Best Trip Ever » Food

Green beans — another August garden update

Chris — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 20:41:51 +0000

I don’t know whether green beans are tempermental for everyone or just for me. One year they’ll be wildly successful so I think I’ve got it all figured out, then the next year they’re not so hot. This is mostly a not-so-hot year. I’ve switched over to growing all pole beans since I put up [...]

Tomatoes — August garden update

Chris — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 18:48:07 +0000

Normally I have a love-hate relationship with August, when I have an abundance of tomatoes but it’s too hot to pick them after 8 am. This year it’s all love-love, glorious tomatoes and lovely summer days in the low 80s! A few days ago I picked 29 pounds! I’d been letting the full-size tomatoes stay [...]

Aubergine revelation

Chris — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 13:18:53 +0000

Sometimes bitter, sometimes tasteless, but almost always slimy, especially deep-fried with a greasy coating, eggplant has always been right up there with beets and okra on the short list of vegetables I really, really dislike. I even hate the name “eggplant,” although I love “aubergine,” the French name. The plants are attractive, though, the fruits [...]

July Garden Update

Chris — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 23:02:33 +0000

After a very slow start, summer weather has arrived and my garden is finally starting to produce. I’m getting about a dozen a day of each variety of cherry tomatoes, the sungolds and the sugar snacks, but none of the large tomatoes show any color yet. The plants are loaded with big green fruit, so [...]

Summer fruit tart

Chris — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 20:21:34 +0000

Browsing my favorite cookbook (Patricia Wells, At Home in Provence), I noticed her recipe for an apricot-honey-almond tart, one of the few recipes in the book I’ve never tried. I came home from the farmer’s market a couple of days ago with only two apricots, but I also had a couple of peaches, a couple [...]

My raisin nut bread

Chris — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 16:00:29 +0000

Unlike baguettes, which take few ingredients and lots of careful handling and technique, my whole wheat bread with raisins, cinnamon and walnuts has a long list of ingredients and not much technique involved. It’s a big ugly lumpy brown loaf, but it tastes good! It’s rich enough that a single piece toasted, even without butter, [...]

Day 5 — Random thoughts about French food

Chris — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 07:24:08 +0000

Since I spent most of yesterday alternately napping and reading Julia Child’s My Life in France (it’s a wonderful book, by the way), I’ve been thinking about French food. I really don’t know very much at all about the kind of formal French cuisine she talks about, but I love simple French food, the cheese, [...]

Cooking in Paris

Chris — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 01:01:44 +0000

Obsessing over baguettes

Chris — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 21:49:33 +0000

OK, enough is enough. Over the past four days, I’ve put 8 (small) baguettes in the freezer, and we’ve eaten most of four. I’m sure I could make 60 more and continue to improve my results, but I’ve got to stop eating so much bread! Here’s what I’ve learned. For me, without professional skills in [...]

My baguette adventures

Chris — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 20:08:03 +0000

A few weeks ago, challenged by a Slowtalk message board conversation where a few people didn’t think it could be done, I decided to see if I could make a good French baguette. I’d tried before, with very mediocre results (pale, dense loaves that tasted OK but resembled baguettes only by being long and narrow). [...]