Gilding the Lily since 2006
I hate talking about it, but I’ve been sort of counting my calories the past week or so. I should have started a few months ago, but we’ve only just started to have nice weather. Cloudy days were invented for chicken and dumplings, and we’ve …
Just a quickie post this time, because it’s canning season again, and I’m getting busy. My season starts with strawberries and other lovelies from California (mostly just halving and freezing to buy sweet time), but it’s also a great time for pickling the early birds. …
Yes, spring is here in Portland, but hanging-on cloudy days have me clamoring for earth tones. I’ve always preferred muted earth tones and rich jewel tones, and even though I should be eating piles of sweet green pea tendrils and fennel bulbs, I don’t mind …
I usually don’t cook from cookbooks, but occasionally one finds oneself with a surfeit of some wintry CSA crucifer like cauliflower, and after gazing at your kitchen shelf, still shockingly covered in dusty quart jars of pickles, decide maybe you’ll try cooking the damn thing …
Many foods are evocative of one’s place of peasant origin, of one’s mother-tongue. When done properly, the mere smell of these foods has the power to bring a grown man to his blubbering knees, felled by memories of hiding shy behind grandma’s apron. Borscht is …
Umami is a many-splendored thing. I love just piling it on in my dishes, and I am even known to add a scant whisper (or sometimes more of a prattle) of MSG to my dishes. Oh, lower those eyebrows, you. MSG is harmless. I see …
Spring has indeed sprung, yet I always find myself at this time of year with a certain yen for autumnal things. Pomes and root vegetables; meats cooked to shredded perfection, their connective stuff all pulverized (by time, or pressure) to gelatin. These are good things, …
All this cold rain has the nettles taking their sweet time, but in my spot, they’re up a little. They’re up enough, anyway, about three nodes or so, and I snip off the top two and slip them in my bag. Zephyr whines from his …
…or, Variation on a Theme I know – I talked about making tomato soup only a few weeks ago. Get off my back! It’s been really rainy! And besides, if you had all these jars of home-canned heirloom tomatoes staring at you from your pantry …
Everyone has been complaining lately about the utterly deplorable suckfest that was 2010. I may have been too shell-shocked, too sleep-deprived and too baby-stoned to notice the surfeit of misery apparently all around me (oxytocin’s a helluva drug), but I really didn’t think last year …