I promised recipes last week and I’m not one to break promises, so here’s a quickie in celebration of the fact that I’ll be free of the bar exam in a week. Another winner from The Dallas Junior League Cookbook: nectarine-tomato chutney.
First off, I wanted thank you all for the really sweet and supportive comments I’ve received over the past couple of weeks. I’m getting down to the wire (the bar exam is on the 26th and 27th) and I’ll soon be back to posting and commenting with regularity.
In the meantime, I have a thank-you gift: my latest Charcutepalooza creation – mortadella.
When I was making an Ancient Roman feast a few months ago, I started thinking about yeast. In particular: how did people culture it before the days stores started selling it in cakes and packets? At this point, I really should be thinking more about Trusts, Estates, Torts, and the bar exam, but it’s so easy to fit a bit of kneading and some yeast thoughts into the day for study breaks. The result: sourdough.
I woke up at 5:30 AM yesterday morning for some ungodly reason. As I lay in bed pondering what to do about this, I thought, bakers get up before this hour every day – so why not bake? My younger stepsisters were heading to camp around noon, so I made a Monkey Bubble Bread from my non-vintage Achilles heel cookbook – Baked Explorations.
Yesterday, I picked some blueberries up at the grocery, and came home to hunt through the books I have here in Boston for a pie recipe. I was expecting to find some variation on the classic “sugar + lemon + cornstarch” formula – maybe to get crazy and do a lattice crust. Instead, I found The Best Blueberry Pie – I didn’t say it first; it’s titled that way in the Dallas Junior League Cookbook.
This is one of those recipes that reminds me why I continue my cookbook archaeology efforts: it’s completely different from any blueberry pie I’ve encountered before, and though it doesn’t photograph well, it is utterly delicious. In lieu of true food porn, I give you a visual testimonial. Before:
Confession time: I’ve been a bum about posting this week. Warning time: it might happen again this summer as I get closer and closer to the July 26 (eek!) bar exam. And then it might happen more afterwards, as I crash on a beach in Rockport, and then trek around Southeast Asia for three weeks. I’m pretty stoked about all of the post-exam bits, though, and will try to share as much as possible up here.
Before I dive into future travels, though, I’m harking back to a former jaunt I’ve already spoken about, and putting up a lovely Greek recipe for your enjoyment. I give you…Stuffed Eggplant!
Last month I started down a Louisiana-centric path for my first Charcutepalooza sausage challenge, with a Creole Chicken Sausage. This only whet my appetite, however, for a recipe I’d been eying for a while in Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie: Smoked Andouille Sausage. So, for this month’s stuffing challenge, I pulled out all the stops, dove back into pork with a vengeance, and lived the andouille dream. I even got some shrimp ‘n grits into the picture.
