A look at local food discoveries, whether it’s a particular dish or an ingredient, often with one or more recipes.
I couldn’t have found Bahrain on a map a week ago. I could have pointed vaguely towards the Middle East, but I couldn’t have told you that it was an archipelago consisting of 30 islands, though the vast majority of its land mass is one single island. I couldn’t have told you that it’s 25% the size… Read More The Bread & Soup Project #14 – Bahrain
It’s been quite awhile since we had one of our online cooking challenges in the Reinventing the Whisk series. Episode #12 was back in December, and here we are, going on seven months later with Episode #13. This time around, four randomly selected ingredients (we put together a spreadsheet of about 120 ingredients that between the… Read More Rad-icchio… totally tubular man…
Another round of new plates. Interestingly, I think that over the last little stretch, these are some of the more experimental dishes that I came up with, and while they weren’t universally liked by everyone (nothing ever is), they were the ones that got some of the biggest thumbs-up responses in feedback from guests. Not… Read More More New Plates
The Bahamas, or, officially, Commonwealth of the Bahamas, has an intriguing cuisine, a blend of a wisp of the native taino traditions with a whopping dose of African influence – given that some 90% of the population are descendants of freed slaves and free Africans brought there by the third influence, the British, after the American… Read More The Bread & Soup Project #13 – Bahamas
I promised last week that I’d start posting a little about new dishes at the dinners. I think that’s a nice compromise between doing a writeup on every week’s menu, and what I’ve been doing for the last while, just posting the occasional recipe for one or another dish. So here are a trio of… Read More Keeping the Dinner Plates Spinning
Stradette A historic part of Piemontese cuisine, stradette is a pasta made from a blend of cornmeal (coarse polenta) and pasta flour. It stems from a period of time when cornmeal was simply cheaper than wheat flour, and was a way to stretch the dough, so to speak. Most traditionally, it’s made into a simple… Read More Peculiar Pastas #2
At the dinner last night, a young woman was asking me how my cooking changes as time goes on, a sort of “what’s your process?” conversation. The subject comes up time and again, both with guests, and just chatting with friends and colleagues. For me, I often discover a new ingredient, or a technique, and… Read More Mexican Invasion
I know, I know, this project is moving forward achingly slowly. But, so what? It’ll continue, as I find time to do the research and have fun with filled breads and soups, bit by bit, until it’s either complete or I decide to stop. And hey, here we are at the end of the “A”s,… Read More The Bread & Soup Project #12 – Azerbaijan