There’s nothing wrong with the bottles of tonic you find in any grocery store, but once you make homemade tonic, it’s hard to go back. It has so much more flavor! Bursting with citrus, spices, and herbs, it’s the perfect balance of sour, sweet, bitter, herbal and floral.
Would you like some bright tart lemon bars? Yes, I know we’re smack-dab in the middle of Fall and everybody’s hugging their sweaters, walking through crunching leaves and imbibing in pumpkin-spiced everything but this is exactly when I crave bright lemony flavors the most. Don’t get me wrong, I love fall. Halloween is my birthday, for chrissakes, but there’s only so much pumpkin, butternut squash and apple a girl can handle before she starts craving citrus.
As you can probably tell, I reallylikelemon. And when I eat something that claims to be “lemon”, I want to taste actual tartness, not just sugar that a lemon once sat next to in a grocery aisle. So to these lemon bars (or lemon squares, depending how you slice them).
Pescanova’s toss-and-serve shrimp in their own salted butter and garlic sauce are the star of this recipe, paired with lightly-charred broccoli and pearl couscous.
Tender, flaky hake roasted to perfection over a medley of colorful roast vegetables, with a lemony, savory pan sauce — an easy fish supper all cooked in one pan!
This chunky blend of crispy shallots and garlic infused in aromatic chili oil becomes a spicy topping that goes with meat, fish, eggs, tofu … or just about anything.
Orange-ginger curd is a less tart variation on lemon curd, with a bright citrus flavor and a gorgeous hit of warm, spicy ginger. We love it on bread, scones, biscuits or as the filling in a tart.
Every Easter we’re required to rifle through our egg recipes and find yummy egg recipes for those of you for whom just dipping eggs in food coloring isn’t quite enough of a challenge.
We’re very fond of our herb garden. A few years ago, we built a step stand on the back deck, and this holds enough aromatic greenery to pinch for the kitchen all summer long. Having herbs so close to hand means that it’s easy to get inspiration for a food or drink recipe. Herb pots are easy to set up, don’t require any digging, and can be positioned wherever you have a sunny spot. A few years ago, in our garden-less apartment in Brooklyn, we’d sneak herb pots out onto the fire escape in defiance of the landlady. When Emily lived in an industrial loft building, the roof was always the sunniest location and where herbs thrived. The pride of our raised bed garden is always late-summer tomatoes, but there’s a hero of the herb garden that brings us delight from early summer onwards. To paraphrase T S Eliot, we can measure out our summer in basil leaves.
This is about a third of the herbs we’re growing, though the shiso (bottom left) is trying to take over the world.
In the spirit of the holidays, we’ve decided to publish one of our favorite recipes, Chocolate Frangelico Mousse, from our new cookbook, Cork and Knife.
It’s around this time of year that we load up at the grocery stores on cartloads of high-quality semi-sweet chocolate, cream, Frangelico hazelnut liquor and shelled hazelnuts. And that’s just our normal shopping list, it’s nothing to do with Christmas. But seriously though, this year we really are stocking up, because Cork and Knife was published this summer, and we’ve been overwhelmed with the positive responses to it! We’ve seen your wonderful Instagram posts and stories about recipes you’ve made from the book, and you’ve sent us so many wonderful emails. Thank you so much!
If you haven’t picked up a copy yet, now is the perfect time. Are you searching for a Christmas gift for that special foodie in your life? Is there a family member whose sock drawer is STILL bursting with all the socks you’ve bought them as gifts over the years? Are you looking for an unusual cookbook that combines the best of the food world AND the liquor cabinet? Well, here you go! Click on the book cover below to hurry over to Amazon and order your copy while you still have Christmas mailing days left!
(If you prefer to get your books elsewhere, no problem! Just head over to our cookbook page to find other places you can buy it! Or ask your local bookstore.)
As a holiday treat and a sneak peek at the book, we’re sharing just one of the recipes you’ll find in the book: Chocolate Frangelico Mousse. Think of it as an amuse bouche to get you in the holiday mood.
Our annual Thanksgiving recipe round-up has a little twist of something special this year. We published our first cookbook, Cork and Knife, earlier in the year, and it celebrates cooking with alcohol. If you haven’t picked up your copy yet, now’s the perfect time — and it’ll make a great holiday (or Thanksgiving host) gift. We’ll soon post an exclusive recipe from the book, but in the meantime, in the summaries below, we’ve marked recipes which contain booze in bold.
If one thing on this green earth is certain, it’s that in about a week and a half, most of the US will be engaged in stuffing a turkey and then stuffing themselves, with the turkey, like some kind of human Turducken. Let’s call it a “Turkhuman” (unless you’re actually stuffing yourselves with a stuffed Turducken, in which case I don’t know what to call you. Answers on a postcard please.)
Even though we have a food blog (this. This what you’re reading now is a food blog. Honest to goodness it is.) we’re not great at keeping up with the regular “National FOOD THING Day” celebrations. Everything has a National Day. There’s a National Peanut Butter Day (March 1). A National Pickle Day (November 14). There’s even a day (August 16) which is simultaneously National Bratwurst Day and National Rum Day (if only someone would write a book which combines food and alcohol OH WAIT THEY DID). And last week, July 30, was National Cheesecake Day.
Let’s get this out of the way upfront: there’s a meat-and-fruit tradition in cooking that we’re just not a hundred percent on board with. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that kind of combination, but the problem occurs when the fruit is overly sweet and there’s nothing to balance it out. When you have a fatty cut of meat — such as lamb — or fish, such as the wild salmon we use here — it benefits from being cut with an acidic component. It’s the same reason we use oil and vinegar together in a salad dressing.
We’ll often use lemon in our dishes to contribute that balance, but this week we’re looking at how pomegranate molasses, made into a pomegranate glaze, can lend a similar complexity to the rich flavor of roasted salmon.
We’ve all got that ingredient somewhere in the pantry. It’s the jar of something you picked up at the store, maybe on a whim or maybe with a specific purpose in mind, but then it got forgotten and languished in your kitchen cupboard until you re-discovered it and thought “aha! I know what to do with that”. Pantry space is not infinite (we can’t all have a TARDIS) and there’s a limit to how many items we can store that we aren’t using on a regular basis. For us, this ingredient is pomegranate molasses.
Why do winter-season dinners feel more of a challenge to put together than summer ones? The days are darker, the evenings draw in, there isn’t quite as much fresh local produce at the store or farmer’s market, and maybe we don’t have the energy to get as creative as we’d like. But here’s the key: sticking with simple ingredients such as hardy winter squash, healthy farro and fresh greens, and then packing them with winning flavor combinations will reward you with a dinner as healthy and delicious as it is straightforward.
In this recipe, we’ve partnered with Maille Dijon Originale Mustard to create a hearty seasonal winter supper packed with nutrition and flavor.
Just like in Seinfeld’s “The Muffin Tops” where Elaine sets out to prove that nobody really wants to eat a whole muffin, we’re largely in the camp that believes that nobody really wants to eat a whole bagel. And judging by the range of “bagel-light” hybrids (flagel, crogel, and the like), we’re not alone. Bagels are big. They’re doughy. And even though they’re inevitably filled with something delicious, you still have to bite through an inch of starch to get to the stuff inside. In our opinion, the crust flavor and the filling are the selling points of a bagel. If we can get those flavors in something more delicate, let’s do it. So we turned to the airy cheese puffs known as gougères to see if they could replace our morning favorite.
