Category Archives: Food

In service of our homage to ‘Babette’s Feast’ – happily updated as ‘Suzette’s Feast‘ for our silly intents and purposes – I tried my hand at this simplified version of Danish rye bread (Rugbrød) – thank you Kristi – love the floral head wreath! Given my penchant for the occasional kitchen mishap, and Mercury being in retrograde, I was wise enough to do a test batch before baking the actual version I’ll be serving at dinner tomorrow. That proved fortuitous, as I made a fatal error in one of the ingredients.

If you look closely, or at the shot below, you’ll see some very prominent pumpkin seeds. The bag said pumpkin seeds, and the recipe called for pumpkins seeds, and I’ve eaten this sort of pumpkin seed (salted) after Halloween, but I didn’t realize, and didn’t think through, that I needed ‘hulled’ pumpkins seeds – the green meat within the pale shells. 

The test version came out well side from this – heavy and dense and rustic with rye. I didn’t have a pullman lidded bread pan, so I just encased the regular bread pan with foil and topped it with a heavy cookie sheet for the first part of the being process. Once cooled and set, I sliced it up with a sharp serrated knife and piled on some toppings for a Danish open faced sandwich that Suzie had learned to love in Denmark when she was an exchange student there several decades ago. Perhaps this will bring it all back tomorrow…

(Proper seed types seen below.) 

This Tom Yum soup is the ideal antidote for these frigid days – warm to the taste, both from the spice and temperature – and packed with the traditional flavors of Thailand. I’ve made a few variations and deviations based on what was in the house, but it’s a soup that bends beautifully beneath such changes. Instead of Thai chiles, I used a habanero. Instead of galangal I used ginger. Miraculously, we had the lemon grass and kaffir lime leaves in the freezer from a previous summer. Andy had a pound of shrimp on hand from a batch we forgot to put out for a recent family dinner. I picked up some mushrooms after work, and used some remaining tomatoes and a new bottle of fish sauce to round it all out. It was just the slightest bit too biting when I first sampled it, so I added some coconut milk to temper it – not too much… these are icy days and nights. 

Stay warm, friends.

Winter… and we’re very much in it. Lunch-time scrambles to nearby food places prove a dire battle against icy winds ever since our office building cafe went out of business. A Tibetan blanket of soft wool makes for a heavy and oversized scarf; wrapped around my head and neck, it provides a portable cocoon that allows for a cozy walk. 

The soup and stew days are upon us, so I made this chicken soup for a friend whose family has been stricken with the nasty cold/flu thing that is going around. Simmering chicken and vegetables and a few bay leaves fills the house with the scent of comfort and coziness, turning plain water into a rich stock in just a few hours of patient heat. Making soup is like making tea – a ritual tailor-made for winter, for rumination, for survival. 

Yes, you.

And shame on everyone who knew about the glory that is the chocolate orange and just sat on that knowledge without so much as whispering its magic and wonder to me. (Not to be confused with the chocolate starfish or a starfruit.)

This is Terry’s Chocolate Orange, and apparently much of the world was aware of its awesomeness and yet no one bothered to introduce it to me until Andy gave me one for Christmas. At first I assumed it was some lovely trifle of candy, which I piled in with the rest of the treats I received.

Then I tried it.

Is this the best chocolate I have ever tasted? 

Quite possibly. At the very least, it was a revelation.

The instructions to ‘Tap and Unwrap’ are no joke – you do need to give this a fun tap, and not the shy kind, at which point it will open up its inner orange form and fall into bite-size slices easier than a real orange would. Such whimsy! I was instantly obsessed, but Andy says they only come out around the holidays, and of course we are no longer in the holiday times, so shame on all of you who kept this secret all these years. 

If you happen to find any hanging around on clearance, you know where to send them. 

New Year’s Eve is one of those weird quasi-holidays that sometimes gets us rallied and sometimes finds us sleeping through the whole thing. This year we invited Suzie’s family over, as has become somewhat of an occasional tradition, for an eclectic meal of whatever comfort food is on hand. Years past we tried to get a fondue ritual together – and for several gatherings I got out Suzie’s fondue set (for some reason she wasn’t using the one gifted to her years ago) and made a traditional cheese fondue – with the garlic rub, the kirsch, the gruyere and the cubed bread and green apples for dipping. 

This year I said fuck it – fondue is such a beast to clean (or so Andy told me, repeatedly) especially when you try to keep it warm with a sterno or tea light that just solidified a burnt circle of soot onto the bottom of the fancy fondue pot – whoopsie daisy as I used to say. Then I saw a cup of fondue at Trader Joe’s – La Fondue – and bought it as a joke. Of course I forgot to heat it up on NYE when everyone was here, but I found it this week and used the sourdough bread that Milo had made as a vehicle to test it out. 

Y’all, Traders Joe’s doesn’t dick around with this fondue. Somehow they got it all right – not sure there is any kirsch in this but damn it is decent – just as good as any fiasco I might have conjured, minus all the mess. 

Pie never did much for me. On my list of preferred desserts, it’s near the bottom. Not that I’ve ever turned a pie down if that’s the sweet treat to close out a dinner (Andy makes a mean one), it’s just not my favorite. For holidays, however, it seems that pie is often the choice for dessert – especially Thanksgiving and Christmas. For yesterday’s low-key non-celebration of the 4th of July, I picked up a small apple pie, because they say nothing is more American than apple pie. Whether that’s true or not, I have neither the energy nor the desire to investigate or argue – we’re talking about a fucking pie.

With some whipped cream and a double serving of softened vanilla ice cream, we made this one into apple pie à la mode, which sounds way more French than American to me, but what the fuck do I know? 

PS – I don’t hate pie because I’m gay. I’m gay because I hate the pie. 

Andy has been on a burrata bend of late, and I’m reaping the benefits of it in plates like this, which features a ring of heirloom tomatoes outfitted with fresh basil from the garden and a generous drizzle of a balsamic glaze. Taken with bites of burrata, it makes for a glorious combination to form a light lunch, or happy appetizer for a simple summer dinner. 

Simplicity is key for summer contentment.