3 ways of looking at vanilla sugar

May 15, 2009

Vanilla beans are pricey, but they’re well worth it. Especially if you consider what they are: the hand-pollinated, hand-picked, cured, dried and fermented fruit of an orchid.  One of the ways to get the most out of every Mexican, Tahitian or Bourbon-Madagascar bean is to save the pods–after you’ve scraped the seeds from them or [...]

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Grow your own salad

May 15, 2009

This is a box of lettuces, well, two, that took only a few weeks to grow.  They’re set up atop a low table in the backyard, in soil that came from a large compost box about 20 feet away.  The seeds are from a packet (you can see it there on a little stick; how’s [...]

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Chile tacos with parsley salsa verde

May 14, 2009

If you don’t have a good taco truck in your neighborhood, then you have to make do and cook your own.  These are my favorite tacos to make, other than fish tacos (more on that later).  It’s a Deborah Madison recipe, with a few modifications: different chiles, corn instead of flour tortillas.  (Local Flavors, p. [...]

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A trail of breadcrumbs

May 12, 2009

You can buy breadcrumbs at stores, which I find completely absurd given how many bits of baguette I always have at home–and the inherent lunacy of paying money for someone else’s stale crumbs.  Instead of buying the stuff (it tastes and looks like ground up cardboard anyway), simply save the ends of loaves or the [...]

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Turkish coffee & spice grinders

May 11, 2009

These utterly gorgeous contraptions are brass grinders, made for pepper or other spices, or for the grinding of Turkish coffee. They’re both from Turkey: the smaller of the two I bought at the spice bazaar in Istanbul a few years ago; the larger is from Turkish Coffee World, a fantastic online site that sells Turkish [...]

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Weights & measures, ratios & scales

May 4, 2009

More than other kinds of cooking, baking relies on precise measurements, which is the reason why many baking recipes (particularly European recipes) call for ingredients to be weighed rather than measured out in cups or liters.  This is especially true of flour, which can be an enormous variable depending on how you fill your cup [...]

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Nutella espionage

April 28, 2009

Recently, a friend of mine passed an unmarked brown paper bag to me during a walk through a crowded Los Angeles farmers market.  Passersby eddied around us; the traffic cop stationed in front of the alley conducted her street orchestra.  We were so busy looking at the fruit-laden stalls that we didn’t say anything or [...]

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Still life of gremolata on a counter top

April 26, 2009

Fishing around for something to make for dinner the other night, or more accurately for something to spice up dinner, I made a quick gremolata on the counter top.  Gremolata, the traditional garnish for osso bucco, is a simple fine chop of fresh parsley, lemon and garlic.  The beauty of it is that it’s stunningly [...]

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