Delectable, creamy winter soup created from a blend of mushrooms, herbs, and wild rice — this is our choice for an easy and healthy vegetarian or even vegan supper that highlights the variety and richness of the fungi kingdom.
As the weather turns chilly, we want a cocktail that will warm our cockles, and this Spiced Rosemary Old Fashioned is the perfect drink to take us straight through the holiday season. Heritage Distilling has us covered.
Inspired by the sweet nectar of summer flowers, we created a cocktail in partnership with Heritage Distilling’s Brown Sugar Bourbon, which has notes of cinnamon and nutmeg, to which we added fresh thyme, lemon and elderflower liqueur. It’s tart, herbal, and beautifully smooth and luscious and very drinkable. After all, don’t we all deserve a little sweetness in our lives?
Sweet, fruity, cheesy blintzes are a great Mother’s Day treat for the Mom in your life. But let’s face it, they’re equally awesome as a weekend splurge you can make for yourself!
Breakfasts at the Nerds household are probably a lot like breakfasts at your house. During the week, we never have time to indulge in anything luxurious – it’s grab-a-slice-of-toast, open-a-yogurt, pour-a-quick-coffee time. So the weekend is when we really get to enjoy ourselves. And when it’s a special weekend like Mother’s Day, we really feel like going for the luxury option. These blintzes … well, let’s just say, if they were on the breakfast-in-bed menu at a classy hotel, I would not look at anything else. No, not the pancakes. No, not the eggs benedict. Well, maybe the eggs benedict, but I’d ALSO order a round of these blintzes. But here’s the thing – I’ve never seen them on a hotel menu, and maybe I’m going to the wrong hotels. but that’s all by-the-by because I’m making them at home now. And yes, they are as good as they look.
Give grilled chicken thighs or breasts a long pre-cook marinade in Green Goddess dressing, and then char them to perfection along with sweet red onions. Then dollop more herby dressing on them for good measure and eat dinner under the stars.
Well, it was inevitable. Last week, after complaining that the summer had been so cold after a spring that was so cold and a winter that was so very cold, we finally got hit with the annual New York heatwave. And to the friends and family members who always say “OMG I love this heat! I could take it all year round!”, I literally do not know who you are and please get off me with your sweaty hug. While we were merrily cavorting around the garden a few days ago, tending to the herbs, the tomato plants and the budding zucchinis, now we’re staring sadly through the window from the air-conditioned interior. It may look pretty out there, but just half an hour in the sun and we both tend to go all Mad Max Fury Road. And nobody wants that.
So if we can’t go to the herbs, the herbs must come to us. And that’s best achieved in the form of Green Goddess dressing. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s basically a fancied up ranch, loaded up with Greek yogurt, a little mayonnaise, garlic and all the soft herbs in the garden.
Stinging nettles aren’t just for stumbling into with painful consequences. We’ll show you how to use the leaves safely to make a delicious and super healthy risotto.
Matt here. Emily’s going to come in with the important tasting notes and all that later in the article, but I just wanted to share an anecdote from our very early cohabitation. When we first moved in together, I remember I was clearing room in the fridge – and at the time, Emily had a really beautiful spacious fridge (I think it was even bigger than the one we have now) and there was plenty of room to hide stuff at the back of the shelves. I was clearing out room to fit in whatever we’d bought together at the store, and I spotted a jar whose contents were unfamiliar to me. I opened the lid and, I don’t remember now, but I probably cursed. I think I might have warned Emily that there was something really bad in there that needed to be thrown away right that second, and preferably triple-bagged. I warned her that we might have to replace the fridge. I warned her that we might have to move.
We love a good cocktail around here, but more often than not, when we’re looking for a drink to pair with our food, we choose wine. Both of us love the versatility of rich red varieties: making Grilled Steak With Blue Cheese Butter? Red wine is the perfect choice. Having friends over for cheese and charcuterie? Red wine is a must. Hosting a holiday Pork Roast? Yup, you know what to serve with it. As soon as we tasted this wonderfully fruity and spicy Mullan Road Cellars Red Blend, we knew we wanted to drink it with something grilled. We decided to take inspiration from one of our favorite classic dishes, Eggplant Parmesan, and lighten it up for summer. To bring it out into the sunshine, if you will.
Revenge doesn’t have to be the only dish best served cold. We combine crispy baked tofu cubes with cold noodles in a spicy sesame – peanut sauce for a fantastic dinner or picnic recipe.
We’re adopting a new strategy to help us cope with the cold Northeast spring: we’re simply going to pretend that it’s summer. That’s right, readers: the tiki bar has been set out in the garden (which, incidentally, is BLOOMING), we’ve slathered on a healthy layer of SPF50, and we’re putting together all sorts of yummy goodies to take on our next picnic. Yes, it’s perfect weather to take a room-temperature noodle dish out on the deck or to our local park. Okay, all that may not be true, but this recipe is a perfect meal to make when you don’t need to serve up a hot dinner.
Call it winter blues, call it having a massive sweet tooth, or call it being homesick for my mother country’s dessert items, but over the last few weeks I’ve had a big old hankering for biscuits. Brits (and Commonwealth-based readers) will know exactly what I’m talking about, but just to make the point clear: I don’t mean American-style “biscuits”, the savory (sometimes cheesy) risen doughy product with a soft interior that you might slather with butter and eat for brunch. Neither are they exactly “cookies”, in the strictest sense.
What IS a biscuit?
If I was the dedicated type, this is where I might insert a Venn diagram of dessert snacks with a big circle in the middle representing the set of “cookies”, and another circle representing the set of “biscuits”. Depending on who you ask, “biscuits” might totally be a subset of “cookies” (i.e., all biscuits are cookies), or it may have a significant overlap (many biscuits are cookies, but not all), but it’s hard to make the argument that the two are completely separate. As for the “all biscuits are cookies” camp, while that may be technically true, if you asked me for a cookie and I gave you a Rich Tea biscuit you’d be pretty miffed. So here’s the best definition of “biscuit” that I can come up with:
A small, lightly sweetened, unrisen baked item, that will break with a snap (it should definitely not bend), and is typically eaten as a light snack with a drink (tea, coffee, milk). Some are a single layer (digestive or Rich Tea), and some comprise two layers sandwiched with a thin cream filling (custard creams, Bourbons).
If it helps you to think of them as “tea biscuits” or even “sweet crackers”, feel free. Of course, living in Britain, few people would go to the trouble of making a variety of a store-bought biscuit, since it’s a matter of minutes to pop into the nearest shop and pick some up. Here in the US, though, we’re just going to have to roll up our sleeves and do it ourselves. And we’re going to start with the classic sandwich chocolate biscuit, the Bourbon.
Falafel – crispy fried nuggets of ground chickpeas, flavored with herbs and spices – are an essential Middle Eastern dish. Serve them as a meze appetizer with Lemon-Garlic Tahini Sauce, or stuff them into home-made Pita Bread with a veggie salad.
Perfect homemade pita pockets served fresh out of the oven, using a combination of white and wholewheat flour to create just the right chewy texture. Use them in a Greek sandwich, or tear them up for dipping.
When putting together recipes for falafels and tahini sauce, we realized that using store-bought pita as an accompaniment would be a bit of a cheat. Certainly when the process for making it at home is as easy as David Tanis makes it in this New York Times recipe, it’s almost more effort to actually go to the store. Pita is leavened, so it does need a rising stage, but it’s nowhere near as time-consuming as for more substantial breads. In fact, the whole process of making homemade pita can be completed in less than two hours. And it’s a lot of fun!
