Fish with Leeks and Tomatoes

We're still traveling, and won't be home for a couple of weeks. Here's a recipe from the archives to keep you busy and happy till we get back. Bon Appetit!

Growing up in an Irish Catholic family meant that we ate fish on friday. Every friday, without fail. 

Actually, as Catholics, we weren’t obliged to eat fish. We just couldn’t eat meat. At our house, though, 'no meat' meant fish. So we ate fish every Friday. We didn’t live especially close to the sea (Atlanta), and the selection of fresh fish at that time wasn’t great. We were also a large family (Irish Catholic, remember?). All of this meant that we ate a lot of the dreaded Tuna Noodle Casserole. With potato chips on top. No peas. We also ate a lot of salmon patties made from canned salmon. I still like these. I haven’t made them in a long time, though. Hmmm....

To Slip the Surly Bonds of Earth

I remember the first time I flew on a commercial airliner. I was 19 and on my way from Atlanta to Knoxville to visit my college roommate. I was absolutely enchanted with the experience of flying, and couldn’t wait to do it again. I loved the rush of takeoff, being slammed back into my seat and that magic moment when this enormous awkward machine became weightless.

Many years later, I had a job that required that I fly about 400,000 km / 250,000 miles a year. Every week I would leave home on Sunday (or the crack o’dawn Monday if I was lucky) and fly to a different city to meet with clients. Often I would repeat this every day till Friday, when I got to fly home. If there was a storm in Chicago or a tornado in Atlanta my carefully constructed week would shatter and I’d have to phone my bff, my travel agent. She bailed me out more times than I can count. 

Ristorante Zio Gigi: Home cooked food in the heart of Florence

We're traveling again. This time we're in Florence, where we spend our mornings in Italian class and our afternoons exploring this amazing city. 

In Florence there are hundreds of restaurants, pizzerias, osterias, tavernas, bars, cafes. It’s hard to choose; there are so many. We love to wander off the main piazzas, looking for that special little place where everyone likes to go. Where they know your name and they know how mamma made lunch. 

Last November we stumbled on a place like that: Ristorante Zio Gigi. It’s a little place like many others, but something about the menu caught our eye. And when the door opened, we heard singing. Loud, boisterous, welcoming. We had to go in--we had no choice. 

Mayo Clinic

Let's face it: no matter how much we love our favorite ones, sometimes we feel the need to spice things up. I get bored with the same old thing. Come on, admit it—you do too. I mean, we've all tried to make it more exciting, haven't we? A little spice helps a lot, I think. I've been playing around lately, going farther than ever before, and I think I've found some tricks. So if you're tired of plain old mayonnaise, why not send your mayonnaise to the Mayo Clinic for a little lift?

Donna Hay Photo Challenge

Simone of Junglefrog Cooking has a monthly photo challenge. She picks a photo (and recipe) from Donna Hay Magazine and challenges us to replicate the photo as closely as we can. The object of this exercise is not to copy someone else's work (ew) but rather to sharpen our skills in food styling and analysing the light in a photo. Why? So that we can be better photographers and do our own work better.

I'll admit that I don't normally gravitate to food challenges. However, after the Plate to Page workshop I began to think about how to do a better job of styling and photographing my recipes, and this challenge seems to me to be the perfect way to continue the learning that I started at P2P. 

New Year's Traditions: Hoppin John

I have a confession to make. I really don’t like New Year’s. To me, it’s an artificial thing. Don’t get me  wrong, I love the IDEA of it--a new start, wipe the slate clean and begin anew. What’s better than that?

The problem is that we seem to take all our problems, resentments, wounds into the new year. We can’t seem to leave them behind. We try to feel as if it’s a brand new year, but if we’re honest with ourselves, nothing is different, is it? At midnight we say HAPPY NEW YEAR! and we pop corks and throw confetti and set off fireworks and we try to feel as if something is different, something is new. But it really isn’t. At least for me.

Merry Christmas 2011

In

this

season

of star light

and candle light

when hope lights up

all our lives, we gather to

decorate

a tree

Each ornament is a shining reminder that happiness comes one thought, one action, one day at a time.

Best wishes for happiness from our house to yours. 

.

Orange Cupcakes with Chocolate Cardamom Ganache

Sometimes you find something that just works. For me, that's chocolate and orange. Chocolate and cardamom. Ok, to be honest, that's chocolate and just about anything (but probably not brussels sprouts).

I've been working at a new part time job. I would dearly love to learn how to make chocolates, and I offered my local chocolatier Christophe Saive my slave labor during his busy season if he'd teach me to make chocolates after the rush. I think I'm going to be way ahead on this deal!

STANDOFF!!

They say that there's a Chinese curse that goes something like, “May you lead an interesting life”. I have to say that parts of my life have been very interesting indeed. I came of age in Atlanta during the Civil Rights era, when Martin Luther King was still alive. I saw him show the effectiveness of nonviolent resistance, and it's a lesson I've never forgotten—even if sometimes my Irish temper doesn't let me put it into action... 

