basil vinaigrette

A couple of times over the past few months, I've glanced down at my thumbs, hoping they would have turned a deep emerald.  Or at least a nice olive green.  But, as the sorry state of my potted herbs will confess, I am not an instinctual gardener.

Here's the story.  This year I grew some fresh herbs out on the front deck.*  I lovingly potted them in soil, imagining fresh basil pesto, tabbouleh with parsley, and summery potato salad made with thyme.  Now I look back on my two-months-ago self and think—don't waste your time!  (Puns! Groan.)  These herbs were doomed the second they met me.  The parsley bolted (that's a thing, right? bolting?), the rosemary got all thin and spindly, and the rest of them wilted within inches of their lives.  Except the mint, which is totally dead.

(Merrick is kind enough to blame my wilting herbs on the crazy summer heat we've been having.  Have I mentioned the heat wave?  There is a short list of things that I am SO. OVER., and "heat wave" recently moved into the number-one spot, beating out "the copy machine at work" and "accidentally poking myself in the eye with the arm of the cat-eye sunglasses that I bought to look cool in the heat wave.")

sesame cucumber salad

I know it's summer because multiple TSA agents asked to pat down my huge, frizzy hair.  Oof da.  Ninety-percent humidity is not my friend.  In search of a reprieve from the heat wave that's been clutching this part of the country, we made the short trip out to Walden Pond yesterday, and the water was perfect: cool enough to be refreshing, but without that bone-chilling cold that's a signature of our northern Atlantic ocean beaches.

Shiki: Authentic Flavors of Japan

Sushi for the discerning, and much, much more

Brookline offers plenty of sushi, from everyday spots perfect for a nice bit of maki, to express joints smelling like greasy tempura, to supermarkets selling pre-packaged boxes of the stuff. You might think there's no reason to visit another sushi joint.

But Shiki, if you let it, will give you a hundred different reasons. To start, there's much more here than sushi: the menu offers dozens of small plates and noodle dishes that sparkle with the flavors and textures of meticulous and distinctive Japanese cooking.

caramelized fennel

I'll be the first to admit that fennel is an intimidating vegetable.  A dense knot of layers with a good ten inches of greenery fuzzing about like a Mardi-Gras headdress?  (Being from the Midwest, I like my vegetables homely and unassuming, thank you very much.)  All that pageantry, and then you discover that fennel just tastes like black licorice.  Um, no thank you.  Until this spring, fennel was brooding down at the very bottom of my list of favorite vegetables, right next to—well, to be honest, there was nothing next to it.  I thought there was nothing quite so bad as fennel.

chickpea soup

Every once in a while I see a recipe that makes me drop everything to buy ingredients and make it immediately.  I'm sure some of you can relate to this—flipping through a magazine or cookbook with pretty, pretty pictures, hearing the siren song of some delicious braised this or sauteed that, and heading straightaway into the kitchen like a cook possessed.  For me, this is especially true when those pictures contain one of the following: crispy potatoes, oozy caramel, butternut squash, or melted cheese, melted cheese, melted cheese.

 Then occasionally, I'll feel the call of a recipe that I just can't explain, which is what randomly happened with this chickpea soup.  What?  A soup the color of that cakey, sedentary cave mud from the last time I went spelunking?  From the Bon Appétit issue featuring the most annoying interview ever?  An entirely healthy pot of virtuous nutrition?  Yes. That one.  I want to make that and eat it RIGHT NOW.

rosemary sea salt truffles

aaaaaaaand... I'm back.

Since this is, actually, a blog about food, and seeing as how I have remained woefully silent during the two most important months in a gourmande's year (gravy month and gingerbread month, I like to call them), it's high time for me to prove my continuing legitimacy as a cook.  My time has been vacuumed up by other writing—so much writing—but lest you think I've been silent because I haven't been cooking, let me assuage your fears.  This has been an inspired time for culinary experimentation, and in some cases I've been so far out on a limb that it's a wonder I didn't come crashing to the ground.  Much of the R&D in soup and chicken will show up here, in one form or another.

But I'll tease no further.  Let's get down to business with some truffles.  Sure, for my first recipe back, I could have gone with a banana-kale-nutritional yeast smoothie or some such nonsense, to help you keep your New Year's resolution.  But I'm more of a devil-on-your-shoulder kind of girl.  I'd never advise a vegetable smoothie when there are truffles to be had.  (If you're one of the veg-faithful, I'll be accepting your carrot-fueled snarky comments at the end of this post.)

gammy's baked apples

I am one who is given to excess, particularly where apple-picking is concerned.  Twenty pounds is near on half a bushel, which is just a charming way of saying too much!  More than you need!  But the thing is, twenty pounds never sounds like too much, not to me, especially when one is caught up in the crisp autumn air and the sunshine that makes the day just right and the perfectest apple-cider doughnuts you've ever tasted—the first bite crunches from a shell of cinnamon sugar and the insides are pillowy, light as air.  They taste best right out of the paper bag, still hot from the fryer, while standing in the orchard.  But be warned, because they may induce doughnut-fueled apple frenzy, symptoms of which include delusions that one can totally use half a bushel of apples, so let's go ahead and get picking!

The moral of the story is this: I need ways to use twenty pounds of apples.

Sorry to get your hopes up—this post is not about those doughnuts (although sometimes I wish it were.  Curse you, stuff of my dreams!).  No, this post is much more sensible, the kind of thing you can do when you've gnawed the last apple you could possibly gnaw, and yet an invincible mountain of Granny Smiths and Macintoshes still stares at you with apple eyes full of accusations.  (What? They do.)

I've always been skeptical of baked apples.  They seem like a fake dessert, like a health food in disguise at a masquerade dessert ball.  It's as though they come from a different life, a world away: you might imagine them as a sweet from the French countryside, where your itty-bitty white-haired grandmother would hand you one, soft and still warm, and you'd munch through the syrupy mess of apple, brown sugar and butter while running off to play kick-the-can or freeze tag with flushed cheeks and sticky fingers.  Whose life is that?  I have way too many bad hair days to be that perfect.

Well, to be fair, one part of that flight of fancy is mine—lucky me!  I married into a family with an itty-bitty, white-haired French grandmother.  And these are her dessert; or, at least, they're her idea, one that Merrick wanted to try so badly that he actually made them himself, unprompted and I thought, 'here's my own October surprise!'  And actually, it was a double surprise, because the apples turned out to be simple, not overly sweet, and just right.