February, as a rule, is a hard month to love. January, at least, has the benefit of being a FRESH NEW START to the year; we can, if we’re lucky, coast on hopes, and dreams, and the sugar high from Christmas, all the way through to the 31st. And then, the next morning, we wake, mentally done with winter and ready to see the sun again, keeping our eyes closed for a few blissful seconds of ignorance before opening them to find … February. Ugh.
It’s no coincidence that Groundhog Day is right at the beginning of February. If summer is a season of Sundays, February is a month of Februaries. TS Eliot had it wrong: April would only be the cruelest month if it arrived at your door dressed as a spring maiden only to rip off its mask and yell “surprise! April Fool, motherfucker! It’s February again!”.
But it’s not all bad. If you can make it exactly halfway through, to the month’s hump-day, so to speak, you’ll hit Valentine’s Day. (Any sensible editor would absolutely forbid me from using the phrase “hump-day”, but fortunately, this blog doesn’t have one.). We’re not teddy bears and roses kind of people, but we do like a colorful drink with zesty flavors. So that’s what we wanted to blog this year: a good, tasty Valentine’s Day cocktail that you can share with a loved one, or just make for yourself. (Because YOU, my blog-reading friend, are a loved one. Yes you are, and don’t you ever forget it.)
The classic combination of spicy sausage, creamy white cannellini beans and bright escarole has never been so satisfying. We go heavy on the garlic and herbs, add more vegetables, and give it a hearty, creamy texture by mashing some of the beans and adding a little cream cheese.
Every year on the blog about this time we complain about the weather. It’s so cold right now, we’re watching the Hardhome episode of Game of Thrones, where Jon Snow and his pals are as far North as they’ve ever been, and they’re fighting through a vicious blizzard and the cold is literally making people’s hands drop off, and we’re thinking “mmm, that looks like a toasty vacation spot”.
This year, the weather gods have outdone themselves (it’s -16ºF / -27ºC with the wind chill. That’s an incomprehensible amount of cold.). So instead of shaking our fists at the sky and risking instant frostbite, we fight back by making the coziest, heartiest, most fortifying soup we can imagine.
Rare footage of Matt learning we’re out of milk for tea.
If you like to celebrate Fall by reaching for the pumpkin spice, try its sophisticated cousin, Chai. Complex sweet, spicy and peppery notes combine to flavor these Chai Cupcakes, topped off with decadent Brown Butter Cream Cheese Frosting and a sprinkle of pink peppercorns.
It’s easy to knock pumpkin spice. It’s the low-hanging fruit – early-dropping leaf, perhaps – of the autumn zeitgeist. But don’t worry, we’re not heading into a cliched diatribe about hipsters and their spiced lattes and something something Williamsburg gentrification. We’re here to celebrate something with more depth, more sophistication, more … panache. Chai is not a new flavor by any means – in fact, it’s one of the oldest spice combinations in the culinary palette, dating from thousands of years back in India’s history. The nineteenth century saw it added to black tea and given more of a global reach, but the essential spice base has lasting appeal beyond hot drinks.
This one-pan wonder combines crispy-skinned chicken, baked directly on top of buttery, lemony orzo, studded with wild mushrooms, leeks and baby spinach. It’s a complete (and completely delicious) dinner, made in a single skillet.
Sticky toffee pudding is a hallowed British dessert which translates to American as “warm date cake drizzled with toffee sauce”. Either way you say it, it’s a deliciously rich and comforting treat, perfect for a chilly evening.
Almost from the beginning of this blog, there have been a number of recipes that we’ve wanted to make, but have lacked the time, ingredients, or frankly, the willingness to tackle. Pork pies are one of those recipes. For any of our readers who are unfamiliar, the traditional British pork pie is a hearty, venerated and highly portable vittle served cold and protected from the elements with a robust pastry shell. Between the layer of meat and pastry is a set aspic jelly. At this point, our carnivorous Brit readership (alright, Nathan?) will be slavering and ready for the recipe. More trepidatious American sensibilities might be juggling with the concepts of “cold pork”, “robust pastry” and “aspic jelly”. Fear not, Brad, buddy, all will be explained. Oh? You’re not? Well, you kind of look like a Brad. You just do. Sorry.
When the cold evenings get you thinking about a warming supper, but there’s still farm fresh corn in the market, corn chowder is our favorite way to ease into autumn. This version combines sweet corn and smoky bacon in a creamy broth, dotted with lightly poached shrimp and sliced jalapeños to soothe the end-of-summer blues.
What happened to summer? It seems as though the season just started, and its bounty had only yesterday begun to fill the supermarket shelves. Just like that, it’s all done for another year. Fortunately, even the Northeast still has plenty of farm fresh corn to offer – a cornucopia, you might even say – and we’ll take up our supermarket’s “12 corn cobs for $4!” offer as long as we can. This aren’t the tiny, young cobs from July that we could almost eat raw – at the end of the season, while corn is still pretty tasty, but not really at its peak, it’s a fantastic ingredient in a soup or stew. Hence: shrimp and corn chowder.
This vegetarian side dish or main course features roasted cauliflower in a fragrant, creamy sauce, spiced with ginger, cinnamon, anise, and more, and studded with plump raisins and slivers of crisp almonds.
When your childhood introduction to most vegetables is through their boiled varieties, you might be forgiven for seeking any alternative — anything at all! — to another plate of pallid, soggy specimens. I’m not saying rural England in the 1970s was unimaginative when it came to mealtimes, but … well, yes, that is actually what I’m saying. I am saying exactly that. Nothing was immune to the standard preparation (boiled beyond all recognition). I couldn’t again face parsnips or rutabaga (what we called “swede” which was served up in tiny cubes from a can) until well into my 30s. And then, of course, there was the poor old cauliflower. It’s such a healthy food – packed with nutrients and vitamins, but if you’re just going to boil it to death, what’s the point?
This article is part of our collaboration with Serious Eats.
Fish pie might seem like an essentially British recipe, but there’s no reason why it can’t be made in America. By finding your best local options for fresh fish and using your grill or smoker to enrich salmon, you’ll end up with a great catch!
Take our already delicious and zingy lemon curd, add blueberries, and you have yourself a shockingly colorful and brilliantly tasty fruit curd that will dazzle your breakfast table.
We take what we love about most about nachos (crunchy chips and an unapologetic amount of cheese) and loaded them up with the best flavors of summer. Grilled corn, fresh tomatoes, avocado, pickled radishes and shredded chicken with bourbon-brown sugar BBQ sauce.
Layers of lemon syrup-soaked lady fingers, silky smooth mascarpone cream, and perfectly-ripe summer strawberries. Not a traditional tiramisu, perhaps, but it might become your new favorite.
A perfect Scotch Egg has a crisp golden shell, flavorful sausage and most importantly, a soft-boiled, runny-yolked egg. This just might be the ideal portable picnic snack – that we’d be happy to eat anywhere, even the dining table.
Vanilla and turmeric-flavored pannacotta with hibiscus syrup. A) A rich, creamy, colorful dessert, or B) a murder victim on a teaplate? You be the judge! (Hint: It’s A.)
Every now and again with this blog, we create a recipe so unrepentantly weird that it seems a shame not to share it with the world. This week, we’d like to introduce to you a dish based on a gorse* pannacotta that we encountered a few years ago at one of our favorite restaurants, Llys Meddig in Newport, Wales.
