There is a comforting romance to tracing your culinary roots back to grandma’s stained cookbooks or memories of mom letting you wear her apron and stir. These bits of nostalgia are stereotypically accented with the recollection of shared kitchen laughter and lessons learned at the elbows of others—food preparation that bonded the family and ended in feasts of Norman Rockwell perfection. In my case, however, this love affair with formulas and mixtures and experiments began in the garage. My father had set up an old Formica-topped table, behind the cars and next to the lawn mower, where I could spend hours by myself just messing around in my own imaginary kitchen. I made milk by shaking together baby powder and… Continue reading »
A Feast of Vegetables, or How Not To Waste Your CSA
Here in Wonderland Kitchen, some weekends are all about the big projects–sourdough bread baking or cheese making or pickled vegetable canning. Other weekends consist of 105-degree-shellacked days in which the majority of the “cooking” is devoted to sitting in the direct blast of the window air conditioner and contemplating the meal plan that requires the least amount of time out of its cool company. As you have probably already guessed, today I’m going to tell you about the latter. I wasn’t going to post about any of these “recipes.” In fact, I was thinking of taking a couple weeks off–a little summer vacation–during which I would consider what this blog might best become as it cruises into its one-year anniversary…. Continue reading »
Savory Summer Pie: Tomatoes and Corn and Biscuit Crust, Oh My
I may have grown up amid Ohio’s horizon-filling corn fields, with tomatoes piled high at every farmer’s stand we passed, but I had never tasted the Southern treat that is tomato corn pie until a few years ago. Since that revelatory time, however, it has become the dish that announces “Summer!” in our kitchen (and celebrates its bounty a few times more throughout the season). Despite all that, somehow it has never ended up detailed here in Wonderland. I think I get distracted. There’s that weekend when I arrive at the market and see that the stall at the end has a pickup bed backed in and filled with ears of corn, and that the man who’s been selling the… Continue reading »
Canning and Preserving: The Season So Far
I am a “learning by doing” type of person, but I’ve never enjoyed group classes. I may not get much from reading instructions, but I do like to make my mistakes in the privacy of my own home, on my own terms and on my own schedule. It’s not the most efficient method of knowledge acquisition, I’ll grant you, but it’s what has always worked for me. Last year a lot of my study concerned bread, particularly sourdough. I trialed, I errored, and I learned a lot. And now I really feel like I know something, something satisfying in the same way that working to play the violin well provided but that getting a good grade never did. (There are… Continue reading »
Ultimate DIY Picnic: Housemade Buns & Mayo
I did not intend to bake my own hamburger buns when the week began. The thing of it was, I kept eating Brian’s whole wheat store-bought ones, simultaneously lamenting both their dwindling number and their shoddy quality. After polishing off half the bag–what? I was feeling nostalgic for the NYC egg sandwiches of my youth–it seemed only fair that I replace them, but I was hoping for something a little less prone to collapse. Maybe I could make them? That seemed likely to be prohibitively labor intensive for any pre-workday morning, but before I hit the store, I hit the Google. As per usual, King Arthur Flour delivered a recipe for a spectacular dough: a snap to mix, a dream… Continue reading »
Adventures in CSA Vegetable Preparation
This week’s farmers market/CSA haul is smaller than it might first appear, I suspect, piled, as it is, with leafy greens of all shapes and types. Regardless of its feeding power, however, it was definitely not going to all fit in the ‘fridge in its current state. Measures had to be taken. Kale and I are historically wary kitchenfellows. I like it, but I don’t like the aerobic workout that chewing it usually involves, even when massaged with salt for raw salads (though I am impressed that leftovers will hold up for days that way). I was set to show it who was boss and pulverize the kale down into a pesto again this week, but then I caught this… Continue reading »
