[Ed. – To my friends in the US, please vote today if you haven’t already.] The sheer number of Spanish and Catalan cookbooks in my collection is proof enough that one of the things I love to do most after visiting a place I love is to try to recreate as many of the dishes that…
Category: aperitivo
A txiquiteo in San Sebastian: shrimp and pancetta pinxtos with modern allioli.
It should come as no surprise that I was determined to embrace Basque cooking even before we had left San Sebastian; I found one of the few open-on-Sunday bookstores and purchased myself a copy of Los Mejores Pintxos de Donostia along with another book devoted to tartines that was too visually appealing to pass up,…
Barcelona’s Bar Marsella and their gin, fig, and honey cocktail, which I have named La Fi de L’Estu.
Bar Marsella first came on my radar four years ago when I was doing research for our last vacation to Barcelona; specifically, I wanted to spend a day doing a walking tour of the city finding various filming locations from Vicky Cristina Barcelona because it’s one of my favorite movies, despite its director being highly…
Beet-cured salmon from Gail Simmons’ Bringing It Home.
My love of Top Chef has gotten to the point that I have a section of my main bookshelf dedicated to some of my favorite judges* and cheftestants from the show—though I will admit that Tom Colicchio’s books live up in my New York section, because most of these books came out way after his…
The Tom Cat cocktail from The Hygge Life.
While I can’t believe January is almost over, I’m also relieved that January is almost over. This is my least favorite time of year, and furry blanket and globe lights aside, I’m eager for the trees to have leaves on them again and for a 60-degree day to be a normal one rather than a…
A recap of NYE, holiday cookbook roundup, Cherry Bombe’s #86This, and other thoughts in early 2018.
With the holidays over and things slowly coming back to normal, I want to get back into the habit of blogging more regularly again. So in order to do that, I need to clear out some mental clutter. 1. Tuesday marked the first day in about two weeks that the temperatures went significantly over the…
Feast of the Seven Fishes preview: fried oysters with pickled pepper mayo and cucumber salad.
With Christmas less than a week away, it’s time for me to start packing up all of our stuff to bring back to PA for the holiday weekend and get a cooking game plan set for Christmas Eve. We’re leading that particular dance this year, which is great since we did zero cooking during Thanksgiving….
Cava sangria from José Andrés, because even I am finding this heat to be a little much.
Sangria was something I dabbled with in New York but fully embraced when we moved to Stamford–many a weekend during the spring and summer months would I make a big pitcher for us to sip on, often relaxing out on our balcony. My sangria-making frequency went down significantly since we moved to Baltimore, likely because…
Pigs in a blanket with black pepper pastry.
In the section on entertaining in Anthony Bourdain’s Appetites: A Cookbook, one of his suggestions is to always keep some frozen pigs in a blanket on hand because from his experience, no matter how fancy the affair everyone will come clamoring for some meat in puff pastry. It’s a fine idea, and one I’ll probably…
Ham and quail eggs tapas from The Book of Tapas.
One of the objectives of this whole cook-through-my-cookbook-bookcase experiment was to reconnect with cookbooks I used to use all of the time but have since…well, not abandoned, per se, but haven’t referenced as much as I’d like to. The Book of Tapas is one where I have a handful of recipes that have entered our…
