morsels & sauces

Well hello again.  It's fall.  It's my favorite season of the year, and generally it means squash soup and apple butter and warm blankets and sweaters.  However, the weather has been warm during the day (but brisk at night), so instead we have Ottolenghi's raw artichoke and herb salad.  This is a good thing. We have a new cookbook, my friends.  And we all know how much I love new cookbooks, and it's even better to have a new cookbook from Ottolenghi, given that I am quite a fan of his other cookbook (see here and here and, yes,  here ).  This cookbook celebrates the variety of foods from Jerusalem, where Greek Orthodox monks, Russian Orthodox priests, Hasidic Jews, non-Orthodox Jews, Sephardic Jews, Palestinian Muslims, Christian Arabs, Ethopian Copts, and Russian nuns (to name a few) all come together in this global city to create, as Ottolenghi says, "an immense tapestry of cuisines."  Ottolenghi, with his business partner Sami Tamimi ( C...

I have an addiction that many of you share--cookbooks.  Thankfully, I have an enabler.  A dear friend of mine sends me cookbooks out of the blue (see here and here ), and this cookbook was another gift brought to me by my dear friend via the USPS.  What a lovely surprise to find such presents awaiting me on my door step. This cookbook comes from Sara Forte, "a food-loving, wellness-craving veggie enthusiast" (or so she describes herself in the cookbook), and Hugh Forte, her photographer husband, who also run a snappy little blog , The Sprouted Kitchen.   Focused on good, local food in season, the Fortes are part of the movement that has made it, I would say, to the mainstream.  There are so many good cooks, good food bloggers, and good growers out there that support this movement; all you need is one good farmers market or a grocery store committed to these qualities, and you're set. Lucky for me, I live less than a block from mine.  While it...

Spring!  Spring!  The farmers markets are slow to bring out the bounty but it's true--spring is trying it's hardest to be here.  Dull roots are stirring.  Lilacs are breeding.  How I love April, if only because I get to read Eliot: April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering          Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s, My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there yo...