Category: Food

Tidy Tidbits: Food Fare

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Labor Day marks the unofficial end of summer, and for many, it’s a chance for one last barbecue or picnic before work and school take center stage.  We don’t have any special holiday plans, but it does seem an appropriate time to focus on food.  So this week’s blog is mostly local, as they say.

Cooking with the Chief Penguin

Over the course of our marriage, I’ve been the primary cook and my spouse, aka Chief Penguin, the baker extraordinaire.  He’s a foodie too and now that he’s retired he’s the one who spends time studying cooking web sites, poring over cookbooks, and collecting recipes we should try.  We go to the supermarket armed with a sheaf of papers and usually I decide which recipe I’d be happy to prepare.  Don’t get me wrong, he’s a capable cook in his own right and sometimes takes a turn as entrée chef.

Our recent culinary adventure was the result of his finding a Gordon Ramsay YouTube video on how to prepare short ribs.  You might say, short ribs in this heat?  And you’d be right, but he was captivated and then so was I.  Something about Ramsay’s exuberant energetic style and how easy he made it all look.  We printed the recipe, shopped (a word about where later), and I got into motion.

The recipe is really fairly straightforward and involved browning the short ribs on top of the stove, then adding and reducing a bottle of red wine before adding beef stock, and then putting the pan in a supposedly slow oven for 3-4 hours.  Ramsay’s low slow oven was 338 degrees F. or 170 C.  Although the pan was covered, our ribs were more than done in 2 hours—a bit blackened in fact.  And the stock and reduced wine were very thin and didn’t ever become thick.  But, before serving, the ribs are topped with a marvelous mixture of crispy sautéed pancetta and crimini mushrooms which adds salt and spice and texture.  Would I make this dish again?  Possibly, but with some adjustment in oven temperature and the amount of stock, for sure, and perhaps an herb or two.

A footnote:  some years ago we enjoyed a superb Thanksgiving dinner with friends at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in London.  It was so wonderful we were at table for four hours.  Still sated from the meal, we continued to relax.  Then the wait staff pleasantly, but firmly, requested we move to the lounge.  There we sat until the noise of a vacuum cleaner around our feet suggested it really was time to depart.  A most memorable meal!

Eating Out

Although we like to cook, we also dine out frequently.  Last night we tried a new restaurant on Anna Maria Island that was recommended by several friends.  Called Eat Here, it’s informal and slightly funky with a very appealing menu.  It also happens to be the sister restaurant to the much fancier, more expensive, and excellent Beach Bistro nearby.

Here we succumbed to temptation (multiple ones, I’d say) and ordered the homemade potato chips with blue cheese dip to start—sinfully addictive and easy to transport any extras home since they are served in a small tan takeout box!  We also sampled the flounder with a lime butter caper sauce, shrimp served over roasted Brussels sprouts, the house French fries (scrumptious skinny ones!) and their key lime cheesecake.  It was a very tasty meal and we will definitely go back again…and again.

Provisions

There is a Whole Foods market in downtown Sarasota, but closer to home are two very good options for fresh produce and meats.  Fresh Market on Manatee Ave. in Bradenton is a branch of a North Carolina-based chain and very good for organic fruits and vegetables, meats and fish, with a carefully curated selection of dry goods, everything from nuts and grains to jarred sauces and pasta.  We are fans of their roasted chicken salad (light on the mayonnaise) in the deli case and their ultimate crab cakes (a thicker cake with virtually no filler).  This is an upscale store and our regular go-to market.

For the aforementioned ribs, however, we paid a visit to the Chop Shop, also on Manatee.  It’s a low undistinguished building, doesn’t look like much from the outside, and you might hesitate to go in.  But do!  It’s a high quality butcher shop and much more with a wide selection and helpful staff.  The deli case contains delicious made-on-the-premises ham salad and very good vinegar-based coleslaw.  And if you need any unusual jellies, jams, pickles, or sauces, there is shelf after shelf, an eclectic and international array that will surely tempt you (it always does me!) to try something new.

Photo credit:  Skinny-fries, www.foodfood.com

Tidy Tidbits: Reading, Cheese & Theater

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READING WOMEN

Our local paper included an article from the Washington Post by Alyssa Rosenberg about reading a year’s worth of books written by women.  That’s a fine idea, but she carried it a step further and did a pair of books each month for a total of 24.  I was intrigued and checked to see how many of these titles I had already read, a disappointing five in all.

