I know it’s been a while and I’m sorry, really. Luckily, though, I don’t have a laundry list of excuses for you – just one: I got a new job. On weekends I get paid to sell cheese at Whole Foods; yes, you read correctly, PAID to be at Whole Foods.
Category: savory
All that isn’t sweet belongs to me
This is how I roll
With winter quickly approaching, everything gets pushed off to the back burner. Getting out of bed, hopping out of the shower – the basic tasks that were once a drag begin to feel even more impossible. I had originally intended on writing this post last night, but I failed. I was laying in bed, snuggled under my warm blankets with my powerbook perched over a pillow, typing away. The arrangement seemed perfect… except, I woke up the next morning to the annoying sound of my alarm, my laptop around my arm and a blog post that was complete rubbish. Needless to say, I’m writing at my desk today.
Witch Hat Pumpkin Ravioli
The past couple of days have been rough. I’ve been in curled up in bed with all the goodie pre-symptoms the common cold has to offer: sinus pressure, sneezing and I’ll spare you the phlegmy details. Today will be a short post since I’ve only got a couple of hours to prepare myself for the army of trick-or-treaters screaming for obscene amounts of sugary sweets. It’s my first Halloween in this neighborhood so we’ll see how it goes.
In the meantime, I couldn’t pass up celebrating Halloween on my blog either. It seems like everywhere I click there are amazingly ghoulish culinary masterpieces on display. Keeping with the whole Mediterranean theme of my blog, I decided to go with an Italian inspired dish. The pretty pumpkin you see below was one of the many gifts I got while I was at the Beekman and it was perfect for what I had in mind. So without further ado, I present to you my Black Witch Hat Pumpkin Ravioli.
Divine Culinary Intervention
“Tony, you just ate 1200 calories worth of bread.”
-Jess Park
I rediscovered Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread recipe a couple weeks ago. It was Wednesday evening and there it was, idly sitting in my RSS feed, waiting to be double-clicked: Faster No-Knead Bread. Mark Bittman had just blogged about a quicker variation of the original recipe he featured in the NYT in 2006. I never got around to making this bread when it first came out. Originally, I sided with the skeptical foodies who wanted no part in this trendy no-knead fad. For me, the foundation of bread was all in the traditional kneading techniques and no post in the NYT was going to change that. But, many successful minimalist recipes later, Mark had made a believer out of me. I took Mark’s recent post as a sign of divine culinary intervention and decided to give this no-knead method a try.
A twist on an all American classic
I have no clue what it is about a couple slices of bread, some good quality cheese and a dab of fat that enables the humble grilled cheese to stand a chance in today’s culinary colosseum, but it does. As much as I consider myself a foodie and lover of all things gourmet, sometimes I don’t want fois gras topped with caviar and doused with fancy white truffle oil – no, thanks. Give me a couple grilled cheeses, a big bowl of soup and a Law & Order marathon (SVU or CI, of course) and I’m a happy camper. The star of this post is the ubiquitous grilled cheese and all the ooey, gooey, mouth-burning goodness that it brings to this world.