Entries Tagged as 'Recipes'

The Unbearable Lightness of Fried Okra

September 2nd, 2010 · 1 Comment · Recipes, dinner

It’s official. This was the hottest summer on record in the District of Columbia.
With meteorological summer having ended Aug. 31, our local weathermen tell us that we experienced a mean high temperature of 90.2 degrees and overall temperature of 81.3 degrees. The previous records were 89.3 and 80 degrees. So far, we’ve had 58 days of [...]

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My Favorite Piece of Kitchen Equipment Isn’t in the Kitchen

August 28th, 2010 · 2 Comments · Recipes

We use cast iron skillets and Le Creuset pots for cooking every day. But ask me what turns me on most in my batterie de cuisine and I would have to say my electric Weber spit-roaster. It’s really just a metal ring that fits onto a standard Weber grill with a bracket to hold the [...]

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Birthday Cubanos

August 26th, 2010 · No Comments · Ethnic, Recipes

Every year we cook a birthday dinner for our friend Tomeika with her choice of entree. This year she chose Cubanos, the famous Cuban sandwich made with pork loin, ham, Swiss cheese and pickles. We had no idea she was a Cubanos fan.
The one missing ingredient in a Cubano made outside Miami typically is the [...]

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What to Do with Green Tomatoes

August 23rd, 2010 · 5 Comments · Recipes, garden

I saved more than 10 pounds of green tomatoes from the marauding pack of field mice that have been devouring our kitchen garden lately. In the picture above you see what I salvaged from our Roma vines, the tomatoes we would normally use for canning. No ripe tomatoes to can here. Fortunately, some of our [...]

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Spicy Cajun Pickles

August 20th, 2010 · 1 Comment · Recipes, garden

We look forward to these pickles every summer because they’re our daughter’s favorite and they really are spectacular. The way they’re made is a bit unusual, too. They’re lacto-fermented in a salt brine with a wee bit of vinegar and a heap of herbs and spices while in the jar. Then they’re moved into the [...]

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A Little Sweetness in Your Dill Pickles?

August 19th, 2010 · 3 Comments · Recipes, garden

I’m convinced that the best dill pickles I’ve ever tasted had at least a little sugar in them. The traditional flavor combo–dill seed, mustard seed, peppercorns–just doesn’t do much for me. Yet I’ve had the hardest time finding a dill pickle recipe (I’m talking about vinegar pickles, of course) that gets me closer to the pickle [...]

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Foraged Garden Mash-Up

August 18th, 2010 · 1 Comment · Recipes, garden

Sometimes bits of one thing or another from the garden end up creating their own dish.
As I considered a handful of okra left over from a round of pickling yesterday I wondered what else we had in the garden that might work with it for dinner. A few minutes with a pair of kitchen scissors [...]

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Baba Ganouj

August 17th, 2010 · 3 Comments · Ethnic, Recipes

When you’ve got lemons–so the saying goes–make lemonade. The same applies to eggplant. We’ve got plenty of it in the garden right now. In fact the plants themselves have long given up trying to stand upright, they are so weighted down with fruit. They just spread themselves on the ground. (Note to self: stake the [...]

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Quince and Clove Sour: A Cocktail Weeks in the Making

August 13th, 2010 · 6 Comments · Recipes, entertaining

We needed a delivery of “Pink Cloves” cordial from a friend living in London, but finally last night we were able to sample a cocktail my wife has been working on quite literally for weeks. It’s called a Hendrick’s Quince and Clove Sour, and she found it on the amusingly Monty Python-esque Hendrick’s Gin website.
We’ve [...]

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Okra Gone Wild

August 10th, 2010 · 3 Comments · Recipes, garden

It’s that time of year when we are racing to harvest our okra. It grows so fast in the heat and humidity here in the District of Columbia that we have to check our okra plants twice a day. You can practically hear the okra pods getting bigger.
But my purpose here is not to bend [...]

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