Some of her pairings were unusual and some I will follow up.  For example, she paired My Brilliant Friend, which I’m happy to report I did finish and enjoyed, with Last Things by Jenny Offill, a first novel set in contemporary Vermont.  Calling each of these “slim,” however, is misleading as the Ferrante novel is a dense 300+ pages.  The Margaret Fuller biography by Marshall is paired with Marriage: A History by Stephanie Coontz—interesting since Fuller spent the bulk of her life as a single woman.  And Louise Erdrich’s beautiful novel, The Round House, is paired with The Secret History by Donna Tartt.  I loved the Erdrich book and certainly know of Tartt’s work; each novel is told from the male perspective.  There are more on Rosenberg’s list, but I’ll leave you to explore the rest.

CHEESE

We were in upstate New York (really upstate in the Finger Lakes region) last week.   Thanks to a recommendation from my sister-in-law, my sisters and I ventured into the countryside to visit the Muranda Cheese Company. It’s outside Waterloo, and on the way, we passed through the pleasant town of Seneca Falls, home of the Women’s Rights National Historical Park.  Seneca Falls was the site of the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention.

On their farm, the Murray family raises Registered Holsteins; the milk from these cows is used for producing a wide range of cheeses which are aged, cut, and wrapped here.  For a modest $2.00 each, we were invited to taste 15 different cheeses.  They included several cheddars, Gouda, Colby, a killer blue, and an array of smoked and flavored cheeses—with garlic and chives, bacon, and sundried tomatoes.  Our host was knowledgeable and friendly and we each went home with more cheese!  And, not a surprise, you can order their cheese online.

CULTURE NOTE

We recently saw a first-rate production of Pulitzer Prize winner Nilo Cruz’s play, Sotto Voce.  It focuses on the relationship between an elderly female novelist and a young male student, both of whom have connections to the 1939 doomed voyage of  the S. S. St. Louis.  This boat was taking Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany to Cuba, but was denied entry there and also turned away by the U.S.  The two main characters in the play never meet face to face, and all their interactions happen by phone or e-mail.  It is a play of voices and silences, very creatively staged.

Tidy Tidbits: Women, Film & Cheese

JWF 1 Comment

Book of the Week:  O My America! Six Women and their Second Acts in a New World by Sara Wheeler.  This is a delightful romp through the 19th century with six middle-aged women, each of whom re-invented herself in the United States and either published a book about her experiences or journaled extensively.  Wheeler is primarily a travel writer who was prompted to write this work by her own anxiety about turning 50 and her uncertainty about her identity at this stage of life.  She not only researched the travels of Fanny Kemble, Fanny Trollope and four other women most of us haven’t heard of but, an English woman herself, she followed in their footsteps over the course of several years traveling in the South, New England, Colorado, the Midwest, and lastly, California.  None of her “girls” as she calls them had an easy time of it, but they persevered and her wry comments about them and herself add a distinctive personal note to these accounts.  I found the descriptions of Oakland and San Francisco in the 1870’s particularly intriguing given my familiarity with that region.

Movie of the Week:  We went to see Selma and I highly recommend it.  Whatever you might think about the film’s portrayal of President Johnson (accurate or slanted), it is a powerful and grim reminder of the events of 1965 and extremely relevant given the ongoing national discussion about race and the police.  I was a teenager when these events took place and while I knew about them at the time, they happened far away and did not impinge on my daily life.  Seeing them on the screen was chilling—that we put up such barriers to allowing people to vote and inflicted such brutality on innocent individuals.  Unfortunately, there are some states today enacting legislation to again make it more arduous to register to vote.  See it!

Music Scene:  Rich and Brandon Ridenour are a father and son music duo.  Father Rich is a pianist and son Brandon, a former member of the Canadian Brass, is a trumpeter and composer/arranger.  They are also lively personalities with a wry sense of humor.  We heard them in conversation and performing their versions of Rhapsody in Blue, Chopsticks and a meld of Simple Gifts and Amazing Grace.  For Rhapsody, Brandon alternated between the trumpet, the piccolo trumpet (or baby trumpet as they called it in their household), and the flugelhorn (or pregnant trumpet).  Upcoming concerts include Sarasota later in the spring.

Local Discovery:  We made our first visit to Artisan Cheese Company on Main Street in Sarasota recently and it’s a treasure!  The cheese mongers are all women and their selection is modest in size, but carefully chosen.  We went home with a creamy Camembert, perfect Roquefort, and a new-to-us cheese from upstate NY (specifically Cazenovia, near where I grew up) called Lorenzo.  It is a semi-hard mild cheese and a counterpoint to the other two.  I foresee regular stops at this shop.