Rush Hour Shortcuts
I start each week with grand plans of beautiful dinners and creative leftovers for lunch. But over here at the corner of rush hour and reality is a very busy family of four, and to make our dream meals come true, we have to be dedicated. We’ve gotta do the planning, the shopping, the chopping–and clean it all up afterward. And I don’t mind doing it; but we also need to be at a meeting, drop off at karate, pick up at ballet and make it to our dentist appointments. Cue “The Lone Ranger” theme song.
Celebrity chefs, magazines and cookbooks inspire me to strive toward better end products in the kitchen. But if I hear one more time about homemade chicken stock that I can “just throw together when I keep a bird carcass and vegetable trimmings in my freezer,” read more…
Top o’ the Mornin’ to Ya!
Those who like to cook don’t wait for a holiday to bring out the big guns, and many of the folks associated with Plummelo tend to find any excuse for celebration, whether a regular Wednesday or a nationally celebrated holiday.
Two of our more Irish-inclined guest bloggers are planning a bit of a food extravaganza for St. Patrick’s Day. It has everything to do with fun and flavor, and not a lot to do with luck.
Robin Horrigan, guest blogger
Our house is covered with shamrocks and the local leprechauns have been getting into a lot of mischief. The head leprechaun in charge, ahem, that’s me, is planning a fun feast for dinner on the 17th.
My husband and I both love hearty Irish cuisine and always find March to be the perfect, blustery month to enjoy it. This week we roasted pre-seasoned lamb chops from Whole Foods and made Martha Stewart’s recipe for colcannon, the traditional Irish potato & cabbage casserole, to complement the meal. Tomorrow I am starting the day by baking Irish Soda Bread to go with Beef & Guinness Stew, and we’re finishing off with the Hot Nutty Irishman, an Irish coffee drink with Frangelico, Kahlua, Baileys and whipped cream while we snuggle up to watch one of our favorite movies, “Waking Ned Devine.” All leprechauns invited!
Julie Hallinan, guest blogger
I am not Irish, but my last name certainly is. I decided that was reason enough to cook corned beef and cabbage for the first time in my life, coupled with the fact that we have a special guest for dinner tonight. I found an easy corned beef, cabbage, carrot and potato recipe to prepare in the slow cooker–similar to this one. I can smell it now, fragrant after simmering all day. (Good thing I like cabbage.) Stay tuned for the reviews.
And don’t forget the Chocolate Guinness Cupcakes topped with “frothy” Baileys Irish Cream [cheese] frosting!
So hopefully at this point, you have embraced the beauty of screwcap wine. It is no longer a sign of cheap wine, but rather incredibly convenient and offers assurance against insidious cork taint.
The new wave in wine packaging is even more difficult for some consumers to get their head around, but I promise that the benefits outweigh any silly snobbery. Folks, it’s time to stop thinking outside the box and simply drink what’s inside of it.
First made popular in Australia and synonomous with Franzia in the United States, box wine is now moving from plonk to posh. (For any of you uber-traditionalists shaking your heads, might I remind you that at one time wine was stored in goat skins and I don’t think any of us would eagerly return to those glory days!)
This is a topic that has intrigued me for many years, to the extent that I wrote my Master’s thesis on premium box wine. Needless to say, it has been incredibly exciting to finally see the vision become a reality.
This year we have seen the explosion of high quality wine in 1-liter Tetrapaks, like you see for soymilk or stock, as well as 3-liter bag in boxes from around the glob
Why is this a good thing? read more…
My crock pot began as a joke, but has turned out to be anything but.
Over Thanksgiving seven years ago, my husband suggested we get a crock pot. I have no idea where this came from since this is the man who cooks nothing but the occasional Thanksgiving turkey or Christmas roast. But I thought he was onto something. After all, we had an infant at the time and another mom friend of mine had been raving about the simplicity of dinner in the slow cooker prepared during naptime.
