Category Archives: food photography

Ottolenghi picnic (no recipe)

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In lieu of a “real” post (haha), please enjoy a few photos of the food at a picnic I attended this past weekend. We were instructed to choose and make one of Yotam Ottolenghi’s recipes, and we (mostly) followed instructions, choosing his burnt eggplant dip from Jerusalem, the chard and saffron omelettes from Plenty, and the cauliflower cake from Plenty More. K brought bread: a beautiful selection of slices from several different country loaves (the sesame seeded one was indisputably the best), handmade in what she calls her “nano-breadery” out of her own kitchen.

Unable to resist going off-recipe a bit, S. made us a drink, too: a fizzy mocktail featuring rhubarb simple syrup and a fresh mint sprig. I did dessert, not Ottolenghi but pulling toward some of his flavors: a massive rectangular pavlova drizzled with raspberry coulis and dotted with fresh raspberries, candied-and-aleppo-pepper-spiced pistachios, and dolloped with fresh whipped cream. As you can see from the final photo, we all but decimated it…

Frog’s bakery photoshoot (no recipe)

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No new recipe today, I’m afraid. After the treat you’ll see below, the sweet rolls I’d half-planned felt a bit too indulgent. Instead, enjoy these glamor shots of a cinnamon morning bun from Frog’s, a French bakery just a few short blocks from our house.

Until next week…

Reflections: Jubilee Red Beans and Rice (no recipe), and Bread in a Pandemic

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Jubilee Red Beans and Rice:

I don’t have any bread to share with you today, based in part upon some complications I’ve realized my “Breads of the World” project poses. More on that below if you’re interested, but first, instead of a typical recipe post I thought I’d share a few images and considerations about the meal we ate on Saturday. In an effort to diversify my cookbook shelves, one of my recent acquisitions is the beautiful volume you see above: Jubilee: Two Centuries of African American Cooking by Toni Tipton-Martin. As numerous Black cooks and food historians have in recent years, Tipton-Martin wants to acknowledge the tremendous role of Black cooks in “soul food” and “Southern food.” But she also wants to push beyond that – to restrict African American food to stereotypes is to perpetuate caricatures and poor representation. Tipton-Martin’s recipes come with history lessons – not all are extensive, but she recognizes and shares the background and development of the dishes she offers, sometimes with original recipes from centuries-old collections, and then her updated or adapted version.

Although the book certainly pushes beyond the borders of “The South,” on a cold, rainy day in Los Angeles I wanted something deep and warm and spicy I could spend the afternoon checking on, so I went with red beans and rice. Tipton-Martin’s recipe headnote is about Louis Armstrong and his devotion to the dish despite changing circumstances, a consideration of how traditions are sustained even as they undergo adaptation. Unless I’m baking, these days I tend to see recipes as guidelines rather than rules, but this one I followed to the letter, and it was basically perfect. A mound of hot, buttered rice underneath and a final sprinkle of cayenne pepper on top, and we were the happiest of quarantine campers.

Bread in a Pandemic:

Speaking of quarantine, while I continue to be enthusiastic about my “Breads of the World” project, I’m starting to realize it carries a few distinct challenges, emphasized thanks to pandemic conditions. First and perhaps most obvious: N. and I are going to eat a lot of bread this year. That doesn’t sound like a big or particularly intelligent revelation, I know, but it is a blessing-curse I hadn’t quite realized the magnitude of when I started collecting ideas. As my friend D. commented the other day, when you are a happy household of two working from home, baked goods weigh more heavily (all puns intended) in your day-to-day. Were this a typical year, I would just bring my bread of the moment to work and leave it in the department mail-room. It would be gone by mid-afternoon, and I’d be headed home ready to think through the next one. Now, although I certainly could (and probably should) engage in some bread-drops for local friends (what would you call a drive-by bread drop? A roll-out? A loafing?), the reality of making a loaf or a batch of buns is that most of the time N. and I will wind up eating them all. “We’re going to be having a lot of bread and salad this year,” I told him yesterday. He was delighted, but I can imagine weekly dosings might become less appealing than the panem et circensus alternative.

