plum tart

I was craving Chicken Pot Pie a few months ago and scoured my cookbooks for a recipe that matched my craving (because I think we all have different taste memories of what makes the perfect CPP.) The one that matched my taste memory perfectly was in Jasper White's The Cooking of New England...and when I made it I was delighted with it. I made a lard crust from some very special pork lard that I had shipped from ChefShop. The pie included pearl onions, some diced carrots and peas. I think I added some mushrooms. I made a lovely veloute out of rich chicken broth. It was perfect. When I have another Chicken Pot Pie craving, I will make Jasper's recipe again.

I guess I'll be in Hell for a long time because I accumulate many kinds of ingredients "just in case" I might want to cook a dish with them some day. This is not a past habit that I am swearing off, it is an ongoing obsession. The ingredients, I need change with the latest cookbook I am reading and the shipping guys at Kalustyans and Chef Shop know me by name. I have bags and bags of various kinds of hot peppers from all over the world, a number of varieties of dried legumes, spices and flavourings for most of the major cuisines of the world, losts of Asian pastes and sauces, vinegars and oils (I once spent $40 to ship a small bottle of strawberry vinegar from Germany); varieties of grains, and many kinds of rice, flours and meals. And a number of cheeses that I am going to consume soon... I do use these ingredients as I journey from one cuisine to another and I store them sealed in cool dark places to reserve their flavour and freshness. I don't want to be sentenced for ingredient abuse during my stay in Hell. But as others have pointed out, I don't use all of a spice in one go, and I don't like to repeat dishes too often - I am too busy exploring and trying new cuisines and new recipes. I do like to look in my condiment fridge, my freezer (which contains a large tub of leaf lard) and my shelves in the basement filled with fascinating jars and cans and bags. My taste buds perk up and I think of how many dishes I have yet to try.

I had a 4 gram white truffle from Alba. I made pasta al burro with homemade pasta, artisanal butter and some freshly grated parmesan. Then I grated the truffle all over the pasta and chowed down while it was still hot. Red wine of course and after veal marsala followed by a fennel salad dressed with aged balsamic and extra virgin olive oil from Spain. Very sad that the meal is over. Certainly can't afford another white truffle from Alba this year. I am just so grateful the grocer would sell pieces of truffle.

I made fabada today - big huge dried limas from Spain and a dried Spanish chorizo which I got as a freebee for ordering over $60 of olive oil (and the beans) from latienda. I used wild boar porkbelly and a tamshire ham bone as well as morcilla. I mostly followed Penelope Casa' recipe which finishes the soup with garlic and paprika heated in olive oil. There's a name for that treatment but I forget what it is. I also added some caldo nero which is not authentic at all but I wanted some greens and it seemed meaty enough to accompany the heavy duty meats. The fabada tastes good, looks good (I wish I were a better photographer) and sticks to my ribs which is important in cold weather. The beans are incredible - very creamy and buttery. The recipe makes a large amount so will try freezing some.

I just bought the cookbook and have enjoyed reading the food writing very much. I like to read about the process she goes through coming up with a recipe. There are also a number of recipes that interest me (NOT the shrimp and broccoli recipe) which I will be trying very soon. I like the way she did combination tagines. I have always been frustrated by the simpleness of many tagine recipes, for example, prunes and lamb, or dried apricots and lamb, or preserved lemons and chicken etc etc. I'm sure you get the point. A couple of her tagine recipes combine ingredients that are complementary and should make for a more complex and interesting dish. Maybe this weekend I will cook a tagine from this book and christen my new tagine from tagines.com I miss photographs as well but the writing is compensation.

I have a lot of food art in my home. I will list it but do not have pictures of much of it. 2 egg pastels of eggs - brown eggs 1 still life of an apple 1 still life of a peach 3 still lifes of pears 1 still life of lemons 1 Indian print of a lady sieving rice i print from New Orleans of peaches in a basket 1 coloured print of my favourite grocery store in Dundas, Ontario - Picones 1 gorgeous print of a vinyard in Niagara 1 oil painting of cherries on either snow or q white table cloth 1 photograph by Beth Powning of 2 broad beans I have other works of art but my favourite is food art. i can't resist it.

Pumpkin, brown butter and pecan cake. I pretended it was a coffee cake and ate it for breakfast.

