Sun + Earth combination

For a new flavor to combine with earthy sweet potatoes, try making an apple-honey butter. I like to combine the tree fruit with a root vegetable. Its a sun and earth combination.
Bake a local apple alongside your sweet potatoes until the apple is mushy and dark. Scrape out the flesh into a bowl. Add 2 tablespoons of sweet (or salted) butter, mix with a spoon, and drizzle honey over the top. Then refrigerate until the sweet potatoes are done. Spoon this onto the sliced or mashed sweet potatoes and enjoy! This goes well with marinated flank steak and braised brussel sprouts.

Bacon Love at Flying Pigs Farm

Flying Pigs Farms supplies New York City with the best bacon there is, hands down. They bring their heritage-breed pork to you every Saturday at the Union Square Greenmarket and Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket. All their pork is certified humane raised and handled by Humane Farm Animal Care. What does this mean? It means that your pork wasn't force fed while standing in a sanitized frankenstein pen during its lifetime. It was running around rooting in the mud like a happy pig should be.
I like bacon because it fast and easy to cook, and you don't have to commit to a recipe to cook it every now and then. Just toss it on the skillet. Their Canadian Bacon goes well with everything, especially beans!

Gifts from the Freezer

Granola…sigh. Blueberries…yes!
This summer, for the first time I had the foresight to hoard fresh blueberries in the freezer until winter, and what a treat it is! I put boxes of them in those ziplock freezer bags and made myself wait until January to eat them. No more dried fruit or apples, and thank goodness for the freezer. For breakfast I eat them (defrosted) with granola, ground flax seed, bee pollen, and Ronnybrook Farm milk.

In Praise of Beans

Beans, a most humble food, get a bad rap as a “poor mans food”, which is totally underserved. Yes, they are cheap, and thank goodness for that. Lets keep it that way.
They also get a bad rap because they can wreak gastrointestinal havoc, i.e. cause gas, if they are not cooked properly. Unfortunately this stops people from cooking with them at home, because who has the time to cook beans when you’ve got a half hour to eat?
I’m not going to go into detail about all the advantages to eating beans, all the proteins, phytochemicals, and nutrients they have. If you are really interested you can google it. I’m just going to praise them because they taste good and they are a perfect winter food.
I still recall one of the many food conversations I had with my Cuban friend, in which she explained that one of her favorite foods were black beans. That’s interesting, I thought. It just would not have occurred to me to ever put black beans on the top of my list. But I had never tasted Cuban black beans! Or Brazilian feijoada!
The first secret to a great relationship with beans is to buy a PRESSURE COOKER. A pressure cooker is a pot that has a lid that seals and locks, and cooks on a regular gas stove. It’s easy and safe. By cooking your food under high pressure it dramatically reduces cooking time and saves fuel. Back in 1998, when I told my Cuban friend that we don’t use a pressure cooker, she looked at me like I was crazy. Its true, I was. My beans would sit on the stove for about an hour and often char to a crisp from forgetfulness. Another pot ruined. Cubans just don’t do this. They don’t have the beans, pots, and fuel to spare so they can be spaced out in the kitchen. If beans and rice are what they have, they are going to prepare them carefully, efficiently and deliciously. And their old pressure cooker looked like it was from the 1950's too, just like those beautiful but well-used cars that Cuba is famous for. Cooking pre-soaked beans in a pressure cooker takes about 10-15 minutes. Don’t ever think about buying those cans again. I pre-soak the beans (black, kidney, garbanzo) for about 8 hours while I am away at work. My favorite beans are KIDNEY beans, because the color is lovely, they hold their form, and they are flavorful on their own. All I add is salt, cumin, and a bay leaf. And they are perfect with a cooked green like collards or kale.

souffle!

My savvy friends (the Tus) whipped up this souffle about two hours before they left for the JFK airport on their visit...
It is a goat cheese souffle from Alice Water's Art of Simple Food Cookbook. Creyde's kitchen was short on ramekins so we used a baking dish too. Want to make sure that your host always welcomes you back the next time you visit? Bake a souffle on the last day! I can't wait for their next visit!! Come back soon Tus!!!

On The Road

IHOC= International House of Corn

Welcome to TEXAS! Pull off the road and supersize yourself for breakfast! IHOP offers the bottomless coffee cup and 4 different flavors of corn syrup! Pour it on! Wahooooooo!

Miami Eats

Conch Fritters and salad

Cuban morros y cristianos

Chicharrones y tostadas yum crunch

The best of Miami street food... the conch stand was at a local art fair, and the Cuban joint was a drive-up market with enormous portions of prepared food...

Roland scales the backyard tree with machete so the yankee guests can try the coconut milk!

Sidewalk Cider Press

Apples collected from neighborhood trees...

Cider Man in action...

This sidewalk intervention happened on a sunny October afternoon in Park Slope, two Cider Guys were turning the press on foraged apples... and the juice was delicious! Looking forward to next year...