Collectages

A simple & elegant dish for brunch lunch or buffet dinner that can be poached the day before. I use a  Norpro Stainless Steel Fish Poacher and find it quite useful though the  10 pounder salmon  (whole, gutted and scales scraped — I keep head and tail on) was almost too big! For the court-bouillon: [...]

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Thank you all of you who came to hear Trialogues at The Local 269 on Monday.  Pierre Joris, Michael Bisio & I had a wonderful  time and the captive audience provided great support and inspiration. At the end of this post you will find the photo gallery of the gig —courtesy of my friend documentalist/ [...]

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This is a very pleasant & simple dish. I called it Forestière because my grandfather used to call anything garnished with mushroom Forestière —meaning of the forest. Though the porcinis mushrooms are not wild & neither were all the mushrooms my grandpa used! Pan fry the cod  (4/5 mns each side) with a dollop of [...]

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The previous post showed  how to clean  squids while saving their precious ink to make the wonderful recipe Calamares in su Tinta,  Calamars à l’Encre or Squid in their own Ink. But first let me share some sweet family history about this dish. When we first moved to this country in 1987, my son Joseph [...]

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Yes, you can buy clean squid but then you are depriving yourself of what will give you one of the most exquisite dishes: Calamare en su Tinta or Squid in its own ink. You can also buy the ink in a little plastic bag and make the sauce from that… but it ain’t the same, [...]

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It was great fun to be a guest at the Official Residence of the Consul General of Japan in NYC to celebrate the Capital of Japanese Food (self declared): the Tottori prefecture.  Under a grey and crying sky ready to fall on my head I was more than happy to take refuge in the Carrère [...]

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When Miles (my younger son) came into the kitchen and asked quite intrigued: “What is that smell?” I pointed to the Papalo bunch sitting next to the sink. Papalo is a native South American plant, also known as Papaloquite or porophyllum ruderale or macrocephalum. Its name comes from papalotl, —butterfly in Nahuatl and interesting (to [...]

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Last night we ate porgies. I bought them at the Bay Ridge Greenmarket from the excellent Long Island Sound based American Seafood stand. I prefer whole fish to fillet or steak. One of the reasons is that I like to look the fish in the eye. If the eye is clear, bright with dense black [...]

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Saturday morning we extracted ourselves from moving madness mode to go to the Bay Ridge green market. I was craving good fish and I know I can always rely on the American Seafood stand, they do catch all their fish on Long Island Sound and  to this day they have always provided top quality fish, [...]

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