February 2010
6 posts
4 tags
Tongue
The enormous cow’s tongues at my nearby Vietnamese market (16th and Washington) have an inexorable pull on me. I recently bought and cured one. It’s a pretty easy process, a good warm-up if you plan on corning beef for St. Patrick’s Day.
The only special ingredient is so-called “pink salt”, a mixture of table salt and sodium nitrite. You don’t even need...
4 tags
Delancey Street Bagels
Regional specialties can be so cruel. How can New York have at least 3 reasonable bagel options per block, yet Philly is such a bagel wasteland?
Here are the places I know of that sell bagels in Center City: South Street Philly Bagels (which I always thought was just called Hot Bagels), Manhattan Bagels and Breugger’s Bagels. There’s also the Bagel Factory on Walnut Steet, but...
3 tags
Dulce de leche, can to pan
If you would like to draw me to a recipe, here is the phrase that pays: “It only has one ingredient!” (In my world, salt is not an ingredient. It is a fact of life.) It takes almost no prompting to get me to whip up a batch of butter. So, the idea of boiling a can and getting out a tasty treat had immediate, obvious appeal to me.
Traditional dulce de leche requires you to spend...
2 tags
Hello, and Consommé
Hi! I’m Michael. I’m friends with Helen and company, and I’m excited to be share some of my cooking with you fine people.
This is my kitchen; it’s in Philadelphia. (I mean, so am I.)
I love to cook: saute, steam, fry, bake, cure, smoke, brew, whatever. (You can see evidence of most of those in this picture, actually.) I like to make things myself, to a fault.
But enough about me. ...
3 tags
Mmmm, mushroom soup!
I grew up a vegetable hater. Mushrooms were my first love of the vegetable world. (Fungus world… whatever. They were not a meat, fruit, grain, starch or fat, and you find them in salads. Thus, they are vegetables.) Why? Because mushrooms have the delightful property of taking on a lot of the flavor of their environment.
So, for my Saturday snowday, I made a pot of stock, and then,...
2 tags
Philly Cupcake
After a particularly ill-fated trip to Betty’s Speakeasy last October, where the only cupcakes on offer included stout, chipotle and zucchini, I wrote my own personal rules for
How to Be a Good Cupcake Purveyor
Have chocolate-chocolate and vanilla-vanilla, every day.
Cupcakes are all about the cake-to-frosting ratio. Don’t screw it up.
Don’t refrigerate. It makes your...