In Love with Lavender

By Katie Barreira

Your immediate associations with lavender may include eye pillows, scented dresser drawers and massage oil. But the fragrant buds are also a standard culinary herb most commonly known for its starring role in the classic French spice blend, herbes de Provence.

It dawned on me during a recent visit to the Lavender by the Bay farm in Long Island, NY, where the violet stalks are in bloom, that lavender buds are a versatile and underutilized ingredient. So I picked up a sack of dried culinary lavender to tinker with at home…my suitcase still smells fabulous, but that’s nothing compared to the warm, sweet scent wafting from the oven.

Now, no matter how inspired you might be to cook with these fragrant florets, don’t run to your dresser drawer and rip open the sachet perfuming your skivvies. There are specific varieties of lavender that are good for cooking, sold as “culinary lavender.”

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Tracey’s Scrambled Omelet

By Katie Barreira

I was raised on public television episodes of The French Chef and thus, saw Julia Child shake an omelet into submission long before I landed in culinary school. The instructor started us off with the training wheels’ version of Julia’s technique that has been widely adopted as the home cook’s standard omelet procedure. That is, to push the cooked edges of egg towards the center of the pan so that the uncooked portions can run onto the surface of the hot pan.

Some combination of the push and shake served me just fine, until I tested Tracey Seaman’s classic omelet recipe for the May 2011 issue of Everyday With Rachael Ray Magazine (on stands now with loads of great ideas for filling your omelet!).

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Nana’s Softly Scrambled

By Katie Barreira

My Nana could have eaten eggs and bacon for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Mind you, she didn’t, as that would not have constituted a proper diet, but it was decidedly her favorite meal and aroused in her the same genuine joy and finger-licking enthusiasm morning after morning for 90 years. Any style of egg would do, but the best was scrambled and when done right, moist and soft, well that was what she called ambrosia.

No eggs were better than those served at the hotel’s daily breakfast buffet on our family trip to Prachatice, the small Czech town where my great grandfather (Nana’s father) was born. Of all the experiences on this pilgrimage, it was the tale of these eggs, (along with that of an eccentric tour guide at the Budweiser plant) which became the stuff of lore; quite fitting, given Nana’s innate love of a well-cooked egg (and a cold beer).

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Seeing Green: Verdant Sauces across the Globe

By Katie Barreira

Last week, our tongues took a virtual field trip to Frankfurt for a taste of the country’s customary green sauce. But German cuisine isn’t alone in the notion.

In Italy, salsa verde is a mash of parsley, capers, garlic and anchovies, thinned with oil and vinegar. Order haricots verts with sauce verte at a Parisian café and your delicate green beans will come dressed in a green mayonnaise, colored with a purée of watercress, tarragon or other spring herb.

Argentineans love their steak smothered in chimichurri, a thick blend of parsley and oregano seasoned with cayenne or other hot pepper. And in Mexico, enchiladas aren’t complete without green salsa.

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Five Fabulous Reci-Tips for Tasso

By Katie Barreira

Eating out is great inspiration for home cooks. I’m forever ordering the dish with an unfamiliar ingredient or curious preparation in the hopes that it will serve as both sustenance and culinary education.

I never imagined that my latest food obsession would come from the good old pizza delivery menu, but it was there, buried in the topping selections that I came upon tasso. The parenthetical, “Cajun ham,” gave me enough of a clue to ring in an order for a cheese pizza with tasso and red onion. Since then, I have enjoyed the combination with such regularity that the pizza establishment knows me by name, that is, “Ms. Tasso and Red Onion.”

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