Our vacation snapshot of the original dessert is too low-quality to share with you – suffice it to say that it was a delight and well worth trying to recreate. Pannacotta is pretty much a three-ingredient recipe (cream, sugar, gelatin) in its simplest form; all we would need, apparently, is some gorse.
So if you ever need to make a dessert suitable for a Murder Mystery night, we’ve got you covered.
*explanation of what the heck gorse is below
The turmeric gives these pannacotta a beautiful golden color and a delicate spice.
It’s been a while since we blogged about a recipe with family history. We’ve been doing quite a bit of commissioned work for Serious Eats, and they’re a professional outfit you know, and you can’t just submit any old tosh on their site (ahem). Their readers are a refined, questing bunch, wanting to get to the nitty gritty of a recipe without having to weed-whack through paragraphs of us arse-ing around talking about our chickens, or what kind of expression our dog is making (bored, if you must know), or that time we tried to juggle seven lemons. As you know, we leave all the old tosh for our own site, so it is with a familiar thud that I dust off the book of Nerds Family History and tell you all about gamush.
A Baked Brie can turn the standard cheese board into a highlight of a gathering: a warm, gooey communal comfort food.
A party without cheese is like Valentine’s Day without chocolate, and, while a well-curated cheese plate will likely do the job for any occasion, a wheel of baked Brie will deliver maximum impact with a minimum of effort. Especially at a winter party, it can turn the standard cheese board into a highlight of a gathering: a warm, gooey communal comfort food.
Making a baked Brie (or a baked Camembert, Brie’s soft-rind cousin) can be as simple as tossing the cheese in the oven with some kind of drizzled topping, or you can go all out by serving it en croûte—wrapping it up in puff pastry with any number of store-bought or homemade sweet condiments.
Note: This Baked Brie series is also available on Serious Eats!
It’s always gratifying when people write in and tell us that they made a recipe from the site and it turned out so well that they got compliments. But nothing warms our little nerd hearts quite like seeing someone’s face when they’re right there in front of us eating a thing we made and making ohmygodohmygod faces, possibly even drooling slightly. This is such a recipe. We had previously made brownie bites with vanilla mascarpone, which are quite heavenly, but then decided that adding peanut butter to a thing could only improve it, and thus this version was born. (Incidentally, we made these on January 24, which is National Peanut Butter Day. Should this be a national holiday? Well, you might very well think that, but we couldn’t possibly comment.)
A hearty family roast, done right, is a cause for celebration – and a great reason to know your local butcher! This pork loin is flavored with herbs and served with spiced apple chutney.
It may seem as though there’s even less certainty than usual in the world at the moment. If one thing is certain, though, it’s that this time next week, most of the US will be engaged in stuffing a turkey and then stuffing themselves, with the turkey, like some kind of human Turducken – let’s call it a “Turstuffan” (unless you’re actually stuffing yourselves with a stuffed Turducken, in which case I don’t know what to call you).
It’s also the biggest cooking occasion at Nerds HQ – generally we cook for ourselves and then say “hey look internet, we made a thing, ok thx bai” – but this day, of all days, we’re committed to cooking for a large group who aren’t afraid to give their instant feedback. It’s intimidating! We couldn’t do it without a set of tried-and-tested Thanksgiving recipes that we have tweaked over the years to make them really tasty and, just as importantly, to keep preparation and cooking as stress-free as possible. (We’ll never forget the year we accidentally brined the kitchen floor with about 10 gallons of spiced saltwater.)
So here are our dishes. Appetizers, entree and sides, the all-important gravy (you don’t have to make your own stock, but if you can swing it, it adds amazing flavor), sides that’ll knock your socks off, desserts, and some great ways to use up the inevitable leftovers. We hope you find these Thanksgiving recipes as enjoyable to make and eat as we do.
Finally, and most importantly, this holiday is about gratitude, so we want to take the opportunity to say thank you. Specifically, thank you, you reader there, you. We started this blog as a way to get our recipes down in writing where we’d be able to find them again. It has grown in ways we never expected, and it has become a springboard for our cooking, writing and food photography.
Your encouragement, positive comments, ideas and adaptations are what keep us coming back week after week to make something new that you might like. Most of all, seeing you cook, enjoy, adapt, and document your own versions means more to us than we can say. Please keep letting us know how the recipes worked for you, and send us your pictures! You can always tag us on Instagram (@nerdswithknives) or just comment under a recipe post. We always appreciate it.
From us, Matt and Emily, to you, your families, your kitchen and table, we wish you the very best and we can’t wait to show you what we have planned next! Happy Thanksgiving!
Make Ahead Turkey Gravy with Calvados (Apple Brandy)
These deceptively simple shortbread rounds are so rustic, you’ll think you’ve time-travelled to 1740.
We’ve recently been doing some behind-the-scenes overhauling of the site, cleaning up old links, testing a new recipe plugin, that sort of thing, and I found myself looking at one of the first articles I ever wrote for the blog, in 2013. In it I talk about finding three wooden biscuit stamps at my grandmother’s house after she died. Her kitchen cupboards were seemingly endless and there was always something at the back that you never knew was there. Into the 90s I swear we were still finding foodstuffs at the very back of the larder with halfpence prices (which were phased out in 1983). Certainly I don’t remember ever seeing, let alone Nan ever using, these stamps.
So, just to recap, the stamps are, at first glance, a shamrock, a thistle, and a dragon. If you’re British, you’ll be saying “yes of course, that makes total sense”; if you’re not, you will probably be singing the “One of these things is not like the other” song from Sesame Street.
A farro salad is the perfect way to extend salad season into the fall. This combination has great intense flavors and only a little preparation.
[Matt says: We’re reposting this popular recipe from the first year of the blog. The evenings are colder in these parts but we’re still getting warm sunny days; even though there’s nothing fresh in the garden, I still want a healthy green lunch, and this does the job. A good boxed baby kale or even baby spinach is perfect here.]
A long, long time ago, on my first “grown-up” trip, I was at a tiny little restaurant in Florence, Italy, when a waiter asked me if I was a fan of “Farrah”. “Um, huh?” I asked, eloquent as always. “Farrah, you like?”. “She’s… ok, I guess”. I was very confused as to what a 70’s sex symbol had to do with Italian food but was too embarrassed to ask. The waiter, befuddled by my response, wandered away, I’m sure annoyed that he ended up with the table of weird Americans.
Later I noticed a special on the menu, “Farro con Pomodori Arrostiti” (Farro with roasted tomatoes). Aha! Farro, not Farrah! Farro, of course. Farro… I had no idea what Farro was. I didn’t order it.
Making concord grape jelly is really easy and you don’t have to be a homesteader to do it. All you need is grapes, sugar and lemons – no added pectin!
I may as well put it out there straight away: we’re not homesteaders. At least, not yet. If you’re reading this (frankly, if you’re not reading this, I don’t know what the hell’s going on), you’re no doubt into food, and home cooking, and perhaps you subscribe to the newsletters of people who have acreage and live off the land and have their very own scoby and sourdough starter, both of which have names (I’d name my sourdough starter “Scrimshaw”, I think. How about you?) People who pickle. People who can.
Fudgy, ultra-chocolatey brownies kicked up with a salty pretzel crust and caramel drizzle. Want to win a bake off? This is your guy.