Second, there are a lot of breads to choose from! Again, not exactly an epiphany, but I could easily bake one or even two a week and still have pages of recipes to sift through in December. I don’t agree with all of their choices, but the list of breads on Wikipedia is both an entertaining read-through and a fair example of what I mean. I’m not obsessed with authenticity (and I don’t want every selection to turn into the intensive research I did for the naan-e-komaj I made earlier this month), but because I do want this project to be representative in both its scope and its recipes, I do want to look into the breads I’ve chosen at least a little bit, and if possible, to find a recipe or an overview from someone of or familiar with the culture or region that produced the bread. That takes time. Especially when the semester begins, my imaginary second career as a culinary historian will resume its usual status as unpaid-side-hustle, which means less time for exploring and writing about the breads I decide to recreate.

Third, and related to the point about being representative, breads from areas that are typically less well represented also often use less typical, and thus less accessible, flours. Cassava, teff, and millet flour are certainly not impossible to locate, especially with the whole internet at my literal fingertips, but they aren’t on the shelves at my usual grocery store. And since I’m not shopping as often as I would be under non-COVID conditions, I can’t just decide on a whim to make, say, pao de queijo one afternoon unless I already have tapioca flour on hand. That’s not a complaint, per se, but it is a realization that I’m going to have to plan around. You know, like everything else these days!

Until next time, then…

Dog Days

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They’re here.* The “dog days” of summer. As a kid, I thought, probably like most people, that this referred to a hot time of the year when dogs panted a lot. It didn’t occur to me to question why we would name a time of year after dog tongues; dogs were, after all, the best animals in the whole world.

It turns out “dog days” has nothing to do with terrestrial canines at all. Instead, they are the period during which Sirius, the Dog Star, rises just before the sun and can be seen in the same region of the sky. For the ancient Hellenic peoples, they were a time of foreboding – fevers, crop damage, war – all of this could happen under the nose, if you will, of Canis Major.

Foreboding, coincidentally enough, is the feeling I get when I think about cooking right now. For the past week I’ve strategized not what might be photogenic and delicious to share with you, but what I could make that would a.) use our grill as the only heat source, or b.) not involve cooking at all. So in lieu of an actual recipe, here are just a few shots of things I’ve cooked – or not, as the case may be – in the past few months. Just to tide us over.

 

Pink Champagne cake I made for newly married friends.

 

Allium “bouquet”

 

Cold, Thai-inspired tofu “salad”

* Actually, the Farmer’s Almanac claims the “dog days” fall between July 3 and August 11 each year, but since seasons mean next to nothing in Southern California – a place in which summer weather stretches until November, that strange thing called “fall” doesn’t truly exist but “June Gloom” is a season all its own – and stars, dog or otherwise, are everywhere, I think it’s fair to extend the range a bit.

Talking About Thinking About Food *

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* with apologies to I.’s podcast “Talking About Thinking About Records”

It’s funny how vacation works, isn’t it? You dive in with ambition: goals! Plans! But the first thing you want to do is relax, right? I mean, you need some definite time for relaxing, especially if the vacation starts with a holiday that requires preparation. And then once you’ve relaxed for a week… or maybe two… you start thinking about those plans. You start one of them. You consider another. And then when you clear your head again, there are only three days left before work starts again, and you realize that since you can’t accomplish everything you set out to do, it would be better to just stubbornly do nothing, telling yourself you are enjoying the time left as hard as you can.

At least, that’s what you do if you’re me. I had six tasks written down that I wanted to accomplish over the winter break. I did two of them. At first I was fairly gung-ho. I embarked on one of my big projects, but circumstances were more complicated than intended, and then a few things took longer than I thought, and there were shows to watch, and a dog who needed attention, and a husband who wanted the same, and suddenly it was February and I had to start thinking about my classes for the impending semester.

