Slow Roasted, Late Summer Salsa

Is this sacrilege? At the same time I’m buying blackberries in bulk–lay them on a baking sheet, move to the freezer; in a few hours, you’ll have un-clumped berries you can toss into baggies for winter–I am starting to flip through the fall chapters of my favorite cookbooks. Nigel Slater, David Tanis: they are already nudging me towards fall, what with their talk of hunks of pork roasted over beds of thyme, deep apple crisps cooked in earthenware pots, Dutch ovens full of lentils gemmed with sturdy vegetables. I am looking forward to mushrooms in cast iron: cook them in salty butter flecked with parsley, until they’re deep and warm and nutty; twist into strands of pasta bejeweled with crisp-fried nuggets of pancetta, sprinkled with a dusting of some hard, sharp cheese.

But I digress.

We are living in the strange, liminal time where the Fall Season has been trumpeted, and yet: I’m still picking weighty tomatoes off the farmers market pallet, and also melons, and silky husks of corn. I’m still carting home the peaches, the zucchini, the eggplant. Did I miss the figs entirely? (More on that next week.) I’m buying peppers of all sorts by the armful, and cherry and pear tomatoes (why are tiny tomatoes named after other fruit?) Toss those baby tomatoes in olive oil, salt, and pepper; roast for 2 hours at 250F, and then for another hour at 200F. The result will be burst-in-your-mouth, crostini-or-pasta-perfect tomatoes. Add garlic, and a spoonful of ricotta. Read more »

Zucchini-Corn Fritters with Spicy Yogurt Dipping Sauce

A couple weekends ago, the Frenchman and I absconded from the city to the country. It was a necessary escape. New York in the summer is stifling, the heat gets trapped between the buildings and it makes you crazy. It took us two hours just to get out of the city, but it was all worth it, when we crossed the Rip Van Winkle Bridge (yes, it’s a real thing), high above the broad band of the Hudson, straight toward the dusky outline of mountains.

I’d booked our farmstay in January, so you could say that I was looking forward to it.

We pulled into the farm past 9pm, and it was so dark we had to use our brights as flashlights. There was a rib eye from the farm store waiting for us in the fridge. I flicked on the chef’s range and seared that baby over hot, hot heat with just a bit of Maldon sea salt and black pepper. I stirred olive oil and lemon juice and more salt into mixed diced tomatoes for a quick salad, and the Frenchman poured us tall glasses of red wine. We ate dark chocolate for dessert, over a fierce game of Scrabble.

Kinderhook Farm is impossibly bucolic, verdant, and lovely; such a stark contrast from the noisy, rush-about city. The renovated barn where we stayed had soaring ceilings and stripped wooden floors that creaked slightly, satisfyingly under bare feet. We spent much of our time shuffling languidly between the wide, open kitchen and the picnic table/double hammock situation in the yard, although I won’t soon forget the view from the shower: yawning pasture, stretching greenly in three directions. Read more »

Almond-Spice Plum Upside Down Cake

As you can see, The Roaming Kitchen has a bit of a new look, thanks entirely to the Frenchman’s hard work and ingenuity. We’ll be making a few more cosmetic changes around here over the next few weeks. I’m really excited about what’s to come!

I thank you in advance for your patience as we work out the kinks. (And by that I mean, “Cris, be patient. Abstain from hurling your computer out your apartment window, just because it took you a gazillionty-one more hours than usual to format this post, and now you have no brain power left for the witty and devastatingly interesting headnote you’d planned to pen.)

Ah well. I’ll be clever next week. Also, I’ll share some fetching, non-food photos. In the meantime, I’m going to put down my computer and have a piece of cake. You should, too. I hope your weekend is full of seascapes and ripe tomatoes. Happy August! Read more »

Roast Eggplant Dip

I spent most of my kitchen-time last week testing ice cream recipes, none of which were successful. I had high hopes for a ripe market cantaloupe and buttermilk ice cream, but the results were consistently too icy. I moved on to a doughnut peach base, swirled with rivulets of deeply purple blackberry quick jam. But the flavor was always too muted; doughnut peaches might be better for eating juicily, messily over the kitchen sink than stirred into ice cream.

Now I have three new ice cream recipe ideas burning a hole in my pocket (did I mention I really love ice cream?), but I needed a break–ice cream can be finicky to make, it’s time consuming to test, and it makes me grumpy-pants when I get it wrong. And August is not a month for finicky, time-consuming recipes.

