Celebrating wild harvested, traditional & artisanal foods
If you’re a fan of pawpaws, you’ve probably eaten your share of the fresh fruit in season. But what about the rest of the year? Pawpaws are notoriously hard to store for more than two or three weeks in the fridge, and if unrefrigerated, the large, oval fruits ripen quickly and must be eaten within a few days. The answer?Pawpaw curd, another fantastic way to preserve the exotic flavor of pawpaws – practically indefinitely. Fruit curds are a mixture of …
Confit: Anyone who has the vaguest interest in food and cooking has probably heard this word used (and misused) more than a few times. Many people, even experienced cooks, may be a little hazy about the meaning of the term. Is it a dish or a cooking method? Is it French or, heaven forbid, “fancy?” Does it make you feel uncomfortable and ignorant when your food snob friends use it casually in conversation? Let’s see if we can clear up …
The best things in life are often the simplest. Bread pudding is one of those things. Bread pudding is something of a blank canvas for the creative cook. Made from a handful of ingredients that are found in almost every kitchen – milk, eggs, butter, sugar and leftover bread – bread pudding is one of the most basic comfort foods that there is. With the addition of a few spices and flavorings, the variations are infinite. Easier to make than …
Cherries are in season, and while it’s tempting to simply gobble them fresh by the handful, there are plenty of other interesting – and rewarding – ways to enjoy them. When sweet cherry varieties like Ulster, Cavalier, Hedelfingen and Regina ripen fully on the tree, they burst with deep, intense dark cherry flavor, making them excellent choices for use in recipes, both traditional and novel. The long history of cooking with sweet cherries is evident in the wide variety of …
You might not immediately associate fresh cherries with burgers, but it can’t be a coincidence that Michigan cherry season comes right in the middle of summer, just when grilling season is at its peak. It’s an opportunity too tempting to resist! In this recipe, fresh cherries are paired with a classic flame-grilled burger in not just one, but two very different ways. But before we start cooking, let’s make something perfectly clear; it’s essential that you use the best quality …
Is there anything finer, more perfect than a ripe, ruby-red cherry? Sure, we all love succulent strawberries, plump blueberries and juicy raspberries, but nothing can rival a cherry, that bright red summery globe so beloved of birds and small children. Cherries have a long and tangled relationship with mankind (you could say it’s “complicated”). Cherries, both sweet and tart, seem to have originated in Asia Minor, somewhere in the region between the Black and Caspian Seas. While they appear rather …
In Italy, grilled steak is epitomized by bistecca alla fiorentina. Try our twist on the classic recipe for an easy barbecue, featuring succulent steaks simply served with lemon, Italian-style. It all starts with a great steak. In the classic version of this Florentine dish, a very specific cut of meat known as bistecca nel filetto is traditionally used, but here in the United States, a good quality, thick bone-in steak is a reasonable substitute: a porterhouse, ribeye or t-bone is ideal. Once …
“À l’anglaise” is just a fancy way of saying “English-style” in French. It really has little to do with actual English cooking but refers to the way that the French imagine English cooking to be – in other words, plain and boring. The term à l’anglaise is used without much consistency. In general, it means food that is prepared very simply and presented with no sauce more complex than melted butter. Sometimes it means boiled; other times, it means turned …
Nothing says “Country Breakfast” like fresh, hot buttermilk biscuits. There’s really nothing hard about making biscuits. With a little bit of practice, you can whip up a batch in 15 minutes or less (plus baking time, of course). The secret to making great, flaky biscuits lies in a few basic principles. Chill all of your ingredients before you start Cut in the fat with a pastry cutter Add just enough liquid to hold the dry ingredients together Use liquid with …
Many of our favorite wild foods seem to appear all at once in the early spring, which can make it hard to appreciate each one adequately. A practical way to enjoy the season’s abundance is to combine several of them together into a single dish. Another is to preserve the fresh flavors of the spring wild harvest so they can be enjoyed all year round. This dish does both. The flavor and texture of the morel is well known, and these unique, …
