Posts Tagged ‘cookbooks’

A Pennsylvania Fall:
Tuna Salad Croquettes

In Berlin, if you blink too fast you’ll miss fall. For the last ten years, I’ve stubbornly insisted that fall is my favorite season. But this year, as I celebrate my decennial in this city, I will finally give up the fight and align myself with team summer. In part, it’s because I recently spent two weeks in my ancestral homeland remembering what a glorious fall is supposed to feel like. The days are still slow-baked with sunshine, but there’s a breeze that tugs against it as night falls. The late-September leaves are just starting to dip-dye orange and red and yellow. It’s sweater weather. It’s decorative gourd season. I have no feelings about pumpkin spice, but maybe I’ve just been away too long.

At the apple harvest festival, held each year in Adams County, Pennsylvania, I reanimated a twenty-year old memory. There were the vats of apple butter being stirred, the Boy Scouts selling hot apple cider. The chainsaw carving demonstration, the craft stands, the antique hand-cranked machine that makes friendship bracelets. The apple fritter, scooped fresh from a bubbling vat of oil and dusted with powdered sugar, so hot it’s hard not to burn your tongue. I grew up in apple growing country, and it has spoiled me for the supermarket. Outside Gettysburg, there’s an orchard market that always provided our autumn apples – they’d have big wooden crates piled high with different varieties, some standard, some heirloom, and we’d fill a big paper bag with them, plus maybe a pumpkin or two and whatever late summer fruits were still coming off the trees. Mom’s apple pie is the best apple pie, but the secret is Hollabaugh’s apples.

The apple fritter, scooped fresh from a bubbling vat of oil and dusted with powdered sugar, so hot it’s hard not to burn your tongue. » Continue reading this post...

There and Back Again –
Introducing Palate

Well. Hello. It’s been some time. The longest time I’ve ever not written something in this space since I started writing in this space eleven years ago. But it’s been some things. It’s been fire and the end of a relationship. It’s been living with boxes for furniture and then unpacking boxes of furniture and getting really good at IKEA instructions once the five months of renovations were up and I was back at home. It’s been painting all the walls and trying to capture photos of Rum Tum the cat at his best angle. It’s been work, so much work, and endless pots of coffee. It’s been bouts of bizarre dreams and insomnia, but also lots of baths and even more reading because I’ve invested in bookshelves. It’s been a trip home for Christmas and a New Year’s cruise in the Caribbean, a weekend at the Baltic and in Amsterdam. It’s been the mundane things, like eating dinner and cleaning the bathroom, brushing my teeth. It’s been getting my bike fixed. It’s been watering the plants. Basically, it’s been life.

And also, it’s been a book. Last year, I decided that if I had nothing else to show for my year, I’d finally get around to finishing the book that’s been sitting on my hard drive 95% done for about four years. The book has had its own dramatic history – it would pick up momentum, garner interest, and then plans would fall through, people got busy. It’s okay, I get it. Life happens. Half the time it was my life happening that got in the way.

But in the same way that all of last year’s bitterest moments revealed just how much I have to be grateful for, the book has always been supported and loved on its journey to becoming, no matter how serpentine the turns. » Continue reading this post...

A Premonition of Winter: Grilled Jerusalem Artichoke Salad with Red Onion and Olives

Jerusalem artichoke salad (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

For me, there is not much more seductive than unwrapping a thick piece of smoked fish from fat-stained wax paper. I don’t know what that says about me, or about what I find seductive, but there you have it. Grease-flecked paper makes me swoon.

Maybe it’s the nostalgia of it, how it recalls a time when we went to the butcher for meat, the fishmonger for fish, the cheesemonger for cheese – and a piece of something would be picked out just for you, weighed on a scale, and wrapped up by hand.

Grilled Jerusalem artichokes (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Onion scrap art (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Lemons for vinaigrette (eat Me. Drink Me.)

This week, I finally made it back to the Winterfeldt Market, a Saturday-only affair I keep skipping because I’m tired or otherwise engaged or am once again lured by the Turkish market’s ludicrously cheap prices on crates of perfectly decent vegetables and fruits.

The Winterfeldt Market is classier, with the price tag to prove it. Most of the sellers are from small organic farms, there are beekeepers with jars of local honey and riotous bouquets of flowers, there’s the guy selling hand-sharpened knives and olive wood cutting boards, the craft vermouth stand, the truck that sells fresh whole fish grilled on the spot, and the tiramisu counter that’s always crammed with people slinging back espressos and digging into pillowy piles of dessert.

Jerusalem artichokes (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Parsley (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Three little onions (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

I don’t go to the market often, but when I do, I’m reassured to find my favorites in the same place, with the same good wares to sell. I always start my market tour with a raclette. I like to watch the big rinds of pungent alpine cheese bubble and brown under the hot metal grill, and the aproned woman working the contraption as she swipes the oozy top layer with a big wooden paddle and spreads it on a piece of crusty white bread, sprinkles it with paprika and parsley. » Continue reading this post...