Latest posts
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whole wheat reginetti, garlic, bay, chili, anchovy, cabbage
Categories: Meals at home..and marjoram. [note; the picture doesn’t include any of the green herb mentioned in the description below; until we’d begun to eat, I hadn’t remembered to add it, but I then quickly and – mostly – corrected the error] It could have been a wintry meal, mostly because of the cabbage part, that it didn’t…
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seared porgy, shallot, lemon, 4 herbs; tomatoes; broccolini
Categories: Meals at homeI’ll be honest. I really stumbled in preparing this meal. It was basically pretty simple in conception, and it should have been simple to execute. It didn’t happen that way, but I managed to recover from several stupid slips, and while it looks a little messy in the picture, it tasted great, and the music…
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ciauscolo, rucola, dark bread; sautéed cucumber pasta, dill
Categories: Meals at homeI’d never heard of ciauscolo a month ago, but if I had heard the seductive description, ‘soft, spreadable salami’, I would have been very surprised if it did not exist somewhere. I’m now here to say that it does, that it apparently has existed for a very long time, mostly in Umbria and the neighboring…
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substitutions can add spice to a dish: mint insalata caprese
Categories: Meals at homeLast night I was set on serving the water buffalo mozzarella we had as an appetizer, especially since I had several possibilities for a tomato role, but I had forgotten I didn’t have basil of any kind. I was sure neither the mozzarella nor the tomato would object to my fiddling with the classic insalata…
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breakfast with older tomatoes and younger others
Categories: Meals at homeWhile thinking about breakfast this morning I remembered I had some beefsteak tomatoes that I really shouldn’t be hanging onto any longer (I’d had them on the north windowsill for 2 weeks, but still looked and tasted fine when I tested one). The problem was that I didn’t want to turn on the oven when…
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soft shell crab; green beans; tomato; berry/gelato cobbler
Categories: Meals at homeOne of the great boons for a cook who’s at it regularly is the ability to use leftover ingredients saved from earlier meals. Last night it was a small amount of some juices that had started out inside very ripe heirloom tomatoes whose flesh had been a part of this meal, 4 days earlier than…
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lemon/onion/thyme-baked flounder; grilled zucchini, mint
Categories: Meals at homeAlthough I’ve worked with this flounder recipe once before, this time it didn’t look or taste anything like that of last December. Last night I almost burnt the bed on which the fish was to lie inside the oven. If knowing your way around mistakes is a sign of a mature cook, I may now…
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rigatone, scapes, chili peppers, scallion, tomato, epazote
Categories: Meals at homeIt was delicious. but we we both got a pepper scare with our initial bites: The little yellow capsicum had been described as sweet and juicy (“citrusy sweet’, the sign said), and I neither heard nor saw any mention of heat, so when I was looking around for something to add to a good artisanal…
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feta, shishito; baked cod, potato, tomato; cucumber, celery
Categories: Meals at homeI’m leading with an image of the main course, even though it had been preceded by an appetizer, only because the image of the former is a little splashier. That almost didn’t happen however, because the heirloom tomatoes that account for much of the color on the plate in the picture above had already been…
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chitarra, tomato, garlic, olive, caper, anchovy, epazote, feta
Categories: Meals at homeIt was pasta, not a salad, although it has some of the aspects of a ‘pasta salad’, including the fact that the pasta was the only element that was actually cooked. a couple handfuls of datterini tomatoes, small, sweet, date-shaped (hence the name), from Campo Rosso Farm, halved, plus one not-large yellow heirloom tomato from Oak…