Watermelon, mango, blue cheese and cayenne pepper combine sweet, savory and spicy flavors in a fresh, colorful summer salad. Recipe below.
WHEN WE STARTED PLANNING LAST WEEKEND’S ROAD TRIP TO EASTERN IOWA, one of our first thoughts was that we might make it to Newton, Iowa, home of the Maytag Dairy Farms and Maytag Blue Cheese. Continue reading “A fresh, spicy surprise for summer: Watermelon Mango Salad with Blue Cheese”
On April 24, two friends set out on bicycles from Hardwick, Vermont, to explore the local food movement. As they approach their final destination—Portland, Oregon—my post on the USA Character Approved Blog shares some of what they found.
To our grandparents and great-grandparents, local food was just food, something grown by them, their neighbors or maybe a farmer a few miles away. Anything that had to be shipped from someplace more distant—an orange, for instance—was deemed exotic, something to be reserved for a holiday gift.
Fast forward to today, though, and local is the new exotic. Increasingly, “locally sourced” is the new mantra for restaurant chefs, home cooks, community activists, environmentalists… But what does local food really mean, to those who produce it and those who consume it? Friends Aaron Zueck and Robert DuBois decided the best way to study local was to go national, biking across America, hosting potluck dinners along the way and talking to people about food, over food. They named their epic project Bikeloc. Continue reading “Biking across America in search of local food”
Cuban-inspired Fish Fillets and Tomatoes rely on garlic, cumin, cilantro and capers to deliver big flavor; crushed red pepper flakes add just a touch of heat. Recipe below.
When a Cuban-inspired seafood dish caught my eye recently, I was intrigued as much by what wasn’t there as what was. Where were the chiles? Where was the heat? Sure, the recipe called for red pepper flakes, but a mere 1/8-teaspoonful. That wouldn’t even register on our heat-loving palates.
But then I thought about the Cuban sandwich place near my office. The sandwiches I’ve had there all aim for savory flavors, with little or no heat. The salsas they bring to the table alongside follow this pattern too—only one of the two is at all spicy, and even then, not in the sinus-opening way salsas found in Mexican restaurants can be.
So I did a little research. It seems that fiery heat just isn’t part of the Cuban culinary vocabulary. Continue reading “Big flavor drives Cuban seafood dish, not big heat”
The urge to grow your own food can strike in even the most urban environments. My post on the USA Character Approved Blog this week shows how one person answers that urge in the wilds of Manhattan.
Peter Bazeli and his wife Lisa Nathan live the big city dream—certainly my big city dream. Their apartment on the Upper West Side faces New York’s green jewel, Central Park. But old habits die hard. Peter grew up helping his parents in their large family garden in the Midwest. Gradually, he took it over and even put in a fish pond. Moving to the big city did nothing to stifle his desire to dig in the dirt. So he rents a tiny plot in a Manhattan community garden, where he and Lisa raise heirloom tomatoes, broccoli, peppers, eggplants, lettuce and spinach.
“Farming” a four-foot by four-foot garden plot in the heart of New York City is not without its challenges. Continue reading “Green .000367 Acres: Farming in Manhattan on a very, very small scale”
Versatile eggplant caponata, flavored with garlic, fresh tomatoes, golden raisins, red onions and parsley, makes a vegetarian meal for two, a side dish for four or an appetizer for a whole party. Recipe below.
Eggplant caponata is often referred to as Italy’s take on ratatouille. And it shares a rustic charm with that classic French stewed vegetable dish—as well as eggplant in a starring role.
But eggplant caponata boasts some real versatility when it comes to serving it. Chances are, if you’ve ever had eggplant caponata, it was served on crostini as an appetizer. But it’s also great served warm or room temperature as a side dish. Or with a nice crusty bread as a vegetarian meal. And it can even be spread on a sandwich, stuffed into a pita…
Recipes for eggplant caponata are just as impressively varied. Fresh tomatoes, canned tomatoes, no tomatoes… capers, no capers, pine nuts, no… well, you get the idea. Lots of recipes call for olives, but not all Continue reading “Multiple personalities, one delicious rustic dish: Eggplant Caponata”
The USA Character Approved Blog has now officially launched! For my first post-soft launch post, I’m profiling chef Marcus Samuelsson.
For many of us, Marcus Samuelsson first appeared on our radar screens when he was chosen to cook the Obamas’ first White House state dinner last November. But the accomplished young chef had already made quite a name for himself. At age 24, he was named co-owner and executive chef of New York’s Aquavit, transforming the Swedish restaurant with his willingness to use distinctly non-Swedish ingredients such as curry and lemongrass. And he is the youngest chef ever to receive a three-star restaurant review from The New York Times.
