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5 Favorite Specialty Kitchen Tools
With specialty tools available for almost any cooking need, it can be tempting to pick up new gadgets. Many of these wind up being used once and then relegated to the back of the drawer. Avocado slicer, anyone? When the urge to make a purchase strikes, or you’re seeking a gift for the cook in your life, consider one of these five tools. Though their purposes are specialized, they help you to accomplish kitchen tasks that would otherwise be time-consuming, messy, or downright difficult enough to interfere with the enjoyment of cooking. Cherry Pitter Farmers’ market season is right around the corner, and with it comes hauls of fresh sweet…
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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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Roasted Pumpkin Soup
Pumpkins collapse into roasted sweetness after spending some time in the oven. I created this soup to celebrate the moment when their edges caramelize, and their skin is so tender that the weight of a knife is enough pressure for piercing. Certainly use this roasted pumpkin soup as an appetizer, but consider making it a meal with my recommendations at the end. Unlike similar soups which are spiced with cinnamon or made sweet with apples, pumpkin carries this savory dish. At the end of the cooking process, a generous amount of freshly cracked black pepper adds a pleasing spiciness that doesn’t overpower the base flavor. We often think of black…
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Hands
“…they kneaded and twisted and unknowingly squeezed youth back up through their veins…” – From “Making Taralli” – a poem of mine originally pushed in Ginosko Literary Journal The women in my family have beautiful hands. Of all their pleasing qualities, this is the one that fascinated me as a child. Well-formed and graceful, not to be confused with delicate, they are the type of hands that served, cooked, and too often were wrung together over loss. As they worked with dough or arranged chicken in a stock pot, their plump skin defined my notions of age in such a way that I found it difficult even to remember the…
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Roasted Asparagus with Sun-Dried Tomatoes
Now that April is well underway, bunches of tall asparagus have begun to appear at the market. Crisp and vibrant green, asparagus stands up to a variety of cooking methods, giving you choices of whether to grill or roast – use the stovetop or oven – and so many other decisions. It’s hard to go wrong, since asparagus can even be eaten raw, but it becomes sweeter and richer when roasted with sun-dried tomatoes. Beyond cooking methods, asparagus stands up equally well to a variety of ingredients from garlic to cured meats such as prosciutto and Serrano ham. With an intense concentration of tomato flavor, chopped pieces of the sun-dried…
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