Fresh apple mueseli and pumpkin, brown butter and pecan coffee cake. No pictures but delicious.

I agree absolutely with every word you have written. I cook what I like and generally I enjoy it unless I screw up. I love to eat and will generally cook what I crave on a seasonal basis. I am very critical of restaurants, and I eat in some excellent ones in Toronto and elsewhere because as you say, they are the professionals and as well, I am usually paying a lot of money to eat what they have prepared. I am more tolerant of friends because I know I am intimidating in the food department. I don't want to be that way but people think "She knows so much, she must be an incredible cook". It is mostly perception and really what I want is for everyone to enjoy cooking and food the way I do. What I am, is a good home cook and I am willing to try anything and I love learning new techniques and trying new recipes and ingredients.

A Chinese student from Fujian cooked little oysters in an omelet mixture with a little green onion. The omelet was a little bit crispy. They were delicious and I have since found a recipe for them in a Chinese cookbook. I have never seen them on a Chinese restaurant menu however. Is anyone familiar with this dish?

I agree with you completely - that has always been my idea of food hell too. I know people who make a pot of soup and EAT IT EVERY DAY!!! Noooooooooo! I commute a long distance to work every day so that I can't prepare a delicious meal every day but I do prepare enough different meals on the weekend so that I won't have any repeats. Mostly the meals that suit this habit are braises, daubes, ragus, curries, and stews. Fish is fast so I will cook that fresh, as well as steak, chops and sausages. And if I have duck confit on hand, that is fast too. I am completely incapable of repeating a meal over the period of a week no matter how much I love it. I don't regard the meals prepared in advance as left overs either, they are all dishes whose flavor improves over time.

Quatrfoil in Dundas is a delight. So nice to have an excellent restaurant in this region.

Perhaps the difference is terroir. You're not using the same water, the same soil, the same feed grain, etc, as what was used originally so, of course, the end result would not be the same (e.g., Vidalia onions). Well Toliver, I write down the recipe the first time I cook it which is very close in time to when I have eaten it in the restaurant. And then I tweak it after the first eating and then I save the recipe with all its tweaks and notes for the next time I want to cook it. Heaven forbid that I should have to remember it years hence and hope and tweak. Now that would be a challenge. You are absolutely right about the terroir. I should have thought of that. Thank you.

I grew up in a remote mountain town in British Columbia. Food choices were limited unless you fished or hunted or grew it yourself. We had an endless supply of freshly caught rainbow trout which I did not appreciate until as an adult I ate what was available in stores, which wasn't the same fish at all. Nevertheless, my mother cooked up a storm every day and I had many favourites. She made delicious southern fried chicken and biscuits which were an odd specialty for a woman brought up in New Denmark, New Brunswick. She must have learned how to make it from the southern wife of a grad student at Princeton where my father was studying for his PhD. I loved her tuna fish casserole, a very fifties dish, which I make myself on the odd occasion when I am homesick for my childhood. She also cooked game very well - wild partridge and venision were my favourites. They were always served with delicious sauces. But she would "out do herself" at Christmas with her Danish roast goose with apples and prunes and red cabbage. The Christmas dessert was not the usual Danish ris a l'amande but a tart lemon ice cream which she made to please my father. It was refreshing and light after the rich goose and went very well with the many different Christmas cookies she had taught me to make. When meyer lemons are in season, I make the Chez Panisse recipe for lemon ice cream and remember. I loved the Christmas Eve dinner most of all the meals my mother cooked. As I said, my father fished as often as he could. Sometimes her fried white fish for breakfast or fish roe. I thought they were delicious and much preferred them to the rainbow trout we had for dinner. I read a lot and my culinary fantasies were influenced by books like Little House on the Prairie. I wasn't satisfied with canned baked beans and with the help of recipes, I figured out how to make them myself with navy beans, salt pork and molasses. I also learned how to make steamed Boston brown bread to serve with the beans. I loved making them and eating them. Naturally there were the weekly roasts - beef with Yorkshire pudding, pork with applesauce, lamb with mint sauce and roast chicken.And of course there was wonderful gravy with each roast. I still love gravy an sauces to an obsessive degree but none were as good as my mothers'. My parents bought their meat and poultry from a farm in the Windermere Valley and the its quality was exceptional. It is only recently with the advent of organic butchers that I have tasted meat that tastes like the meat we ate then. The poultry still can't compete with what we ate then. There were no fine restaurants in Kimberley nor were there any fast food places. When my father was away, my mother would take my brother and I to a diner uptown, where we had hamburgers, fries and chocolate milkshakes. I loved those hamburgers - they surpassed my father's barbecued burgers and for some reason they surpass anything I have eaten as an adult, even my own. It must have been the grease or the bun. Nor have I tasted a better chocolate milkshake or fries. I imagine that it was the specialness of the occasion that made the food taste so good. W When we went on holidays we always went to a city (Spokane, Seattle, Calgary, or Vancouver) and stayed in a grand hotel. We always ate in the posh hotel restaurants and I looked forward to the food. Especially in the coastal cities we could indulge in seafood - crab, oysters, shrimp and these were always a treat. To this day, I am a restaurant groupie.

