My apologies for the lack of clickable links in these archives, which are from my original Tripe Soup blog at http://www.angelfire.com/moon2/jenniferbrizzi/
If I determine there is sufficient interest I will go through and paste in the rest of the photos and make the links linkable. Let me know. You can also use your browser’s search function or Tripe Soup 2’s search feature to find recipes, topics, etc., herein.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
My New Home
Mood: happy
Now Playing: Movin’ on up, to the east side of the web
Topic: food writing biz
Sorry for the extra click, but Tripe Soup has moved here, hosted by WordPress, in hopes of increasing traffic and user-friendliness. Read and comment!
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 1:18 PM EDT
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Friday, March 7, 2008
Nuts about teff
Mood: happy
Now Playing: good good good
Topic: Cooking
Today I’m playing around with teff, a.k.a. t’ef, a tiny and vastly underrated Ethiopian grain that is crazy good and happens to be highly nutritious. In Ethiopia they grind it to make their staple pancake-like bread/tablecloth.
I want to spread the word about teff’s fine qualities in a magazine article so I’m fooling around with flavor pairings to develop some recipes for dishes made with it. Usually I just simmer it for 15 minutes, one part teff to three parts water and a dash of salt, then douse it with maple syrup for a tasty stick-to-your-ribs breakfast. But I think it would be good as a sort of pilaf with poultry, in a soup, definitely with cookies. I figured that its unique nutty flavor would be enhanced by nuts, so this morning I toasted up an assortment of some I have hanging around the house–pine nuts, pecans, hazelnuts, walnuts and almonds, to see what would go best. 
My vote was for the hazelnuts. Pine nuts would probably be good, too, but mine were a bit past their prime, so not good. The pecans were excellent but I love pecans with everything–I would sprinkle them in the bath if I could. The walnuts didn’t work, too assertive for teff’s refined subtleties, the almonds pleasant but almost too mild to stand up to it. So on we go, teff hazelnut cookies anyone? I’ll keep you posted.
* * *
Well, this is totally OT (off-topic) if I ever heard it, but tonight I’m going to go see the King of the Blues, B.B. King. Wee-haa!
***
Ethiopia also gave us coffee when frisky goats were discovered frolicking in a coffee patch, and the shepherd, er, goatherd, said, “I want to get me some of that stuff!” This fascinating country also produced the Queen of Sheba, and much later, my beautiful son Marco (no, I did it before Angelina). So I’m grateful to the country for many reasons beyond their nutty teff.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 9:16 AM EST
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Saturday, March 1, 2008
Cawl: a hearty Welsh stew
Mood: hungry
Now Playing: I wish I could mail some of this to you, Ma!
Topic: Cooking
Every year on this date the Welsh celebrate St. David’s Day by sporting leeks on their caps and lapels, a tradition that dates to a sixth century battle against the Saxons when soldiers wore leeks in their helmets to cut down on friendly fire (actually sword slashes). You’ll find the leek in many Welsh dishes. I love them in this Cawl (pronounced “cowl”), a rustic, rib-sticking lamb stew often eaten by the Welsh to celebrate this day, and which I just whipped up for us to eat tonight, either by pure coincidence or psychologically suppressed on-purpose.
Cawl Mamgu, or Granny Broth:
Welsh lamb and root vegetable stew
This delicious potage will fill your belly happily and sustain you through the rest of the winter. Traditionally it’s served with crusty bread and rich Welsh cheese, and in parts of the country the broth is served as a first course, the meat and veggies as the main. Cawl is best made ahead of time so the flavors will blend in the refrigerator overnight. You can start two days before you serve it, or the morning of the day before. Serves 6-8.
Ingredients:
3 lbs. lamb neck or shoulder pieces, on the bone
3 tablespoons coarse sea salt or kosher salt, divided
2 tablespoons vegetable oil (I use canola)
2 1⁄2 quarts (9-10 cups) water
9 whole peppercorns
1 medium onion, chopped coarsely
1 lb. white turnips (about 3 medium), peeled and cut into chunks about 1” wide
1 lb. rutabaga/yellow turnip/swede (about 1 small), peeled and cut into chunks about 1” wide
3 fat carrots, peeled and sliced 1” thick
3 sprigs fresh thyme
3⁄4 lbs Yukon Gold potatoes (about three medium), peeled and cut into chunks about 1” wide
1 lb. leeks (about 3/one bunch), root ends and dark green or wilted parts trimmed off, the remainder sliced lengthwise, rinsed well and sliced 1⁄2” thick
1/3 cup chopped fresh Italian (flat) parsley
Freshly ground black pepper to taste Crusty bread and Welsh or cheddar cheese for serving (optional)
Instructions:
1. Sprinkle lamb chunks evenly with 2 teaspoons of the salt and set aside.
2. Heat vegetable oil over medium-high heat in a large Dutch oven or thick-bottomed heavy pan. Brown meat on all sides, without crowding pan; this will take about three batches, depending on the size of your pan. When all meat is brown, return it to the pan with its drippings. Add water and peppercorns. Bring to a boil, skimming scum, then lower heat and simmer for 1 1⁄2 hours. Let cool and chill in refrigerator three hours to overnight.
3. Skim off layer of fat that has risen to the top, then add the turnip, rutabaga, carrot and thyme sprigs. Bring to a boil, lower to a simmer and cook 1 hour. Add potatoes, leeks, parsley, remaining teaspoon of salt and freshly ground pepper to taste. Cook a half hour more. Vegetables should be tender at knifepoint and meat will have ceased to cling fiercely to the bone.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 3:52 PM EST
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Monday, February 25, 2008
Blogs galore, and butter
Mood: happy
Now Playing: yum yum yummy I got butter in my tummy
Topic: food writing biz
This new search thing lets you search blogs for recipes. Pretty cool.
I see that Saveur magazine (my favorite magazine in the world) is celebrating my birthday month by featuring butter, my favorite food, in its March issue. I can’t wait to dig into it as soon as I can wrestle it away from my butter-loving hubby. Well, I guess my birthday month probably doesn’t have that much to do with Saveur’s timing…oh well…but I’m happy to see the luscious stuff finally get its due.
Are you a butter eater? An aficionado of fine margarines? A lover of spread? Click on Post Comment below and don’t be shy.
Here’s my own column on butter which saw print November 30, 2006, in Ulster Publishing’s newspapers:
Ravenous
Butter debauchery
“Eat butter first, and eat it last, and live till a hundred years be past.”
–Old Dutch proverb
O wild, depraved and decadent butter, you are so creamy and so sinful. Years ago when the masses turned their backs on you for the sake of frugality, health and sensibility, I stayed staunchly by your side, keeping you constantly near, for purely hedonistic reasons. I just didn’t like the taste of margarine.
Now they’re saying that you’re not only tastier but better for us than margarine, that you’re a natural product free of trans-fats, preservatives, emulsifiers and stabilizers. Although there are still plenty of folks who prefer the new light trans-fat-free “spreads,” I’ll stick to my butter, thanks, until they pry my cold dead fingers off those yellow sticks.
When the topic of garlic comes up, I’ve always said it’s my second favorite food, the first being butter. Butter is not really a food, you may argue, but a fat, a flavoring, but I can think of so few things it doesn’t enhance that I think it’s one of the finest foods anywhere. Is there any compliment better than “buttery”? To call a food that isn’t butter “buttery” or a piece of fabric or music or anything “buttery” is high praise indeed.
Love for butter is as basic as the sweet tooth we’re born with. All babies love it. When I was a kid there was always a stick on our family dinner table and my baby sister Katy used to grab it when no one was looking and stick fistfuls into her mouth.
