Vegetables

Wouldn't you know it? The week I post my culinary resolutions, my gas range rebels. The stovetop works just fine, but the oven fluctuates wildly,  making baking a crap shoot with wheat and a roast chicken dinner  the poultry equivalent of Russian roulette. And the real kicker? My stove's so old a replacement thermostat is no longer available. Since I want to replace my aging 24-inch range with a 30-inch version (which requires moving cupboards in a 145-year-old kitchen with plaster and lathe walls) it's not going to happen until spring. Something tells me it's gonna be a looooong winter.

[caption id="attachment_2017" align="alignnone" width="814"] Photo courtesy McClelland & Stewart.[/caption] The area of a circle is ∏r². This bit of high school math comes in handy when a recipe calls for a 12-inch tart pan and you go to three stores in search of one and all you...

Every once in a while I do something unpredictable. Like cook Brussels sprouts. I don't like Brussels sprouts, but Pierre A. Lamielle's book Kitchen Scraps made me do it. Here,  Monty Python dukes it out with Edward Gorey as Martha Stewart barks encouragement from the wings....

The deed is done. I have picked all the tomatoes, uprooted the plants and put the garden to bed. Green tomatoes outnumber the red, but who's counting. I'd like to think the tomatoes didn't want to go any more than I wanted to remove them. I...

This blog has ruined me. Forever. Just this week I realized what my family has been accusing me of for years is actually true. I am a food snob. Not the Beluga-Caviar-or-Bust kind of food snob, but a food snob nonetheless. The facts are indisputable. I am...

I can't believe I didn't think of half the tomato dishes people suggested yesterday, especially since Summer Fest ended with tomatoes. Given my mental lapse, I'm quite surprised how polite you all were with your suggestions. Not one of you put "Doh!" in your answer...

Tomatoes are a paradoxical plant. Botanically, they're a fruit — they have their seeds on the inside — but in the kitchen we treat them as vegetables. While their flesh is a staple in many world cuisines, their leaves are toxic enough to poison a...

Zucchini is one of those innocuous vegetables that doesn't really stand out. Sure, the small ones can be tender, but the large ones tend to get spongy. Because of the high moisture content and neutral taste —and it's debatable zucchini actually has a taste —...

I'm feeling a tad guilty again. While yesterday's post about roasted garlic got a lot of you excited, it turns out this dish raised a few issues. First, DivaLisa is extremely allergic to garlic. Although she was too polite to say this, I'm pretty sure...

Lesson learned. Don't blog for a few days and family members will phone to check up on you. I'm fine. Really. I haven't succumbed to swine flu, only the temptations of summer. Truth be told, I've been playing hooky with my barbecue — I mean grill. Our...