Plate to Page: A Weekend to Remember

On a recent Friday, 4 friends and 12 strangers gathered for lunch at a villa in Tuscany. Monday morning 16 fast friends hugged goodbye, promising to keep in touch. In between, there was work and laughter and photos and wine and food. Lots of food. This was Plate to Page Tuscany.

Plate to Page is a workshop that combines food writing and food photography. And food styling. All in three days. Whew! A lot to do. And we did it all.

My Dream Lunch and a Winner!

There is a restaurant I’ve wanted to visit since I first read about it when I was in grad school. It just ticked all the boxes for me, and I’ve had it on my list of things to so ‘someday’ ever since. 


Whenever we came to the Bay area I tried to get reservations, but I was always too late. This trip, however, a friend of Dan’s invited us for lunch. He’d managed to get the reservations by staying up till midnight and at 12:01on the day they were available he pounced. Needless to say, I was thrilled! 

Lunch at the CIA

Yesterday we drove from San Francisco to Napa to have lunch with some friends. It was my first time in the Napa Valley, and it is gorgeous. The hills and fields are covered with vineyards--rows and rows of vines as far as the eye can see. These corduroy hills are the home of some famous American wine names, and as we drove we could see their names all around us. 

We got to our friends’ house and spent (not enough) time catching up and touring their wonderful garden. Then it was off to lunch. I was a little surprised when Jan told us that we’d be eating at the CIA. When you lived in DC for as long as we did, “lunch at the CIA” sounds a little ominous. I tend to start thinking of all the the things I’ve done wrong and wondering which one they’ll be wanting to ask me about--kind of like when that police car is following you for a while... 

Le Bilan and a Giveaway

Well. It’s been a long time since I posted here. I know. I’ve been pretty much staying away from food stuff lately—as my goal weight approaches. And now I can proudly say that I’M THERE! And now it’s time to ‘faire le bilan’.

In French, the word ‘bilan’ means ‘the bottom line’. Heh, when talking about a diet, is there a better description? Since I started my diet with a ‘rechnung’, it seems appropriate to end it with a ‘bilan’. For me, there have been some interesting results. 

Some are about the obvious—weight lost, fitness gained, etc—but others have been about the reactions of others and my own re-training of my eating habits. So here we go. After 12 weeks of dieting, here are my results: 

Making lemonade

No, those aren't lemons, and the only lemonade we made was the kind you make when life hands you lemons. Last Thursday one of my neighbors showed up on my doorstep with a case of little green plums. It seems that her sister's plum tree had so many plums on it that it fell over! They had an absolute GLUT of them. So she brought me a few... eight and a half kilos of plums, to be exact. (18.7 pounds) That's a lot of plums when they're not much bigger than an large cherry!

Oh, my. I love plums, especially these little ones. Normally I'd be thinking about clafouti, pies, tarts.On my diet, though, I can't eat fruit right now. None. Not one little tiny plum, let alone 8 ½ kilos of them. What to do?

In Praise of Everyday Miracles

One of the things that I've been doing since I've been on this diet is walking. At least 30 minutes. Every day. Rain or shine, hot or cold (Belgium, remember?). I have several routes, depending on whether it's raining or not, how far I want to go, whether I want hilly or flat, or just how I feel.

Katrin's Summer Beans

No, I haven't disappeared. I've not been cooking much, since I've been on this diet. Roast chicken, grilled steak, fish with leeks and tomatoes. You've either seen these recipes or you don't need them. So I haven't been posting. MISTAKE! Because we've been travelling....

The Reckoning (recipe: Fish Terrine)

In restaurants in Germany, when you finish your meal you don't ask for the bill. You ask for 'die rechnung'. It's what tells you how much you have to pay for your excesses at the table. As you may have guessed, this word is the root of our English word 'reckoning'. Which also has to do with paying for your excesses.

Apocalypse

So. The world ended yesterday sometime when I wasn't looking. I guess we're now in paradise—a place where we have everything we need to be happy. To me the world looks the same as it did before. Maybe we always lived here? Maybe we've always had everything we needed to be happy?

Occupational Hazards

I've been a little bit under the weather lately. No, that's not really true—I've been on the injured reserve list. I have a kitchen injury.

We're all familiar with the normal kitchen injuries: burns and cuts. When we work with fire and knives we expect a little blister or cut from time to time. Sometimes we even have something more dramatic, like the time I sliced the tip off my little finger while preparing dinner for some friends. It bled significantly for a couple of hours. When I say 'significantly' I mean that I had blood dripping off my elbow as I held my tightly wrapped hand above my head (why hold it above my head? I don't really know—it seemed like a good idea at the time).

CARDAMOM LIME TEA CAKE

I have been trying to figure out how to bake with gluten-free flours. I have quite a collection: brown rice, white rice, corn (fine and coarse), buckwheat, almond, oat. But wait, there's more! Teff, millet, quinoa, chestnut, chickpea, coconut. I keep thinking that I have to 'know' each one before I know how to combine them. I've been a little discouraged, to be honest.

As I read more and more about gluten- and wheat- free baking, I see similar recipes with different flours and I don't understand why they used one as opposed to another. I don't like it when I don't understand...