Have you heard? Have you heard the news about Great British Bake-Off? Have you? Have you heard it? Of course you have, I imagine it’s all people are talking about down your way. It’s certainly all they’re talking about in our neck of the woods. Of course, the show is not technically ending, but it’s been bought by Channel 4 and won’t have Mel, Sue, or Mary, and will no doubt be presented by Vince Vaughn and Colin Farrell and Paul Hollywood all exploding in an underground parking garage or something. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, bless your very face, and go and find an episode or three. It’s shown on PBS in the US, and they have to call it “The Great British Baking Show” because apparently Pillsbury has a legal lockdown on the term “Bake Off” and will send goons, floury goons, to give you a right drubbing should you flout compliance.
Lemon-Garlic Tomato and Chicken Skewers with Basil Chimichurri
Grilled chicken doesn’t always need a long marinade to be full of flavor. These spend just a few minutes in a lemony-garlicky mix before they’re grilled to charred perfection. The hot chicken absorbs the flavor of the fresh basil chimichurri, and the grilled cherry tomatoes bring sweetness and acid.
We need only the slightest of excuses to cook outside in the peak of heat-wave summer. Turn the stove on? Ah, no, thank you. Making a quick-marinated chicken dish that we can throw on the grill is an ideal solution. And, if we can use the Mediterranean heroes of the summer vegetable garden—tomatoes and basil—so much the better. Not only do tomatoes and basil taste great together, they also have a symbiotic relationship in the garden; companion gardening with the two plants in proximity improves their resistance to pests.
A successful garlic crop in the urban backyard depends on a lot of factors. We tell you what went right this year for us, what we might do differently, and one option for roasting your garlic once it’s harvested.
There’s a line early on in one of those first-generation text computer adventures – Colossal Cave or Zork or Adventure itself, I think – where the game asks you if you’re a wizard and what the secret incantation is, requiring that you’ve played the game already, or you’ve been told the secret by someone else who has (this was way pre-internet, remember, and this wasn’t the sort of information that libraries tended to know). If you do answer that you’re a wizard, and you get the code wrong, the game scoffs at you and tells you you’re a charlatan.
Gardening is a bit like that. Some years you feel like a wizard and some years you feel like a charlatan, like an actual wizard left you in charge of their garden and you’re just randomly throwing things into the ground and seeing what comes up. I wouldn’t say that I have an innate skill by any means, but I do have an immense amount of fun getting things to grow and gradually, slowly, learning by my mistakes and the variations of the growing season. Last year we put up straw bales for the first time, and had great success there with most of our seedlings. At the time, the raised beds that I’d been relying on were retarded by the branches and roots of nearby maples, which I took down at the end of the summer. This year, the raised beds are going gangbusters, but the straw is not so successful. On the one hand, shazam!!!, buton the other hand, ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
A gorgeous and rich, cheesecake, flavored with rum and vanilla and topped with a summery compote of strawberries and rhubarb.
Hello Nerdlings!
Sometimes I wonder if we’re quite nerdy enough on this blog. I worry that our readers, steeped as are Westerosian Meisters in the lore of SF and fantasy, will flit from recipe to recipe, searching in vain for just the right clue that, yes, we too know the exact galactic co-ordinates of Gallifrey (*10-0-11-00 by 02), we have read The Silmarillion (*Needed more dragons and fewer diacritics) and we have a perfect theory to reconcile, entirely within the Blake’s Seven mythos, Stephen Greif’s depiction of Travis vs Brian Croucher’s (*I have discovered a truly remarkable proof along these lines, which this blog is too small to contain).
Is it not enough to show you our collection of Alan Moore’s 2000AD, DC Comics and Vertigo works, including not only the obvious Swamp Thing, Promethea and Ballad of Halo Jones but early Doctor Who Weekly? Must we dig out our Battlestar Galactica DVDs? Have we not mentioned that we named one of our pets (Arya) after a Game of Thrones character, and another (Bascule the Rascule) after the protagonist in the best of darling Iain M. Banks’ SF (although non-Culture) books, Feersum Enjinn?
Don’t worry. We WILL be talking about strawberries and rhubarb soon. Promise.
This custard tart with berries makes a great start to the summer. Creamy, rich vanilla custard in a crisp, buttery tart shell, topped with sweet berries and mint.
Raising chicks isn’t something we ever thought we’d do, and yet here we are, in our basement with a half-dozen chirping chicks on our hands. Join us to watch the fun!
Hi, woodland chums!
No recipe this week as Emily is busy with photography work, so I thought I’d “entertain” you (rarely was a word used so incorrectly with such flagrant abandon) with a little video diary of us raising chicks. Last September, we got five new chicks, and like any proud parent, I Periscoped the hell out of them for about a month before promptly dropping the whole documentary process.
Our salmon favarolles, AKA Bernie Sanders. Can you guess how she acquired this nickname?
Chocolate babka: a sweet bread treat made with enriched dough and layered with chocolate – a weekend project you’ll be glad you made.
Greetings, Easter (and Passover***) bunnies!
***This babka is leavened and therefore not suitable for Passover, if your family, unlike ours, cares about such things. Read Matt’s full, sincere and amusing apology at the bottom of the post.
It may have slipped out in the course of this blog that one of us is Jewish, and the other of us is English. These are not, frankly, genres that strike awe into the hearts of home chefs (although Nigella Lawson does prettywell for herself) . When our best friends in town got married, they catered the reception with dishes from Italy (his family heritage), and soul food from New Orleans (hers). It was awesome. A Jewish-British catered wedding? Maybe not so much.
An Easter/(not)Passover*** dessert option, though? Now you’re talking.
This Babka is filled with rich, dark chocolate with just a hint of cinnamon.
It’s a shame about toffee apples, it really is. In theory, I ought to love them. There’s the toffee, which, as our Ultimate English Toffee recipe proves, we’re all about. I have no problem with the toffee. There are the apples – and who doesn’t like apples? Your basic apple is basically the perfect snack – you … Read more
Dear reader, or indeed, readers: You may, singularly or en masse, have become increasingly concerned at the startling lack of chicken-related news in this blog. It is possible, but admittedly not likely, that you are of a nervous disposition, and have been unable to reconcile the existence of a “Chickens” menu with the non-existence of any news or updates regarding them. Well, my anxious friend, this post is for you.
We started out almost exactly two years ago with four red sex-link pullets. Since then, we have gained two Ameraucanas – one of which turned out to be a rooster and had to be “returned to the farm”. I don’t know why I put that phrase in quotes, he literally was returned to the farm. To, you know, “live out his life in the paddock”. What? It’s the quotes, they make everything look suspicious. Anyway, the farmer promised to “take care of him”, so I’m sure everything’s fine. Just fine.
A few notes on our success in the garden this summer … as well as our failures.
Comrades! While Emily is entertaining you all indoors with delicious seasonal goodies, I thought I’d update you with news from the garden to show you what’s been going on outside the house this year. This is technically our third full spring/summer, but our first since we bought the house. We were loathe to install anything permanent during our rental period for fear we’d do irreparable damage to the property – now of course, we’re quite merrily doing plenty of irreparable damage and NOT GIVING A HOOT.
So: the garden. Over the last couple of seasons I’ve built two 8’x4′ raised beds. I’ve planted vegetables that we tend to use most in cooking – garlic, onions, dark greens and squash – with varying success. The first year, we had what seemed like two fresh zucchini every day. We’d eat them, go down to the garden the next day and pick off two more. The second year, we didn’t notice ANY squash growing until late in the season, I moved a leaf aside and found one enormous zucchini that must have been growing un-noticed for a month. [Emily: I wish we had taken a picture of it because it seriously would have needed an NSFW tag]. That was the first and last squash we had that year.
