Savour Fare » Seasonal

French Cauliflower Soup with Bacon and Herb Garnish

Kate — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 21:23:05 +0000

I sometimes feel like I’m running perpetually behind. Is it 5:00 already? Is it February already? How am I suddenly six months pregnant? Remember that vacation we took to Paris last July? I never shared it with all of you because I just finished editing my photos in DECEMBER. Expect a post in about April.

The nice thing about being behind on things is that reminders can feel like discoveries. When editing my Paris photos, I found the pictures I took at a wonderful meal we ate in the Latin quarter at Bistro y Papilles. Located in a small wine store, with a different set menu every night, it was the kind of wonderful meals that makes you feel like you’re really in Paris. The menu that night started with a velvety cauliflower soup, served at the table in a big tureen. We were presented with shallow soup bowls that were garnished with a “salad” with lardons, croutons, cauliflower, herbs and creme fraiche, and the hot soup was ladled over the salad. All the garnishes brought a wonderful textural contrast to the soup, and it was one of the best things we ate that week.

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Toad in the Hole

Kate — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 13:32:56 +0000

It’s very strange being pregnant in January. It seems like everyone is going on a diet, vowing to lose weight, committing to a high-intensity exercise plan. Me? I’m craving hamburgers, and trying to decide if it’s a good idea to go to a once a week yoga class. I do hope to lose weight this year, but not before I gain a bunch, and I’m just trying to keep up with my protein needs. Oh, and I plan to eat more vegetables.

This time of year has proven to be difficult, anyhow. My dad died a year ago, and while I steeled myself to face the date itself, I’ve found myself feeling a bit more fragile than I normally am. A year is the traditional period of mourning, but while there is a lot of happiness and even joy in my life, I haven’t stopped tearing up unexpectedly, and I still miss him fiercely.

So instead of salads and superfoods, I’ve been seeking out comfort. One of my favorite Friday night dinners is Toad-in-the-Hole — a British classic that’s basically a Yorkshire pudding with sausages. It’s not health food, but it IS comfort food, and it’s made from scratch (OK, I buy the sausages, but you COULD make them from scratch) and there’s a place for that, too.

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Panforte Margherita

Kate — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 19:06:38 +0000

I have waxed rhapsodic on this blog about my love of a traditional Christmas fruitcake, a classic holiday dessert, but my love of fruitcake extends beyond the Dickensian Christmas cake. During my first year of law school, my parents spent the year living in Florence, Italy, and the Christmas I spent with them that year was the only Christmas I have spent away from home (whether home was in California or New York.) What I remember from that Christmas was the cold, damp air, the lights everywhere, but most of all the food. We went to the Mercato San Lorenzo and loaded up on Prosciutto, Grissini, Pecorino, and even, memorably, whole black truffles that we shaved over pasta for New Year’s Eve. But what I loved the most were the sweets. Panettone in every bakery, and even better, panforte, a fruitcake like confection which may be the best thing I’ve ever tasted.

Panforte, a specialty of Siena, a hill town near Florence, dates back to the middle ages, when it was paid as a tax to monks and nuns, and was reportedly carried by Crusaders on the crusades. A combination of fruits and nuts, honey and sugar and spices, it is a cross between a caramel based candy and a cake. It is also utterly addictive, with a satisfying chew from the fruits and the caramel, and a crunch from the nuts.
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Old School Sage Stuffing

Kate — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 01:49:31 +0000

My father didn’t just love tradition, he loved ritual. He wouldn’t just visit the same city over and over again, he would stay at the same hotel, visit the same restaurant, and order the same dishes off the menu. He was especially particular about holidays: not just turkey gravy and stuffing — GIBLET gravy and this bread stuffing. (Although he called it dressing, even though he also insisted on stuffing the turkey with it.) If we were eating Thanksgiving dinner at someone else’s house, my mom always had to roast her own turkey (usually for charity) so we could make giblet gravy and bread stuffing. The man was obsessed.

Thanksgiving morning would see our family gathering around the kitchen table. My father and I would each have a cutting board and a knife — my mother would be standing at the stove, presiding over a large pan of sauteeing vegetables. Dad and I divided up the chopping duties — I took celery and onions, he cubed the loaves of white bread. The kitchen smelled of sage and onions, and we would snitch bits of stuffing — a crust of bread, a cube dipped in the oniony, celery sage butter, before it was ceremoniously added to the turkey, when the smell of poultry and sage would sneak out from the kitchen and fill the whole house.

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Five Easy (Center) Pieces

Kate — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 00:38:51 +0000

Holiday dinners, holiday parties, intimate gatherings with family and friends — cooking is key, but you have to decorate too. You could buy the obligatory bunch of grocery store flowers and stick them in the vase that those roses came in last Valentine’s Day, or you could exercise a little thought and creativity and come up with a simple centerpiece on a budget.