Maybe it’s my northern European heritage that makes me batty for butter. Traditionally the peoples of the warmer Mediterranean climes looked down upon their barbarian neighbors to the north for being butter eaters. The ancient Greeks and Romans used it as a poultice rather than a food and butter didn’t keep well in the heat anyway. In Italy and France the countries are divided for the most part between the rich dairy dishes of the upper regions and the olive-oil-based dishes of the south.
Recently in a Manhattan supermarket I found nearly a dozen imported specialty butters from various parts of Europe. Although the idea of a “fresh” butter traveling across the ocean and sitting on a shelf for an unknown period of time did not prompt me to fork over the substantial cash for any of them, I do have memories of incredibly sweet unsalted butter on breakfast rolls and croissants in pensioni, B & B’s and petits auberges in Europe, butters I’ll take over any ice cream any day, butters that to top with fresh tart-sweet fruit jam seemed almost overkill (but I did it anyway).
The reason that that European butter is so good is not necessarily because it’s unsalted, as I once thought, or that the cows are special, which I’m sure they are, or that they eat special European grasses, which I’m sure they do, but that European butter has a higher butterfat content than our commercial butter generally does. By law our American butter must be at least 80% butterfat and so is usually just barely over that. In Europe the percentage is more like 85 or 86. Also, for more flavor many European butters are cultured, tweaked for more flavor by churning the cream more slowly and for longer and sometimes adding cultures and/or lactic acid.
Butter is what’s good about so many things, from simple lusty garlic bread to snails steamy with shallots, garlic, parsley and brandy. What’s skate?, what’s brains?, without brown butter, a butter cooked until its milk solids turn a toasty nutty brown. Its cousin black butter is a very dark brown, not black. The paler milder beurre blanc (white butter) is an emulsion of butter with wine or vinegar, and bercy butter has shallot, white wine, bone marrow, parsley and lemon juice. Then there’s lemony Hollandaise. A popular French technique chefs love is to “mount” a sauce with butter by finishing it with a flourish of butter at the end to add gloss, body and flavor.
More simply, a pat of butter is the only way to scramble an egg, as far as I’m concerned.
And then there’s butter rum flavor and butter pecan ice cream. Butter in piecrust makes for best flavor but a less flaky crust than lard or shortening. It’s essential for the best cookies and cakes. There’s hot buttered popcorn that smells like the movies, whether you’re there or not, and homemade bread fresh from the oven slathered with butter. “Good bread is the most fundamentally satisfying of all foods; and good bread with fresh butter, the greatest of feasts,” said the late James Beard.
There are luscious compound butters spiked with herbs to dot on plain grilled meats or fish, or Indian butter chicken with ginger, garlic and spice. Niter kibbeh is an Ethiopian clarified spiced butter just as good on potatoes or rice as on the spicy exotic Ethiopian dishes that I love to cook. Smen is an aged Moroccan version.
Larousse Gastronomique suggests coating butter balls in breadcrumbs and deep-frying them to accompany poached fish. The equally decadent Italian-American Alfredo sauce is made merely of sick amounts of butter with cream and cheese. I’ll pass on that one. Recipes for mashed potatoes call for obscene amounts of butter, too, like two sticks to a pound of spuds or some such, a philosophy I don’t subscribe to, spiking mine with olive oil often, and using only a tablespoon or two of butter unless it’s a holiday.
I usually keep whipped salted butter in my fridge for toast, for easier spreading, plus sticks of unsalted butter for cooking, in order to control the salt content of my dishes, although it doesn’t keep as long as salted butter.
“Light” butter has water, gelatin or skin milk added. I don’t go there. Just use less. Ghee and clarified butters were invented in the absence of refrigeration to keep butter longer by removing the milk solids but they remove some flavor, too. They are great for sautéing, though, with their much higher smoking point.
There are the original butters before cow (butter happened thousands of years BC, the original made in goatskin pouches), like those of yaks, sheep, goats, mares, donkeys, camels, buffalos, water buffaloes, llamas and reindeer.
Unsalted butter can be stored in the freezer to keep better, but wherever it is it should be well wrapped to keep off flavors from getting in. Some swear by watery ceramic butter bells on the counter; some say they encourage mold. Some English people shell out 34 pounds for the ButterWizard, “the world’s first fully portable Temperature Controlled Butter Dish, which both heats and cools regardless of ambient temperature, ensuring your butter stays at the perfect temperature for spreading – anytime, anywhere.”
Although I often said in my foolish twenties that there was no such thing as too much sex or too much butter on a baked potato, I’ve since learned that a little bit (of butter, that is) can be just enough, disagreeing with butter-eating world record holder Donald Lerman who ate seven sticks in five minutes.
Naughty or nice, when it comes to the creamy spread for your December bagel be naughty and go for the butter. It’s holiday time, live extra large: buy a jewel for someone who deserves it, eat Krause’s chocolate ‘til you feel ill, eat three dozen escargots at Le Canard Enchainée or a fat tub of good butter from Ronnybrook. Whatever you do to be decadent, eat more butter.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 2:49 PM EST
Updated: Wednesday, February 27, 2008 10:22 AM EST
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Sunday, February 17, 2008
Lameness
Mood: accident prone
Now Playing: Popunders? Unpoppedovers?
Topic: Cooking
Don’t try to make breakfast before at least one cup of coffee. And after a wakeful night with a cough and sore throat.
I left the egg out of the popovers this morning, and I don’t know why I am now broadcasting my shame before the world. But oddly, the little hockey pucks were somehow golden brown even without the eggs, with that distinct popover flavor without the heft and puff. They were crispy on the outside and fluffy within, much better than I would have thought. I might even make them on purpose sometime, to soak up beefy pan drippings or savory braise juices.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 12:35 PM EST
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Friday, February 15, 2008
Horn tootin’ and a simmering cephalopod
Mood: happy
Topic: food writing biz
For the second year in a row, Greenbrier gave me a Special Mention in their annual scholarship contest towards attendance at their acclaimed conference for professional food writers. This one was for a Fred Thompson scholarship of $1000, where I didn’t win but scored high and received a very nice congratulatory e-mail from Greenbrier founder and leader Toni Allegra. So next year I will have to try yet again, and in the meantime try to do some damn good foodwritin’.
* * *
Today I’ve been cooking octopus, in preparation for some queries to magazines on this oft-unpopular item, sweet and succulent as it is. I thawed, rinsed and drained a 2 and 1/2 pound critter, and although not as purple and curly raw as I wanted it to be, it was still pretty in a gnarly kind of way.
I seared it and it threw off a lot of liquid, turning curly and purple as a good octopus should. Then I simmered it in red wine, garlic, onion, olive oil and oregano, with a bay leaf and cinnamon stick thrown in, cooked it for an hour, then another hour until the lot was brown and thick and murky. Hubby cut it up while I was off interviewing a cook for a story, and then it got tossed with linguine. Sublime, no, but worth some work. I’ll keep you posted.
P.S. I can’t get this pic to be smaller on the page–technical difficulties–guess I’ll have to rename this entry “Octoporn.” With all those big fat tentacles, it’s for octopus lovers only!
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 2:24 PM EST
Updated: Sunday, February 17, 2008 12:53 PM EST
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Sunday, February 10, 2008
Me Hungry, Me Cook
Mood: caffeinated
Now Playing: A Clipping from the Brizzi Bulletin Board
Topic: Cooking
I found this on an internet message board in late 2005 and put it on the wall where I can see it often, because it always makes me laugh. A Google search reveals no author, so if it was you, stand up and take the credit.
