Food, Photography and Bons Mots
With apologies to George and Ira Gershwin: You say grits, I say polenta. Somehow making polenta made me think of the Gershwins’ classic “Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off”– people squabbling about inconsequential differences. (If you are not familiar with the depression-era song, here is…
Need a little spice in your life? (Who doesn’t?) This spicy pozole soup should do the trick. Pozole is the Spanish word for hominy. Hominy is a traditional ingredient in Mexican cooking. It’s use, in fact, dates back to the kitchens of the Aztecs when…
Potato salad.
It’s a beautiful thing.
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This recipe is adapted from one that appears in Barefoot Contessa At Home. The book is available on Amazon here.
This is a very good vinaigrette. Glorious, in fact. The hot new chef, Samin Nosrat, featured this salad dressing recipe in a recent New York Times Magazine food piece titled “Best Green Salad in the World.” That kind of high praise made me think this…
An abundance of riches… My mango odyssey continues. I recently let my heart rather than me head guide my purchase of a case of sixteen Manila mangoes at my favorite Vietnamese market. What was I thinking? Sixteen rapidly-ripening mangoes is quite a challenge for a party of…
Ever considered making your smoothies in your washing machine?
I didn’t think so.
Apparently others have. ABP, a Hindi news station in India, has reported instances where Indian smoothies, lassis, have been bulk produced in washing machines. HSBC , the British multinational banking and financial services holding company, even distributed a cute advertisement about the practice. You can see it here: HBSC Lassi Washing Machines.
So, why am I bringing this up? Smoothies have been on my mind lately and I’ve been enjoying a lot of them as breakfast drinks. I recently came across a recipe for Mango Lassi Frozen Yogurt and I couldn’t wait to give that recipe a try.
A lassi, if you are unfamiliar with the drink, is an Indian smoothie made with dahi (yogurt) and water. Indian sources are hazy about the ancient origins of the drink but not hesitant to tout its virtues. Lassi is claimed to have Ayurvedic healing properties, calming the mind and healing the body. Devotees credit the probiotic drink with everything from cooling you down on a hot day to aiding the digestion of heavy food.
The drink is a blank, creamy canvas for all sorts of variations including spice-laced lassis, sugared ones, and fruit-based ones like mango lassis. Sometimes there are other additives, too. Anthony Bourdain, ever the food adventurer, was able to seek out a lassi (a bhang lassi) laced with cannabis in Rajhastan. He recorded the experience on his program, No Reservations, and joked that he wanted a “wake up in the morning…what the hell happened?…where is my passport? these aren’t my clothes” kind of experience. Funny tragic man.
Here is the recipe for Mango Lassi Frozen Yogurt. It is as delicious as it is beautiful.
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This recipe is adapted from one that appears on the Serious Eats site here.
Cooking brings people together. Right? Apparently that is not is the case if the food is hummus. The chickpeas themselves don’t seem to be the subject of much debate. It is generally believed that they have been harvested as food since antiquity. Harold McGee, in…
I’ve been making (and enjoying) this soup for a very long time. This corn chowder recipe first ran in the Los Angeles Times on September 30, 1998–21 years ago. The Times food section had a “Quick Fix” column at the time and this recipe was…
Nineteen hundred and twenty two NY Times readers can’t be wrong. That is how many NYT cooks have rated this Guinness cake an average of five stars (out of five stars), some giving the cake rave written reviews sprinkled with praises like “Divine!” and “Insanely Good!.”
Some of the NYT reviewers went so far as to suggest subbing in some Bailey’s Irish Cream for some of the heavy cream called for in the cream cheese frosting. Who could argue with that!
The only consistent negative review was that the cake, once baked, sinks a bit in the middle. I figured that wouldn’t happen to me. Baking this cake isn’t my first rodeo. I know my way around the kitchen.
Sure enough, though, when I baked the cake, the center sank. Damn.
Not to worry, though. There were lots of recommendations to relax (maybe drink some of the Irish Cream!) and just cover up that little flaw with a heavier application of the cream cheese frosting. Who would know?
It was also recommended to use a quality beer in the recipe, one with a more complicated flavor profile to enhance the cake’s flavor. One person, interestingly, recommended using North Coast’s Old Rasputin’s Imperial Stout in the recipe. What? Having taught European history for a very long time and being infatuated with Russian history, that recommendation caught my eye. Any beer named after the wily Rasputin has to be very interesting. Rasputin, if you have forgotten your Russian history, was the debauched consigliere to Tsarina Alexandra, the wife of the last Russian Tsar. Desperate, she welcomed him into the Russian court believing that he could cure her son’s hemophilia. His subsequent notoriously-debauched behavior led to his murder by a group of nobles. The Romanov dynasty collapsed a few months later.
North Coast’s Old Rasputin’s Stout, it turns out, is produced in the tradition of 18th Century English brewers who supplied the court of Russia’s Catherine the Great. With its rich and complex flavors, the stout has quite a cult following. Seems kind of appropriate for a beer named after Rasputin.
Here is my adaptation of the recipe.
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Do you have filo phobia? Afraid to touch the delicate sheets of filo for fear that they will tear into a million pieces? If so, this recipe is for you. It is called Greek Rag Pie and the recipe actually calls for you to…
