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Tuesday, November 30, 2004
what I ate last: back to the local Mexican: steak flautas and guacamole salad Eating in NYC was certainly wonderful - decadent, expensive, lovely. Actually, it was probably not more of any of those than a good week in normal London life, but coming from a town with, effectively, no restaurants (Mexican/steak/bbq joints not counting) it was culture shock and a treat. We did the whole Thanksgiving turkey thing, which was cooked, bizarrely, by a friend of our hosts who turned out to also be a mutual acquaintance of mine from Suffolk. He apparently owed them a favour, as he turned up clad in a velvet suit, proceeded to prepare the turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce and giblet gravy, put the bird in the oven and then, after a couple of glasses of wine, left to have his Thanksgiving meal elsewhere. It all turned out deliciously, and was finished off with pumpkin pie, which our all-English party had to phone-a-friend to find out whether to serve hot or cold. Then lots of coffee and scotch (no Southern bourbon here) and our expat celebration was complete. The most decadent part of our visit was certainly the impromptu jump out of a traffic-jammed cab into the Grand Central Station oyster bar for an oysters and Guinness lunch. But actually, if I lived in NY and worked nearby, I would probably go there far too often for lunchtime treats, a bit like I used to do at the bar of St John in London. Most main courses and sandwiches are really pretty reasonably priced, with some obvious bargains in the soup/stew sections, and utterly delicious, not to mention the surroundings. The small baby who was accompanying us also loved the whole affair, stuffing oyster crackers in her mouth and charming everybody, looking around with wide eyes and definitely not wanting to leave. Other good things were eaten at the Peasant - good fashionable Italian food and good cocktails with which to while away the wait for our table. The only very strange thing here was that our waitress allowed us to all order main courses without telling us that none of them came with any side vegetables. Therefore missing out on fleecing us for more money, but also meaning that we were all rather gobsmacked when a bistecca the size of a dinner plate turned up for one of our party garnished with nothing more than parsley, and we had to rather hurriedly order some greens. Also, steaks the size of dinner plates are so ridiculously sized as to be slightly nauseating no matter how well they are chosen and cooked - and unfortunately this one was also not cooked rare as requested. After having waited a fair time for our food to arrive, however, no-one was going to send it back. My ossobuco with farro was very good, however, and the pannacotta also. We had good New York breakfasts at institutions like 0 comments permalink  
Thursday, November 25, 2004 what I ate last: grilled goats cheese and mint sandwich Leaving the Black Belt results in an overflow of food-related moments and the spending of slightly absurd sums of money on eating. Travelling via Atlanta to NYC for Thanksgiving, we haven't even had the turkey extraveganza yet and I'm already feeling overwhelmed by the possibilities for eating, and actually slightly nauseated by the overabundance of food - it's all too accessible, too easily bought rather than made oneself with effort and ingenuity making the unexpected out of the mundane. Shops heave with fresh vegetables, exotic herbs, every conceivable ingredient. I eat roasted duckling in a restaurant where every dish contains at least eight or nine elements, not one or two and some clever seasoning. I eat sushi, which I have been craving for the last months, and it's somehow too normal, ordered by phone and delivered to your door. It's a huge treat but I feel slightly ridiculous making such a big deal out of it. We shop with friends for Thanksgiving trimmings in Fairways and I look at the piles of pak choi and french beans and the hordes of frenetic New Yorkers grabbing flat-leaf parsley, and think how absurdly lucky they are to have the money and the shops to spend it in on these items which are, quite frankly, luxurious. I have to grow my own flat-leaf parsley or rucola and I've obviously been in the South too long because I start to think that's the way it should be. 0 comments permalink
Tuesday, November 23, 2004 what I ate last: Another major excitement this week was that a kind soul saw my Amazon wishlist item for a decent kitchen knife, my pining for my Global left back in England getting too much but my finances not really stretching to such an extravegant purchase. You know who you are - thank you very much! It's changed my life (or at least my cooking). 0 comments permalink
