Mains

This Tomato Tart Is Simple To Make–And Seriously Good

September 14, 2023 / / Mains, Recipes

The pastry is a dream–rich, buttery and very flaky.  The filling is enhanced with a thin swath of Dijon mustard and the whole gist of tomatoes is topped with slices of goat cheese with fresh herbs and capers, moistened with olive oil and honey.. It cooks up quickly in a hot oven. You don’t even have to rest the pastry before rolling it out to fiit into a 10-inch tart pan.

I found the recipe from David Leibovitz who got inspiration for it from Gascony food writer and cookbook author Kate Hill.  He made some changes and I made a few, too.

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Chicken By Any Other Name, Spatchcocked Is Often the Best

August 29, 2021 / / Mains, Recipes

The last time I prepared a spatchcocked chicken was with one already cut up perfectly  The chicken was from Commonwealth Farm, in Unity, Maine.  They sell their  chickens at the Camden Farmer’s Market, which I visited a few weeks ago. It’s a great market, very old-fashioned  with a good mix of vendors).  Now,  don’t confuse Commonwealth Farm chickens with Commonwealth Poultry Farm in Gardiner, whose chickens are widely available in Portland; the latter are not.  They are not one and the same.  The latter is the son of the owners of Commonwealth Farm.  He gets his chickens far and wide and processes them in Maine.  They are a good,  fine choice.  But if you’re after authenticity and local,   Commonwealth are raised and butchered at their farm in Unity and they’re wonderful chickens, with the usual provenance, organic and pastured. They have great chicken flavor and very meat breasts and legs.

Sorghum glazed spatchcocked chicken

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Leg of Lamb In Winter: The Perfect Roast

January 3, 2021 / / Mains, Recipes

I love lamb winter or summer but particularly in the summer when I use a charcoal  grill  to roast a whole leg on the bone or butterflied. I stud the charcoal base with smoking woods.  And  I generally make a seasoning paste of parsley, garlic, thyme or rosemary, mustard and olive oil whizzed in the food processor until it’s the texture of a well made pesto.  I rub this over the lamb.

Leg of lamb prepared for roasting on a bed of potatoes and a few local carrots

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Julia Child’s Honestly Good Tuna Fish Salad Sandwich Revealed

November 2, 2020 / / Mains, Recipes

Some American sandwiches are innocent delights. Consider the tuna fish salad sandwich–as universal as white bread.  But  now that the New York Times has  lionized the sandwich in its weekly food pages, the Sunday Magazine and  the NYTimes Cooking app, I had to try it.  Cookbook guru Dorie Greenspan wrote in the  Times Magazine a charming article  about Julia Child’s devotion to the tuna fish salad sandwich as her favorite lunch dish when working at her home kitchen..  And when Greenspan assisted in Julia’s kitchen years ago, she learned first hand how to make it because she was asked to by Child herself.

Chopped onion, celery, cornichons and capers chopped by my handy Cuisinart manual chopper.

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A Box of Spaghetti: An Odyssey of Pandemic Shopping

August 23, 2020 / / Discoveries, Mains, Recipes

At five in the afternoon I decided to  make spaghetti carbonara for dinner.  I had all the ingredients for the sauce (local onions, raw heavy cream, double-smoked bacon, Parmesan), but  I needed a box of spaghetti–or any kind of pasta such as a pound of fettuccine, papardelle, etc. I had a box of Market Pantry  linguine that I bought in March at Target in the days when we  quarantined and items of packaged, canned products were so de rigueur to stock our pantries.  No, that would not be good enough to use in this especially rich and luxurious sauce made otherwise with my pantry items in stock.

Since I live on the Hill the closest store was the local  Rosemont.  Masked, hands sterilized, a wallet of credit cards (no cash accepted) I was admitted entry.  I asked where the pasta was and the clerk pointed to the shelves in the back.  “Except,” she said, “we only have non gluten.”

“No other pasta?” I nearly barked.

“It’s the pandemic,” she replied.  I walked out in a huff.

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Recipe Find: Easy and Delicious With Gulf of Maine Salmon from SoPo Seafood

June 5, 2020 / / Mains, Recipes

Loads of sponsored recipes appear on Facebook, and I’ve made a few of them, generally disappointing.  But this one for baked salmon with a brown sugar glaze, panko, spices and parsley caught my attention. There is nothing new about this preparation but the confluence of ingredients made for a partcularly tasty dish.

The recipe was courtesy of the Food Network and I made it exactly as directed.

Atlantic salmon from Sopo Seafood (photo courtesy of Sopo Seafood)

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Comfort Food: Char Siu Pork Tenderloin Mississippi Style

March 25, 2020 / / Mains, Recipes, Uncategorized

Continue ordering in from our local restaurants to help our Maine restaurants stay afloat,  but sometimes you might need a break if only to curb the cost of restaurant meals on a regular basis.  The takeout menus available are, I think, fairly priced and they’re still less than real dining out tabs.  I cook at home most of the time, and this dish courtesy of cookbook author Virginia Willis can be found in her book “Secrets of the Southern Table.”

