Recipes

Eat

Salt Potatoes With Butter

July 9, 2013

Apparently this is a thing.

My friend Katie - who is from way-upstate New York - served salt potatoes at a BBQ last weekend, and I was pretty confused by the fact that I've never heard of them (as I'm fairly certain I've heard of most things involving too much butter and salt). So I ate quite a few - all in the service of research, of course - and then looked them up.

"Salt potatoes" are young potatoes that you cook in super-salty water (about one pound salt per four pounds of potatoes) and then serve with drizzled butter. The point is that the salt creates a kind of crust on the potatoes, so they don't get waterlogged the same way normal boiled potatoes do, and end up tasting more like they've been baked. They're apparently popular in Syracuse and the surrounding area mostly because the region has a big salt production industry.

SWEETS

Hearts On A Pie

July 3, 2013

This pie was born of necessity.

I completely forgot that I wanted to make it until just a couple of hours before we were due to leave for our friends' house, and so instead of rolling out crusts I used two deep-dish frozen ones, flipping one upside-down to use as the top crust. The problem with this technique is that if the crust isn't perfectly defrosted, it can stick to the aluminum while you're flipping it, and sort of...break. Which is what happened to my crust. I would ordinarily fix this by rolling out the crust and starting over, but: no time.

Teeny-tiny (and crack-concealing) hearts to the rescue!

SIDESSALADS

I Grew Something, And Then I Ate It

July 1, 2013

See that?

I grew that.

It is a living thing that I GREW AND DID NOT KILL.

ENTREES

Lemon-Rosemary Spatchcock Chicken

June 21, 2013

That is my very own rosemary that I grew.

(Don't be too impressed. My basil has drowned.)

The return of the summer has brought with it the return of local farmer's markets, and because we live right next to the Stone Barns Agricultural Center that also means the return of spatchcock chickens. I've written about how amazing these things are before, but basically what they are is chickens with the backbone and sternum removed; the flattish result means that the parts on the inside (the breasts) cook slightly less and the parts on the outside (the legs) cook slightly more, which is exactly how a chicken cooks in a perfect world. It also cooks faster, which is awesome.

You can spatchcock a chicken yourself, but honestly: it seems like a pain, and isn't something I'd bother with; I just buy a couple whenever I come across a place that sells them and consider myself lucky. (This recipe, incidentally, also works for a regular roast chicken; just adjust the cooking time as noted below.)

SIDESSALADS

Baby Bok Choy with Garlic Scapes

June 12, 2013

What are these crazy-looking things?!

They're very pretty and twisty, but I honestly had no idea what to make of them when I spotted them at our local farmer's market last Saturday. It turns out that garlic scapes are a late spring/early-summer thing - they're the part of the garlic that grows above ground, and that gets harvested so that the bulb below can mature more fully.

What do they taste like? Garlic. Except lighter and fresher and milder, so you can use lots of them.

How to use them? Apparently pretty much any way you'd use the regular stuff, but the subtle flavor means they're extremely versatile: people pickle them, make them into pesto, blend them with white beans to make crostini, add them to soups and pastas, and even eat the younger (milder) ones raw.

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