Monday, November 22, 2004 what I ate last: pumpkin risotto and green salad Another simple, yet satisfying meal courtesy of my trip to DeKalb. The small things I crave here - like the small, hard, sweet pumpkin which I roasted and made into risotto tonight. The only pumpkins here are the hugely swollen, bright orange ones bred solely for carving into jack'o'lanterns and putting on your doorstep. Pumpkin risotto has to be one of the most quintessential autumn foods - its sweetness and texture and colour, the chunks of pumpkin melting in your mouth and the slight bite of the rice. I make mine with chopped rosemary added at the beginning of the process, sauted along with the onions and garlic. Somehow pumpkin and rosemary go really well together and again, rosemary is a very autumnal taste - warming, fragrant, dark. With a green salad as a contrast to the sweet richness of the risotto, it's a simple meal that does everything I want from a home supper. 0 comments permalink
Saturday, November 20, 2004 what I ate last: ribs, fries and slaw at...you know where... The seeming lull in cooking activity is deceptive. The most exciting food event of the last two weeks was my visit in Atlanta to the De Kalb Farmers Market, my excuse being to pick up my boyfriend from the airport. It's a strange place. For the English among you, this is nothing like the Borough Markets of the world. It's a huge supermarket, flying in food from all around the world, hidden in a massive anonymous-looking warehouse in an Atlanta suburb. Endless aisles of exotic vegetables, a huge fish and meat section, and shelves stacked high with the trademarks goods of the foodie middle classes - extra-virgin olive oil, couscous, tofu, spices, dried pulses, red wine. And also the mundane - boring red peppers, rather washed-out tomatoes, large white onions. They don't have free-range chicken, only 'farm raised, all natural' which as we all know is a euphemism and if you were in any doubt, the pallid white skin on the beasts betrayed their upbringing. It made me uneasy, shopping for 'real food' in this environment so redolent of the international food trade and all its excesses. Nevertheless, I was excited by the fish section. Mainly, because they sell off-cuts, the pieces that normal people don't like to deal with. Especially exciting were the cod heads - 99c each - and the bluefin tuna offcuts - $1.49 a pound, as well as wild salmon offcuts and grouper. A steal, for great fish soups, stews, stir-fries and really good stock. So at the moment, I have a fish stew simmering on the stove, and a pile of bones from which all the meat have been cut, waiting for the one big saucepan I own to become free, so I can make a good batch of stock to freeze Considering the utter impossiblity of buying fish here in Greensboro, this is really exciting stuff. The offcuts section was frequented by Asians, who know that the cheeks of fish are the best bit, while all the white people shoped for tame skinned, boned fillets. 0 comments permalink
Tuesday, November 16, 2004 what I ate last: roast lamb, ratatouille, brown rice I got the rest of my Amazon test-drive food deliveries yesterday evening, after I'd finished dinner, so tonight was their testing ground. Sadly I got them all a bit late due to the parcel-delivering customs in deepest Alabama. These are that when we are not home (which is all of the delivery hours), the UPS man knows to deliver our parcels to Barnette Furniture down the road from where we sometimes get a phone call or, as last night, the owner dropping by to inform us rather than that little piece of card in the mailbox. All very well but unfortunately this time I was informed rather late and my leg of lamb which I was so looking forward to definitely did not benefit from the wait despite its careful packing in insulative foam, cold gel bags and so forth. Nevertheless, it was still edible, roasted simply, and the real brown rice that I also ordered (good rice being one of my most insistent food rules) was just what I wanted - nutty, crunchy, especially when I accidentally-on-purpose burnt the bottom a little bit. Despite the lamb being past its best, I still find it amazing that a piece of meat can find its way to smalltown Greensboro through the vagaries of internet and UPS and still be even edible. And having not eaten lamb for two and a half months, it was a very welcome taste. The excitement of receiving packages of food through the mail is also unequalled. Amazon does a fantastic job, especially the wishlist service, which yields me surprises from friends and family just often enough. It does feel, as a reader has noted, rather like shopping at WalMart, but at least I don't have to feel guilty about burning up all that gas to get there and back. 0 comments permalink