I’m no whiz at floral arranging, but I have a few tips on designing your own centerpieces:

Keep it low. The last thing you want at a dinner party is to discourage conversation by plopping a giant arrangement in the middle of the table! Let your guests see each others’ smiling faces!
Forget the flowers. Flowers can be great, but they’re also a little expected. There are all sorts of other interesting items you can use in an arrangement. See below for some ideas.
Move away from the mixed bouquets. If you do use flowers, avoid those bouquets of 10 different types. Either they cost a fortune or they scream “grocery store!” Stick to one or two types of flowers with interesting colors and textures.
Go crazy with your container. There’s a place for a simple glass vase, but other containers can also lend some pizzazz to a plain arrangement.

Below are ideas for five simple centerpieces you can recreate at home or adapt using the materials you have:

1. A pumpkin we will go

A hollowed pumpkin makes a great vase that lends any arrangement a seasonal air. Here, I combined tiny yellow mums (from the grocery store) with purple Mexican sage (which is taking over my garden). These are combined in a glass jar that’s placed inside a hollowed-out pie pumpkin.

2. A study in scarlet

Seasonal fruits are beautiful and always appetizing on a table. Here I’ve arranged a few pomegranates — one of my favorite, striking fruits — on a bed of cranberries, with their deep red shine. To give this an extra holiday flair, I’ve used a green dish.

3. Chestnuts roasting and an open fire

I always think chestnuts are beautiful and seasonal, and I want to buy them but I don’t want to peel them. Using them for decoration solves this problem. Here, I’ve arranged several chestnuts on a low white tray and placed tealights among them.

4. Citrus Shine

A large bowl of fruit is beautiful and seasonal, and guests may be tempted to help themselves after dinner is finished! I always associate clementines and their scent with the Christmas holidays, and the bright color is welcome on a dark day. I think a simple silver bowl sets off the shining orange beautifully.

5. Christmas Classic

Most arrangements have all the color up top in a rather plain container. Placing cranberries in a glass vase and arranging greens in the berries (here, sprigs of rosemary, which offer a lovely piney scent and also grow like a weed in my garden) inverts expectations and provides holiday colors and fragrance.

All of these took less than five minutes to put together, and would add to any holiday table. What are your favorite holiday centerpieces?

Pomegranate Glazed Ham and Giveaway {Sponsored Post}

Kate — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 01:18:21 +0000

The holidays are so much more than a single day. They’re an excuse for gatherings of friends and family, shared stories, and shared meals. A cook during the holidays is always looking for recipes to feed a crowd — for dinners, buffets, lunches, brunches, cocktail parties. Turkey is an obvious choice, roast beef a luxe one, but another great (and economical) dish that will feed a crowd with a lot of payoff for a little effort is a baked ham.

Farmer John is a name practically synonymous with hams, but what I didn’t know is that they are based right here in Los Angeles, and have been for 80 years. I love supporting local businesses and industry — one of the things I love about living in Los Angeles is how economically diverse the region is. Furthermore, Farmer John really emphasizes their local ties and origins. When they approached me to develop a recipe using Farmer John ham and local ingredients, I was happy to work with them.

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Finding Fall in Southern California

Kate — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 00:53:36 +0000

The first time I ever went apple picking was my senior year of college. Ken had his car on campus that year — a little blue Ford Festiva, that had been spray painted, and had no air conditioning or radio. We were celebrating one year of dating, still shiny and happy and young and new, and decided to head off into the wilds of Connecticut to pick apples. I wore my appropriate apple picking attire — a red and green gingham shirt, and we discovered the joys of fresh air in an orchard, of plucking apples off the tree, of cold pressed cider and hot apple cider donuts.

After that first year, we went every year we lived in the Northeast. When we lived in New York, we borrowed my father in law’s car, or rented one (we could barely fit ourselves in our tiny Manhattan studio — where were we going to park a car?), and hit New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut to get out of the city and load up on apples. Apple picking was never about the apples — they’re readily available at the Greenmarket after all — but about simple entertainment, fresh air, getting out of the city. And donuts. Don’t forget the donuts.

When we moved to Los Angeles six years ago, I thought my apple picking days were through. Our climate is too warm to have apple orchards — we can pick oranges in our own back yard, but the autumnal fest was lost to me. Until this year. We piled into the little blue car (now, so many years later, a Prius, with air conditioning and an iphone connection), with the Nuni in tow and headed into the mountains, into the “mile high” town of Oak Glen. Nestled in the San Bernardino mountains just east of Redlands, Oak Glen boast six or seven apple orchards, and the crowds that go with them.
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Fresh Grape Pie

Kate — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 00:10:14 +0000

October is probably my favorite time of year here in Southern California. The days are clear and sunny (and can be hot — supposed to be in the 90′s today!) but it invariably cools off at night, leaving clear skies, perfect for stargazing. October is also one of those magical food times, when we’re still getting a few tomatoes and peaches from the summer, but the cool weather produce is starting to come in — apples, peaches, butternut squash, and grapes.