I’ve made this often since there are few recipe ideas for pork tenderloin that appeal to me.  Don’t confuse this pork cut with a tenderloin roast.  This is the fillet section extracted from the loin and measures about 1 1/2 pounds.  Prices vary depending on where you buy it.  I get mine from Bisson’s who sells excellent Canadian pork products.  A full loin is about $6 and can easily feed two to three people.

When grilling season arrives soon enough, this cut is great on the grill, smoked over fruit wood and bathed in whatever kind of sauce you like. Or use char siu sauce.

Various dishes using pork tenderloin

A word about the sauce: It’s Cantonese and typical of urban Chinese markets. How it wound up in the Mississippi Delta is a curious story.  It’s from, according to Willis, an inspiration of a Chinese market in the Delta in the home of another cookbook author Martha Foose who says, “Though Cantonese, the flavors of the char sui have always reminded me of the flavors of the Mississippi Delta.” Read more…

Home Cooking: Chicken and Dumplings Are a Treasure of Simplicity–Hearty and Delicious

December 11, 2019 / / Mains, Recipes

As dinners  in a soup bowl go, chicken and dumplings are so honestly good.  There are a couple of versions of how to prepare this old-time dish.  One method is to put a dumpling dough, more like noodles or pie dough, cut into strips and poached in chicken broth.  Sometimes they’re used as the final addition to stews and braises.  Erin French offers a recipe in her “Lost Kitchen” cookbook, showcasing a stew of moose (or beef) with parsley dumplings.  These dumplings are more like puffy balls of dough that are put in to poach in the stewing base.

For my chicken and dumplings version I chose the dumpling balls as the medium.  The dough is flour, baking powder, milk and dried herbs of parsley and sage.  You can use fresh, but I like the stronger taste of the dried herbs.  What you need to do is boil up a 3 to 4 pound chicken, cut into 8 pieces, covered with water in a large Dutch oven and simmered for about an hour.  The chicken is removed from the broth, allowed to cool and then taken off the bone and shredded roughly. Pour the stock through a strainer into a large bowl or glass measure.

A soup bowl of chicken and herb dumplings

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The Simple Pleasures of Appalachian Cookery

September 11, 2019 / / Mains, Recipes

Today’s New York Times food pages featured Appalachian cooking, citing such culinary stars as Sean Brock, the southern chef, cookbook author and restaurateur (Husk in Charleston, SC) and his plans for his new restaurants in Nashville that will feature Appalachian cooking.

As a fan of southern cooking—my library has at last 100 books on various facets of southern cuisine—I’ve recently focused on Appalachia for culinary inspiration.  The most famous champion  is cookbook author Ronni Lundi (“Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes & Honest Fried Chicken” and “Butterbeans to Blackberries”) whose latest book, published about a year ago, is “Victuals,” which covers Appalachian cooking thoroughly.

How is the cooking of Appalachia, different from say Low Country cooking?  It’s hard to say other than the most forthright recipes focus on pure and simple ingredients, culled from one’s own farm fields or whatever is grown locally in its vast region.  You cook what’s available farm fresh.  This means that you have buttermilk that’s unadulterated or bacon grease to glaze your buttermilk biscuits or cooking your corn kernels in the fat that lend an inimitable flavor. The ramps that grow wild in Appalachian woods are world-class as are other vittles, like  Perigords, the truffles of France,  that proliferate in the region.

Left to right, Southern Appalachia Farm Cooking;, Victuals and Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread & Scuppernong Wine

Of course there’s more to the cooking than bacon fat or buttermilk, if not truffles.  And it’s anything foodstuff that comes directly from the farm, a practice that as Mainers we have great access to.

Two recent cookbooks that I’ve found compelling  are “Southern Appalachian Farm Cooking” by Robert G Netherland and “Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread and Scuppernong Wine” by Joseph E. Dabney.

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The Perfect Summer Salad: Lemon Slaw

August 7, 2019 / / Mains, Recipes, Starters

I came across a  recipe called Lemon Slaw in one of my favorite cookbooks on southern cooking, “Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes and Honest Fried Chicken” by Ronni Lundy, a chronicler on not only Appalachian cookery but  regional cooking of the Mountain south as well as a wide swatch of cooking from Georgia to the Kentucky, where she resides.   Her other books, which I use all the time are “Butter Beans to Blackberries,” a gem of a book that has the finest recipe for peach cobbler you’ll ever have (I’ve adapted it here in past posts) and “Victuals” her definitive tome on Appalachian cooking.

It’s an old family recipe from Lundy’s mother, who made it on special occasions.  I’ve adapted the recipe with very few changes and have made it twice so far, it’s so good.

Lemon slaw in its serving dish

Essentially, it’s a gelatin salad, which is not made with Jell-O but uses unflavored gelatin flavored with lemon juice and sugar.  Yes you can call it retro–it reeks of 1950s American cooking, and you wouldn’t be wrong in thinking it should be prepared in a ring mold.  I think that would make it fancier than it’s intended.

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