Sunday, November 14, 2004 what I ate last: home-made gnocchi and tomato sauce Having my memory jogged by making Nuccia's tomato sauce, and by hearing stories of gnocchi being eaten in London, today I made gnocchi with the left-over mash from last night (another good thing about cooking for one is that there's always plenty of leftovers). Having probably not made these for over a year, I wondered whether I might have forgotten how, but Nuccia's teachings were obviously deeply ingrained because they turned out perfectly, even if I do say so myself. This is one of those recipes that is impossible to give quantities for. Break an egg or two into a pile of mashed potatoes (I made enough for two and used one egg) and mix up gently with a fork. Start gradually folding in flour, keeping a light touch. I couldn't possibly tell you how much flour goes in, except that when you've used enough the dough should be silky and hang together in a ball so that you can knead it very gently by hand. The silky feeling is what you want; too much flour and the dough will be hard and lumpen when cooked. It's really just enough flour to bind the potatoes into a coherent piece of dough and stop them dissolving while they cook. Then start shaping the gnocchi laying them on a floured surface. They swell up when cooked so make them small - the finishing touch with Nuccia was always to mark the surface with a fork so it looked stripy (holds the sauce better? makes the gnocchi less likely to fall apart when cooking?) so they should be about the size where a table fork will easily mark the whole surface, and not too fat. About the size and shape of a large broad bean. Then dust them over with flour, boil your water, throw them in and they are done when they rise back up to the surface. Serve immediately - no waiting for anybody! The lightness of the dough makes homemade gnocchi totally different from the lumpen, heavy dumplings that go by that name in packages or bad restaurants. These should be light and smooth, and I think tomato sauce is really the best accompaniment, none of this cheesy stuff that people sometimes smother them with. These are so easy to make, and quick, I must remember to do them more often. 0 comments permalink
what I ate last: pan-fried chicken breast, porcini mushroom sauce, sweet potato mash, turnip greens Everyone always says how they hate cooking for one. For me cooking a really good meal just for me is one of life's greatest luxuries, as eating in a restaurant by oneself also now is, though the latter used to make me uncomfortable. I am home alone tonight and cooked just for me exactly what I wanted to eat, a proper meal (not just a quick pasta) and sat down and ate it properly with a glass of wine and a glass of water, salt and pepper on the table in front of me, and, in lieu of conversation, a good book to stop me from eating too fast. Once I remember planning for myself a three-course meal because I knew my flatmates were going to be out. Jerusalem artichoke soup as a starter, if I remember right, then lamb chops, and as a dessert I think I had biscotti and poached apricots. It was the greatest treat - not to worry about pleasing everyone's tastes, not to have to have everything done on time or to have to wait for someone who was late for dinner - a sensation of sheer luxury that is all the more so knowing that no-one can witness my greed. Tonight's menu was planned around my new dried porcini from Amazon, which are actually pretty good. I'm getting into the turnip greens thing here too, for me slightly preferable to collard as they have thicker stalks giving them more crunch - some way to the texture of swiss chard. Eating in a restaurant by myself was definitely an acquired taste as a result of travelling a lot on my own, but now I have lost all shame and love it the more for the fact that often staff and fellow customers are rather bemused by the appearance of a single girl wanting a table for one. Especially as then I tend to eat my way through a substantial part of the menu, not restricting myself in the slightest. In England I rarely do eat out on my own, except at local cafes or greasy spoons: the experience is definitely associated with travel. Reading a guidebook at the table in a foreign country, writing postcards with dinner, observing the eating habits of a different culture, striking up conversation with my waiter - these are some of my most vivid travel memories, located in falafel bars in Jerusalem, chic-chi neighbourhood brunch spots in New York, upper-echelon hotel restaurants in Iran and bistros all over France. No fellow traveller to worry about spending too much at a better restaurant, or to fret over the hygiene standards of a backstreets eatery. Just myself, able to eat exactly as I like. 0 comments permalink