Next thing I knew, read more…
Man vs. Cured Meat
On the tails of Friday’s popular post about bacon, we give you another mouth-watering tribute to cured meat.
There is something about the transformation of a simple cut of pork into sausages and salumis that smacks of alchemy. Our relationship with Italian delicacies like prosciutto, pancetta, and mortadella is usually limited to ordering them from the deli counter of a market or Italian specialty food store, so it’s easy to believe that this feat can only be accomplished by aging nonnas laboring away somewhere in a hill town outside of Bologna. We assume they know things about pork and charcuterie that we could never hope to, so we step to the counter and humbly order our quarter pound of sopressata like everyone else.
I never considered trying to cure pork on my own until I found myself far from the dependable supply lines of Italian food that I had become accustomed to when living in my native Boston. While staring at an overpriced, watery, shrink-wrapped hunk of pancetta in a market recently, read more…
Better with Bacon
Once upon a time when I was new to a group of friends, a now-dear pal asked about the fruit salad at a summer party, “Is it vegetarian?” I laughed out loud, wondering how a fruit salad could possibly incorporate meat. Little did I know that my gang could find a way to sneak bacon into just about anything. “Bacon makes it better” is a favorite motto.
Bacon has gotten a bad reputation as a greasy diner food that has no place in a healthy diet; but cooks can use bacon to add punch to otherwise boring meals without going overboard. I think the larger problem with this salt-satisfying cured pork product is that although it is easy to cook, it’s messy and sometimes painful (splatters! ouch!) with intense cleanup. And the house can smell like bacon for days.
When I have bacon on hand, read more…
Colette was standing aside the stove, juice glass in one hand, scissors in the other, barking at me to get in the shower and dress for lunch. “Vite! Vite! On mange!”
We were in Sète, France, my first French host family and I, lazing about for a week at their summer abode. Every morning I would run through the terraced seaside town, hoping to sweat out every gram of chocolate I’d filched the day prior.
I was sixteen, and a wannabe vegetarian. But I’d been too polite to tell the Provençal family who’d taken me in that I didn’t eat meat. Au contraire, the more they piled onto my plate, the more I ate.
There were lamb chops and grilled sardines that we inhaled until our teeth clanked against the bones, headcheese and calf’s testicles that I thought would land me in the local clinic. Every chance I got–breakfast, late afternoon and even late night–I’d steal a hunk of baguette with butter, jam or Nutella. A sweet antidote to all those other toxins I was pumping into my body. Or so I thought. read more…
The Armchair Epicurean
I love everything about cooking. Except for the actual act of cooking.
And, I’d imagine, to the food-passionate circles of which I dream of being part, such a declaration would be akin to telling, say, a whale activist that I like everything about saving whales except for having to actually cut those storied nets and save them.
I read food magazines and chef memoirs. read more…
Pickled Pandemonium: A Themed Food Party
Life in my social circle is one food related adventure after another, and this February has been no different. A few weeks back, a friend threw a pickle party, where everyone buys or makes their own pickled something or other. (I know: something about me draws in the culinary eccentricity. I’ve learned to embrace it.) I was smitten with the idea; themed food parties can be so fun!
When one ingredient, preparation process, or general theme is made universal, creativity and playfulness (two of my favorite elements in cooking) often come to the fore. For example, when the same friend moved out of her old apartment in August, she had a rather more racily themed “Skin and Bare It” party to beat the heat. read more…
The Midday Gourmet
When we talk about meal planning, we’re usually talking about dinner. So what about lunch? Left unplanned. Left to the last minute. This phenomenon is what I call the lunch dilemma.
More often than not, I come home from the kindergarten pick-up at 11:30 and start the scavenger hunt for lunch. I am usually so hungry and know it will take a few minutes, so I start nibbling on something while I make my daughter’s lunch and figure out what I am going to eat. I grab a Diet Coke and reach for my old standby, pretzels. This gets me nowhere, really… because then I am thinking “what goes with pretzels and Diet Coke?” read more…
