Without intending to write a follow-up to my last posting on heirloom seeds, I’ve done so with this story, which deals with the other h word—heritage breeds.

A couple of weeks ago, after having done the work of making a double batch of David Leite’s Amped-Up Red Pepper Paste as well as his Piri-Piri Sauce, both in his cookbook The New Portuguese Table, I decided to make two poultry recipes that would highlight their flavors.

I started with Leite’s Quick Weekday Roast Chicken with Potaotes. The chicken is (more…)

If you are running for your life in a landscape infested with zombies, aka “walkers,” and devoid of a modern food distribution system, would you grab your guns or seeds?

In “Seed,” the first episode of this season’s apocolypic zombie series The Walking Dead, Hershel, one-time-farmer now “walker” killer, muses that the caged bit of open green the show’s characters find themselves in could be a planting field for tomatoes, cucumbers, and soy beans.

In this temporary oasis, they have land, symbolized by the dirt Hershel allows to run through his fingers as his imaginary vegetable garden takes shape. But oops! No seeds.

Even if Hershel had the presence of mind to (more…)

I used to think the difference between a tortilla and frittata is that the former is flipped and returned to the pan to brown and the latter is browned in the oven.

Why I ever wanted to categorize, classify, and clarify, in my own mind, the characteristics of the frittata versus tortilla, I don’t know. David Leite’s recipe for a sausage tortilla in his cookbook The New Portuguese Table freed me from that pointless exercise, which is not to the main point: enjoying a delicious egg dish, whatever its regional names or styles of making.

Leite’s tortilla, or tortilha in Portuguese, similar to (more…)

On the fourth glorious day of eating Green Olive Dip, while sitting on our front porch in our Victorian neighborhood, I realized what is so intriguing about this dip. And why I love David Leite’s cookbook The New Portuguese Table and the Dowdy Corners Cookbook Club.

To my non-Portuguese palate, evolved from a one part mid-Western, one part Southern, but entirely anchovy-free diet, there is something ever so slightly (more…)

This past weekend, while driving home from a late summer swim, I saw an unusual sign for free tomatoes by the side of a back road. Unusual because here in Vermont, during the last few years, tomatoes have either been (more…)

RIPE
A Cook in the Orchard
by Nigel Slater
Ten Speed Press
591 pp. $40.00

For many, this summer’s read was the phenomenally popular Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James, a soft-porn bondage thriller that has, I have it under good authority, led to an increase in sales of rope in hardware stores.

I got my kicks from reading Ripe by Nigel Slater, a deliciously written bit of (more…)

This is Nigel Slater’s redo of clafoutis, a French rustic dessert that is traditionally made with cherries. Slater’s version is a good showcase for the flavor and color of blueberries: the amount of sugar doesn’t overwhelm their tart aspect, and the pretty blue juices of the berries stain the batter as they burst. The sides and bottom of the pudding, or quasi-custard, as you and I are more likely to think of it, form a nice golden brown crust. The center remains delicate with a near flan consistency.

Blueberry batter pudding is served (more…)

I have some club news—newsier news than the ongoing ebb and flow of members coming and going, and the cycling through of new cookbooks: The Dowdy Corners Cookbook Club will no longer be based out of Dowdy Corners. All else will remain the same: the name (when Steiglitz’s 291 gallery changed address from its location from its original address of 291 Fifth Avenue, he kept the name—so I am too); the growing list of members (Bhakti and Marianne being the most recent to join); and the club’s function—to explore new foods and cooking techniques with a group of likeminded passionate cooks who love cookbooks.

I could stop writing here, and this posting would truly be just an update on club news, and the shortest posting to date. Instead, it may become the longest bit of writing on this blog, except perhaps my posting last year about a trip to France, a place that encourages wordy praise. Aside from poetry, which I do not write, how is it possible to describe the impact of three life-changing years in 500 words or less, the length of a typical blog posting?

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The house at Dowdy Corners is a 1940s cape which, being built on an older (more…)

. . . reading about one of nature’s best flavor enhancers

FAT
An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes
By Jennifer McLagan
Ten Speed Press
240 pp. $32.50

When DCCC members picked Fat this spring, I decided to make The Food of Franceby Waverly Root my companion read. This beautiful book—its is spine embellished with golden fleur-de-lis—is organized by butter, fat, and oil.

I got as far as the second page, where I was stopped in my tracks by a sentence so concise and so contemporaneous, even though the book was published in 1958:

“. . . .food is a function of the soil, for which reason every country has the food naturally fit for it.”

Or, said another way by Dan Barber, (more…)

Filled with seasonal, locally grown strawberries and rhubarb, this galette recipe could be in the newest DCCC pick, Ripe, a gorgeous book devoted to 23 fruits and nuts. But it is not. I haven’t quite left Fat yet, the last DCCC pick. (The club seems to be on a trend of sensual, single word titles.)

After following author Jennifer McLagan’s method for preparing suet for use in pastry, found in Fat, I used it to make a pie. I fell in love with the crispy, flaky texture of the dough, and found it (more…)