Saturday, November 13, 2004 what I ate last: lots of hot green split pea soup I bought a great new skillet today, fed up of using the thin-bottomed telfon-coated frying pans that 'came with the property', as they say. In the flea market here you can buy ancient very heavy cast-iron skillets for 10 bucks, already well-used and worn in with decades of frying chicken, bacon, pork chops and beans. This one will definitely push me over the airline weight limit but it's with me for life now. I'm also happy because I've just made a big pan of tomato sauce to put in small containers and freeze, so when I come back starving from studio on a cold night I know I've got something to eat. Again, it's an inherited recipe that my mother learnt from Nuccia, the fantastic chain-smoking cook at Castello di Volpaia, a beautiful estate in Tuscany making wonderful Chianti and probably the best olive oil and wine vinegar. The owners became our friends when my father fell ill there while on a wine-buying trip about 20 years ago, and was nursed back to health by Nuccia. We have been to stay there almost every year since, and Nuccia has let me make my way into the kitchen at every turn. I learnt to make potato gnocchi with her, and risotto ai funghi, and eaten Easter lamb with artichokes, classic Italian pork scalopettes, potatoes with rosemary, and much much more. The bit that makes this tomato sauce so good is a decent amount of non-tomato stuff - onion, carrot (for sweetness) and some celery - long simmering, bay leaves, black pepper. 0 comments permalink
what I ate last: spaghetti with spinach and chickpeas In need of warming, comforting and tasty food after a hard day's work, I made the above - one of my favorite pasta dishes, and one that falls into the all-important category of 'sauce takes as long to make as pasta takes to cook'. I've streamlined the making of this dish into an extremely efficient process. Chop an onion and plenty of garlic, put in a frying pan with olive oil and a pinch of oregano to soften. Put a couple of bags/big bunches of spinach [this makes enough for 3/4 but the sauce keeps well in the fridge for a couple of days and I've even frozen it before] into the pasta pan with a little water on high heat, steam quickly, then remove and put the pasta water onto boil. Drain a can of chickpeas and rinse. Put the spaghetti in to boil and stir the chickpeas in with the onions. Chop the spinach roughly. At about the time when you are impatient enough to test the pasta, although it quite clearly isn't done yet, add the spinach to the chickpea mixture and stir. By the time the spaghetti is done, the flavours of the sauce will have combined just enough and you're done. The key to this dish is plenty of garlic and plenty of olive oil. Ideally it would be finished with a good swig of extra-virgin just before serving, although Piggly-Wiggly doesn't provide such luxuries so tonight the basic oil had to do. It's also really good finished with some fresh chopped oregano, and sometimes I add diced fresh tomato right at the end too. This always reminds me of home - my mother makes a fantastic version of this, and in the summer with the fresh tomato and oregano from our garden, it's great for an outdoor lunch with some green salad. In the winter with a glass of red wine, it is just what I crave as instant satisfaction. As an aside, my first order from Amazon's food section arrived today - some dried porcini mushrooms. I'm a happy gal. 0 comments permalink
Friday, November 12, 2004 what I ate last: eggs, grits, biscuits, center-cut ham More good breakfast things today - a late one to celebrate finally getting my driving licence here. The Waysider in Tuscaloosa is definitely going to have a return visit. The best biscuits - fluffy and crisp on the outside and my first real grits. They're kinda weird to have with eggs and ham, as they remind me of pudding, but I got used to them by thinking of Japanese rice porridge which is also a savory dish. But the clientele in the Waysider on this Friday around 10.30am was a real pull. Incongruously groomed old ladies meeting for a gossip over their grits, old couples having a double date: the combination of hearty, inelegant food and twin-sets with Southern accents, with a scattering of the check-shirted working men that you would expect to find in such a place. Sort of like a really old-school London chop house, with that East End gentility bordering on roughness - a kind of Lyons Corner House of America. You could imagine having a great date there at a corner table, with a Southern railroad worker who had picked you up on your way home from teaching elementary school. It looks like they do a mean lunch menu too - pot-roast, catfish, collard greens and field peas, corn, squash. 3 comments permalink
Thursday, November 11, 2004 what I ate last: eggs, hash browns, sausage patty and biscuit Eggs in the USA: For the first time here I ordered eggs. How do you want them? I was asked. 'Fried, please' I answered. Blank look. So no-one here talks about fried eggs! and scrambled eggs aren't really scrambled eggs, they're sort-of 'vaguely-stirred-around-while-being-cooked' eggs. And you can't buy free-range eggs anywhere in the Black Belt. I might have to get my own chickens. Though even with the artificially-coloured piggly-wiggly-eggs, last night I did manage to make a pretty good mushroom omelette, all runny in the middle... 1 comments permalink
