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bellastraniera
a.k.a. Marcy Swingle - obsessed with food and fashion.View my photography website.
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Tag Archives: recipes
Cocktail Recipe: The Big Apple
Put away the mojito ingredients: Fall calls for a new type of cocktail. We went looking for a cocktail recipe that incorporates bourbon and apples, two favorite autumn flavors, but ended up getting creative, since none of the recipes we found involved calvados, the classic apple brandy from Normandy.
“The Big Apple” seems like an apt name for this cocktail, an apple-y spin on the Manhattan. Also like a Manhattan, it’s strong. It may be a good way to gird yourself for Thanksgiving dinner, no matter where you celebrate it. (more…)
Recipe: Banana Buckwheat Bread
Like a lot of culinary inventions, this recipe for banana bread came about by accident. I had enough white flour to make half a recipe originally given to me by my college friend California Girl, but not enough to make the whole thing. Rather than make a sad, small loaf of banana bread, I decided to substitute 1/2 cup of buckwheat flour for the missing white flour.
The results were surprisingly good, since buckwheat flour adds a slight edge of bitterness to balance out the sweet bananas and sugar – I often find banana bread to be too sweet. This banana bread is like the ideal banana pancakes, in loaf form. (more…)
Recipe: Toasted Corn and Tomato Salad
Corn is wonderfully good right now. If, like me, you find yourself buying more than you can eat, this toasted corn salad is a great use for extra corn and tomatoes. Farmer’s market produce like this should never go to waste when it’s sweet as candy in late August. (more…)
Recipe: Grilled Artichokes
This is one of those great minimalist Italian recipes that requires nothing more than super fresh produce, olive oil, salt and a little panache. It’s another artichoke recipe from Jib Girl Daniela, handed down through her family.
For the artichokes, trim and de-choke them as described in the Stuffed Artichokes recipe, then proceed from there. (more…)
Recipe: Stuffed Artichokes
Artichokes can be a mystery to those of us who didn’t grow up with them. Alexandra Wentworth described them in The WASP Cookbook as “vegetables you scrape against your teeth” – not exactly something most of us could serve grandma at a holiday dinner.
But for many Italian Americans, they’re an essential part of family meals. After several kitchen disasters when I tried to make these on my own, I recruited my Italian-American friend Daniela, aka Jib Girl, to demonstrate how to make artichokes two ways: stuffed and grilled. The results were excellent, especially when you follow her technique for prepping the artichokes, stuffing them, and testing to see if they’re done. (more…)
Recipe: Special Sauce
One of the best things about going to Burger King as a kid – other than those gold paper crowns – was the “special sauce” on the burgers. It probably wasn’t anything more special than a mixture of mayonnaise, ketchup and mustard, but it was still more exotic than what Mom made.
At a recent barbecue, we decided to make Pat La Frieda burgers more special with our own grown-up version of special sauce, a chipotle mayonnaise recipe cobbled together from several similar ones. But this version includes all the key secret ingredients – chipotle, adobo, lime and garlic – in particularly spicy, smoky proportions. It’s ridiculously easy to make and adds an extra layer of deliciousness to burgers, veggie burgers, hot dogs or grilled fish. Added bonus: the resulting sauce has the same peculiar orange color as your childhood favorite “special sauce.” (more…)
The Babbo Cookbook: Oxtail Ragu
I must have bought The Babbo Cookbook as soon as it came out nine years ago, but it included so many recipes that were nearly impossible to make until now. Remember when guanciale wasn’t exactly a household word? Oft-mentioned ingredients like boar sausage, beef cheeks and calf’s brains may still not be available at your local Gristede’s, but now Eataly’s butcher counter sells oxtail meat. (more…)
Catalan Fisherman’s Stew
In Barcelona, cod is on the menu for every meal of the day. And while baccala often refers to salt cod, it can also refer to the fresh cod fishermen brought home from the catch and cooked up in any number of ways. One of the simplest and most satisfying is a tomato-based cod stew, the sort you’d find at a waterfront restaurant in Barceloneta. It’s usually made with briny olives, capers, and just a hint of red pepper. The following recipe was adapted from Sicilian Fisherman’s Stew found on Epicurious, livened up with a few more ingredients – and of course, the all-important cod.
Cookbook: The Fundamental Techniques of Classic Cuisine
Do you know the proper way to core and chop a head of cauliflower, truss a chicken or whip up a plate of crêpes Suzette? If not, put down the Sandra Lee cookbook and invest in this one. The French Culinary Institute has issued these incredibly thorough and detailed lessons in French cooking in The Fundamental Techniques of Classic Cuisine, starting with kitchen equipment and terminology and continuing with essential techniques that will have you bonding with Julia Child. Proper French stocks, sauces, meat, poultry, fish, soups, salads, shellfish, marinades, stuffings, pastry, creams and custards, crêpes, meringues and souffles are all part of the instruction.
In fact, it is so thorough that in the book’s forward, the school’s president warns readers that this book cannot replace “the value of studying at the FCI.” But FCI grad and blogger Cucina Testa Rossa writes that “Techniques is almost verbatim our first quarter (6 week) curriculum…. Word for word, gram for gram, ingredient for ingredient.” (Full disclosure: I have taken a class at the FCI, Alan Richman‘s “The Craft of Food Writing.” Recommend!) (more…)
Recipe: Fashion Week Omelet
Fashion people! Do not forget to start these crazy long days with a good breakfast. While it’s tempting to eat any old thing when you’re in a rush, eggs – not muffins or sugary coffee drinks – provide you with the energy you need to get through five shows in a day. Also, this low-cal Fashion Week Omelet takes only 10 minutes to make.
Click through for the simple recipe. (more…)
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