HOW DO I MAEK FOD
WELL FIRST U NEED ROK. BIG ROK IS BEST BUT NOT TO BIG FOR THROW.
THEN U WAIT FUR ANIMEL. RABBIT OR COW OR DONKEY IS ALL OK.
THROW ROK AT ANIMEL.
IF ROK MISS ANIMEL RUN AWAY. FIND NUTHR ANIMEL.
IF ROK HIT ANIMEL DED. IF ANIMEL NOT DED, TAKE ROK AND THROW AGEN.
TAKE OFF ANIMEL SKIN AND EAT ANIMEL.
IF REAL GUD HUNTER MAEK FIRE AND PUT ANIMEL ON. SCARY THO SO MAKE SHUR UR GUD HUNTER OK.
IF NO FIND ANIMEL, EET FRUT AND HOP IT NOT POISEN.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 9:24 AM EST
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Monday, January 28, 2008
Unwrapping the Mysteries of the CIA
Mood: hungry
Topic: food writing biz
I toured the CIA today. Lucky me, their Hyde Park campus is only 20 minutes from my house so I can go anytime I wanna. I haven’t yet tried any of their popular restaurants other than the Apple Pie Cafe, but I’ve been for a graduation and a couple other events. I know about four of the teachers and a couple other employees, but no current students, as they ship ’em in and out pretty quick.
The atmosphere there is exciting, infectious. This was my second tour, the first about 11 years ago when we first moved to the area. The main building, Roth Hall, is gorgeous and high-ceilinged, in a former life a glamorous seminary. I love to peruse the amazing library, whose periodical collection was not as comprehensive today as I recall but maybe some of it was moved or they cut down on their subscriptions. They used to have every food magazine ever published (very useful for food writers), but I didn’t see hide nor hair of Saveur, Gourmet or any of the biggies today. I was proud of myself in the bookstore, though, whose incredible and vast collection never fails to thrill me. I didn’t buy anything, not even any of the seven-dollar cookbooks.
What I love best about “the Culinary,” as we call it around here, is that it’s all about food, every aspect of food. It’s just food food all the time, kinda like my life. The tour made me want to don chef’s whites and a toque and be a student there, stuffing as much knowledge into my brain as it will hold.
Food writers take note: an excellent source of summaries of current articles about food, with links, is at the ProChef SmartBrief newsletter, which you can have e-mailed to you daily. It’s been an invaluable resource for me for keeping abreast of what’s going on and what topics are being covered in newspapers and magazines.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 2:16 PM EST
Updated: Monday, January 28, 2008 2:45 PM EST
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Friday, January 25, 2008
High-brow Roadkill?
Mood: a-ok
Now Playing: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CLAIRE TAILLON!!
Topic: Eating
Check out the new gourmet.com, a great new site full of great food writing and fun stuff like Varmints, with recipes for beaver, raccoon, woodchuck and more! I try to be adventurous and once did sample squirrel stew at a party, but beaver?–I will have to work up to that…
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 9:07 AM EST
Updated: Monday, January 28, 2008 2:16 PM EST
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Thursday, January 24, 2008
It’s official! I’m going to the IACP conference!
Mood: celebratory
Now Playing: happiness, bliss, excitement
Topic: food writing biz
I’m so thrilled–I’ve decided to go to the IACP conference in New Orleans in April!!! Definitely cannot afford it but it seems worth it in terms of knowledge gained, contacts made, etc. And interesting, fascinating and fun. It doesn’t look like I’ll have a lot of time to soak in NOLA ambiance, as about 20 hours a day are scheduled for the four days I’m there, but it promises to be a wonderful experience. Emeril’s gala is just too expensive for me, but I’ll see scholar Jessica B. Harris, of whom I’m a big fan, and agent and media trainer Lisa Ekus, kind and good food writer John T. Edge (he wrote me a nice letter a couple years ago), and Mai Pham, who wrote Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table, one of the all-time best books on Vietnam and its food.
And my new friend Jessica Bard is going to the conference, too. Jessica is a way cool, sociable, delightful, and very talented chef, teacher, food writer and stylist for Fine Cooking and other magazines who just happens to live nearby. After a brief e-mail correspondence we finally met and had lunch together on Tuesday, it was a real treat to meet her.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 1:24 PM EST
Updated: Friday, January 25, 2008 8:17 AM EST
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Wednesday, January 16, 2008
I wanna go!! Please please please!
Mood: on fire
Now Playing: I promise to be good if I can go…
Topic: food writing biz
It’s that time of year again–time for the annual conference of the IACP (which in my case stands for the International Association of Culinary Professionals, but there are also the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the International Academy of Compounding Pharmacists, the International Association for Cognitive Psychotherapy, the International Association of Canine Professionals and the International Association of Chinese Pathologists. Really).
Yes, it’s that time of year again, depending on where the conference is being held, for me to wish and want and long for something too expensive for me to justify going. I went in 2000 when it was in Providence, because I could drive there and had a friend to stay with. I met Julia Child and various other important food people and it was a wonderful experience, one big four-day high to be surrounded by thousands of other people fascinated with food. This year it will be in New Orleans in April and I’m dying to go hobnob with people just like me, plus an assortment of editors, agents, publishers and people passionate about food and the outrageous potpourri of New Orleans.
Oh, there just has to be a way…
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 10:27 AM EST
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Monday, November 12, 2007
Home with the kids
Mood: blue
Now Playing: “sqwitz swackers” (Marco) and “I wish I was that soup so I could be warm” (Sofia)
A very odd thing is happening to me: a chronic digestive system illness (for which details have no place in a food blog) has come back to me after nine years with a vengeance. For the past few weeks I have no appetite, which means that I eat like a normal person instead of a pig who long ago burned out the wires on her full-ness meter. It’s a very strange feeling to not be obsessed with food for a change, though, and I can’t even bear to read about it or write about it, combing my giant collection of unread books for the rare volume unrelated to food. After losing lots of blood I don’t have the energy or interest to even cook a meal, and so we’ve been living on take out for a while. Gorgeous fall vegetables are tragically rotting in the crisper drawer. Summoning up the energy and enthusiasm to write mouth-watering columns and articles on food seems beyond my capabilities as well.
I am glad to be eating way less but so ready for this to get better…sorry to bitch but you’re the only one who will listen.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 11:53 AM EST
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Friday, October 19, 2007
Baaaa…
Mood: don’t ask
Now Playing: more cooking demos
Topic: food writing biz
Lat year I swore off doing cooking demonstations, because the preparation was too overwhelming. But like the parties I swore off a few years ago and still throw once a year or so anyway, I’m glad I didn’t give up doing cooking demos. They really are a lot of fun, albeit stressful for an introvert such as myself, but it’s tons of fun to spout off and share my love of cooking with other people. I never used to think I could do cooking demos because I didn’t think I could cook and talk at the same time, but if I find that if I plan every last detail ahead of time, I don’t screw up more than once or twice per demo!
This is my third season of doing demos at the Dutchess County Fairgrounds, during the Dutchess County Fair and now this weekend at the New York State Sheep and Wool Festival, where I’m limited to lamb and sheep cheese, which is fine with me, because I adore both. Tomorrow at 3 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. I’ll be doing a pecan-crusted rack of lamb, accompanied by circles of acorn squash with sage butter. Here I am last year, on the upper left, doing either Lambie Pies or Lamb on a Stick–I did both last year, with two recipes during each demo. Be there or be2.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 1:27 PM EDT
Updated: Friday, October 19, 2007 1:55 PM EDT
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Thursday, October 4, 2007
Curly & Purple
Mood: chatty
Topic: food writing biz
I love unnaturally curly veggies like the okra in this column, Okra ode, or this eggplant I picked up at my CSA yesterday, along with these gorgeous purple tomatillos.
