Risotto. I love the stuff. Creamy, lovely, perfectly al dente rice flavored with parmigiano cheese and whatever else you like. Not too heavy, not too many big ingredients – in texture as well as taste.
My favorite risotto has to be the yellow one, Risotto alla Milanese, but then again, that is the classic risotto if ever there was one.
Coming home one day, after work, it was hot and I hadn’t bothered stopping by the grocery store. I had to just make dinner with what was in my cupboards. The arborio rice was screaming at me. Loud I might add.
I thought about it for a second and decided that the pepper I’d picked from my plant the other day would have to go in. I also had red onions. Red onions and red chili pepper as an additive, red risotto.
The risotto was tasty, very tasty. A little on the sharp side (that chili was hotter than I thought it’d be after cooking it in olive oil for a couple of minutes) but still creamy and full of flavor. I used a beef stock from a cube, some dried Italian herbs, I grated some fresh parmigiano and added a little notch of butter before serving. Yummm!
Continue reading »
I love it when a tiny alteration, which hardly takes time at all, makes a huge difference to a recipe. The sheer joy of that ‘eureka-moment’ when you figure out a way to improve on something great. Like the moment when Ruth Graves Wakefield decided to dump a bunch of chocolate pieces into her cookie dough and thus invented the chocolate chip cookie. Or when Lemuel Benedict had a nasty hangover and Oscar Tschirky made something beautiful and tasty out of the separate ingredients he wanted for his hangover cure – Eggs Benedict were born.
I love food inventions like these. They don’t have to be fancy, or difficult. It just takes that 1 moment where you defy the rules of what you’re used to as a cook and just do something else. Those are the moments magic gets created.
Regular flour and toasted flour side by side.
In a previous post, I already showed you a sneak peek of the cake I made my mom for easter. It wasn’t the usual chicklets and eggs or baskets, which you so often see at Easter. Not because I don’t like those, or that I think I can’t make those. (Though I haven’t tried basketweaves yet, so really, maybe I can’t make those.)
To me Easter spells spring. New life has begon to emerge everywhere, from little ducklings, to lambs (traditional Easter food, right?!) to flowers that come up in abundance. Even though Easter fell very late this year, it didn’t change that feeling to me.
Continue reading »
My Easter cake needed to have spring colors, close to pastels, but possibly just a slight bit more vibrant (what do you call that?) Pink and green and yellow would do fine. I also knew I was bringing the cake to my mom, and she’d expressed her love of fondant flowers before, so I needed to incorporate that as well.
It’s been a while since a food has really, truly amazed me. Sure, I eat enough food that’s good. I make enough food I really like. But amazement is something entirely different. The last time I experienced it, was at Tarantella. I just couldn’t stop tasting. I kept eating at a steady pace, to make sure the taste would keep coming, all the while making sure the bites weren’t too big, so the amazing tastes would last longer. Food like that is a rare treat. Ask Laurens, it’s a rare occurrence where I get that sparkle in my eyes and giant smile while murmuring “this is really good”. These rare occurrences are a huge complement to the chef. And so obviously – I think – I don’t usually say that about the food I made myself.
Tonight was different. Tonight I got that creepily happy smile, the sparkle and the murmuring. I kept repeating how much I loved this soup. All the flavors, the strong subtleties, though there’s nothing subtle about the soup. The textures, the taste explosion. It was amazing. I loved this soup.
Welcome, at the revamped, all new and better version of Love through the stomach…
After much tweeking (and some obvious frustration which was solved quickly by eating some cake) the new version of the blog is all ready to go and live.
I love the light and fresh new look. I love the options I have here. I love that after weeks of working on the new site, I actually get to really blog again.
So for now, I say “Welcome”. Browse around a little and figure out how things have changed. And come back soon for more recipes, pictures and stories about food.
Enjoy!
Networks