James Beard wrote a lot about "taste memory" especially in his memoir "Delights and Prejudices" and when I read what he had to say, I connected with it. Madhur Jaffrey writes about her experiences with "taste memory" as well and once again, I resonate with what she says. I will quote from them; The ability to recall a taste sensation, which I think of as "taste memory," is a God-given talent, akin to perfect pitch, which makes your life richer if you possess it. If you aren't born with it, you can never seem to acquire it....And naturally good chefs and cooks must depend upon memory when they season or when they are combining subtle flavors to create a new sauce or dish. -- James Beard, Delights and Prejudices (1964) Madhur Jaffrey Years later, in New York, I helped my ailing neighbor James Beard teach some of his last classes. One of them was about taste. The students were instructed to sample nine types of caviar and a variety of olive oils, and do a blind identification of meats that had had their fat removed. Toward the end of the class, this big, frail man, who was confined to a high director’s chair, said to the students, “Do you think there is such a thing as taste memory?” This set me thinking. A few years earlier, my husband, a violinist, had been studying the score of Bach’s “Chaconne” when a friend asked him, “Can you hear the music as you read it?” It was the same question in a different form. When I left India to study in England, I did not know how to cook, but my palate had recorded hundreds of flavors. From cumin to tamarind, they were all in my head, waiting to be called into service. Rather like my husband, I could hear the honey on my tongue. ♦ I like Madhur Jaffrey's musical analogy. Taste memory for me is like "perfect pitch" for a musician. It is a gift albeit contingent on having a large repertoire of flavours in the memory bank. Like Madhur Jaffrey, I didn't know how to cook when I left home and I had no recipes or cookbooks. I recreated my mother's meals from memory and was usually successful. Later on when I had the money to eat in restaurants and ate a particularly delicious meal in a restaurant, I would analyze the flavours in the dish I was interested in and return home and recreate it as soon as possible. I was often successful. I became a cookbook collector and lost my dependency on my "taste memory" and mostly hunt down recipes instead. Recently, friends asked me if I could recreate the Hovis bread that we all ate as children. Hovis sent the dough to various Canadian bakeries (even those in very small towns). I ordered Hovis flour from Great Britain and found a Hovis recipe on the Hovis website and used it. We all agreed that it wasn't as we had remembered it. I have since experimented (Elizabeth David reports in her bread book that the wheat germ was toasted) so I tried that and still my tasters and I agreed that that bread wasn't quite "it" either. Next I will grind my own wheat (because it is the wheatiness that I am after) to see if that works. I also wonder if my friends and I are "in synch" vis a vis our taste memories. We grew up in different parts of Canada, me in a remote mountain town in BC, another in Hamilton, Ontario and another, north of Toronto. Also with regard to childhood taste memories, I find I am frequently disappointed. Chicken even free range doesn't have the same deliciousness of those we used to get from the farm in the Windermere Valley. Carrots do not taste the same at all, even those grown from organic European seeds by me. So a taste memory can be a source of great frustration as well.

I agree. I have read this in many excellent Chinese cookbooks and most of the Chinese cooks I know agree. I had a wonderfully seasoned Chinese wok - daily use (2 or 3 times a day) by three Chinese grad students who lived with me between 2000 and 2009). I loved to use it and was so proud of its patina and the smokey taste I achieved in my food. Then I rented briefly to a very young Chinese student who was grease phobic. She scoured my wonderful wok down to the bare metal (which then rusted) and told me that my previous students were not very clean in their cooking habits. I was heartbroken. Then I found out that she didn't know how to cook at all! Fortunately she didn't stay long and I am once again trying to season my wok to its previous glory, however, I do not use it frequently enough so it is taking a long time.