My website http://www.jenniferbrizzi.com remains, after two years, a work in progress, as I continue to learn and struggle with it. I just learned how to put some frames and tables in it an attempt to clean it up and make it look better but it still won’t do what I want it to. I’m trying to move this blog over to the site too so everything is in one place. I doubt it will ever be perfect.
Thinking of taking a web design course to get me out of the house and into civilization. Found myself envious of my son this morning when I dropped him off at his bus stop, that he would see so many people today. It’s glorious to have 7 1/2 hours a day without the kids so I can get stuff done, but other than my husband’s visits home at lunchtime, it’s kinda lonely.
Two weeks ’til my next cooking demos, at the New York State Sheep and Wool Festival–think I’ll wrestle a rack of lamb, but not sure just how yet…
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Cooking Demo time again…
Mood: silly
Topic: food writing biz
This week at the Dutchess County Fair I’m demoing cast iron cooking–hope the folks over at that booth that sells cookware won’t be pissed! Audiences have often asked me why I use all that cast iron instead of something more cheffy. I’m just crazy for cast iron; watch for my column Friday about why. I’ll be doing the same demo Wednesday and Friday at 11:00 a.m.
Mostly Traditional Southern Fried Chicken
One-Bowl North/South Cornbread
Be there or be2.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 1:28 PM EDT
Updated: Monday, August 20, 2007 12:38 PM EDT
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Monday, May 14, 2007
Ten Sweet Years
Mood: happy
Topic: food writing biz
This month makes ten years as a food writer for me, since my first food column “Jenny’s Food Focus” came out in the May 1997 edition of the Hudson River Sampler. I’ve been doing columns ever since, through “Good Food,” and now “Ravenous.”
I was once asked if I was afraid of running out of topics, with so many columns to write so regularly. I haven’t run out yet and don’t foresee it ever happening. Writing about food, tasting it, thinking about it and cooking it, are a joy and a delight, most of the time, and food is a subject I know I’ll never tire of.
So after ten years I’m waiting to turn into an overnight sensation. Maybe a few more decades are needed…
Back to work, doing radishes this week…my babies~~~my first radishes frm hort!
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 2:27 PM EDT
Updated: Monday, May 14, 2007 2:39 PM EDT
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Sunday, April 15, 2007
special mention for me
Mood: celebratory
Topic: food writing biz
For years I have really really wanted to go to Greenbrier, the annual foodwriters’ conference in West Virginia, which sounds to me like a few days of bliss on earth, hobnobbing with others as crazy for food as me, and who are making a living at it. Last year I missed the deadline for scholarship applications because of a messed-up link in my bookmarks. This year they extended the deadline and I barely got in with two columns, one on okra, the other on cephalopods. Lynn Swann, the coordinator, has been wonderful about answering e-mails and seems like an all-round good sort.
Well, I didn’t get a scholarship, so I can’t go, but they listed some special mentions in each scholarship category, and there were two winners of the Apicius scholarship, which awarded $500 towards the conference to “a professional food writer whose prose rings a clear voice and reflects the delicious joys of the table. In the spirit of Apicius, the first Roman to write cookbooks, the goal is to grant this award to that writer whose work will stand the test of time.” After choosing two winners, the kind judges picked four of us for Special Mention and I was one of the four. The list.
This does make me very happy, even though I won’t be able to go. Enough carrot to keep this donkey from giving up the food-writing thing, not that I really would, because I love it too damn much. But enough of a tease that I will keep trying until some day I get there. It’s lovely that some judges who read 160 entries liked me enough to put my name down. Thank you, judges, you have made this food writer happier and prouder than she probably has a right to be, and hopeful that I can keep on doing what I love best after eating and cooking: writing about it.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 11:02 PM EDT
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Thursday, October 26, 2006
New Lamb Recipes
Topic: Cooking
See my new lamb recipes from my cooking demos last weekend at the New York State Sheep & Wool Festival.
They’re for South African curried lamb bobotie, shepherd’s pie with roasted lamb, lamb tikka kebabs and Lebanese lamb kefta.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 11:14 AM EDT
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Monday, August 28, 2006
Appearances
Mood: a-ok
Now Playing: Me on stage
Topic: food writing biz
This past week I did two cooking demos at the Dutchess County (NY) fair and appeared as a tomato judge at a local farmers market. It was all lots of fun, although the demos were lots of work recipe developing and testing, planning, paperwork and washing dishes. My demos seemed fairly well-received, I was nervous as usual (that old public speaking bugaboo) but planned better this time, I think. I got some nice feedback from the audience on how good the food was and one couple said, “You’re our favorite presenter,” which tickled me pink.
Although I forgot to put the corn in the Grits Casserole with Corn in the first demo (Southern Sides with Fresh Corn), and the basil in the tomato sauce in the second one (Italian Ways with Zucchini), they seemed to go fairly well, not perfectly but okay with good and bad points. The second had a little too much dead air and “well, let’s just pretend this is done,” so I could move on–I’m hoping that better timing will come with practice.
My recipes are not for everyone, not innovative, wow ’em, cheffy nor wild. They’re classic dishes with a twist, none of them terribly complicated, most yummy, and I think there is a certain audience for that.
Well, they have asked me back for the Sheep and Wool Fest, and maybe I’ll do two recipes instead of three so I can focus and time them better–I have a couple months to figure it out.
And I may be doing some little farmer’s market demos on hot plates, which should be a gas.
It is great fun though, and I think a good thing for a food writer to do. I’m seeking help and advice from experts on the nuances of food demos, on timing, recipe development, etc., so I can streamline and make them better, more entertaining. Lisa Ekus does a one-day media training for food pros that sounds wonderful but at $1800 for one day, $3000 for two, that will have to wait until I find a sponsor!
Oh, and a scrumptious heirloom “Mennonite” won the tomato contest, but I had to talk the other judges into it…
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 1:12 PM EDT
Updated: Monday, August 28, 2006 1:18 PM EDT
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Sunday, August 20, 2006
Pork story … continued
Mood: crushed out
Topic: Cooking
The meat was a tad dry but undeniably tasty, and swabbed with a western NC-style mop, topped with cole slaw on plain buns, not bad. But the experiment didn’t pan out quite as planned.
The part I thought would be the toughest, keeping the temperature between 200 and 250, was not as hard as I’d expected; it actually cruised along without the addition of coals at the right temp throughout most of the afternoon, spiking only briefly when I did add coals and stir them up a bit.
From my research I learned from many sources that such a chunk of slow-smoked pork would rise in interior temperature to about 160 or so and then arrive at a plateau that would take about two to four hours and then rise until it reached 190, 195, 200 which would be the perfect point of melting fat and collagens, and then it would be perfectly ready to pull (translate shred).
But that never happened. In the late evening it reached the plateau and just never left it. The temperature in the Weber kept right where it was supposed to be, around 225-240, the aromas were lovely, but the meat never did what it was supposed to. I didn’t want to give up, and crazily kept at it until it had been on the fire for 19 and 1/2 hours, and I had been conscious for 24, at which point I simply gave up, spent and ready to sleep. So I just wrapped it in a couple layers of foil and a big paper bag, put it in a cooler with ice, washed some of the ashes off my filthy feet, and crashed. The next day I put in in the oven for a couple hours and the temperature still never rose about normal pork temp, although it did shred pretty well.