One of the tasks I had set for myself, as it seems I always do during breaks, and always fail to fulfill, was to create a backlog of posts so that for the first month of school, I would already have something ready to go and thus stay ahead of the curve, if a week lacking in time or inspiration came along. But in the actual weeks when I should have been doing this, I was by turns uninspired and resentful. I realize that this blog isn’t my job – it’s my hobby! But sometimes, because I give myself a weekly deadline, it feels like a job. Therefore, when I start to think about plotting out and executing a recipe, especially if that’s going to involve doing a round (or two) of dishes first, I feel like I’m giving up my vacation. Even though this is supposed to be my fun “work.”

So clearly I don’t have a recipe for you this week. “Just post a photo of food!” my mom said when I talked to her this weekend. But I’m a writer more than a photographer, so instead I thought I’d tell you a little about some of the food I ate during this break, and some of the dishes I’m thinking about now. I can’t promise all – or any! – of them will appear here, but maybe it will be a good way, as I teeter on the precipice of the new semester, of getting me back into all of my “jobs,” not just the one I get paid for.  🙂

The best thing I ate over the break may have been the dessert my sister, my mom and I made for Christmas. This year, we decided on a theme of “spiced.” Breaking from our appetizer tradition, we made a sit-down dinner, and everything in the meal – in fact, everything we ate all day (minus the odd chocolate truffle) – had to have a spiced component. Apple cardamom cake for breakfast, avocado toast with dukkah for lunch; N. even brewed a winter-spiced ale to fit the theme. Dessert, then, was an opportunity to show off all those warm tingling flavors in the spice cupboard, which we did with a trifle. In a huge balloon of a wine glass, we layered chunks of Mom’s best gingerbread, dollops of nutmeg and rum custard, ginger apple compote, and a generous heap of whipped cream. It was an indulgent project to dig your spoon all the way down and pick up a taste of everything, but the components went together perfectly, and the custard and compote were sufficiently rich, and the whipped cream, well, creamy enough, that you couldn’t tell I’d overbaked the gingerbread just a touch… Actually, I do have a photo of this one:

Other break foods that were definitively worth eating included the lamb burger from the recently shuttered San Francisco location of Park Chow, perfectly medium in the center and so juicy it required rolled-up sleeves. I tried a deliciously crunchy Hong Kong style crispy noodle dish at a Chinese restaurant near my parents’ house and wanted nothing else for two days. We made a lightly amended version of Melissa D’Arabian’s wine braised pork tacos that went over extremely well, especially with bright red cabbage strands and chunks of avocado on top. Perhaps most recently, we took a large, lightly toasted pavlova topped with stewed berries, toasted almonds, and amaretto whipped cream as a dessert offering for dinner with friends with a severe wheat allergy. The pillowy, marshmallowy center hidden inside the light crispness of the meringue’s exterior is a revelation.

Looking forward, I have an eclectic mix of things I think sound good. I’ve finally caught N.’s taco bug and now I just want them all the time. This week I’m taking an Ottolenghi recipe for squash that drizzles butternut batons with an herb oil and dollops them with yogurt, and folding them into a tortilla because why not? I’m dreaming of a winter taco that involves beer braised beef, shaved brussels sprouts, and definitely some radish. Maybe a horseradish crema of some sort. On the sweet side, I’m thinking about cookies studded with dried apricots and white chocolate, and just this morning (well, I guess it will be yesterday morning when this goes live) I thought about how lovely a thick, densely crumbed chocolate loaf cake – almost fudgy – would be topped with a light frosting, maybe a swiss buttercream or the like, flavored with something unusual. Marmalade, maybe, or ginger. Or tea.

And then of course I have my Chopped Challenge. N. tells me he has the entrée “basket” of ingredients for February worked out, so maybe that’s what I’ll have to share with you next week. Until then, be well, and tell me what you’re loving (or dreaming of) eating!