Food! Glorious Food!

[lsanderson]

Stirring the Pot for Good Fortune
A Black-Eyed Peas Recipe for Luck in the New Year
Recipe:

Black-Eyed Peas With Ham Hock and Collards

Fish Cakes Conquer Their Shyness
A Recipe for Spicy Fish Cakes
Recipe:

Fish Cakes With Herbs and Chiles

Pot Pie, Redefined? Chefs Start to Experiment With Cannabis

A Kansas Town Rallies for a Modest Lifeline: A Local Grocery Store

Learning Mexican Cooking From Diana Kennedy

Airports Modernize Dining Options With Farm-to-Terminal Fare

A Chef Regains His Focus
Danny Bowien Reopens Mission Chinese Food

In Naples, Gift of Coffee to Strangers Never Seen

Maybe This Will Make Mom Proud
‘My Son the Waiter: A Jewish Tragedy,’ Brad Zimmerman’s Show

Comments

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

The "Fish Cakes with herbs & chiles" sound interesting, & I may try them when or if I ever regain my appetite. Of course I'll omit either most or all of the chiles, which kinda defeats the purpose of the name, but I have remarkably fond memories of salmon (canned, of course, because this would have been back in 30's, in Ohio) croquettes, and I suppose "fish cakes" are pretty much the same thing.

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

Yes, it is. A bit of shrimp or crab works as well.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

[LiveJournal is getting Cranky again: I hope I'm not doing multiple Postings of parts of this.]

That for Black-Eyed Peas With Ham Hock and Collards seems to have been constructed for a Fancy Expensive Restaurant, maybe in NYC. In the South, it would almost certainly be done in one pot -- cover the ham-hocks (or whatever pork -- preferably smoked -- material you have) with water, cook for a while, remove bones and chop the meat & skin small, add the black-eyed-peas/beans (& maybe more water, to cover) cook until they're about done, then add the greens (not necessarily kale) and finish it off. It can be served as a soup, or as a solid dish, with the broth reserved for something like cooking rice or making a different kind of soup. But my point is that in the South & its Tradition, as I knew it, most people had only one large pot, and one fire.

This year, with little appetite recently, I didn't cook anything like this, including "Hopping John", or any of Asian "Hao Ping Jong" varients (there, too, each bean you eat adds a month to your life expectancy, and each grain of rice a day).

The most I did was to fix about a gallon (at least I did get the icebox cleaned out & there's some space in the freezer compartment) of chicken-stock soup, mostly with recently-harvested vegetables from my own Community Gardens plot -- carrots, celery, corn (rather old), potatoes, daikon, mustard & beet leaves, pak choi of some kind, snow-peas, a handful of dried beans, and bits of Greek basil, thyme, and rosemary. It turned out good enough to be, IMHO, a fine start for the New Year.