The meal was great; my mop was cider vinegar, water, brown sugar, catsup, Worcestershire sauce, salt, red pepper flakes, etc., nicely balanced, and a coleslaw dressed with mop, plus baked beans James Taylor style from Amy Rogers’ Carolina cookbook. At the last minute I ditched the hush puppies I was going to make, but served a killer grits and fresh corn casserole, redolent of garlic, jalapeno and cheddar, that I did up in preparation for a cooking demo I’ll be doing at the Dutchess (NY) County Fair on Thursday. Friend Erin brought a great green salad. As a goof, along the southern theme I made a blueberry jello “salad,” which was actually great, although I don’t usually go for that sort of thing. I did some lame sausage balls for an appetizer, but a nice peach cobbler for dessert, but that pork just didn’t quite do what I wanted it to do and I m not sure that I want to try it again. I will ask my expert buddies at the eGullet Society for Culinary Arts and Letters, who know everything, what they think I did wrong.
Oh, and I took photos, but when I tried to add them they were too huge, so I will keep working on the technology of that, too…
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 11:53 PM EDT
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Friday, August 18, 2006
Swine a comin’!
Mood: happy
Now Playing: It begins…
Topic: Cooking
Today’s the big day; I’m going to slow-cook me some North Carolina-style pulled pork. After poring over 102 pages of research culled from a variety of Internet sources, I’m ready for my first real attempt at the art of replicating this soul-of-southern-cooking specialty.
At 6 a.m. I rubbed a 9.75 lb. picnic shoulder with approx. equal parts coarse sea salt, coarsely ground black pepper, sweet sticky paprika from Penzey’s Spices and dark brown sugar.
I won’t be able to start it smoking until after I drop off the kids at camp, so if I can get it on the Weber by 9:30 or so I could conceivably be at it until about 1 a.m. when it gets to the magical internal temp of 190-200 essential for pulling.
Keeping the temp inside the Weber hovering around 200 degrees will be the tricky part. I’ll be hoping I don’t get a citation for stinking up the neighborhood with hickory and apple smoke!
Will keep you posted as the process progresses.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 7:30 AM EDT | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Thursday, July 20, 2006
Shredded swine quest
Mood: bright
Topic: Cooking
I’m on a mission. Having recently sampled fine examples of eastern North Carolina and western North Carolina barbecue (but not in sufficient quantity), I am planning to try to replicate it in the near future for a small group of victims. I did an improper but tasty one in 2000, and am ready to re-tackle it with lots of research. I can’t decide whether I prefer the eastern style (whole hog, spicy vinegar sauce) or the western (shoulder only, vinegar/tomato sauce)–they are both unbelievably good.
Lacking the funds to buy a whole hog, I will buy a nice fatty, bony picnic shoulder. My next step is to find some apple wood chips–going hunting for that this afternoon. Then I need to set a date for the event–I will keep you posted.
For my recent column on N. Carolina food, look here.
Can’t believe it’s been three months to the day since my last blog entry–I will have to check in more often. And it seems that blogs just aren’t blogs these days without lots of big juicy photos. Should I add some of those?
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 11:56 AM EDT | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Updated: Thursday, July 20, 2006 11:59 AM EDT
Thursday, April 20, 2006
easter feastin’
Mood: party time!
Now Playing: an intimate sit-down dinner for 15
Topic: Cooking
Readers of my columns know about the grand holiday feasts cooked by my father-in-law Angelo, a Tuscan expat who crossed the Atlantic more than two dozen times as a merchant marine and died five years ago. Every Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas and other occasions in between he would cook huge meals in his two tiny Manhattan kitchens, serving ten to twenty-five people dirty jokes, jolly camaraderie and fantastic food.
In his honor–and admittedly with my own desire to cook a big dinner–I offered to cook Easter dinner for my mother-in-law and an assortment of her friends.
I kind of surprised myself that I pulled it off, since usually timing the components of a meal for two is beyond me. I think Angelo’s spirit was guiding me. I can’t wait to do it again. The menu:
Crostini di fegatini (the classic Tuscan chicken liver pate on toast that Angelo often served in the living room before big dinners–mine was tasty but the texture a bit off, with no food processor on hand)
Olive (an assortment of olives from a Greek market on 9th Ave.)
Then into the dining room for:
Cosciotto d’agnello arrosto sulle cipolline primavera (a departure from italian dishes, to Macedonia, Greece, thanks to Diane Kochilias’ The Glorious Foods of Greece: leg of lamb on a bed of scallion greens and fresh mint)
Involtini di pollo « saltimbocca » (homage to something Angelo might have made: pounded chicken breast wrapped around prosciutto, Italian fontina and fresh sage, but with my own added touch of Southern cream gravy)
Torta pasqualina con carciofi (a Neopolitan Easter tradition, a savory cheesecake with artichokes encased in puff pastry)
Lasagne « amerdicane » (also an homage to the way Angelo made lasagna for parties, studded with slices of Italian sausage)
Patate al forno (roasted potatoes the way Angelo cooked them, dried to shoe leather in a slow oven but scrumptious)
Scarole coi pistacchi (Sicilian in honor of my Sicilian mother-in-law Maria, escarole with pistachios)
Asparagi (topped with fresh grated Parmigiano Reggiano and butter, from Emilia-Romagna)
Piselli (peas with onion, prosciutto and white wine)
Insalata verde (three salad-in-a-bags plus thinly-sliced mushrooms)
Vini Italiani e Siciliani, rosso e bianco
Pastiera di pasqua (an Italian classic candied fruit-studded not-too-sweet cheesecake, purchased on 9th Ave.) ed altri dolci (cakes, tarts and other sweets brought by generous guests)
Caffè, tè, liquori
It was lovely, a fun gang, some new faces and some old, tons of fun, lots of work, a joy!
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 9:49 AM EDT | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Friday, March 31, 2006
IACPconf/I wish I were there
Mood: blue
Now Playing: CRANKY!!
Topic: food writing biz
Man, life as it is is good, but how I have wanted to go to this year’s conference, in Seattle, of the International Association of Culinary Professionals. I went in 2000 to the one in Providence, RI, and it was so incredibly great that I wanted so bad to get to this one, too, and to see Chandley, my best oldest childhood friend who lives there, and a family–the Kaplans– who were in Vietnam with us, getting another son when we adopted our daughter, and my second cousin Mary Ann Gwinn, who is book editor of the Seattle Times–so many reasons to go, but not enough cash, not enough child care.
I am thinking of the crowds, thinking of the schmoozing, thinking of the tastes and smells and joy of being with thousands of other food-fanatics. In Providence I got to meet and talk to the recently departed and very sweet Sicilian food expert and actor Vincent Schiavelli, and also Clifford Wright and Julia Child, all of them pros and genuinely kind and friendly.
Alas, Child and Schiavelli will not be there this year. But I wish I was. It is all for the best, I know. I need to be here with my little ones. But man oh man how I wish I could be there, too. Cheers to all of you IACP’ers in Seattle right now. I hope you are having a fantabulous time.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 11:45 PM EST | post your comment (1) | link to this post
Updated: Monday, April 3, 2006 12:03 AM EDT
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Taste Your Own Tongue
Topic: food writing biz
If you want to be a food writer, there are three things you need to do, and none of them has much to do with food.
The first thing is just to be a writer. Forget about the food for now; that part will come naturally. If you truly love food, it will infuse everything you write.
