I am a middle age guy who started cooking in the 60's out of a need to eat something better than college food service stuff. I grew up in a household with a cook, but both parents liked to participate on weekends and did a lot of entertaining and all the menu planning. Neither thought too much about it, but one brought a scientific bent to the process and the other just knew what she liked and how she wanted it done. Both read cookbooks and one subscribed to the Time/Life series of world cookbooks. These were quite exotic for the time; most of what we had eaten came from family recipes, "it's just done this way, that's why.." and several reliable books, like The Joy Of Cooking, Charleston Receipts and a few others.
College food revealed to me that I had been eating pretty well as a kid and I learned that if I wanted to continue to do so, I was going to have to learn how to do it. Julia Childs started on the television; I had friends who had spent time in Asia and learned the rudiments of stir-fry and basic prep. I started acquiring knives and cooking vessels - some of which I still use to great effect 45 years later.
Cooking has always been a creative outlet for me. I never thought about doing it as a profession because I was afraid it would stop being fun. It's still fun and though I cook a little less often and for fewer people, I still do it and try to keep learning new pieces. Most everything I do is shaded somewhat by the lowcountry style I grew up with.
The stalls at the farmer’s market are getting bigger each week because they have more and more stuff to sell. Being as how we are in the high season of the farmer’s markets here in the lower Hutson Valley when the produce starts to overwhelm the farmers, the vendors and the consumers the time seemed right for a completely local dinner.
Thirty minutes at the Hastings market provided us with the following; two young chickens fresh from a chicken yard, Several pounds o...
If you have an interest in how the food you eat is grown and processed, especially pork, you will find this
link of interest.I recieved a Googlealert for Evergreen State College, the school my son is going to attend this fall, and it led to this site. It should be of parrticular interest to the porkers.
This is a wonderful little book and will prove very useful to anyone who loves oysters. Beware, however, that the recipes can be more than a little vague by the overwritten cook book standards of today. Experience in quantities and amounts will get you through most of the recipes. Some would seem to be divine while others give me pause. "Al Fresco" is an example of the latter.
"String the oysters on a small wire, bent like a hairpin, putting first an oyster then a v...
Maybe fifteen years ago, we were invited to a lake in New Hampshire. That’s where I think it was, anyway. It’s been a long time and I have unfortunately and regrettably lost all contact with the people who invited us. It was somewhere close to the Canadian border and as far north as I have ever been while remaining in the U.S. It was very hot in the day and quite chilly at night. Being from the south, this was a new phenomenon to me.
It was old family sort of place i...
Let’s put the road through here because, whynot?! Let’s have an Edisto salad tonight, because – whynot?! We’re on Edisto, home of fresh, local tomatoes, cucumbers and all sorts of vegetables except there aren’t any, not anymore.
The road has to be built to get to the field and there is what looks like a pretty good route; it avoids the ‘grand’ trees and is a mostly straight with just enough curves to satisfy the local aesthetic. Sure, it cros...
For the first time this summer I got to the local farmer’s market before everything had sold out. I was able to buy a brace of small, true free-range, scratch-in-the-dirt chickens, a tasty straw colored raw cow’s milk cheese and some astonishing goats milk cheese sold as do-re-mi which is spreadable and slightly sweet.
A pound of local bacon made its’ way into the bag as did a hunk of “The Country’s Best Mozzarella Cheese – NOT KIDDING&rdqu...
For many years I have planted tomatoes in big green plastic grow boxes from Gardener’s Supply and been frustrated with the results. Some years the dogs ate them. I mean, who knew that dogs would love tomatoes – any kind at all?! Some years the squirrels and birds got into them and sometimes the weather didn’t cooperate and the plants would get blasted all to hell and never recover from the sudden thunderstorm micro burst in the front yard. When they weren&rsq...
Sometimes living in a mature suburban area has real charms. You don’t have to go much beyond the kitchen door to barbeque or snatch some basil off the stem. The every-now-and-again eatible fungus pops up on a stump or the compost pile. The wild flowers grow no matter what happens. You can string a clothesline or collect the mail in your underwear if you want and you can hunt for wild berries if you have a certain tolerance for weeds, especially the old growth kind found ...
There is a fine piece on pork at
salon.com,
One
of my all time favorite jobs is that of bartender. I haven’t held this
position in many years and I never held down a real New York City job as bar
man. I worked in some theatre concession stands on occasion, but most of my
experience came in the hinter-lands and at private parties and at home.
The
first place I ever worked was in West Virginia. There was a little tavern near
the Greenbrier Hotel and Resort and somehow I got a job there tending the bar.
In...
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