Cooking Up An Ice Storm, Day 1

Given the way the weather is going, perhaps we need a bad weather cooking blog...Here's what I made on the first day of what the Weather Channel calls Winter Storm Pax. Please post comments on what you've been cooking, too.

For breakfast, I pulled some brioche dough and almond paste out of the freezer and made a few pastries. Some of assembled pastries went back in the freezer.

During my last minute run to the grocery store, I snagged some chicken thighs for stock and chicken soup. I will have some of the soup today, the rest went into the pressure canner.

I also made some pizza dough and a pizza, with more than enough dough left for another pizza today. This is the first time I've made pizza since the snowpocalypse. My dough stretching and shaping skills are a little better but I still have a long way to go. I used some of the sauce I canned last summer and fresh organic mushrooms on the pizza.

And at night I made a peach cobbler using some peaches I vacuum packed and froze last summer. I was too tired to make a full-fledged crust, so I used this as an opportunity to work on my cobbler skills. I normally use half cornmeal in the cobbler, but I discovered that I had run out of cornmeal. Too late to do anything about it...

Comments

Asheville NC: Luella's BBQ

Luella's is a nouvelle BBQ outfit on the north side of Asheville. It is nestled among the trees in a lovely neighborhood. The restaurant has lots of windows for inside seating and plenty of outside seating. Service was courteous and amazingly fast. This is a combination plate with pork and brisket. Both were very moist and tender. For the pork, I tried both the mild and hot vinegar sauces. To my surprise, I preferred the milder one because it didn't assert itself too much. I enjoyed the spicy tomato sauce for my brisket. The hushpuppies were very good. The fried okra was fresh out of the fryer and excellent. The slaw was of the vinegary variety, which I usually enjoy, but this version is heavy on the white stuff and didn't have quite enough variety in tastes for me.

Pressure Cooker Candied Ginger

I made candied ginger a few years ago. It's not something I would do every day but I had a lot of fun doing it. I recently acquired a pressure cooker and it inspired an interesting idea to me: why not make candied ginger in the pressure cooker? It should be very soft and flavorful. Here is the result. I peeled two large ginger roots, cut them into small cubes, and put them in the pressure cooker with heavily sugared water. The traditional method first boils the ginger in plain water to soften it and then again in sugar water to candy it. The resulting candy was very tender but still with the characteristic ginger texture. It was also sweet without being overpowering. The traditional method leaves a lot of sugar crystallized around the ginger. The pressure cooker gives a much more subtle result. The ginger stays moist even after it cools but you can dry it in the oven at 350 degrees for about 10 minutes. That inspired me to dip it in chocolate. While I was in the b...

Everybody's Pizza

Everybody's Pizza is across the street from Emory University. It was founded in 1971 and has a seventies college feel. But it isn't musty or dated---you don't feel like you are eating in a museum. It's just pleasantly funky. They played a Big Bird song while I was there. What's no to like? The pizza is college-style as well, as contrasted to the Italian neighborhood style that is (or should be) the goal of a New York style pizzeria. I think that the cheese is the ingredient that most leads me to this feeling. In a New York pizza, the cheese would be central (even if it came from a low-grade Mob supplier), while in more suburban pizzas, the cheese is seen as one in a medley of ingredients that form the topping. (I think that cheese-centrism should be the essence of pizza. Remember that the modern pizza was created by adding cheese to traditional tomato sauce-covered bread.) I think the biggest fault of this pizza is the crust, which I found to be just a lit...

Atlanta etc.: Marilyn Wolf's Food Blog and Restaurant Blog

Search This Blog