On the way back from my in-laws Christmas day, my daughter announced she was officially a vegetarian. My wife and I weren’t surprised. We knew it was coming the day she disavowed bacon, and I’ve been encouraging her since reading Michael Pollan’s “Farmer In Chief,” which includes striking information on environmental impact of [...]
Monthly Archives: December 2008
How to cook vegetarian
Posted in artichoke, bake, basil, boil, broil, butter, chop, garlic, mayonnaise, mince, olive oil, oregano, panko, parmesan cheese, salt, simmer, spaghetti, tomato, tomato sauce Tagged artichoke, panko, parmesan cheese, pasta, recipe, tomato, vegetarian 8 Comments
Ingredients, techniques and methods
I know this much about cooking: to make food, you need ingredients. To cook, you need heat. Between ingredients and heat, you might need to alter an ingredient to two. Dice an onion. Trim fat from chicken livers. Dunk cucumbers in a brine.
By way of cataloging my journey, I plan to break apart recipes in [...]
The impostor’s confessional
No one taught me to cook. I never found a dusty wooden box, faded paper scraps scrawled with generational recipes for pecan pie or great-grandmother’s chicken stew. I never stood tiptoe by my mother’s elbow as she deftly stirred yolk into flour. No grandmother graced table with latkes, and I never asked the recipe for [...]
Salt
“[T]he primordial condiment that was prepared by the earth billions of years before early humans ever learned to enliven their food with it.”
-Harold McGee
We start with salt. We must. Before history, before tools, before technique. We start with salt, a basic taste. That to which other food is compared. A [...]