To round out an intimate Easter dinner with elegant simplicity, one can do no better than the classic Italian semifreddo. At first glance, the name seems contradictory, since it means "partly cold (frozen)" and yet the thing is actually completely frozen.
The usual explanation is that the light, mousse-like texture remains soft even when frozen solid, and doesn't feel quite as cold in the mouth as gelato, sorbet, or ice cream. Read More
Arguably the easiest and best way to prepare asparagus is to cook it whole in a large pan of boiling salted water until it's just crisp-tender—as little as two and no more than four minutes if the spears are nice and fat, then carefully drain, drizzle it with melted butter, and serve it forth. Second to that is to spread it on a baking pan, sprinkle it with olive oil and salt, and roast it in a very hot oven.
The drawback to both those methods is that they're best done just before serving and require the cook's almost undivided attention. When I know my attention is likely to be spread out over several things at the last minute, this sauté is what I turn to.
The asparagus is already mostly cooked, so it's really just a matter of warming it up in the pan, Read More
For those who prefer potatoes as the starchy side at Easter, an alternative to the pasta suggested earlier is this luxurious but simple potato gratin. Based on a classic French one, it's usually made with caramelized onions, but here thinly sliced scallions and a few spring herbs give it a fresh lift and make it a fine accompaniment for either lamb or ham.
Actually, it's pretty compatible with just about anything, and is also lovely with poultry (especially roasted), fish, pork, and venison.
The only real work is grating cheese and scrubbing, peeling, and slicing potatoes. And, actually, those probably don't even have to be peeled if you like the skins. Once those chores are done, it's just a matter of tossing it together and popping it into the oven. Read More
Thin spaghetti simply dressed with butter, freshly-grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, and thinly sliced young scallions has long been a spring standard at my table. I start making it when the first beautiful, slender little scallions appear in the market in late winter, and have it at least once a week throughout the season.
It's the very essence of spring and so perfectly balanced that even thinking of adding a thing risks falling into an exercise in gilding lilies.
But whenever I happen to have fresh thyme on hand, a few of its leaves inevitably find their way into the bowl. Read More
All my life, the way holidays were celebrated has been determined by family obligations. Easter was the lone exception. It was the one holiday with no prior claims on it, the one where we could create our own traditions.
For most of my time in Savannah, I've hosted Easter dinner in my own home or at the very least have planned and executed it from the kitchen of a friend.
Last year laid waste to that tradition. Read More
The older I get, the simpler my cooking seems to become. Whether it's because our aging palates develop a taste for simpler flavors or we just get lazy is a toss up, but the change has been so gradual that it might've gone unnoticed had it not been for the pandemic.
Through this time of isolation, our comfort favorites have been repeated over and over, and I've begun to notice how they've gotten simpler, both in their composition and execution. And it's had its merits. Stripping away extraneous layers, steps, and ingredients has made for cleaner, more direct flavors, not to mention a whole lot less fuss.
This soup is a good example. Read More
It's been one of those cold, wet Sunday afternoons in Savannah, the kind that's perfect for having a hearty, comforting stew simmering in the kitchen.
"Stew" for most of us brings to mind chunks of red meat or poultry simmering for hours in rich brown gravy. But there was no meat in the house nor time for an endless simmer. Happily, "stew" is a technique that isn't just for meat; it can be applied to just about anything. And the time it takes depends on what's in it. Read More
That hackneyed saw about old dogs and new tricks has never felt more depressingly true than it has in my kitchen over the last few months.
The pandemic lockdown might, for some, have been a challenging adventure into previously unexplored culinary avenues. But let's face it, most of us are really not all that adventurous. For every undauntable wanderer there are probably a dozen or more of us who'd just as soon stay in with a good book and cup of tea.
This tired old dog is one of the latter. I settled into a nest lined with an endless cycle of repeated comfort food favorites, emerging only when forced into dipping my toes into new territory out of necessity to keep my newspaper column interesting.
The end of the column brought with it an end to any motivation to go exploring. Read More
Braising may well be my favorite way of cooking. Not only does it concentrate flavors and tenderize tough foods, it actually keeps delicate foods moist and succulent.
While it's ideal for winter and for the hearty but tough cuts of meat that we favor in cold weather, this versatile method really knows no season. I turn to it year round. It's really ideal for this strange time in our lives, too, since any quantity of food, large or small, can be braised.
