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 01:14:38 +0000

My pal Amy found this book on a remainder table at Borders & bought me a copy. The Complete Vietnamese Cookbook appears to be out of print, but I’d recommend it. Even though my tastes run to northern cuisine & this cookbook focuses on the south, I’ve already found its extensive & well-illustrated discussion of basic ingredients useful. I also like that it includes several Cambodian recipes — in the countryside of the Mekong Delta the culture of Vietnam blends into that of Cambodia as you go east & this cookbook recognizes that. In fact, I tried a Cambodian dish last night. Amy came over with her friend & colleague Peter, a sculptor like Amy, & I made a Vietnamese diner: 1) Summer rolls (somehow seemed appropriate in the middle of January) with carrot, shallot, basil, coriander, & lettuce wrapped in an uncooked wrapper; 2) Fried Cambodian sweet potato balls rolled in sesame seeds; & 3) My old standby Thit ga koh gung, chicken with ginger. I also put a couple of dipping sauces on the table — nuoc cham, the standard lime & fish sauce concoction, & a spicy peanut sauce I hadn’t made before. When Amy came in she saw the cookbook on the table, open to the sweet potato balls, and said, “I’m glad you like the book! — did you see these sweet potato balls?” And I was able to answer, “Yeah, I’m making them right now.” First we ate the summer rolls, which were great in both sauces, then the sweet potato balls, which loved the hot peanut sauce & have an almost custard-like texture, then my Saigon chicken with some rice to which we added the peanut sauce & some squirts of Sriracha. We had Amy’s cherry pie for desert! Peter brought his dog Jackson & Amy brought her dog Penny so we had six dogs in the house for the evening. Everyone was quite well-behaved. Even the humans. It’s wonderful to have a good kitchen after all these years — it was the last thing we remodeled in this our house — because I can cook for friends. And what wonderful friends.

Xmas-Eve Meatball Sandwiches

jd — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 15:58:42 +0000

I had some leftover spaghetti sauce & some left over turkey sausage, so I made meatball sandwiches last night. For the meatballs, take about a cup of mild sausage, mix in three cloves of finely minced garlic, salt & pepper, some oregano, roughly 1/2 to 3/4 cup panko breadcrumbs, & one egg yolk. Mix with your hand, then roll in more breadcrumbs & fry until golden brown. Hollow out the halves of some crunchy bread (I had some asiago cheese bread I’d made earlier), rub the outside with butter, place the halves for each sandwich on foil, slather the bread with lots of spaghetti sauce, cram in meatballs, grate cheese over meatballs, put the halves of bread together & roll them up tightly in the foil. Bake in a preheated 300Â° (F) oven for 30 minutes. To serve, let cool slightly, unroll from foil, serve with a salad.

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Note: I had erroneously been thinking of this sandwich as a Stromboli, which is clearly related, but not the same thing at all. I love it that the Stromboli originated, not on the island of the same name off the coast of Sicily, but in Pennsylvania & was named for an Ingrid Bergman movie! Now I can’t wait to make one. Italian, Mexican, & Asian street food is among the best arguments in favor of open immigration policies I can think of. I mean that seriously.

Pasta Dough

jd — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 15:45:19 +0000

Pasta Dough

I’ve been meaning to post a picture of the pasta extravaganza from a couple of weeks ago. Amy came over & we started from scratch, making the dough, three fillings, and two sauces. I’ll need to practice more rolling out the dough & handling it, especially making ravioli. Surprisingly, very few of the little pasta packages burst when we were cooking them and, anyway, it was one of the best meals I’ve contributed to in a long time. And one of the happiest. Playing in the kitchen — especially with a friend — is one of my greatest pleasures in life. Note: This is my first attempt to use Flickr to post directly to the blog. The link above goes to my Flickr page. Seems to work pretty well, though I wish it wouldn’t automatically add a line with “originally uploaded by . . .”