To Be A Writer is a fine idea, like wanting to be a teacher so you can have summers off but forgetting about squabbles with administration or brats hurling blunt objects at the back of your head. To Be a Writer sounds like sitting at a desk all day dressed in PJs, sweats or nothing at all. To Be a Writer makes you imagine a long snaking line of people all gazing at you with abject adoration as they approach the table where you sit signing book after book until your hand cramps pleasantly.
But To Be a Writer actually means writing. And if you have always scribbled words on paper and banged computer keyboards, you are already a writer. If you have always had to write–rather than chose to write or wanted to write–and just could not keep yourself from doing it, if you are hopelessly addicted to writing, you are already a writer.
So keep writing. Anything: great literature, newspaper articles, how-to manuals, potentially prize-winning essays, journal entries, a blog, short stories or just witty, pithy e-mails to people who love you. Just write. Every bit of practice does you good.
And another thing. Read. Read not to emulate other writers, but rather to inspire yourself with the joy of words, and especially to stoke the fire of your lust for words. If you don’t love reading, if you wouldn’t rather read than just about anything else, maybe your love for words and the way they blend and simmer is not quite fervent enough to spend days molding them to sound like the thoughts in your brain, only better.
The last requirement for being a food writer is to follow your own tastes, not what’s trendy or popular but what you love. If creating recipes for low fat vegetarian dishes gets you going, do that. If it’s discovering what makes people tick, then follow around wildly popular chefs and crab fisherpersons and microgreen farmers and make your reader really get to know them. Or if you love how sexy food can be, or if strange foods from the other side of the planet stimulate your sense of adventure, write about that.
See food through your own eyes, taste it with your own tongue. Seize the aspect of it that excites you the most and let that thrill spill out onto the pages of what you write.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 10:33 AM EST | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Wednesday, February 8, 2006
Timkat Tet party
My children, nearly five and nearly four, were adopted from Vietnam and Ethiopia, and the biggest annual holidays in the countries of their births fall close to the same time each year. Ethiopian Epiphany runs from January 18-20 and is celebrated there with much more hoopla than their Christmas on January 7, with parades and mass baptisms and feasting on the meat of the fat-tailed sheep. Vietnamese New Year, or Têt, begins like Chinese New Year on different dates each year, January 29 this year. The days-long festival celebrates the return of the buffoon-like kitchen gods to heaven. The Vietnamese prepare by cleaning their house until it sparkles (I deviated from this part of the tradition) and cooking up a storm so no work will be have to be done during Têt, which will be devoted to fireworks, feasting and visiting relatives.
So I planned a modest feast to celebrate both holidays. I would have liked to invite a hundred of my best friends for the occasion, but my house is so tiny that any large gatherings are reserved for when it’s warmer outdoors. So we invited a few nearest and dearest and I served the food buffet style, with the Vietnamese stuff on and near the stove and the Ethiopian on the small kitchen table.
It struck me while I was planning the food that the two cuisines, Ethiopian and Vietnamese, are so different that it seemed odd to serve them at the same meal. But as I cooked it I realized that both call for lots of garlic and ginger and sweet spices. My mother, who had never tasted either cuisine before, said that the flavors were much the same. “It’s that ancient spice trail,” said my husband, and actually some of the food of Vietnam, especially in the south, is influenced indirectly by India to the west, and many people who have tried Ethiopian food say the rich spice blends and buttery foundation remind them of Indian food.
We started with nem, or cha gio, Vietnamese spring rolls that were fun to make. I rolled delicate rice paper wrappers around a filling of ground pork, minced tree ear mushrooms, bean threads, garlic and ginger. They were fried and then eaten by wrapping them in Boston lettuce with fresh mint, cilantro, sliced cucumber and star fruit, and then dipping them into Vietnam’s classic dipping sauce, nuoc cham, of fish sauce, lime juice, sugar, chopped bird chilies and garlic.
Artifacts, art, scarves and serving ware from both countries did the decorating, with a shuffle of music from our CDs of classic and contemporary Ethiopian and Vietnamese music. My kids dressed in the colorful costumes of their birth lands, topped by a red conical hat of poster board for my daughter and a black pillbox type for my son.
We moved on to the main courses with a few more Vietnamese dishes to go with steamed jasmine rice. There was coleslaw that I dressed with something similar to the nuoc cham but with touches of canola oil and rice vinegar added. Friend Erin brought a pretty pink and red Vietnamese dish of fat shrimp in a sweet caramel sauce embellished with red pepper strips. I had stewed some pork riblets in sweet spices, fish sauce and coconut juice, great fun with the atypical kitchen tools of drill, screwdriver and hammer.
On the Ethiopian side of the room there was a big platter of freshly cooked injera, big pancakes made of a fermented dough of teff and wheat flours. In Ethiopia it acts as fork, napkin, plate and tablecloth, a sour but tasty contrast to the sweet complex stews.
One was the classic feast dish, doro wat, a stew of chicken, red onions and boiled eggs swimming in spiced butter and the fiery spice mixture berbere. We also had some milder red lentil stew colored yellow with turmeric and a luscious on-the-bone lamb alicha cooked by my brother-in-law Mig.
For dessert we had two lovely Vietnamese desserts brought by generous good-cookin’ guests: a sumptuous banana cake with ice cream baked by Erin, plus a creamy coconut flan provided by my sister Calico.
We were likely the only ones in town having such a dinner, but it was great fun and I hope it will become an annual tradition for us.
This ran in my column “Ravenous” in the Kingston (NY) Times on February 2.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 11:04 AM EST | post your comment (2) | link to this post
Thursday, January 19, 2006
chickenendumplins
Mood: hungry
In last year’s special food issue of Oxford American magazine, my father Donald Harington wrote an ode to chicken and dumplings in which he debated round versus flat dumplings and presumed that my sisters and I only made flat ones these days, unlike the fluffy ones he made when we were little.
Although the real thing is pretty much just chicken and flour and nothing else, this is how I do it and it is truly delicious. The dumplings, which are not so fluffy but reminiscent of a German bread dumpling, are killer and lifted directly from The Fannie Farmer Cookbook by Marion Cunningham (13th Edition, Knopf 1990).
The rest of it is my recipe and I’m sticking to it.
Chicken and Dumplings
For stew:
1 (one) 2 and 1/2 to 3 pound quality, naturally-raised chicken (I get mine from Gippert’s Farm in Saugerties, NY)
Salt, pepper and cayenne to taste
1 large onion, chopped–mince 1/4 cup of it and reserve for the dumplings
1 carrot, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
1-2 cloves garlic, chopped
1/2 teaspoon Kitchen Bouquet (optional)
For “feather dumplings”:
1 cup flour
1/2 cup fresh bread crumbs
2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 egg, beaten well
2 tablespoons butter, melted
The 1/4 cup minced onion you saved from the stew part
1/3 cup milk
1 tablespoon finely minced parsley
Freshly ground pepper to taste
Rinse and dry chicken and cut into 8 serving pieces. Sprinkle with salt, pepper and cayenne and brown on both sides in some of its own fat over moderate heat in a Dutch oven.
Remove chicken pieces and reserve. Add onions, carrots, celery and garlic to Dutch oven and cook and stir until soft.
Put chicken back in pot and cover with water, approximately a quart, depending on size of the pot. Add the Kitchen Bouquet, if using, and some additional salt and pepper to taste. Cover and simmer about a half hour.
Meanwhile, (here’s Ms. Cunningham talking) “Combine the flour, bread crumbs, baking powder and salt in a mixing bowl, and stir to mix. In another bowl, lightly beat the egg, melted butter, onion and milk together. Stir into the dry ingredients to m make a stiff batter. Stir in the parsley and pepper. Once the chicken has cooked about 30-35 minutes [actually M.C. says 20 but I like my chicken well-done], drop spoonfuls of dough on top of the bubbling broth. Cover and steam for 20 minutes without lifting the cover.”