I meant to mention Judith Jones' cookbook, "The Pleasures of Cooking for One". Judith Jones, for those that don't know, is the Knopf editor of Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, James Beard, Lydia Bastianich and many many more famous cookbook authors. The recipes are actually written in quantities for one person - for example, Hollandaise for One, Lobster Bisque for One, A Small Roast Pork Tenderloin, Linguine with Smoked Salmon (for one) etc. When she does provide a recipe for something that will have leftovers she provides recipes for those as well. The recipes draw from her years of experience as a cookbook editor and so there is a range from Moroccan Cous Cous, to Indian Curry, and Ratatouille for One.

Whenever my husband was away, my daughter and I would bread some slices of brie or camembert and deep fry them. We would eat them with a chutney and a salad of bitter greens dressed with a vinaigrette. The oozy crunchy cheese, the spicy chutney and the tart bitter salad made for a delicious meal, all the more delicious because it was a secret pleasure. When my husband came home, he could always tell what we had eaten. He said the house smelled like a barnyard. So much for our gentle rebellion.

You guessed! I infuse it with flaked coconut. I leave it in and it is lovely. My daughter wondered if we could whip coconut milk, but even if we could, which I doubt it would be too rich. Try it!

Pineapple upside down cake with rum butterscotch sauce and coconut whipped cream. No picture but it is gold and burnished and beautiful and delicious. I had it for breakfast; I couldn't wait.

I just bought some freekeh. Do you cook it like rice or like cracked wheat? Do you cook it in water or soak it or steam it?

I absolutely agree. I love the combination of food writing and recipes. It makes the whole experience of cooking a dish much richer; and it allow you as a cook to participate in the evolution of a dish. You definitely feel like your part of a lineage, in my case a Danish Canadian Nonna following in the steps of the many Italian Nonna's that Elizabeth David evokes. I love Julia Child but I don't feel as free to depart from the precision of the recipe.

I made Elizabeth David's Paparadella con Lepre from her Italian Food this weekend. It is a wonderful autumnal dish. I cut up two rabbits and marinated the pieces in red wine, juniper berries, pepper, bay leaf and a little onion overnight.(This part is not from Italian Food, but I do it to make the rabbit taste more like hare - gamier). I cut the flesh from the bones to make the pasta sauce and I used the bones to make stock. I lightly sauteed the pancetta, followed by the rabbit pieces, onion and celery. Then I added the chopped boletus (previously dried and then soaked) and some fresh marjoram, sprinkled flour lightly over the mixture and then added dry marsala wine and reduced it. Then I added the stock and simmered to mixture for an hour. Delicious on fresh paparadella. Since this is such a fiddle, I make enough to freeze for later. It freezes very well. All other recipes cook the rabbit meat on the bone and then shred it,which is easier,but the result is a drier less integrated meat. While Elizabeth David does give quantities, I find this recipe very forgiving in that regard as many of her recipes are.

Yes it is a beautiful coffee table book but the ingredients are so rarified and the techniques are so beyond my home chef abilities not to mention my batterie de cuisine that I can only look at the pictures and dream. I have examined most of the recipes hoping to find one or two that are possible. The Aebleskever recipe is somewhat accessible but still not completely doable unfortunately.

Several times a year, I make Waldorf Salad for my friend Lyndsay. She doesn't cook herself but she loves waldorf salad - the way she remembers having it in the fifties when she was a child. She wants crisp apples, celery, walnuts a hint of tartness, and a hint of sweetness. She doesn't want it messed up with marshmallows, grapes or raisons or other variations that are out there. So I use two kinds of crisp apples so it is visually attractive- Honey Crisp for red, Granny Smith for green, home made mayonnaise made with grapeseed oil and extra lemon juice, a touch of dijon mustard and a little cream. I add some honey for the sweetness and a little walnut oil. Of course, I include chopped celery and lightly toasted and chopped walnuts. Lyndsay likes it that way and so do I. We eat it with homemake Wiener Schnitzel. Somehow, they taste good together with a glass of German riesling.