Five-layer magic bars made with coconut, chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, and toasted pecans held together by condensed milk on a graham cracker crust.
I sometimes have a tricky time starting these posts, and true to form, for this recipe I got stuck on the very first word of the post title. FIVE-layer magic bars. Is it really five layers? Or is it three? Or four? Honesty in cooking is pretty important, right? There are certainly more than (but not MUCH more than) five ingredients, and you do assemble the bars in neat layers, so really, it can be as many layers as YOU think it is. Or you can just make them and not worry too much about it.
We made these to take to a local bake sale last weekend called For Goodness Bake. This is the third year that it has been organized, and each year the proceeds go to a different worthy local cause. This year it was the Green Teens, an offshoot of the Cornell Cooperative Extension which teaches farming, gardening and other food-related skills to local teenagers.
Ramp and cheddar biscuits are a great savory vacation on the classic biscuit – you’ll wish you had your own secret ramp patch!
Hello, friends. If you’ve been following this blog from the very beginning (and if not, WHY) you might remember a recipe for ramp and fontina biscuits from a couple of years ago. Here it is. We were not tricking you, it was indeed a fine recipe and made good-tasting biscuits. However, the consistency of the final product was more like that of a scone, and did not have the rise nor the flakiness of a really excellent biscuit. I thought we could improve on that with a new technique.
Pasta with sausage, broccoli rabe and white beans is a classic combination that needs its own name. While you’re thinking of one, check out our recipe.
Neither one of us grew up in an Italian family. We didn’t have childhoods where there was always a lasagne baking away in the kitchen, twenty people crammed into a dining room, cheerfully shouting at one another to pass the meatballs, Dad sitting at the head of the table with his slicked-back hair, pencil moustache, eating slices of orange, two bodyguards at the door … you know what, I’m thinking of “The Godfather” there, that’s what that is.
Of course, it’s easy to get inspiration from Italian cuisine – there are are a handful of classic pasta dishes that we fall back on for dinner parties or quick weeknight meals, and I think this might be one of our favorites – it’s cheap, easy and phenomenally delicious. We make it all the time.
Crunchy, buttery phyllo shells filled with rich, smooth cappuccino cream. Make lots of these bite-sized lovelies because they will go quickly (if they even make it out of the kitchen).
I don’t know if it’s a weird inverted class thing, but I’m always hesitant to make and promote a recipe that sounds – let’s say a bit too fancy. I imagine serving it up to a family of simple Northern playwrights and gauging their reaction. Would my guests nibble appreciatively while explaining how the semiotic thickness of a performed text varies with the redundancy of auxiliary performance codes? Or would they prod at the food uncomprehendingly and declare that they remembered this town when it were all fields? It’s always in the back of my mind, that.
And then I found this recipe and thought, sod it, let’s do this.
Hallowe’en is a very exciting time over at the Nerds residence. You see, one of us (EMILY) not only grew up on horror movies but also, you know, HAS HER BIRTHDAY on October 31st, and the other one of us (MATT) has a fondness for Edward Gorey and M R James, and has spent whole months of his life subsiding entirely on candy bars. So it’s a propitious melding of minds, really.
Hallowe’en was not much of a thing for me, growing up in Britain in the 1970s – which is perhaps a little odd, considering that every other major holiday of the year is inextricably connected to the consumption of chocolate. The big event of the week was Guy Fawkes’ Night, which is fun and all, and has a bonfire and fireworks and the mocking of failed political plots, but unless the Guy was somehow fashioned out of sugar mice (IT WAS NOT), a distinct lack of sweet confections. So I thoroughly approve of the American version.
Hello gang! Ready for some delicious baked French toast? I do like to think of us as a gang, by the way: we, the writers of this madcap screed, and you, our wonderful readers. Not a particularly effectual gang, I have to admit. It’s not a gang to strike fear in the hearts of our … Read more
Our recipe for chocolate chip cookies comes with a bit of history, a Cookie Monster / Tom Waits mashup, and our usual nerdy tips for the tastiest cookies.
Cookies! Who DOESN’T love them? The churlish people, that’s who, you know the ones I mean. Those sour, pinch-lipped joykills with hearts of black, black stone. People who, for whatever reason, just don’t have a sweet tooth. People whose doctors have advised them to maintain a cookie-free lifestyle. People with gluten intolerance. Er. Look, I’ll come in again.
Cookies! Who DOES love them?
While you’re enjoying that, have a little bit of history of chocolate chip cookies. No extra charge.
It’s not always possible to identify the exact time and place a recipe was invented, or with whom it originated, but with the chocolate chip cookie, we can. Not only do we know exactly who invented it, when, and where, but we also know that, somewhat bizarrely, it was invented before the chocolate chip.
In 1938 Ruth Wakefield, proprietor of the Toll House Inn in Whitman, MA, made a small change in the recipe for her butterscotch cookies, substituting a chopped-up chocolate bar. And that’s how chocolate chip cookies were born. It became so popular and renowned that Nestlé not only permanently added the name of her restaurant to their baking chocolate bars, but also began to sell packets of ready-made chips specifically to be added to this recipe.
Sadly, the inn burned down in 1985, and now the Toll House sign at the Inn’s original location only welcomes you to a Walgreen’s parking lot.
Where the Toll House was. Don’t worry, it’s a big lot, nobody will hear your sobs.
Creating your own home-made Greek yogurt is easier than you might think and doesn’t require any special ingredients, just a little time.
The missus has been out sick this week, so I’ve taken over blog duties. Last weekend I expanded on my bread baking with a really good multigrain recipe from Martha Stewart (to be blogged later) that involved three kinds of flour, two kinds of grain, and four kinds of seeds, and after all that I had to have a good lie down in a darkened room.
For this post, conversely, I decided to try something else I’d never done but keep it as simple as possible. Yogurt is something that we always try to have in stock in the fridge – not only is it a fantastic breakfast option, especially with some toasted nuts or seeds, maple syrup or honey, or (when in season) fresh berries, but it’s a great stand-by for a host of other recipes, such as marinades, dips and saucy dishes such as curries. We often use it in place of sour cream, like in this Lemon Basil Sauce.
We almost always buy the Greek varieties of plain yogurt, which are strained and therefore thicker than the “regular” variety. People have started wars over their preferred brand of Greek yogurt – to avoid bloodshed, I won’t reveal the specific brand we prefer, other to say that it’s the one that’s not Chobani.
Home-made Greek yogurt is so much more delicious than even the best store-bought kind, and is also much more affordable. The best part is that you get to control the quality of the milk that goes into it and we found that even using the best organic, grass-fed, free-range, hormone-free milk was cheaper than buying it already made.
I don’t remember having cookies when I was growing up in Britain in the 1970s. I don’t mean to say that they didn’t exist; in all probability they were around, but in the country’s crowded biscuit industry, with its Bourbons, its Garibaldis, and Custard Creams, its Jammie Dodgers and digestives of both plain and chocolate variety, its Rich Teas, Penguins, and Jaffa Cakes, there seemed to be no great need for American imported options. Biscuits are great, though, you can have them all year round, they have absolutely no health benefits, and you’re allowed twice as many at Christmas, because of course that’s the time when everyone is a bit low on fat and carbs.
There are plenty of sweet baked items you can make at home, of course, but nobody makes biscuits; there’d be no point. And you see, that’s my socialist English upbringing again; of course, in America, you dream, you aspire, and yes, you SHALL make cookies, and take them to the moon, too, dammit. But the same principles apply: they’re not in any way seasonal, and people like to make twice as many during the winter months.