Wednesday, November 10, 2004 what I ate last: BBQ ribs, fries and slaw from Mustang Oil What is it about the ribs from Mustang Oil that is so much more glorious than the ribs from any other heart-stopping artery-clogging Southern diner? How soft and melting yet crisp and chewy, not too much sauce, those melt-in-your-mouth layers of fat around the knuckles...And accompanied by the best slaw - fresh, crunchy, easy on the mayo, green with flecks of orange carrot and red cabbage, and those inimitable cajun fries. This is how dream-food tastes. Today we hit Mustang Oil at just the right moment, early on, when the fries have just been cooked in preparation for the lunchtime rush and only a scattering of folk sit at the formica tables. Just after we sat down and started to eat, the place filled up with redneck men in grubby jeans, steel-toed boots and baseball caps, from the local metal fabricating company, the John Deere tractor centre, and a few farms and building sites. This place lives at the edge of glorious and worrying in its perpetuation of the stereotypes of Southern life. Grunts of ackowledgement are exchanged, the odd joke, the women behind the counter get to work shovelling chicken, ribs, cheeseburgers, the daily special (today: pork chop and gravy) onto plastic plates. We munch on through our ribs acknowledging the one or two men who we recognise (a local dairy farmer, the man who fixed the lights where we live) and chat to the tiny, wrinkled, slightly crazy old lady who cleans the dishes in a grease-stained Mustang Oil t-shirt and a pink hairnet, and a passion for the Auburn football team. This gas station diner could not exist anywhere else - its name, its food, the severed stag heads adorning the walls, the battered pick-up trucks pulled up outside. If any of y'all are lost in West Alabama, head to Greensboro and eat the best ribs, fries and slaw ever at Mustang Oil. 0 comments permalink
Monday, November 08, 2004 what I ate last: smooth green split pea soup (tastes of home) Call me slow, but I only just noticed that Amazon has started a new section (currently beta-testing) selling food. It's utterly amazing. Not just dried/smoked/bottled things, but fresh meat, fish and vegetables. And what's more peculiar is that the price of their frehs vegetables, such as onions, tomatoes, pototoes or peppers, are actually cheaper than Piggly Wiggly. Admittedly, this is without the shipping charge, but nevertheless, I'm astounded. I'm not sure whether its wonderful or terrible that I could have vegetables delivered by UPS in 1-2 business days. What's even weirder is that half the stuff is from mainstream brands - Dole lettuce, Green Giant, Birds Eye. Does anyone really buy frozen Bird's Eye peas from Amazon rather than their local grocery store? (unless you live in the middle of Alaska, sure...) Certainly, given my starved-of-produce state here, fresh meat and fish by mail is something I'm definitely going to be trying out - pictures of legs of lamb, whole lemon sole and yellowfin tuna have me salivating. Although I can't afford the organic stuff, I can't get ANY lamb or fish here at all, so anything is welcome. But what is going on with our crazy methods of food production whereby this is possible, yet for me to buy locally raised lamb, beef or chicken is impossible? Why do I have to get good fresh food flown in to me when I live in the middle of the countryside surrounded by fields? and why don't more people ask these questions? 1 comments permalink
Sunday, November 07, 2004 what I ate last: curried sweet potato fritters and rice The last couple of days have been pretty good on the food front. Last night I even managed to have two dinners - I'd already cooked and eaten a spaghetti with fresh tomato sauce, when Cara-Mae turned up to bake bread and make herself (and me as it turned out) a sort of cassoulet for supper. And today Cara-Mae and I had a lovely peaceful lunch on the porch of a tiny catfish diner near Mason's Bend - the typical soup from round here (chicken with small broad beans, green beans, corn and a tomato base with a little chilli heat), freshly fried catfish, hush puppies and fries. Catfish when freshly cooked like this is absolutely fantastic despite its ubiquity and simplicity and the hush puppies were fluffy and grainy. We sat and ate, with our sweet tea, while chatting to the owner-cook - a woman by the wonderful name of Willie Pearl, who started the diner in January after deciding to retire from Magnolia, one of the big catfish plants nearby. Before that, she told us she used to cook in people's houses - 'rich white people in town', as she put it. She grew up nearby in a family of 11 children, and was cooking for them from a young age, learning from her mother. All the black women here spend inordinate amounts of time at the stove, while the men occasionally tend a grill or barbecue. Willie Pearl had one of her sons working with her, serving and washing the dishes. 'He don't know to cook nothing', she observed. Catching up on the press, this article is absolutely right - vanity and snobbishness are the only way to eat and keep (reasonably) trim. If you don't deign to eat a big mac then you won't get fat. 0 comments permalink
