A cult may be born around this olive oil. Smooth and buttery, without a trace of green, this olive oil tastes like the sun shining on the Greek hillside from whence it arrived. An olives’ roundness still shadows the texture. It has a perfume redolent of wild thyme on a dry mediterranean day. Click to continue »
Also called wild leeks, ramps are clearly the good news in a New England spring. The first green edible in the Vermont and New Hampshire mountains if you don’t eat skunk cabbage, ramps have historically inspired jubilance, so starved were northern climaters for the season’s first chlorophyl. Click to continue »
Hungry, gloomy, refrigerator-weary, I took my shopping bag to Willowrest today, and came home happy and hopeful. I chatted with Deb who works there, and found real spring lettuces and the ingredients to make a simple French lunch: a salad of these Essex-grown mixed greens and chopped D’Artagnan duck confit, tossed with my multi-use Caesar dressing from three blogs ago, bound with local Hardy eggs. Click to continue »
Portrait of a beautiful lunch to-go from Willowrest last week: roasted Asian salmon with vegetable chips (snap-crispy, taste like the actual vegetable, these are my new favorite snack, and available at Willowrest in small tubs), and sesame noodles. Click to continue »
This is the story of the cold cucumber soup that never was.
With the weekend’s first 80 degree days, my temper ordered me to the refrigerator for dinner ideas. Too hot and irritable to think imaginitively, I headed to the store with a list of ingredients for making cold cucumber soup, but when I got there my conscience reminded me that cucumbers wouldn’t be local around here for at least a month. So, maybe I would just switch the cucumbers in the recipe for those beets feeling so unwanted at the bottom of my produce drawer, the portion of my CSA share subconsciously labeled “trouble” because it meant peeling.
The next item on the cucumber soup list was buttermilk, but I was at Willowrest, our cute little market trying very hard to supply the most local ingredients possible, not easy in New England. So, instead of buttermilk I bought two cartons of beautiful Rhode Island full-fat yogurt.
The next thing on the list was lemon, and then a jalapeno, not New England natives. By then the Willowrest vibe had gotten to me, and I was freshly committed to strictly local possibiliites. Why was I shopping for lemons and jalapenos from Mexcio when I had an acre of mint in my garden and spring onions crammed in a plastic bag in the basement refrigerator, the portion of my CSA share I just didn’t know what to do with?
Why was I still shopping at all? I had everything I needed at home, except the yoghurt. So, having left my home fantasizing in my head about some mediterranean cucumber soup, I returned home excited to prepare Early Summer New England Borscht.
Amelia O’Reilly, the chef at The Market, had just expressed what I knew, but somehow still fail to completely integrate into meal planning: the fresher the ingredients, the shorter distance they’ve traveled, the less manipulation they require to taste good.
I cannot describe how delicious this soup was, and have made it three times since.
Here’s a recipe, should you want to give mine a try, but the most important ingredient is nearness. Use what is near you.
-About 3 large beets, or even 1 really large one and 2 smaller ones.
-1 cup loosely packed mint leaves
-one spring onion, chopped a bit
-2 pints very good yogurt; it really makes a difference
-2 tablespoons maple syrup
-1/8 cup olive oil (ok, no local, but it somehow pulls out the “garden” tastes here)
-approximately 3/4 cup water, or to taste. You decide how thin or thick it should be without watering the flavor. Much will depend here on the thickness of your yogurt.
-salt and pepper
Some mornings the tea spills, the weeds rule, and the fog won’t lift, but there is a recipe for curing any bad start: a cruise through the blog GoodMorningGloucester.
Your water bill may be too high. Your spot on the Rockport mooring wait-list too low, but there is no way you can feel anything but love for this part of the world once you’ve spent five minutes reading Joey Ciaramitaro’s take on Cape Ann, even if you’re reading from China.
A third-generation lobster dealer, who just happens to look like a J. Crew model with an iPad, (I can say that because he refers to me as “the H Bomb”), Joey is the happy force behind this amiable, rambling blog. Joey and his cousin, Frankie, run Capt’n Joe’s Lobster Co., “Lobster Dealers” is how Joey describes them, out of Gloucester Harbor. Their grandfather was Captain Joe. Credentials to comment on this city don’t get more legitimate.
Everyone cooked in my family, even my brothers. We subscribed to Gourmet Magazine and hungrily read the articles about what people in little French villages were having for supper, and then my mother and I tried to recreate them ourselves.
My academic background is in painting and writing, but I waitressed at Jasper’s and Hammersly’s Bistro in the 1980’s, when dining in Boston was just becoming exciting, and the people in it - waitstaff and kitchen staff - were like a small university of students and faculty. Everyone knew each other, ate in each other’s restaurants, and were aware that dining in Boston had just turned a corner, inspired by youth, global awareness - these were chefs who had traveled to Europe - and new respect for American ingredients. It was a wonderful community of people who cared about all sorts of good food and wines. Because they cared about these arts, they also cared about growing food, preserving space for it to grow, preserving the lifestyles of people who grow it. We were all beginning to understand that caring about what was served on a plate was to care about the bigger picture.
Married, the mother of two daughters, I now live in Rockport, Ma. My daughters cook. Everyone in our house welcomes a new cookbook for the dinner and dessert possibilities it might offer, which really means the possibility of changing our lives just a little, pretending we live in a little French village for a night. Isn’t that what food does, too - a little bit of theater every single day? “What are we having for dinner tonight?” is really the question of “What is the performance tonight? Where are we traveling? Who will we be?”
I write a column called “Food for Thought” for The Gloucester Daily Times. In it and on this blog, I’m always looking for the possibility food offers for transformation and I’m looking for those wonderful communities of all kinds who care about preparing a great dish, setting a beautiful table, drinking a good glass of wine, and then having a great conversation.
0 | Unique Visitors |
Food for Thought © 2010 The Gloucester Daily Times All Rights Reserved.
You agree that you are fully responsible for the content that you post, and understand that the The Gloucester Daily Times is not responsible for any content posted by third parties. You understand and agree that the Weblogs are to be used only for non-commercial purposes and are for text only. You acknowledge and agree that you use and/or rely on any information obtained through the discussion forums at your own risk. The views expressed on the Weblogs hosted by the The Gloucester Daily Times are solely those of the authors and contributors of the content only and do not reflect the views of the The Gloucester Daily Times, its management, agents, employees, subsidiaries or parent companies. No warranties are made, whether express or implied. For more details on our terms and conditions of use click here.