Good thing, then, that just before Spring leapt into the calendar and stole an hour from us, last week I decided to make cookies. To tell the truth, I believe the conversation in the house went something like this:
Me: Do we have any cookies in the house?
Emily: I don’t think so, but you could make some! And blog it.
The first thing that every schoolchild learns about King Alfred is that he burned some loaves. The history books clearly could not come to an agreement on what Alfred actually looked like, but they all agreed that he was a big old loaf-burner.
The schoolchild later, of course, goes on to learn about Alfred’s leadership of the Anglo-Saxons, his fortification of London and his effective resistance against the Danish incursions of England in the 9th century AD, but the first thought that gets dredged up at the mention of his name is, inevitably, “That Alfred, eh, couldn’t even work an oven properly”.
Which goes to show two things.
First, don’t leave a king to do a baker’s work, he’s going to have his mind thoroughly busy with keeping the Vikings out of Mercia, of course he’s not going to pay attention to mundane culinary matters. And secondly, it doesn’t matter how effective you are in your chosen career (eg, King of England), everyone’s going to remember that one time you ruined a batch of bread.
When it’s dark at 4.30pm, your drafty home refuses to get above 55F, and there’s ice on the INSIDE of the windows, what do you do to warm up in the evening?
You could make a big fort in the middle of your living room with every blanket you have in the house. You could rub two kittens together and bathe in the glow of their static electricity (DISCLAIMER: DOES NOT WORK WITH CHICKENS).
Or you could make these Old Fashioneds with maple syrup.
Mixologists will tell you that these are not real Old Fashioned cocktails, since they aren’t strictly made with plain sugar or simple syrup. While they’re explaining that to you, nod sagely and drink up and then demand another glass of “whatever the hell you want to call it, Poindexter”.
Emily bought me the PDT Cocktail Book and a fine Boston cocktail shaker set for Christmas (do you think she was trying to tell me something? Should I be making more cocktails? Is the answer to that question ever “no”?) which I needed to test out, and their “Benton’s Old Fashioned” was a great starting point. Now they use bacon-infused bourbon, which, delicious as it sounds, I just couldn’t put my hand on.
So use whatever whisky or bourbon you have – we’ve tried both Jack Daniels and the local Hudson Whiskey pictured in these shots. Feel free to adjust the amount of maple syrup or bitters; these are just general suggestions that work for us.
A lot of people have been asking me how our chickens have been coping with the winter weather. To be honest, I had been a little worried about keeping them safe through the cold months. We’re not exactly Minnesota, but we do get snowy winters. Last year the snow didn’t seem to stop coming until April.
And as for this week … yes, it has been cold (see left). The current cold snap may be an outlier, but it’s still a serious threat to your health if you spend too long outside in it. I was half-inclined to make the chickens a little winter palace in the basement, but to be honest, they wouldn’t be that much better off inside.
The house we’re renting is, let’s say, insulation-ally challenged. The old half of the house has new windows, but cold floors. The new half has old, draughty windows and inefficient baseboard heaters. When it reached -5F last week, it was simply impossible to keep the ground floor heated. Both the cold AND the hot taps in the kitchen, as well as the pipes to dishwasher and washing machine, froze up. We rounded up every blanket in the house and kept ourselves warm with maple syrup old-fashioneds.
It’s been an exciting sort of week in the world of chickens around these parts.
First, we started getting eggs last weekend. I might have mentioned in our first chicken post that we weren’t exactly sure how old our hens were, but breath was baited, fingers were crossed, wood was touched, and, more practically, I purchased a couple of small plastic eggs from Amazon and set them in the nesting boxes, as if to say, “Look. You see that? That’s what you’re supposed to do.”
The days are getting shorter. My research suggested that hens need about 14 hours of daylight to lay, so I had also run a light into the coop and set a daily timer to come on at 4.30 every morning. (I’ve since relented a little and given them a little lie-in; it now comes on at 5.30 every morning. I’m not a monster.)
Whether any of the above helped, or whether it was just their time, our first small, brown, speckled egg appeared on the morning of Saturday 12th October, exactly six weeks after we first settled the chickens into their new home. The next day, one more, and the next day, two. That day I also found one of the hens crouching at the corner of the garden, and when I investigated, found it had created something with a soft shell.
I like to tell people that growing up in England, and particularly in the Garden of England™ that is the Kent countryside, you naturally absorb, as if by osmosis, an understanding of the ways of nature. You find yourself in easy harmony with the plants, and the trees, and gardening and horticulture come as easily to you as walking, or talking. (But not walking AND talking together, let’s not fly too close to the sun, Icarus.)
It’s all bollocks, of course. My Nan loved to garden, my Mum loves to garden, I had a Big Book of British Trees (“Number 4: The Larch. The Larch.”), but other than that, the very few nuggets of natural lore that still rattle around my skull are things I remember from Scouts. (For example, did you know you can tell compass directions by looking at the moss growing on the side of a tree? I’m pretty sure it’s the north side, unless it isn’t.)
Moving back to the countryside after so long, we’re forced to cram a lot of greenery know-how into our increasingly osssified crania. For example, we have two large black walnut trees, laden each summer with green, perfumed globules, which, come the autumn, are released from their arboreal prison and sent careening into the ground. Or into a face.
This post is kind of dedicated to two people, and the first one is me (Matt).
At the age of, oh, about 12, I don’t think there was a single thing in the world – except perhaps, mashed potatoes – that I loved with all my heart more than butterscotch flavored Angel Delight. Pudding, to you.
(Notes – 1: Yes, we’re really big on singing made-up words like “De-smoothest” in British commercials. 2: Apparently, we like throwing maraschino cherries on top of everything, for no damn reason that I can think of. And 3: strawberry pudding is pretty foul. Other than that, 4: you get the idea.)
On as many separate occasions as I could get away with, I would steal down to the kitchen while my parents were elsewhere, mix up a bowl of Angel Delight – butterscotch only – and take it up to my room, wait for it to set, and have myself a little butterscotch pudding party for one. I’d hide the bowl under my bed behind a stash of Doctor Who books, and pig out for as long as I remembered the bowl was still there. (Sometimes I would forget. Sorry, Mum.)
The second person I want to dedicate this to is Fringe scientist Walter Bishop, because … because if you don’t love Walter Bishop loving pudding, you have a dead black heart and you probably work in finance.
I don’t know what Angel Delight did to corner the market in gelatinous butterscotch-flavored dessert, but I never found a packaged version that stood up to their original recipe. We returned from England last spring with three butterscotch pudding packets, now just a delicious memory. So I decided to make some from scratch.
This recipe from the Pizzeria Locale in Denver, described by Melissa Clark at the Times – didn’t seem too tricky – the only cautious stage is cooking the sugar to the correct temperature. She recommends a candy thermometer – I haven’t had luck with the kind that clip to the side of the pan, they tend to slip around, and with a relatively small amount of caramel, the base of the thermometer isn’t guaranteed to sit comfortably in the mix. So I prefer to use our Thermapen (made in England, don’t you know), which has a really fast digital readout with great accuracy. The only thing I don’t like about it is that it powers down after a couple of minutes unless you deactivate it by closing and re-opening it, so if you’re focused on caramelizing sugar, it can be a pain to have to wake up the thermometer at a crucial moment.
That’s all the nerdy gadgetry for this recipe; everything else is quite standard.
