Monday, June 30, 2025
Wax Bean Salad for Summer
Monday, June 23, 2025
No-Cook Food
Too hot. To trot.
So it's Caprese salads all the way, whee, whee, whee.
We are so very, very lucky to have central air on days like these. That has not always been the case. The feel-like is allegedly 107°F. The crazy (cough, determined) Frenchman went for his five-mile run, regardless.
I have some other insalata do Caprese ideas over here, at Gardenista.
Where are you? What is the temperature?
Saturday, June 21, 2025
Tuna Mousse: Food for a Heatwave
It wobbles, it jiggles, it's straight out of the beginning of the middle of the last century. It's wonderful. It's tuna mousse. Wrong, somehow. But wonderful. And inhalable. I revive the recipe every year when heat threatens and I won't cook indoors. We are in for a possibly unprecedented week.
We - the Frenchman and I - used to eat it on our rooftop in Cobble Hill, accompanied by Don Estorbo (de la Bodega Dominicana - a bodega cat before bodega cats were cool), with a wide view over New York Harbor. In those days we had a single, room airconditioner, whose roaring was no match for the baking heat. The rooftop was our evening escape.
Tuna...is overfished. Try and find pole-caught tuna: American Tuna, Wild Planet, or Whole Foods 365 brand are better choices. Walk past the Starkist. You are better than Starkist.
Tuna Mousse
The beauty of this decadent, 60's-suggestive mousse is that it goes with all the crunchy, healthy things: celery stalks, crisp cucumber spears, carrot sticks, endive leaves, snap peas (halved lengthwise), long breakfast radishes or round, stout ones, quartered.
Tuna Mixture:
1/4 cup mayonnaise
1 Tablespoon ketchup
4 cornichons (tiny cucumber pickles)
1 Tablespoon capers
2 Tablespoons lemon or lime juice
Freshly ground black pepper
1 packet (1 Tablespoon) gelatin
For the tuna mixture: Combine the ingredients and whizz in a food processor till smooth. No food processor? Chop the capers and cornichons finely, then mash everything with a fork in a mixing bowl bowl.
Wobble mixture: In a small bowl, combine the gelatin and the extremely hot water and stir until the gelatin has dissolved.
Add the gelatin mixture to the tuna mixture and whizz/mash again.
Taste. Assess the salt, pepper and lemon juice situation. Adjust.
Transfer the tuna mousse mixture into a small bowl or mold. Chill for at least 2 hours. To unmold, slide a knife dipped in hot water around its edges, cover with the serving plate, and shake until it plops out.
It wobbles. See?
Of course, you can also eat it with a good baguette, or dark brown Scandi bread. Or crackers. Or a spoon. Or on your own, with no one else watching.
Here's a bonus picture of Storbie, aka Estorbo loco, aka The Don.
Gone, never forgotten. Eeep.
Friday, June 20, 2025
A tea to soothe sleep
Standing on the terrace recently I snuffed the air and smelled an unmistakable and welcome scent. Lindens were in city-wide bloom. Some still are.
Feeling besieged by the sense that the world is about to break over our heads?
Sip some linden tea.
Are the trees still in bloom, yet to bloom, soon to bloom, near you?
Their flowers dry easily, and rehydrate gracefully. Linden tea has been used for a long, long time, to calm nerves, and soothe the sleepless. I am a convert.
Find the recipe and some gathering tips in my linden tea story for Gardenista.
Tuesday, June 17, 2025
Supper edition
Cool, grey, misty mid-June days and evenings have sent us back indoors for supper.
Tonight's was a salmon oven-roast that we've fallen in love with and repeated many times. I first started cooking it in Maine, where we had access to superb - if farmed - Gulf of Maine salmon, and it has translated well to Brooklyn (with salmon farmed in the Faroe Islands; eating fish is...tricky, to say the least).
The recipe is based on this one: spicy slow-roasted salmon, from The New York Times. I riff a lot with the spices, and often use berbere (the fragrant East African spice blend). And tonight's version included three tender, sliceable heads of spring garlic.
Tuesday, June 10, 2025
Green
The raccoons are afoot again in the evenings, on the roof above the Boston ivy.
Saturday, May 31, 2025
Refuge
The little garden is very green, a small echo of the park and wild spaces nearby. There has been a lot of rain. In the pots perennials are growing taller daily, working towards summer bloom that will last until frost.
The green suits me. It's restful and varied, and the older I get the longer I can look at leaves. They're very quiet. The world is not.
Wednesday, May 28, 2025
Morse
Tuesday, May 27, 2025
Peonies, two ways
Sunday, May 25, 2025
Cassis
Friday, May 23, 2025
Seed Bread - nuttily delicious
I served my seed loaves at a picnic recently, and, as is usual with this particular bread, the recipe was requested. Now it's up on Gardenista, via my weekly column.
It can take a long time to develop a recipe, and many, many tests. This is now a regular in my baking rotation, and has been for about two years.
What's the neon topping? An intensely savory bean pâté with some raw beet microplaned in at the last minute. The bean recipe is also on Gardenista, if you're desperately curious (it doesn't have to be puréed, but can be eaten as a warm casserole or a cool salad. It's divine).