Samuelsson comes by his global approach to cooking naturally. He was born in an Ethiopia village. When he was three, his mother died of tuberculosis, and he and his sister were adopted and raised in Gothenburg, Sweden. Continue reading “Chef Marcus Samuelsson approaches cooking and life without boundaries”
A pair of simple, delicious French recipes this week—Mussels steamed in wine with shallots, garlic and lots of parsley and oven-fried pommes frites flavored with herbes de Provence.
“LAFAYETTE, WE ARE HERE.” Those famous words, marking our returning the favor to France in World War I for their vital assistance in our Revolutionary War, were undoubtedly followed by the less well known, “Now, when do we eat?”
Because in addition to contributing to American independence, the French are rightly far more known for their contributions to food and cooking. And not just for their stellar, elaborate concoctions. It’s more their understanding of how a few well-chosen ingredients perfectly combined can become something wonderful—and their daily celebration of food in even the simplest dishes. So when I saw that this week’s post would go up on Bastille Day, that was all the excuse I needed to feed my inner Francophile in the kitchen. Continue reading “Bastille Day a perfect excuse for sailor’s mussels, frites and all things French”
America isn’t a melting pot. It’s a smorgasbord. A road trip over the Fourth of July weekend proves it without even trying.
Yeah, it’s Wednesday. There should be a recipe here. But we had too much fun in too much heat with too much driving over the holiday weekend—more than 800 miles by the time we got home Monday night. Tuesdays are my absolute deadline for my weekly Wednesday posts. If I haven’t cooked my post before then, it’s do or die time. This Tuesday, it was just not in me to cook something, photograph it and tell you how I did it.
So instead, let me tell you a little about our weekend—mainly about what we ate, this being a food blog. You’re not going to get restaurant reviews here and certainly no photos of what we ate. This is more a celebration of the wealth of food experiences available here in America—more specifically, in three Michigan cities not especially known as culinary centers, but all serving up plenty of good, diverse eats. Detroit, Hamtramck and East Lansing.
Whenever we find ourselves in Detroit these days, one required stop is the Detroit Beer Co., a friendly, comfortable microbrewery, Continue reading “Celebrating America’s birthday by eating our way around the world in Michigan”
Balsamic vinegar offers a subtle and surprisingly mild twist on cooking chicken in wine. Butter and chicken broth help tame it. Recipe below.
I DON’T DOUBT FOR A MINUTE that you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar. But vinegar is just so much more interesting to me. (Besides, do you really want to catch flies?)
I know honey is enjoying a moment right now, especially with the sudden surge in popularity of beekeeping, but we use a heck of a lot more vinegar in our kitchen—and stock a wider array of them—than we do honey. Right now, for instance, we have three different balsamic vinegars, Japanese rice vinegar, Spanish sherry vinegar, red wine vinegar and, oh yeah, some apple cider vinegar. We have two small containers of honey.
So when I came across the phrase “vinegar chicken” somewhere recently, probably in a restaurant description, I was interested. Continue reading “Aged balsamic vinegar plays well with others: Vinegar Chicken with Mushrooms”
Fake brothers from a fake country serve up real treats from a DC food truck, a former construction worker cooks up Cajun food surrounded by Illinois cornfields, and a California winery creates bar snacks to pair with its wines.
Gourmet food trucks have been catching on everywhere (well, except here in Chicago, where draconian health regulations continue to thwart most attempts). In the past couple of years, chefs and wannabe chefs have been rehabbing used postal vans, delivery trucks and even old ice cream trucks and creating rolling restaurants that serve up an amazing range of eats in cities across the country. But few do it with the style and charming back story of the Fojol Bros.
Only two of the four Fojol Bros. are actual brothers, and no one is named Fojol. Wearing turbans and patently false mustaches, they peddle a changing menu of delicious, healthy Indian food with no preservatives from their homeland, “Merlindia.” And they let people know of the whereabouts of their “traveling culinary carnival” on Twitter. The Fojol Bros., back story and all, are the subject of my latest piece on cable station USA Network’s USA Character Approved Blog. The blog is in soft launch mode at the moment—I’ll let you know when it goes into full launch (heck, I’ll probably take out a full-page ad somewhere).
At Ron’s Cajun Connection, a lively roadside place about 80 miles southwest of Chicago, every order comes with a side of sass, from chef/owner Ron McFarlain himself. Continue reading “Food notes from all over: Mobile Indian food with a side of fun, Cajun cooking in the Midwest and bar snacks for wine”