It’s October, and the bulk of the vegetable garden is finished for the season. Of course, our herbs are still going strong on the deck, and we’re still pulling out ripened tomatoes, but the soil beds are now empty. For our first year, we didn’t do too badly. Here’s a recap.
Although last winter wasn’t particularly cold, it was really long – snow persisted through March, and this meant that nothing happened in the garden until early April, when I built the raised bed. Emily’s mom Diane had given us a gift certificate from White Flower Farm, so we ordered potatoes, leeks, zucchini, cucumber, garlic, shallots, and a selection of herbs. I also picked up some carrot seeds from the supermarket. The farm sent us plants when they were ready, so from early April I planted each set of vegetables as they arrived.
The garlic and shallots were apparently doing very well, until we returned from our three-week trip to the UK and found them rotted. Our theory is that they got too wet. I do want to try again with both of these, since we use them all the time in cooking. Garlic can certainly be planted in fall for an earlier harvest, so I’ll get the raised bed ready to plant again probably around late October. We picked up a few bulbs of hardneck garlic some weekends back from the Cold Spring farmers’ market; I’ll try diverting these cloves from the kitchen table to the garden bed in a few weeks. (What’s funny is, some of the “failed” garlic I abandoned in June is now re-sprouting there. I don’t know if it will yield anything, though.)
The harvest weeks of late summer, going into early fall, is when the Hudson Valley really struts its stuff . While there are festivals, fairs, and merry socials all year round, the weekends at this time of year become a whirligig of competing events, all worthy of your time. Last weekend, for example, our options … Read more
What ho, and all that, spiffing readers. I’m being especially upper-crust because I wanted to tell you about the scones I made a couple of weeks ago. Let’s take a gander at them first. Have a good look, there you go, feast your eyes.
Alright, that’s enough. Put your eyes away now.
On our spring trip to the UK, I wanted to take Emily out for a right old afternoon tea, with really nice sandwiches, scones, cream, jam, and all that. (You know, the sort of thing that Americans imagine that we Brits have every day, presumably as a break from striding around our castle grounds and whipping peasants.) We managed to find one at Huffkins in Burford (if you visit their site, do look for the amusing “About Our Employees” section) – all piled up on a proper tiered cake stand.
Anyway, I had picked up a jar of clotted cream at our local health food store last week (just let that sink in for a moment. Clotted cream. Health food store. Hm.) and decided on a whim to make scones. After some cursory research, and quickly realising I didn’t have any buttermilk (a requirement for many recipes) I settled on this version from Rachel Allen. I’ve adapted for US volumes and temperature. You can fuss with biscuit cutters and the like, but I like the country-style triangles simply cut from the dough with a knife.
Matt writes: Hello there, chickadees! You’ve probably gathered that I’m not quite as prolific as m’wife when it comes to updating the blog, but I think it’s about time – no, past time – for an update on how the chicken coop is going. Well, it’s done. We have chickens. “What’s this?”, you cry in … Read more
In the process of clearing out my Nan’s house this year, we dug out these vintage kitchen items. On the left, a pair of butter paddles. On the right, stamps/presses for stamping either shortbread or butter. There’s a shamrock, a thistle and a dragon, so I wonder if there was once a fourth “rose” stamp … Read more
It’s been … er, a while (a SEASON) since I posted about our garden. We’ve had mixed success: the raised bed went in in early April, along with a good deal of mixed potting soil, top soil and compost in a ratio governed only by general internet advice. The vegetables from White Flower Farm started arriving soon afterwards, and in early April I planted garlic and shallots. I dug a separate patch for potatoes, and planted carrot seeds alongside them. Finally, in May, leeks, squash and cucumber all arrived. Other than the carrots (seeds from a packet), all the produce was sourced from White Flower Farm and planted in whole vegetable form. In other words, the farm essentially sent us a bag of potatoes, a bag of garlic bulbs, some baby leeks, and so on. Before we left on our spring trip to the UK, the garlic and shallots were looking great, and the potato shoots were just starting to appear.
If you answered, “Matt, surely it’s an international criminal ring dedicated to evil and fought against by MI5 and James Bond”, well done, you’re almost correct. Go and do a Google Image search for “SCOBY”, and then, if you’re not convinced that the evil criminal masterminds have already won, read on.
I’m writing this while sitting at our dining-room table. At one end are two jars, filled with a light brown liquid, with slices of mold at the top and bottom: that’s kombucha. At the other, another jar filled with string beans, dill and garlic – “dilly beans”. All the jars are covered with pieces of old dishcloth tied with string. I can smell them both quite distinctly. The beans have an earthy, herby smell, faintly sweet. The kombucha is more yeasty, like fresh, live dough or home-made wine.
Last month we stepped into the world of cheese making for the second time.
The first time was a few years ago, back in Brooklyn. The aim was “fromage blanc” which is a very lightly developed, soft cheese, like ricotta. All cheese needs some kind of culture to start the process of acidification, and you can certainly buy them from specialist sellers, but for this recipe we used buttermilk. (We ordered rennet from Ricky Carroll’s rather goofy but comprehensive New England Cheesemaking site.) We had so much difficulty (in Brooklyn!) finding good butttermilk that we ended up, for the first batch, using the dried variety, which is supposed to still contain live cultures. So essentially you warm the milk, add the culture and rennet, wait for the curds to develop, and drain them in cloth (we hung it from the showerhead, like the gonzo rapscallions we are). Anyway, this first batch didn’t so much curd, as curdle. The instructions mentioned a consistency like greek yogurt, and that didn’t happen. It looked more like cottage cheese. Still, we dutifully hung it up and drained it for a day, and carefully tasted it, and decided that we were probably going to do ourselves some harm if we ate it in any quantity, so we tried again. The next batch used fresh buttermilk, and was the correct consistency on curding, and we flavored it with salt, pepper and olive oil and declared that it was good.
You can, but you shouldn’t. Here endeth the lesson (and the ham). Seriously, though, this was a good lesson in experimenting for us. We wanted to put together an Easter dinner for our family. We knew from research (but not experience) that ham in cola is a popular recipe. Here are a couple of examples … Read more
This is our first year in the country with a yard. It’s great to have all that space, and Arya loves having the freedom of running around the house and barking at cars and passers-by, but right now that’s really all it is – space. Almost from the first time I saw it, I have been wanting to dedicate some of it to planting vegetables. Emily’s lovely parents gave us a gift certificate to White Flower Farms, which sell seeds, flowers and other accoutrements. So why not give it a go?
There are quite a few challenges to the practical use of our garden. Most of it has a slope of some degree – quite severe around the back of the house, and less so elsewhere, but there are very few completely level areas. Where there IS level ground, tree roots tend to limit how much digging can be done. I planted crocuses alongside the porch in early December (JUST beginning to see them emerge…) and most of the trowel work involved battling the root system of nearby trees.
When I was a teenager living in Wateringbury, Kent, we kept chickens. We had a moderate garden behind the house, which I was proud to have helped to plan and build (I designed the curved patio area – to this date probably my only piece of landscaping), and my mum and stepdad set up a chicken house alongside it. At any one time, we had up to six chickens – I’m fairly sure we lost several along the way to foxes and dropsy, but I remember we had them for a good few years. They had free run of the garden and, if the bottom part of the kitchen door was left open, they’d wander in and investigate the house. I don’t remember having any real responsibility for them, other than a bit of cleaning and feeding; the clearest memory I have is of chasing them down as they ran, single-file, out of the garden gate and down Pizien Well Road. I don’t know where they thought they were going.