Four, but no one knows this until after it's made: This seed bread makes the best toast. Ever. For that reason alone I keep it in the freezer, pre-sliced, to toast as needed.
Saturday, May 17, 2025
Magnificat
Nkwe Pirelli. Pirelli to his friends. Puss-Puss to his intimates. Bushy-Brooks to the disrespectful. The cat formerly known as Percy. And Inky, before that.
Tuesday, May 13, 2025
Outside, now
Saturday, May 3, 2025
Wednesday, April 30, 2025
Feral Goddess Dressing
Thursday, April 10, 2025
Quince
These things are bone-familiar, yet rare. The quinces ripe on the trees. The shadowed light of a kitchen where a thin cloth in the window softens the sun. An old wooden table.
I grated one small quince and squeezed lemon juice across it. Salt, some chile/chili/chilli, and it was a quick sambal, ready for the lamb chops we cooked over coals under a shimmering southern sky. The sheep eat the bushes that grow in the veld we can see.
In this old house where we are staying, with thick walls, low doors, and and high gables and layers of thatch, I wondered how many hands had prepared quinces, before me.
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Wednesday, April 9, 2025
Candelabras, at last
Sometimes, dreams come true. A small whisper of an idea stayed with me as I booked a ticket to Cape Town for April. Maybe, maybe...maybe the Brunsvigias would bloom while I was here. And if they did, I would see them.
The ones in Nieuwoudtville. About four hours north of Cape Town, in the Northern Cape's Namakwa region. At the end of a dry summer, rain comes. Maybe. And about three weeks after that rain, these geophytes - Brunsvigia bosmaniae - emerge and bloom like vivid pink candelabras. There's no fine-tuning the planning. Bear all possibilities in mind, but it has to be serendipitous.
Word came, phone calls were made (I never call anyone), and here we are. It has been ten years since we visited this high escarpment, and then it was for its brilliant spring display.
There is so much more, too. There is Brunsvigia flava, another, yellow species that blooms earlier. There are thousands - hundreds of thousands - of tiny green seedlings softening the sand in the grey veld. They have risen after these rains and will be mature by spring (August, September) and will bloom in those famous carpets of flowers.
There are blue cranes in the fields, and bokmakieries ringing in the thorn trees. There are glittering stars at night.
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Wednesday, April 2, 2025
The ramps have risen!
The ramps on the tiny terrace have broken their long hibernation. They made flowers last year, in summer, long after their leaves had disappeared in the heat. Several seeds formed and matured and I dug them back in. I wonder if they will germinate?
It takes around, give-or-take, roughly, approximately, more or less, seven years for a ramp grown from seed to be able to make its own flowers, and seeds.
Don't encourage vendors to sell mountains of ramps. Do ask them to sell ramp leaves only. They can be packaged just like delicate leaves like chicories and salad. And do soak some of the rooted plants overnight before planting them in pots or in the soil where they will get spring sunlight and summer shade. They are an Eastern US native, and appreciate cold winters. Compost, leaf litter, and slightly acidic soil help, too. But mine just grow in potting soil, with some of their woodland neighbors.
Many of my overwintered bulbs did not make it and turned to mush: lilies, alliums (the ornamental kind). It's not the cold that bothers them, but a repeat freeze-thaw cycle, and wet feet. Ramps like wet feet, for a bit. And here they are.
Read all about how to grow ramps in this story. And what ramp habitat looks like in spot we visist every spring, in the Catskills.
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Wednesday, March 26, 2025
Monday, March 24, 2025
Seeing red?
Friday, March 21, 2025
Forage walks for spring
New spring Plant Walks and Forage Picnics are ready. Find them and book your tickets via the link.
Pictured above? Bloodroot, and ephemeral native wildflower, doing battle with English ivy. Who are your rooting for (sorry...)?
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Sunday, March 16, 2025
Bud break
Thursday, March 13, 2025
Daffodil hour
The Frenchman's birthday daffodils ablaze in the early afternoon sunlight, now bright through the skylight as that medium-size star climbs higher and higher in the pre-spring sky.
These were the first daffodils I have seen sold locally, and that means we'll have them for the next couple of months. In parks and gardens, they are already in bud, but still tightly closed.
Wednesday, March 12, 2025
Choose your pepper wisely
So where and how did I convert? This country. Living with a food-loving Mexican for four years may have had something to do with it. New York City, and it's plethora of Southeast Asian eateries. And simply being on the continent in proximity to so many forms of fresh and dried chiles had significant powers of persuasion.
I like heat, now. A lot. But there's heat and there's heat. For my recent experiments making shatta, a gently fermented and staple chile condiment eaten in Palestine (and other Eastern Mediterranean countries), I learned that long red cayenne peppers make a fantastic shatta—sweetly hot and mellow. But that compact Scotch bonnet peppers (I know, what was I thinking?) blew the house down.
And atop labne, with an egg and some crisp celery and mint? Delicious, and pretty darn healthy, too.
My shatta recipe is up on Gardenista.
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