Tuesday, September 6, 2011 at 1:00AM It’s late summer and the squash just keeps on coming. Well, bring it on!
Of the thin-skinned beauties, speckled green zucchini are my favorite. Raw or cooked, savory or sweet, the versatile zucchini makes it easy and delicious to get your veg on. Try all three of these recipes and get a taste of the range that zucchini has to offer.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 1:00AM Pickles are all the rage and I couldn’t be happier. The tangy, juicy crunch of a pickle makes a perfect companion to some of our most iconic meals, but pickles aren’t just for cheeseburgers or pastrami sandwiches and cucumbers aren’t the only things you can pickle.
Making a rousing comeback are small stores like The Pickle Guys, in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which preserves the traditional Eastern European style of pickling, along with barrels of half sours, green tomatoes and garlic cloves.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011 at 4:00AM Say preserving in August and the culinary mind jumps to mason jars and piles of late-summer produce. But canning isn’t the only way to preserve, and summer isn’t the only time to do it. This past winter, when citrus was about it for fresh fruit, I decided to preserve some lemons. A staple in Moroccan cooking, preserved lemons are salt cured with spices like black pepper and cinnamon. The result is a soft, entirely edible (though, like a fresh lemon, you wouldn’t want to eat it on it’s own) lemon that adds a rich, pickled lemon flavor to drinks, dinner and even dessert.
Preserved lemons can be found in gourmet food shops; seek them out and add a whole new dimension to your cooking; I did!
Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 4:00AM August is the right time for a ripe tomato. As a latecomer to the joys of this fresh fruit (ketchup was as close as I came to a tomato in my youth), I do my best to make up for the lost years during tomato season.
Whether it’s grape tomatoes halved in guacamole, beefsteak slices layered with fresh mozzarella or whole sun-warmed heirlooms eaten straight off the vine, I can always find room for fresh tomatoes.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011 at 4:00AM Ripe summer berries always make me crave jammy, jewel-toned desserts like pies, cobblers and crisps. But it just seems cruel, for both cooks and eaters, to serve bubbling baked goods in this sizzling heat. The dilemma has inspired me to come up with frozen twists on some of my favorite oven-made treats.
This week, I had a hankering for late-season strawberry shortcake. So I took the traditional shortcake topping of sugar-sweetened strawberries, puréed it with rich, tangy Greek yogurt and poured it into popsicle molds. Then, to mimic the shortcake biscuits, I finely ground shortbread cookies for a crispy pop coating. The result was a hands-free and refreshing version of the original with all the intensity of flavor. These sticks totally hit the spot!
