November 2011
3 posts
Carrot-Ginger Vegan Soup, For Rainy Days
Rain, rain. And not a sprinkle, or, as our Irish friends call it, a ‘soft’ day — stuff coming down, flooding shops on Melrose, etc, etc. So, then, soup. A vegan soup, warming and lovely, and one you can make in an hour, most of that spent smelling ginger and carrots cooking while you watch the TIVO’d SNL from last night.
Carrot-Ginger Vegan Soup (Serves 4-5 as a Main...
Monkey Bread and GOYAKOD
In his elegant street-trained Matt Scudder novels, Lawrence Block at one point has his ex-cop, ex-alcoholic unlicensed P.I. say that a case is at a point where what it needs is GOYAKOD — or, as he explains to a confederate, ‘Get off Your Ass and Knock On Doors.’ It is, he notes, a reliable form of intelligence-gathering, and a neccessary one.
I think of GOYAKOD a lot —...
The Birthday Extravaganza
A dear friend had a birthday recently, and requested dinner. Aside from the dessert — a request for Beet Cake — I was given free reign. So the next time you’re having six-to-eight people who ain’t fancy over, why not try …
THE BIRTHDAY EXTRAVAGANZA
Brined Asian Flavors Chicken Two Ways
Grilled Asparagus
Cold Chili-Sesame Almond Butter Noodles
Chocolate Beet Cake...
October 2011
7 posts
Cream of Grilled Asparagus-Jalapeno Soup
Winter and fall equal soup, and so I reached into the freezer to pull out a little something I’d been saving — a ziplock bag of leftover grilled asparagus from throughout the summer. Now, you could do the non-grilled version of this soup, but, good lord, the grilled has a difference you can taste. Also, this soup has some kick, and it’ll warm up any winter night, trust me.
...
Why We Cook (and Sriracha-Mole)
For the same reasons we write — sheer vanity, to take part in a social conversation, to get to know who we, ourselves are. And because there’s such pleasure in the result, and new things to learn. I’m going to keep writing here once a week or so, if that’s okay with you. But for a lot of you, I will literally see you at dinner.
SRIRACHA-MOLE
2 Avocados
Juice of 2...
Juice, Fast
I recently got a juicer. and I even more recently (if by ‘recently’ you mean ‘yesterday’) had a taco party, so I put away the Slow Cooker — Ron Swanson’s favorite indoor kitchen appliance, with “a grill” and “fire” taking the outdoor division — and got out the juicer. I ate like a cartoon animal yesterday, dear reader, and while it...
Mole For the Masses
First up, let me note that I cannot make a true Mole any more than, to quote Neal Stephenson, you can translate the word ‘f**kface’ into Japanese. This disc is an approximation of the earthy, rich, chocolate-nut flavors of traditional and true Mexican Mole, but that shouldn’t be construed as a claim that I know what I’m doing. It’s not a true mole, but, seriously,...
Cranberry Sauce From Scratch
With Thanksgiving coming — for Americans, anyhow — a few quick notes about Cranberry Sauce. Although, really Cranberry Sauce is amazing anytime. I made this batch to serve with slow-grilled Pork Chuleta and it was terrific. I believe food should taste like what it is, and be made from what it is, and hate the tyranny of canned cranberry sauce. This stuff is impossibly easy to make.
...
Autumn Weather, and Raspberry-Almond Pumpkin-Pie...
Fall baking!
This is of course kind of a joke, as this was the view outside my window in L.A. this aft.
You do not walk down my block to see the colors turn; you walk down it location scouting for The Shield. Regardless, autumn — and autumn flavors — are here. So with that in mind, I wanted to make these:
RASPBERRY-ALMOND PUMPKIN-PIE-SPICE SCONES
Adapted from Mark Bittman
2 cups...
Chocolate Beetnik Cake
Well, hello. After four weeks of travel — culminating in the tale of the Five-Spice Science Cookie, but we’ll talk about that later — I am back in my kitchen. I didn’t want to regale you with tales of Toronto or Austin cuisine, which expanded my culinary horizons but not my jeans. Is this thing on?
In my travels — the night of one of the best homemade meals...
August 2011
6 posts
A Last Bittersweet Taste of Summer. Or, More...
The time passes. In the sky … in the trees. Around our tables. And soon, it will be labor day — a reminder of what labor, what work, can do. A pause before returning to efforts and turning to fall.
Summer will be over. As Buffalo Tom said, “you’ve wasted every day.”
But you squander entire summers to have one afternoon of food with friends, in the best way. A dear...
'Why Cookie Rocket?'
Because Cookies are freaking awesome.
I don’t know about you, but, wow, it’s been one hell of a summer. And one of the highlights was Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which contains a scene set in a primate jailhouse in a third-world hellhole (aka San Bruno) where a simian demonstrates the classic meaning of fascism with a bundle of sticks, inspired by the tactically and...
Five Ingredients
So a new taqueria opened in my neighborhood — Escuela, which means ‘School’ — at Beverly and Stanley, and it is good. So good — so simple and real, $6 for two tacos, made with love, cash only — that it set me to cooking. i had a few people over last weekend, and I wanted a savory, fast hot app perfect for a summer day — easy to serve, easy to handle...
Failure is an Orphan; Good Crumb Crust has a...