But probably the best thing about braising is that it's easy on the cook: Read More
The lingering isolation and economic uncertainty of the pandemic have been difficult enough for all of us. But add in a contentious national election and our need for Comfort with a capital C has hit an all-time high.
And when we're craving that comfort, nothing quite satisfies like those things that comforted us as children. For me, the ultimate such comfort is my grandmother's dumplings, not just eating them, but the process of making them as well.
Throughout my childhood, MaMa was my best friend. Read More
3 November 2020: Election Day and Autumn Stew
Savannah is meeting this election day bathed in crisp autumnal sunlight and, at long last, brisk, seasonal temperatures. It's perfect weather for getting out to do our civic duty.
It's also a perfect day for making a hearty stew. Once they're assembled, they need very little attention, especially if you have a slow-cooker, and are perfect for election day, since they're very forgiving of being left to simmer should your polling place be extra busy and/or the social-distancing precautions make the process last a bit longer than expected.
For most of us, "hearty stew" conjures images of red meat and rich gravy, but it doesn't have to be. Read More
15 October 2020: Orecchiette with Broccoli and Anchovies
One of the things that quarantining during the pandemic has done for some of us is to make us less careless while shopping for food and more conscious of using every scrap without wasting it. As grocery bills have soared in the last few months, straining budgets that were already being challenged, it's a sharp reminder that all food is precious and ought never to be taken for granted.
Still, with only two of us in the house, unless I've made a large batch of soup, stew, or something like country-style steak (which is usually better the second day anyway), our leftovers tend to be a dab of this and a dribble of that—barely enough for a single serving, let alone two. Read More
Autumn has always been my favorite time of year. While it's often depicted as an ending—as the quickening of summer fades and winter's long nap looms—for me, it feels more like a beginning, a time of hope and fresh starts. And this year, we need that sense of hope, of new beginnings more than ever before.
But aside from that, one of the things I love best about the season is that it's such a perfect time for cooking. The warmth of the kitchen not only becomes bearable, but welcome, and the raw materials we have to work with is at its most varied and best. Everything has fattened itself up for the dormant cold season ahead—and I don't mean just animals like us. Even the fruits and vegetables of fall have a density and richness that spring and summer produce often lacks.
This is also the time of year that I bake more. Read More
8 September 2020: Roast Chicken, Leftovers, and Biscuits
One of the most comforting things that I do in my kitchen is roast a chicken. There's something about the process that soothes and reassures like nothing else. Until recently, however, it was a comfort that had its limits.
While the process and the first perfect slices with their sliver of crispy skin and dribble of silky gravy are indeed an unparalleled comfort, even a small bird is more than my two-person household can consume in two meals. After the second day, what's left rapidly starts losing its appeal.
And as its allure dwindled, finding ways to rejuvenate it so that not even a scrap was wasted was a challenge. Even sharply reminding myself that there were hungry people who'd welcome stale leftovers didn't help. The prolonged pandemic quarantine changed all that. Read More
Probably no one will disagree that this has been the oddest of summers. It almost feels as if it passed us by without really happening. Yes, we've had the fresh produce, the heat and humidity, long hours of sunshine, and crashing thunderstorms that mark the season.
And to get out of the apartment and see something other than one another and the same four walls, we've enjoyed long walks in the lovely summer-green parks that make Savannah unique and have even walked on the warm surf-washed sand of Tybee Beach. But for us, at least, it's been with a kind of odd detachment, as if time suspended in March and hasn't really caught up.
My cooking this summer has been reflective of that: Read More
Tradition has been defined as "how it was done when you were a child." Whether that's a general truth or just a jaded observation of how lifelong behavior patterns form at a very early age, we do tend to hold onto things, both good and bad, from our childhoods.
Regardless of when and how they begin, as so many personal and family traditions have been laid waste in this time of pandemic isolation, never have the ones that we can still keep seemed more important.
One of mine, which began when I was about ten, is making shrimp creole every summer. Even at that age, cooking and cookbooks were already a source of endless fascination. Read More
This time of year, there's an awful lot of deeply opinionated nonsense written about one of summer's simplest and greatest pleasures: tomato sandwiches.
Among the silliest are the "we're just plain folks" types who claim that it must be made with gummy white loaf bread that sticks to the roof of one's mouth and is so insubstantial that a slice of it will compress to a peanut-sized nugget, and that it must squirt and run all over one's arms and shirt.