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 10:46 AM EST | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Updated: Sunday, January 22, 2006 12:23 AM EST
Monday, January 9, 2006
Starch ‘n cheese
Mood: a-ok
Topic: Cooking
I will never be too snobby to appreciate macaroni and cheese, in most any form.
In my book that combo of pasta and cheese baked together and topped with crispy crumbs surpasses most treats. I have had creamy versions at southern buffets, sweet macaroni pies in Jamaica and Barbados, had floury bland versions in cafeteria lines, and tasted plenty of the Kraft crap I give my kids sometimes (my own bowl sprinkled heavily with freshly ground black pepper), and ain’t none of it bad.
Tonight at the risk of Rolando’s wrath (he is lactose intolerant and usually I never make it unless he’s not around) I had an urge to bake a little casserole-full to accompany a meal that would have been perfectly fine without it: oven-roasted natural local pork chops with lemon and Penzeys Bavarian seasoning, butter-roasted turnip slices, and (full disclosure) salad-in-a-bag.
My version of macaroni and cheese is like what I ate as a kid but with a couple of tweaks. As a kid I would sit at the table long after every one else had gone, digging into fourths and fifths of my mother’s macaroni and cheese. I was a wisp of a skinny thing then, but insatiable when it came to that stuff.
For tonight’s version, which the kids wouldn’t touch, preferring Kraft as they do, I boiled a bit more than half a box of Barilla pipette until not quite done and tossed it with grated Cheddar and Cheshire (Vermont’s Cabot hunters’ extra sharp and pink crumbly English export, respectively), a dusting of Locatelli Romano, half a finely chopped onion and a little garlic that I had softened in butter in a hot little cast iron pan, hearty sprinklings of dry mustard and cayenne, and salt and pepper. I buttered my tiniest blue Le Creuset, threw it all in and filled not quite to cover with 2% milk. Then with the grater still handy I grated some really old Italian bread over the top, dotted it with butter like I might an apple pie and cooked it at 350-375 until it was golden on top. As sweet as the turnips were, as perfect as the local pork, had I been alone I might have eschewed them both and eaten the whole lot of that macaroni and cheese.
Sort of my mother’s version, sort of mine, all comfort food and all good. Low carb and New Year’s resolutionary diets be damned.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 12:01 AM EST | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Wednesday, January 4, 2006
TGI…CIO
Mood: smelly
Now Playing: Considering blessings and cooking Ethiopian
I hate to go so long without checking in, but life, aaahh, you know. I’m digging out from under that Christmas tree skirt piled with heavy presents garbed with gaudy wrap, from the overwhelm of the holiday season, its purpose seeming most days merely to distract us from the fact that fall is over and winter is grabbing us by the balls.
It had its good stuff: the Christmas cards coming in two by two as they encircled the kitchen door frame, a festive Christmas Eve’s Feast of the Seven Fishes at Maria’s, not quite like in Angelo’s day but reminiscent, happy, the kids digging into their booty Christmas morning … if I’d had more than two hours of sleep I would have appreciated it more …
Now it’s full-on winter and although the kiddies are still singing Christmas carols (pretty much just Rudolph) and basking in the leftover glow, I’m ready for it to be over, to go back to normal, whatever that is.
Tomorrow will be two years since Marco arrived from Ethiopia and I’m considering throwing an Ethiopian dinner party, although I have not the time nor space nor energy nor money for such a thing. But it would be festive. We’ll see. I do love cooking Ethiopian food. I’m remembering the last time I made injera bread, fermenting it in my biggest bowl on the countertop for a few days, then drizzling it crepe-like into a huge saute pan, then spreading the massive pancakes over a platter and dropping bits of spicy chicken and egg stew, lentils, on it. It’s great fun. The food is wonderful.
I have adopted kids from countries where not only are the folk very fair of face, but the food is exquisite. By chance? Perchance not. Sweet luck. Sweet kids.
Every day is a blessing. Whether we are “religious” or not, our lives on this planet are short and each day from dawn to dusk is full of treats for all the senses.
Happy, healthy 2006 to all.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 11:32 PM EST | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Saturday, December 3, 2005
‘Twas good
Now Playing: holiday sick cooking
Topic: Cooking
The weather held out and we did go to Mig’s for his 40th–he and it were jolly. We got there after the meal, so although my sweet potato pie was among ten other pies and appreciated by some, my appetizer-intended pork and rabbit rillettes didn’t get eaten, although I did save some at home that we’ve been digging into. Only slightly like processed chicken spread, they are lovely with horseradish mustard from Drier’s in Michigan.
We had bought a turkey in case the weather was too bad to travel and we could still do our own Thanksgiving so I cooked it all up the next day, with the best stuffing I ever made: day old cornbread, three kinds of crusty bread, sausage (unfortunately Jones instead of Jimmy Dean), apple, toasted pecans–it was killer. Man oh man. The best part. Felt very silly to cook such a feast the day after, though. Shameful, sorta. Something I don’t tell just anyone. But with all those leftovers I made killer turkey pot pie, turkey soup and turkey chili, all good.
Now I’m planning a Christmas Eve meal at La Nonna’s. I’ll bring marinated squid and codfish–the rest will be takeout, but it will be lovely to spend Christmas Eve with Maria…
Merry merry.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 11:56 PM EST | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Here turkey, turkey
Mood: don’t ask
Topic: Cooking
If the snow holds off, we’re going to my sister Calico’s for Thanksgiving and to celebrate her husband Mig’s 40th birthday. Rather than lay back and let someone else do all the cooking, he will spend the day doing one of the things he loves best, and one of the many things he does well, cooking a feast for a gang.
I love any excuse to cook (a baby shower, a New Year’s party? and I get to bring something?–Hooray). And I love to cook Thanksgiving dinner, but with no dining room and only a tiny eating area in the kitchen full of two wriggly, strapping kids, I can’t even have intimate dinner parties anymore, much less host holiday meals.
To Thanksgiving I will be bringing a terrine of some type, which may be oxtail if I can find some or maybe some rillettes instead. I have to shop and figure that out today as it’s a bit of a project and needs to mellow a couple days before serving. I’ll also be bring my killer sweet potato pie, which is not too sweet and has a flaky lard crust.
And a small turkey will hang around the Brizzi house in reserve in case the weather prohibits traveling two hours to Connecticut.
Here’s my pie:
The Best Sweet Potato Pie Ever
Adapted from Big Mama’s Old Black Pot (Stoke Gabriel Enterprises, 1987) by Ethel Dixon
2 medium to large sweet potatoes (1 and 1/2 lbs.)
for crust:
1 1/2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 cup chilled lard
1/4 cup water
for filling:
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup sugar
2 large eggs
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon cloves
1 12 oz. can evaporated milk
Preheat oven to 375°F. Scrub sweet potatoes, trim pointy ends off, and bake on a tray for about an hour or so or until soft. Lower oven temp to 350°F.
Meanwhile, make pie crust. Mix flour, salt and sugar in a medium bowl, then add the chilled lard and work quickly with your fingers until lumps shrink to pea size. Add water and mix together. The dough will be crumbly, depending on the humidity, but pat it together to make a flattish disk. Wrap in plastic wrap or wax paper and stick in the fridge to chill for half an hour.
Roll out dough on a floured flat surface (cutting board, marble slab or dishtowel-topped countertop), and put in a 9-inch pie plate, pinching up the sides so it can hold more filling.