Cooking is, for me, primarily social. Not just in that egomanical ‘good host’ way where you get to unveil each dish with the turning step of a Matador working the cape — although there is that — but also in the way people connect over food and its rituals. I spent more of my youth in the kitchen than in any other room, and life at our home not only had flavor in every sense...
EL TORTE DEL DIABLO!!!!!
Now and then, you want a cake — and not some layer cake made of frou-frou icing and piped flowers and such, but, rather, a substantive cake of slices and richness, pulled from a Bundt pan steaming and luscious. Hence this go-to crowd pleaser cake for me, which is a) taken from the first volume of the San Francisco Chronicle Cookbook (the only worthwhile enterprise that squalling ruin of a...
Thirteen Cherries, Two Ways.
Originally, the whole idea of this was to write for a half-hour every day about food as a head-clearing exercise, and then I got all intense and thought I have to offer something, something empirical each time, like a recipe.
But that’s kinda not good, either, because I wanted to start this, really start this, to change how I think about of food. I wanted to get back in touch with certain...
July 2011
12 posts
Scones to Savor
Hello, friends; it’s been a while, for reasons many of you that know me know and many of you that don’t know me don’t need to. But when I awoke this morning after days — nay, was it weeks? of not being able to cook for myself and having minimal appetite, lo, something in my my weary soul cried out ‘Uh, t’heck with that …” and wanted to make scones.
...
Give a Man a Fish Taco, You've Fed Him for a Day...
Let us be frank: Growing up in Rural Ontario is not exactly a hotbed of ethnic diversity, unless your idea of diversity is Protestants and Catholics. (I joke that growing up in an Italian-Catholic community until I was 18, and discovered Woody Allen, I thought Jews was the plural of You.) And so, while I grew up with Scottish and Northern Italian cuisine — two cuisines based on similar...
Half Measures and Texas-Style Berry Cobbler
(For those of you who’ve been wondering, this is a microplane grater. GET ONE.)
Now and then, you feel like trying a recipe, and then you realize that you can’t make all of it because it’d be a little much. I mean, yes, having your own 9x13 dish of some baked good would be awesome, but, again, moderation in all things, etc, etc. And as ever, baking is like chemistry — you...
Tools and Talent, or, 'Gazpacho is a Dish ... Best...
In our consumerist age, it seems people are always trying to sell us things we don’t need — Sport Utility Vehicles, hair transplants, Sarah Palin. And this is nowhere more true than in the kitchen, where gadgetry promises solutions to problems you didn’t even know you had. Whether a $2.99 silicone egg poaching pod or a $299 ice-cream maker attachment for your standing mixer, the...
Owner of a Lonely Fridge
There haven’t been many posts in Cooking with Rocchi, recently, and that’s because whether novice or expert, the one thing all cooks know is that you can’t cook when you aren’t near a kitchen. I’m going to assume everyone who reads this knows me, and knows why, but, good God, on the off chance that those two things aren’t true, I work as a journalist and critic...
Leftunders and the Art of Cooking for One
A lot of the pleasure of cooking, for me, is social — have people over, all dig in, etc. But this is not how most of us eat, and many of us often wind up eating by ourselves. And here’s where the balance comes in, because while we have all had those moments of lonely eating — standing over a sink, holding a burrito is the evocative phrase a friend used — and that is...
V is for Vegan, and P is for Parchment Paper
So, the other day I knew I was invited to a 4th of July party, and I also knew that my friend Jenn was going to be there; Jenn is a karaoke monster and, more importantly for this discussion, vegan. And because America is founded on both a) tolerance and b) carbs, I figured I, a non-vegan, would make some cookies she could enjoy.
These were … a challenge, quite frankly, but once I got past...
Side Dishes and the Way of Cookie Monster.
Back in 2005, it was decided that having a role model for children who ate a diet of solely cookies might not, in fact, be in the service of the public good. Thus, Cookie Monster was told — by Hoots the Owl — how “A Cookie is a Sometime Food.” This was a deliberate attempt to explain to kids that, yes, fruits and vegetables might be better for you than cookies, and that...
Fat Equals Flavor. And Death.
Oh, fat. Let’s be honest — there’s a reason why bacon is better than ham, why Kobe beef is better than Ralph’s-shelf grain-fed, why ice cream does things frozen yogurt can’t. It’s fat. Foods high in fat content taste AWESOME.
Which, to be honest, isn’t our fault — it’s because our primitive screwhead ancestors (to quote Army of Darkness)...
On Science in the Kitchen and the Chemistry of...
Last night, I made beer-batter fish tacos for some friends, and — even with a lecture to guests prior to the actual cooking about deep frying and kitchen safety that bordered on the fascist only because having a huge vat of 375-degree oil in the company of guests tends to, as has been said of the prospect of hanging, concentrate one’s thoughts — they turned out great. And...
What I've Learned from Guacamole from Scratch.
1) Buy three to four ripe avocadoes. Touch them, in the store. They should yield lightly — too much resistance speaks of inflexible immaturity, too little resistance intimates the slow decay of time passed. Halve. Remove pit. Briefly meditate on bygone Grade 4 science fairs. Scoop flesh free.
2) Add salt, pepper, crushed garlic, fresh lemon juice, hot sauce and diced onions, tomatoes, and...