That's just about all that they seem to agree upon: Some authoritatively insist that the crust may never be trimmed off, others that it must always be removed, some that the tomato must be the size of a rib-steak and hang out the edges while others allow nothing thicker or larger than the bread itself. There are proponents of the dictum that the tomato must be peeled, others that it should never, ever be peeled.
And then there's the mayonnaise (which is taken for granted): Read More
Last week I went back to Anderson, South Carolina, my parents' home town and the site for some of my best childhood memories and earliest cooking experiences. It was the first time I'd been back in at least twenty-three years, and was bittersweet.
It was surprising how much was just was it had been when I last drove away from it, as if the ensuing decades had passed without touching it. But so much had changed—and a good bit of it for the better. By the time I was in college, the old downtown was rapidly going to seed. But it has since experienced a Renaissance. The courthouse square, which had been paved over as a parking lot in the fifties, has been reclaimed as a small park and the site of a new courthouse annex. Trees lined the center median of Main Street, and new shops, restaurants, and hopping night spots have filled the old storefronts that line its edges.
But. While all the places that had meant a lot to me were still standing, many of them were in peril. Read More
Three quintessential ingredients of a lowcountry summer table are tomatoes, okra, and local creek shrimp. And nowhere is the eclectic blending that defines our cooking better illustrated than when those three are combined in the pot.
Though they've found their way into gardens and pots the world over, tomatoes are believed to have originated in Central America. Okra, while now common in the Atlantic Rim's African Diaspora and in Southeast Asia, has its roots in Africa. And although dozens of varieties of shrimp are found in every part of the globe, our local brown creek shrimp have a unique sweetness thanks to the grassy marshes where they've thrived for thousands of years.
When all three come together in the same pan, however, their sum speaks solely of the coastal plains of the South and subtropical Caribbean, Read More
Probably the biggest challenge to comfort baking during the pandemic quarantine has been the shortage of basic ingredients. Early hoarding made flour scarce, but now, while it's still not plentiful, it is available; leavening, on the other hand, continues to be in very short supply. The yeast and baking powder shelves at most markets have been empty for weeks now, and while mail-order sources haven't dried up, on-line ordering is expensive and usually means ordering more than most of us can use.
One fall back alternative is self-rising flour, which is regularly, if unevenly, available. But self-rising flour can't be used for yeast baking, for thickening, or for most pastry, Read More
Many of us have been indulging ourselves a lot through the pandemic period of quarantine with favorite comfort foods, paying scant attention to saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium, and other alimentary bad-boys that make eating as worthwhile as they make it dangerous. But it shouldn't follow that the only comfort food is something that is a coronary waiting for a place to happen.
One of my favorite comfort foods is poached eggs. They can be served up any way from simply seasoned with salt and pepper to nestled on a toasted Holland rusk (or English muffin) that's topped with sautéed Canadian bacon or aged ham, then lavishly blanketed under a fluffy, lemony hollandaise. But my hands-down favorite is uova alla fiorentina. Read More
My mother is descended from generations of gardeners, and fresh produce from our family garden counts among the fondest memories and greatest comforts of my childhood.
From late spring when the red clay of the Carolina hills was turned over for new planting until the frost nipped the last of the tomatoes and sweetened the fall greens, our gardens were both a place of deep comfort and a source for even deeper comforts at the table.
Of all the things that came from them, the one that resonates with the best of those childhood memories and characterized our summer table is yellow crookneck squash. Read More
16 May 2020: Quarantine Cooking for Two—Pan-Broiled Hamburger Steaks
One of the most revealing things about this pandemic lockdown is the power that the comfortably familiar has had over us, especially in the kitchen and at the table.
Many of us who cook as much for pleasure as necessity have a list of things we're always saying we'd master if only we had the time. Well, now we have it. But instead of leaping to explore those uncharted culinary avenues, what did we do? Most of us turned inward, fell back on the kinds of safe comfort foods we've made hundreds of times.
It's only natural, in such unsettling, uncertain times as these, that we'd not just crave but need the safety of familiar comforts. There's nothing wrong with it. Read More
As many of you know, for most of my adult life, two culinary traditions have been inextricably intertwined in my kitchen: the Southern cooking of my childhood, and the Italian cooking that made such a marked impact while I was studying architecture as a young adult.
