Adam D. Roberts's Blog, page 129
November 2, 2010
Roasted Apple & Pear Sauce
No one gets very excited when you say "apple sauce"--well no one except, maybe, people who just had their wisdom teeth out--but throw the word "pear" in there and the word "roasted" and you start to whet people's appetites. My appetite was certainly whet when I saw this recipe in The Barefoot Contessa's newest book, "How Easy Is That?" (When my friends Patty and Lauren saw the book title, they burst out laughing, because they recognized it as one of Ina's favorite things to say.) To make the sauce, all you need is what you see above in my attempt at a still life, plus some brown sugar and a little butter.
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Anatomy of a Pork Chop Dinner (A Three Part Series)
9:24 PM, Friday, October 30th. The scene? My kitchen. In attendance? Myself and Craig. The event? The creation of one of the best plates of food I've ever made.
It started like this, see, I was at the farmer's market, taking pictures with my new camera when I spied these Jerusalem artichokes. Or was it at the butcher shop when I asked the butcher to cut me two thick-sliced pork chops? No, wasn't it on the couch reading The Barefoot Contessa's roasted apple sauce recipe in her new cookbook?
Look officer, maybe I'd do better to split this into separate posts and then link to those posts back here when I'm done. That way future generations can piece together this pork chop dinner using the links I provide. Take off my cuffs and let me get to work; time is of the essence.
November 1, 2010
My First SLR (& This Blog's First Fancy Food Pictures)
It only took six years of food blogging for me to figure out that the images on a food blog are as important as the writing. And so it was, last week, that I went with my cookbook photographer, Lizzie Leitzell (see her website here) to B&H so she could help me pick out my first SLR (or single-lens reflex camera).
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October 29, 2010
Bourbon Chocolate Pecan Pie
So that dinner I made for my friend Alex's birthday (the one with the soup) began a few days earlier when I e-mailed Alex a very important question: "Dear Alex," I wrote, "what are your Top 5 favorite desserts of all time?"
Alex wrote back: "Hmmm...top five favorite desserts...I'll do this w/o thinking too much: pecan pie, warm cake with cream cheese frosting, strawberry rhubarb pie, chocolate lava cake, lemon cake." Seeing as she did this stream-of-consciousness style, I had to trust that the first dessert she named was truly her favorite. Which is why I ended up making what turned out to be (in my opinion at least) the greatest pecan pie ever.
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October 27, 2010
Roasted Squash & Fennel Soup
Dealing with expectations is a tricky endeavor for every cook, whether at home or at a four-star restaurant.
Granted, the four-star chef has a harder time: diners at a four-star restaurant expect impeccable service, pristine surroundings, and food at the cutting edge of what food can be. At home, things are a little different. You don't have to make a streak of sauce on the plate with the back of a spoon, you don't have to scrape crumbs off the table with a crumb-scraper, but if you're going to serve something familiar, as I did recently with Butternut Squash Soup, it better be the comfortingly sweet version that everyone knows and loves. Sad to say that this one, which comes from one of my favorite cookbooks ever, Suzanne Goin's "Sunday Suppers at Lucques," isn't.
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October 26, 2010
Three Great Pieces of Food Writing
"By the time the intercom buzzes, I am assembling the greatest grilled cheese sandwiches of all time and the fridge is filled with seriously good Champagne, so packed that the bottles that can't stand up on the top shelf lie on their sides like stockpiled ammo down below. This is not the day I want to be drinking any of that chardonnay-sweet or over-yeasted bread-dough shit. I want tight effervescence, chalk on my tongue and the roof of my mouth, sugar turned to cold glass."
That passage comes from one of the best pieces of food writing I've encountered in recent memory, Gabrielle Hamilton's essay "Christmas Eve" which appears in the new Canal House Cookbook, Volume No. 5.
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October 25, 2010
Spaghetti and Meatballs
There are certain dishes everyone should know how to make; Spaghetti & Meatballs is one of them.
It's funny, though, because even though I've been cooking consistently for the past six years, cooking my way through the staples (here's my favorite chili, my new standard roast chicken, my go-to chocolate chip cookie) I'd never really tackled Spaghetti & Meatballs. I once made fancy meatballs in a sugo that had orange zest and I titled that post "Not Your Mama's Meatballs." What I wanted, though, was the opposite: I actually wanted your mama's meatballs. And I think, finally, that's what I've found.
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October 21, 2010
The Taste Test Update
October 20, 2010
New Dishes
The last time I wrote about dishes on this blog it was in April 2008 when I wrote a post called "Meet The Plates." Serious Eats was amused and linked to it in a post called "Adam Roberts's Quirky, Idiosyncratic Plates." The idea back then, in 2008, was that each of my guests at dinner would be given a uniquely patterned plate that possibly reflected how I felt about them (if you were given a flower, it meant that I thought you were virginal; if you were given golf clubs, it meant that I thought you were a lesbian.)
But times have changed and I've changed with them. The time had come for new plates and today, with a little help from my mom, I finally bought them.
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