Instead, I went in the opposite direction: a (relatively) quick, savory dip, starring a deep-summer vegetable. Read more »

When It’s Too Hot To Cook: Summer Tartines

It’s too hot for cooking. Plus, the Frenchman is away on business in Atlanta (which, somehow, is cooler and less humid than New York, go figure), so I don’t feel like making a big fuss. Dinner the past few nights has consisted of various salads spooned onto toast, usually with a bit of cheese, sometimes with a runny egg.

It’s handy to keep a running arsenal of these minimally cooked, stuff-on-toast ideas for the very middle of summer, when produce is outstanding, but the idea of turning on your oven is more than you can handle right now, do you have any idea how sweltering a NYC train platform is, seriously how long do I have to wait for this stupid train to arrive, thank you very much.

These “recipes” are largely interchangeable–use the bread, cheese, and herbs you prefer. Use whatever fruit or vegetables look best at the market. When you have excellent summer ingredients on hand, it’s sort of hard to screw it up. Read more »

Raspberry Pie + France Photos

I took this pie to work with me, fresh out of the oven, in a cake carrier. My Uncle Mark requested it. He’s not the kind of man who eats a lot of dessert–a boxer who prefers Earl Grey tea to coffee–so when he confessed his love of raspberry pie, it was basically an invitation to write a recipe. Who am I to deny this health-conscious person a little pie, especially when it’s the season for fruit pies? This one’s made with good butter, and lemon, and vanilla bean.

He asks for raspberry pie, pure and simple, with no bells and whistles, but I can’t help giving the raspberries a small lift. It’s still early in the season, and the raspberries I find at the market are tiny, and not as sweet as they’ll be in a few weeks. So I use a whole vanilla bean, and a whole lemon, too. They marry well with the all-butter crust. Feel free to substitue (or add) other summer berries, or even stone fruits, as they come into season.

Did you know that cake carriers are not leak-proof? On the subway, with no space to maneuver, I hold the cake carrier to my chest. As the train jangles forward, I watch helplessly as raspberry juice breaks free from the confines of the pie tin, and pools into the floor of the cake carrier. Where is all this juice coming from? Can one pie really contain it all? In the interminable, underground minutes between Brooklyn and Manhattan, I watch futilely as a bright red stain appears, and grows and grows, on my dress. It’s like I’ve been shot in a school play. By the time I tumble off the train, several stops too soon and out of desperation, the cake carrier has become a ring of dripping raspberry droplets. Read more »

A Birthday Sundae, A Birthday Surprise

To my darling Frenchman, on his 28th birthday,

As you read this, you are fresh off a fourteen hour flight from Argentina: The tail end of a double business trip that took you far away for the better part of two weeks. But now you are home, perhaps puttering to the coffee machine, or scolding me for not watering the succulents, or racing a line of kisses across my collarbone, razzing “Pepé Le Pew!” into my ear—-or any one of a thousand, small deeds that constitute our life together.

I am grateful for the nearly five years I have known you. I am grateful for what we have together, for what we’ve built, unhurriedly, imperfectly, one day at a time. We’ve fashioned a partnership with firm foundations, you and I, and that simple, essential, stupendous knowledge gives me courage every day, and makes all things seem possible.

I love you so very, very much, sweet chéri. I love you so much, in fact, that I have been lying to you for the better part of five months. Can you forgive me? (Since you are still quibbling about that itty-bitty non-event wherein I told you I was buying two small shelves from Ikea to “organize” our apartment, already filled to the brim with (my) (kitchen) things, but then actually went ahead and bought three, not-exactly-minuscule shelves and then asked you to construct them for me, this remains to be seen.) Read more »

Cornmeal Cake with Mascarpone Cream and Strawberry Glaze

I created my dream cake! (And then found excuses to bake it twice in one week, naturally.) It’s perfect for the season, and also perfect in general–did I mention that this is my dream cake?

It’s strawberry season in New York. Like some bizarre fruit addict, I’ve been hitting up the farmers market at least three times a week for these small beauties. (Yeah, yeah, I’m strange, don’t worry about it.) In-season strawberries are typically tinier than the supermarket variety, also, a lot sweeter and more flavorful. They are maddeningly, delightfully fragrant from a distance, and bright red all the way through.

Also, they taste really very good stirred into mascarpone cream. In fact, you could simply offer guests a bowl of strawberries with a generous dollop of cool, whipped mascarpone cream and be well on your way.

But since you already went to the trouble of buying great strawberries, you might as well go ahead and make the cake, too. Why not? It’s low maintenance, as cakes go, and also very delicious. The crumb is tender, almost-dense, and not overly sweet–the cornmeal helps keep the sugar in check. Read more »