recipe Friday

Something I've cooked recently: Not a lot. On Sunday, while I was opening up a tin of tomatoes for a pasta sauce, I cut my thumb open pretty deeply on the lid. It still hasn't entirely healed, and that's put a damper on cooking and other activities requiring opposable thumbs.

However, today I'm planning to cook a chicken fricassee with anchovies and olives from a recipe by Marcella Hazan. And right now I'm frying delicious bacon for a delicious bacon sandwich.


Something I have concrete plans to cook in the near future: I'm going to make a soup with meatballs (store-bought in a moment of weakness, and there's half a packet left that I need to use up), chard, and barley or maybe farro or maybe Israeli couscous, depending on how I feel about it on the day.


Something I'm vaguely thinking about cooking eventually: I recently acquired Feeding Hannibal, the cookbook by the show's food stylist Janice Poon. Some of the recipes are far too ambitious for me, but I'm tempted by the quail stuffed with sweetbreads and hazelnuts, which is meant to mimic the flavor of ortolans (real ortolans, not the ortolan-shaped marzipan the actors actually ate during the scene). Quail are easy to find and not too expensive, and while getting hold of sweetbreads may be difficult, at least (unlike tripe) I love to eat them, with no ambivalence whatsoever.

I also plan to make brownies or cupcakes or something using some of the Bailey's I bought at Christmas.

a beverage meme

Seen in various places on DW, but originally from thefridayfive.

1. How do you like your coffee? I'm only an intermittent coffee drinker, and often I'm just drinking it for the caffeine. But there's one local coffee shop where the coffee actually tastes good, and I will go there sometimes for one a latte. I always take coffee with lots of milk (or better still, half-and-half) and no sugar.


2. How do you like your tea? It depends on what kind of tea. I drink green teas and certain black teas, such as lapsang souchong and good darjeeling, unadulterated. Same with iced tea. Cheap black tea, such as the "English Breakfast" blend I drink in the mornings to wake up, I take with milk and sugar. Oddly enough, I use the same blend of tea for iced tea, which I drink straight, but chilling the tea seems to tame the bitterness. I put sugar in most herbal teas, but my dream is to discover some that taste good without it, and I've finally found one: the chamomile and lavender tea from The English Tea Shop. It is the best herbal tea ever.


3. What's your favorite late night beverage? In warm weather, water. I drink lots of water all the time. I have to for medical reasons but I also really like it. In the winter I like something warm at bedtime--herbal tea or occasionally a hot toddy or hot whiskey.


4. If you could only drink one thing for the next week, what would it be? Let's assume that water is allowed regardless. So: lapsang souchong. I can drink it when the thought of almost anything else turns my stomach, which is important because I am not a natural early riser and I often feel gross in the mornings.


5. If you were on vacation, what would be the first thing you'd drink to celebrate? Assuming "on vacation" implies travelling, probably a local beer of some kind. Or wine if it's really a wine place and not a beer place, but I'm not a wine fan on the whole. If I were in Japan I would set out to drink all the gyokuro, because it's my favorite tea.