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Some live to travel, others travel to cook
Read Full Post: Some live to travel, others travel to cookWhen I was in Santa Fe last September, I took a few classes at the Santa Fe School of Cooking to get me oriented to my new surroundings. Mostly demonstration classes, except for a hands-on session on roasting chiles and pressing tortillas, they were a fabulous introduction to the town and the food, and a great way to pass the morning, ending with a gourmet lunch prepared before our eyes.
Our chef was Rocky Durham, who was absolutely wonderful: a passionate travel resource for his home town, a quirky advocate of southwestern cuisine – though marked forever by his classical French training – with a well-travelled palate to draw on, and of course a life-long love of good food. One of the best parts of the class were the dining Q and A: Rocky gave his unadulterated opinion of any local restaurant we cared to ask him about, and both tourists and locals (there were some in all the classes I attended) shared their picks as well. But if you go there… just don’t expect to leave without a bag of chiles and seasonings from the cooking school’s well provisioned gift shop.
Rocky gave us a few enduring tips for the road as well. One very useful one was to invest in a cheap electric coffee grinder, and another was not to buy ground spices, but rather to roast whole ones (cumin, cinnamon, oregano etc) as needed in a dry pan and then grind them in aforementioned grinder. It can be cleaned easily, he said, by whizzing a spoonful of plain white rice or salt or fresh bread crumbs. Works like a damn.
One of my classmates, by a strange coincidence, was an American expat living in London, who works at Divertimenti, a stellar cookware shop that has branched out into cooking classes. Though I still have some of their cookware, I’ve never attended their classes, but I have been to some at a much beloved cookbook shop in Notting Hill’s Portobello Market, Books for Cooks, which were endlessly interesting and delicious as well.
And now, after a morning canter along the Gorge with old Anton, I must return to a meditation on rhyme. I’m giving a short presentation on rhyme to the form class on Wednesday; so far I have identified 34 kinds of rhyme and around 40 poetry forms that use rhyme (including 5 different sonnet forms). My favourite kind of rhyme so far is Procrustean Rhyme: rhyme on words which have no conventional rhymes. Uses the method Procrustes used on his victims: stretching them if they were too short to fit his bed, and lopping something off if they were too long. So you end up truncating words (enjambing them awkwardly with hyphens) or extending them into phrases. -
Cauliflower and cumin
Read Full Post: Cauliflower and cuminTwo of my favourite things. Is cauliflower brain food because it looks like brains? And can one have too much cumin in one’s life? So I was delighted to come across a quick and easy recipe for Cauliflower Soup with Toasted Cumin and Lime. With fresh lime juice, it puts, in fact, three ingredients I like all in one place. A wonderful smooth soup, very pretty and zippy. And it’s vegetarian (if you substitute vegetable for chicken stock) and wheat free. I personally would be reluctant to lose the cream but you could omit it from a veggie portion and make it dairy free as well.
If you want to feel even better about eating it, try buying locally grown cauliflower if you can. Here’s a clever site where you can log your Food Miles. Not only do you support local farmers, you cut pollution and transport prices, and get fresher food to boot.
Back on Epicurious there was also an intriguing little snippet about cooking an egg in a glass of vodka (who thinks these things up??)
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Good spreads
Read Full Post: Good spreadsI used to use Epicurious a lot, until they started littering their site with pop-up ads, including the kind that crawl up your screen till you click them away. But I recently revisited them and either my pop-up blocker works better these days or they’ve done away with the ads.
I see Epicurious’ editor has a blog now (you have to sign up for their mailing list to comment though) in which she discussed one of my favourite things from England, Marmite, and observed that taste preferences are somewhat polarised on the matter. There are those of us who think it is an indispensible item for the larder, and those who would only use it to poison the slugs, all of which is tastefully documented on Marmite’s own site.
Personally I think a lot of those who try it once and gag are simply using too much, in quantities appropriate to something milder, like peanut butter. But it’s very concentrated so must be spread very thinly to enjoy it properly; I think using lots of butter is also important. And it is a wonderful thing to have on hand to flavour soups and gravies: totally vegetarian and wheat-free to boot. Marmite has an interesting marketing campaign; what other brand actually sells sloganed (“J’déteste Marmite”) t-shirts to its detractors? And who buys them?
Once when I visited Amsterdam, a helpful local suggested I buy pindakaas as a good typically Dutch treat to take home. I had to tell her we already had peanut butter, which I suppose other countries might claim as typically theirs as well. Interesting , this proprietary pride in snack foods.
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In her latest collection, Rhona McAdam navigates the dark places of human movement through the earth and the exquisite intricacies lingering in backyard gardens and farmlands populated by insects and pollinators, all the while returning to the body, to the tune of staccato beats and the newly discovered symmetries within the human heart.
“…A beautiful, filling collection, Larder is a set of poems to read at the change of the seasons, to appreciate alongside a good meal, and to remind yourself of the beauty in everything, even the things you may not appreciate before opening McAdam’s collection….”
Rhona McAdam is a writer, poet, editor, and Registered Holistic Nutritionist with a Master’s in Food Culture from Italy and a deep-rooted passion for ecology and urban agriculture. Her work spans corporate and technical writing to poetry and creative nonfiction, often exploring the vital links between what we eat and how we live. Based in Victoria, BC, and available via Zoom, Rhona is always open to new writing commissions, readings, or workshops on nutrition and the culinary arts.