Part of it is that the two cuisines (or, I should say, collections of cuisines) have so much in common. The cooks of the South's many cuisines, and those of Italy, especially Northern Italy, share so many of the same ingredients and approach them with a similar mindset, combining and building flavors in exactly the same way. Because of that, the blending of these cuisines in my kitchen has a natural logic.
At any rate, that blending has marked my cooking for nearly half a century. Read More
A social-media query that has often been bandied about among the curious (or merely bored), in this time of pandemic-induced social isolation, is whether or not it's had a significant impact on our individual cooking patterns.
Are we cooking more? Are we experimenting more? Have irregular shortages of certain staples such as meat, flour, eggs, milk, and pasta impacted what we do cook?
For my part, not much has changed. I routinely cook every day, and other than developing a recipe for a newspaper column, the only real difference in what I cook is that I'm tending to be less experimental, and am falling back more and more on things I've made dozens, if not hundreds of times.
The reassuring familiarity of dishes that can be done without thinking about them makes them a comfort both in the cooking and in the eating of them. Read More
As we move into a third week of isolation and face that it's not going to end any time soon, we're all looking for comfort in this time of uncertainty wherever we can find it. Someone asked if I was cooking more—and actually, I'm not: we but rarely eat out and I cook every single day.
But what I cook has changed. I don't bake a lot, especially not sweets, except around the mid-winter holidays. But warm baked treats are a comfort—if you have flour—and I do, having just filled my flour canister up for a seminar I'd been asked to do on bread in the Bible. Social distancing orders caused the seminar to be postponed, but it meant I had a reasonable supply of flour on hand when hoarders stripped our grocery's shelves, so I've actually been baking a little.
A couple of days back, Timothy asked if I would make Congo Bars. It opened a floodgate of warm, deeply comforting childhood memories. They were just what we needed.
A dear friend and fellow food writer/cooking teacher reminded me this morning of one reason that panic hoarders have cleaned out the flour, pasta, and rice from most of our markets over the last two weeks: Simple carbohydrates are a natural mood elevator.
She suggested breadmaking as a great way to expend energy in this time of confinement that has an added bonus of providing a lovely, warm simple carbohydrate that comforts and naturally lifts us from the inevitable depression that comes with being cooped up.
It's a fine idea. Unhappily, unless you made it to the market before panic emptied the shelves of bread's primary ingredient, for the moment, an idea is all it can be.
So far, however, no one has been panic-hoarding one of natures great sources of simple carbohydrates: potatoes (at least, not here in Savannah where I live). Read More
16 March 2020: Braised Cabbage
The middle of March marks an all-too-brief moment in the year when green cabbage, which gets so little attention the rest of the year, comes into its own and finally gets to share a bit of culinary lime light.
After months of being taken for granted slivered up in coleslaw or stewed with salt pork and languishing on the steam table of restaurants offering so-called "country" cooking, green cabbage finally gets to nestle up to that ubiquitous hunk of St. Patrick's Day corned beef and shine, if only for a day or two.
That wasn't always the case: Read More
Today, we're taking a break from cooking to talk about another important aspect of the meal, one that is especially timely just now.
Unless you've been hibernating for the last few weeks, you're well aware of how the outbreak of a new, influenza-like virus has sent a wave of panic over the globe, creating a renewed hyper-sensitivity to sanitation.
Instructions on proper handwashing have become common on social media. There have been runs on toilet paper, hand-sanitizer, and masks. We're being cautioned about being in the confined crowds of an airplane, theater, church, and other such public places. And when people do venture out, they've started shying away from direct contact with others, avoiding handshakes and that modern habit of hugging everything and everyone in sight.
There is, however, a simple and very effective practice that most people have overlooked, one that has almost been lost to our progressively modern world: the use of silver tableware. Read More
One of the best things about having a basic set of simple dishes that we turn to again and again is that they provide us with knowledge and skills that we don't even have to think about. So, when we're confronted with a new ingredient, once we understand its essence, we can automatically apply the knowledge and innate set of skills we already have, without having to dig out a recipe.
Recently, a recipe featured in my newspaper column called for a small amount of fresh pork. While shopping for it, I ran across cubed boneless pork steaks on sale, and found a package that contained just enough for the recipe with two nice-sized steaks that could be set aside for another meal.
I'd never cooked cubed pork steaks, but it didn't matter. Read More