Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Oscar Party


Thanks to M.I.S.T.Y. for that excellent guest post. I'm hopeful there will be more guest posts from our Portland, ME branch office in the near future (rabbit cassoulet, anyone?). I will add a comment that the key ingredient in the lemon chicken sauce is EXTREMELY liberal amounts of creme fraiche, rather than butter. Additional pictures from their farewell dinner are here.

Hey, its not all scallops, or steak, with a side of buttered soul of the proletariat around here. In the interim since my last post, we've eaten steamed kale on toast with poached egg, frozen cheese pizza topped with salami and spinach, and various other fast, stupid-simple meals. For the most part, I've been trying to cook meals based around the contents of our CSA box. The variety is obviously pretty thin in the winter - radishes, greens, cilantro, cabbage, radishes, greens, radishes, radishes, cabbage - you get the idea.

Tonight we're watching the Oscars on DVR (largely fast-forwarding to the John Stewart monologues). I've been enjoying Mark Bittman's, aka The Minimalist, NY Times blog, Bitten. This is a slight modification of one of his recent "Last Night's Dinner," posts: cabbage & fish poached in stock (Tilapia in chicken stock, this iteration), Jerusalem Artichokes on the side. Mark Bittman rhapsodized about the Jerusalem Artichokes; I decided to cross-reference Deborah Madison, who comments in her "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone," that they can be "difficult to digest, so proceed with caution." I wasn't sure what to make of that, but at $4.99/lb. for what I essentially believe to be a weed - Sunflower roots, "Jerusalem" is apparently a bastardization of "girasole" - I was determined to cook the things. Excellent, very easy, meal. As you can see from the picture, a little lacking in color on the plate, save for the parsley. The Jerusalem Artichoke preparation was nothing more than a quick saute in olive oil and garlic while the stock in the main dish was cooking down.

No comments: