Food
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Asiago Polenta Sticks with Rosemary Salt
Baked until the outside is crispy but the inside retains its creamy texture, a polenta stick gives you the best of both ways to eat this Italian staple. Often we think of polenta as a porridge served warm, but it can be grilled or baked to become a crisp surface for a host of toppings or a way to sop up every delicious drop of a pan sauce that’s lingering on the plate. Sprinkled with seasoning before being baked in the oven at high heat, these polenta sticks give a nod to another Italian staple, focaccia. While there are many ways to season loaves, rosemary is a must for me.…
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Tomato Jam
The perfectly balanced sandwich is a comfort food that relies heavily on the right condiment. With picnic and grilling season right around the corner, put this tomato jam into heavy rotation. It’s mostly savory with just the right amount of sweetness to make you swap out the ketchup on your next burger, and it’s equally satisfying on sandwiches of all kinds. Since honey has a more complex sweetness than sugar, I use a combination of both to create a jammy consistency with plenty of robust tomato flavor. Layered with soft cheese and peppery arugula, the jam is part of a satisfying trio that makes my list of go-to toppings. After…
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Honey Roundup
“My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn.” – Louis Adamic Over the weekend, I attended a tasting event featuring the fermented honey drink known as mead, which sparked me to think about all of the ways to cook with honey. When I write honey, I may just as well write sweetness, for the ingredient is most always that, but it can also be mildly spicy, floral, even buttery in its raw form owing to the blossoms visited by the bees. Recipes follow below, but first a note about mead. Steeped in legend, mead has been at various times medicine or holy drink, sometimes both,…
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Stuffed Jalapeño Skins
Perhaps the coziest time to be in the kitchen is after the snow falls, bouncing light between its crystals and making everything just so quiet. While I was working on this recipe, gorgeous light filtered through the window, allowing me to capture the smooth green of jalapeños which would soon be split and seeded. Harvested when young, they were the color that comes to mind when we think of this type of chile, but scarlet jalapeños can be found as well, their redness a sign of maturity and growing heat. In the middle of winter I crave foods that bite, not only with heat but with crispness that stings just…
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Roasted Pineapple Salsa
Fresh salsa is so much tastier than canned varieties that you will wonder why you haven’t been making it all along. You’ll also wonder why you’ve never used a pineapple as a salsa bowl. Fortunately, there is a bit of time to ponder such things while you watch the oven for signs of caramelization on the pineapple slices and blistered skin on all those juicy tomatoes that make up the base of this homemade salsa. Once the ingredients have cooled, use a blender to pulse them a few times, and then make good use of the hollowed out pineapple by transforming it into a serving bowl. Save the lid as…