Friday, November 05, 2004 what I ate last: Risotto ai funghi and a green salad After election night tacos and post-election nothingness, tonight it's back to cooking, thank god. Risotto, one of my most loved foods, though this one has been a long time coming. First, it was impossible to find risotto rice, even in Super Target in Tuscaloosa where they sell that despicable pre-mixed dried rice and mushrooms, but not the rice by itself. After a birthday night conversation with fellow food fascist Frank, the German second year tutor, a packet of very good arborio was dropped in my lap one day in the computer room. Where he got it from I have no idea. Next, stock: it took some time to summon up the courage to buy and cook one of the dubious battery-farmed chickens from Piggly WIggly who swim in their plastic bags in a mixture of blood and water. But I took the plunge and was rewarded by some decent home-made stock. Last, the ingredients to flavour the thing - and I had to fall back on tight button mushrooms which after half an hour of simmering managed to grow some flavour. And cheese - well, you can imagine, it was Kraft shredded parmesan out of a plastic bottle. The saviour of the enterprise was some fresh parsley which I found hidden at the back of the vegetable shelf. If I say so myself, it turned out remarkably well - al dente, flavorsome, fresh - though maybe my starved taste-buds were over-reacting. And mushroom risotto is the taste of autumn, which has suddenly arrived with piercing blue sky and chilly air. English friends tempt my with talk of pigeon and other game, and reading 'Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness' makes me wonder why this lush land isn't offering me these joys, but still, my stomach is happy... 0 comments permalink
Tuesday, November 02, 2004 what I ate last: A very autumnal borlotti bean, beef and noodle soup Today I didn't have any lunch. My so-called team mates all went off for their separate lunches with their secret lovers/inseparable best friends, while I was ensconced in the computer lab oblivious to their whereabouts until my gurgling stomach alerted me to the fact that...I didn't have a ride into town for lunch. G.B's store only has a limited range of edible things and a packet of cookies really doesn't suffice. It put me in a pretty ratty mood, I must say, though luckily no-one was on the receiving end of it because, well, no-one was there. Bastards. So it was good to get home and dig out some real hot food, suiting the dark evening (winter drawing in). Noodles in a sort of Mittel-Europa soup are my only exception to the al dente pasta rule. Sloppy and soupy suits them best. This one was a bit of a cheat, made with frozen borlotti bean soup that I made about a month ago, and left-over beef, but somehow all the better for it in the way that left-over meals can be. Tastes of autumn on All Souls Day. 0 comments permalink
Monday, November 01, 2004 what I ate last: see below How does this country manage to mangle its food so? Today's lunch was an especially appalling example - starving, stopping at a chain restaurant off the interstate which I was assured by my travelling companions was 'pretty alright' (though I thought it looked terrible) for 'Italian' food bearing so little resemblance to anything coming from Italy and tasting disgusting into the bargain. Breadsticks: just so you guys at Olive Garden know, breadsticks are crisp and crunchy, and long and thin, not doughy, soft, lightly elongated versions of hotdog rolls covered in a slick of not-olive oil and salt. 'Italian dressing': what the hell is that about? No salad dressing in Italy has dried flakes of oregano and basil in it, or whatever weird stuff they put in there to make it semi-creamy. And no salad in Italy contains jalapeno peppers, grated cheese, croutons, shredded carrot or iceberg lettuce. Bruschetta does not come as a do-it-yourself plate of toast and minutely chopped, slightly dessicated tomato covered in balsamic vinegar, NO OLIVE OIL, and more of those wretched flakes of dried oregano. It's meant to be a heavenly conconction drizzled in peppery oil, soaking into the toast, juicy and luscious. And I didn't think that it was possible to overcook pasta so much, and to pair it with totally raw diced green pepper and more of the desiccated tomato, slathered with some glutinous MSG sauce. Probably the most depressing meal I've had in America so far. Remind me never to trust my travelling companions food tips, and proudly be the food fascist I normally am. 1 comments permalink
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