We get grapes from so many places around the world now that we forget to think of them as seasonal fruit, but anyone who lives in or near wine country knows that fall is the time of the grape harvest, and that applies to table grapes as well. The best, sweetest, most flavorful varieties abound in fall – the red, green and black grapes we see every day, but also the headily perfumed muscat grapes and the classically flavored concord grapes. I had long wanted to make a grape pie, but the grapes with the truest “grape” flavor — the flavor of grape juice and grape jelly — are Concord grapes, which are also famous for their grape seeds.

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Essential Potato Salad

Kate — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 19:44:35 +0000

Labor Day weekend is bittersweet, like the end of an affair. Three days of sunshine, of flip-flops, of beaches and barbecue. But Tuesday lurks around the corner, like a raincloud with the smell of ozone to the air. There’s almost a sense of desperation — just one more cookout! — before fall settles in, with its dark evenings, the smell of cinnamon and freshly-sharpened pencils, and its long march to winter.

I’ve been busy collecting summer, whether it’s making just one more fresh fruit pie, canning a batch of tomato jam, downing bottles of rose, or just sneaking outside to enjoy the sunset. I keep getting ideas and checking them off the list: Hollywood Bowl tickets, picnics, Lemonade! And one of my favorite summer foods is potato salad. I wanted to get in one more potato salad before roast potatoes become de rigueur.

I love old fashioned potato salad made by my grandmother, but this isn’t that. I also love newfangled potato salads, but this isn’t that, either. This is potato salad reduced to its essentials — a little mayonnaise, a sprinkle of tart vinegar, the oniony breath of chives, and at the end, a dusting of lemon, to add aroma and color, to wake the tastebuds and make the salad sing. It’s hardly a recipe at all, but it’s well worth making all the same, in this last weekend of summer.
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Preserving Summer — Tomato Jam

Kate — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 17:43:13 +0000

How on earth is it the end of August? Labor Day is just around the corner, but I still have so much summer to get in! We haven’t gone to the beach, or made s’mores, or even gone to the Hollywood Bowl. And I need to get in several more hours being lazy in the hammock. I feel like I’m turning into one of those old people who is constantly exclaiming about how fast time passes, but it does. This summer has passed in the blink of an eye.

When I was a child, the summers stretched into infinity. I don’t know if it was that each summer was a greater proportion of my life, or if it was just that I had more time to slow down, visit the library, stretch out on the grass with a book, and let time stop.

The Nuni is in that childhood stretch of time passing slowly, and she so badly wants it to charge on, full speed ahead. In the past few weeks, the Nuni (who will turn four in less than a month) has adopted a new persona, and has told anyone who will listen that her name is Polish (as in making silver shine, not as in Pope John Paul II), and she is seven. Those two things are intertwined. Of course, it is moments like this that make me want to stop time, to preserve forever the moment when my daughter is on the cusp of childhood, and nothing sounds better than being seven.

I can’t stop time, but I can preserve the summer just a little, and capture some of my childhood summers at the same time. When I was a little girl, I would spend some of those infinite summers with my great grandmother, eating berries out of her garden, getting into her cookie jar (I can still remember where it was kept), and eating her homemade tomato jam. Not a chutney, or another version of ketchup, the way so many tomato preserves recipes are, but a tomato jam, brightened with lemon, with that musky tomato flavor and the pure sweetness of preserved summer. Perfect on toast, for that lazy summer breakfast, this really is summer in a jar.

Recipe
Sweet Tomato Jam
4.5 lbs ripe red tomatoes
4.5 lbs granulated sugar
2 lemons

Using a sharp knife, score the bottoms of each tomato in a cross, then plunge the tomato into boiling water for about 20 seconds. Remove and let cool, and when cool enough to handle, peel and roughly chop the tomatoes over a large pot, to catch the juices. (This is not a neat process. You might want to wear an apron.) Discard the skins, and place the tomato chunks into the pot.

Add the lemon juice to the pot, and add the lemon halves to the pot with the tomatoes. Heat the tomatoes over medium heat. Add the sugar, 1 cup at a time, stirring after each addition, and waiting about 10 minutes in between each addition. Lightly crush the tomatoes, or use a hand blender to puree slightly, and let cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, until the jam begins to jell and the entire mixture is bubbling like a swamp, being careful not to let it burn. Remove the lemon halves.

Ladle into hot canning jars with new lids, and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes.

Makes approximately 2 pints.