cook pot stories

Our recent move to Kansas City means I've discovered some wonderful new foods. It's been great, exploring the local restaurants and markets. It also means a few of the things I am accustomed to just aren't available or have become prohibitively expensive.  Moving to KC also means developing new relationships. One way to do this is by mining your connections; work is the most obvious, so last week Kevin and I hosted a dinner party for some of his work colleagues. When he first arrived at his new job he was teasingly told that the new guy needs to feed all of his new work buddies. We asked what they wanted and they suggested something from New England.  Now, although I lived in New England for over 20 years, I never really took to the local cuisine. I loved the fresh seafood that is so abundant, but most of the New England food I experienced was  either fresh, simple and seasonal (yay!) or bland, solid and designed to get you through a long, cold winter (eh). Ye...

This week was the conclusion of a 6-week cooking class I took at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts.   I wanted to approach this with a beginner's mind so I discovered a great deal, not only about cooking but about learning and myself. What did I learn, in my adventure into cooking and beginner's mind? A few things, all of which can be taken literally or metaphorically. Sharp knives matter. Cutting with a dull knife takes longer, requires more effort and you're much more likely to hurt yourself. Make sure your knife is honed as well as sharpened even if you have to expend a little bit of energy to make it so. Use the knife that fits your hand. No matter how big, flashy or expensive, if you can't use it comfortably you won't use it well. When in doubt, add a little more butter. Okay, this may not apply to everything, but almost everything. A little bit of richness in the mouth or in our lives isn't necessarily a bad thing. Even if you have cholest...

You know how sometimes you have an idea for a dish and it just doesn't work? I chalk those episodes up to educational moments. I learn something each time I fail . Equally, I learn when I succeed. And I get to do happy dances. I recently had an idea for a seafood dish reminiscent of cioppino , but as usual I wasn't planning on following any real recipe. It worked beautifully and I'm still feeling smug, especially as this was a birthday dinner for a friend. Perhaps that means I really should have followed a recipe and I was just lucky. I gathered together my ingredients: peeled and deveined shrimp cherrystone clams chopped pepper, onion and garlic chopped chorizo chopped palm hearts chopped tomatoes a can of stewed tomatoes a can of chopped clams a can of seafood broth I sauteed the peppers, onions and garlic, then added in sequence, letting it cook for a bit each time: the sausage the palm hearts the tomatoes along with some basil and pepper the broth and ca...

Some time ago I posted about my problem with cookbooks. I have too many of them I don't use often enough. In that post I said I would try to use them more often and would blog about the results. Well, it's been awhile, but finally I have something to report - an exciting failure. I think we need to talk more about our failures because we learn as much from experimentation and failure (stretching our boundaries) as we do from our successes. I'm putting my money where my mouth is. And where my cake went. I needed to make a dessert for dinner with friends. Rather than go to any of my tried and true recipes or the store, I decided to try something from one of my old cookbooks. After some pleasant reading I settled on this one, The New Pennsylvania Dutch Cook Book by Ruth Hutchinson, (c) 1948 and 1958. Each chapter begins with some homely advice, the recipes themselves are straightforward and largely attributed to various wives - Mrs. Donald Hellferich, Mrs. Thomas B. Keck - w...