When sweet potatoes are cool enough to handle, mash well with a potato masher or fork in the same or a fresh medium bowl. Add filling ingredients and mix well. A whisk is good. Pour into pie crust and bake until firm, about 60-70 minutes.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 6:38 AM EST | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Updated: Tuesday, November 22, 2005 6:48 AM EST
Saturday, November 12, 2005
Cook vs. chef
Mood: not sure
Now Playing: A cook in chef’s clothing
Is a chef better or more clever than a cook?
Obviously it depends on the chef and depends on the cook. The word “chef” implies training and skill at difficult tasks. To be a cook you merely have to know how to saute an onion. (My little kids, 3 and 4, are cooks then, since they helped me stir onions for my carbonnades de flamande the other day. They squabbled and fussed over whose turn it was, but they were both good at it, better than me at age 19 in France, spilling onions out of the tall pot, my Uncle Conrad (RIP) admonishing me that I’d never find a husband if I couldn’t even cook onions right.)
A cook is an artist, a chef an architect: Cassatt to Corbusier. That’s where lines blur because many architects are in fact artists as well as technically adept, like chefs are cooks who combine creativity and skill. In Michael Ruhlman’s The Making of a Chef, one very accomplished chef said proudly “I am a cook.”
I am not a chef but I play one on TV. Well, not yet, but in public anyway I have been known to don chef’s whites to inspire confidence in my audience. And myself. Although I have spent untold hours in my own kitchen and those of caterers and restaurants who have employed me, I feel a bit of an impostor, since I don’t have a certificate of graduation from culinary school, since I have never made a gallantine. I don’t turn out prettily constructed dishes by the dozens at busy restaurants; my last line cook experience ended in tears for me. I don’t spend eleven-hour days on my feet, running non-stop in a frenzied flurry of multi-tasking–well, actually I do, I have two small children, but usually my eleven cooking-related hours in the course of a day are spent reading and writing about food, dreaming up a feast and and how I will make it and who I will serve it to.
But I’m proud and happy to wear chef’s clothing. Not every celebrity chef has that certificate of graduation from chef school at home. I can bandy about the words “self-taught,” I can learn from chefs and books whenever I can, and I can keep on practicing my craft.
I am more Cassatt than Corbusier. I cook to comfort people, not to impress. I cook to please, not to support the weight of thousands. I cook for love, I cook to express my creativity. I cook because cooking is an outlet for my artist’s soul. I cook, like I write, because I have to.
But mostly I cook because I love to eat.
I don’t think chef and cook are two different things. The lines blur, the definitions are vague. Both chefs and cooks feed people, some inspired by art, some by pleasure, some by pure need to make a living.
What do you think is the difference between a cook and a chef? Are they the same thing?
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 6:55 AM EST | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Updated: Saturday, November 12, 2005 7:40 AM EST
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Like pea soup …
Mood: rushed
Now Playing: …Love pea soup.
Topic: Cooking
Forget about the Exorcist; split pea soup is anything but scary. Simple, frugal and rib-stickingly good, yes. Gross, never. There is little better on a cold October night when the spooks are looming.
I started mine today with a soffritto of onion, carrot, celery and garlic that softened in warm olive oil. Then I added about half a bag or so of split peas, stirred, added bay leaf, small handful of thyme sprigs, two small smoked pig hocks, lots of water, simmered for a very long time.
Later added diced red potato (1) to thicken, later still 1/3 of a cabbage, diced (which I don’t usually include but hey it was there and available, begging to be used), seasoned and simmered more.
Last thing: lots of diced old Bronx bread (as in Arthur Avenue, one of New York’s finest old Italian neighborhoods) sauteed with butter and olive oil in my biggest cast iron skillet. When crispy, heat off, and in went minced parsley and lots of crushed garlic to toss as the cubes cooled.
Sprinkled croutons liberally over deep shallow bowl of soup. Man oh man. Thick. Good. Pea-y.
Happy Halloween.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 12:36 AM EDT | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Friday, October 21, 2005
Denial in the bedroom
Mood: hug me
Topic: Cooking
I don’t know why I haven’t come to terms with it yet. It was in the low 40s this morning and I still haven’t put the flannel sheets on the bed. My nightwear is still a long T-shirt, flip flops and a seersucker bathrobe. Neither the flannel nightshirt, the fleece robe, nor the fuzzy slippers have yet to make an appearance.
But in the kitchen and on the patio I seem to have accepted that cold weather is here. I haven’t grilled anything for a while, and I stopped feeding my garden a while back even though it’s still producing splindly tomatoes, peppers and chard. I’m making soups and stews and roasting things. The other day I made a killer, hearty, rib-sticking Ukrainian borscht, similar to the one in the Russian chapter of Jeff Smith’s Immigrant Ancestors cookbook). Tomorrow will be an African peanut stew with Gippert’s chicken.
I may not have put the kids’ bathing suits away yet, but I’m cranking out that winter fare with no trouble at all.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 1:29 PM EDT | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
Luscious lambikins
Mood: rushed
Now Playing: My baaaaad carnivorous behavior
“Man was put on this earth to eat meat … The Bible says so, dumbbell … I mean look it up will ya? All them old bible peoples, they was always eating meat; soon as they found out eating apples was wrong … It’s true, on special occasions: goats and lambs. Who the hell ever hear of sacrificing a head of lettuce? You?”
–Carroll O’ Connor as Archie Bunker
This weekend I’ll be doing a cooking demonstration using lamb, the meatiest of meats and one of my favorites. It will be at the New York State Sheep & Wool Festival, where most attendees will be coming to fondle soft, colorful wool, not to taste heavy lamb stew at 10 a.m.
But it will be fun anyway. I’ll be using a relatively cheap cut that wouldn’t roast well, but will simmer slow and moist to a state of juicy succulence, full of mouth pleasing texture and flavor. It will probably be a Spanish stew, and it turns out that the meat I’ll be using is from Merino lambs, a Spanish breed.
I just wrote a “Ravenous” column about lamb, and I didn’t have enough space to include everything that I want to say about a topic that I’m so passionate about that I could write a book about it. But since lamb has so many detractors, maybe no one would buy it. But I think that can change. I have faith that lamb’s popularity will someday approach that of the rest of the world. It’s just too damn delicious.
The very thought of lamb evokes Mediterranean hills dotted with peaceful, grazing sheep, in parts of the world where grazing lands are too sparse or steep for beef cattle, in lamb-loving lands like France, Italy, Greece, Spain and North Africa.
Cost-effective and practical as they are delicious, sheep can survive in many climates and landforms. Additional bonuses are that the milk makes a tasty cheese (the subject of my 1 p.m. cooking demo) and the wool can also be used for clothing.
Like in China, where the word “meat” means pork, in the Middle East the same word stands in for both meat and sheep meat.
Since times B.C., lamb has been considered the festival and holiday meat for religious ceremonies and rituals: think sacrificial lamb. In 7th century Persia, lamb was marinated in pomegranate juice or yogurt to tenderize it. Medieval court cooks stewed it in wine or ale or pounded the meat to a puree and mixed it with eggs, spices and marrow.
The diet of a lamb affects its taste, so whether it feeds on grass or grain, its meat can be sweet or gamy. The meat’s flavor can be affected by herbs in the grass, the vegetation of a French salt marsh, even the kind of water it drinks, some say.
I love to marinate lamb, but what comes from a really good naturally raised animal is so exquisite-tasting it doesn’t need a lot of embellishments.
Lamb is “at once delicate and rich with faintly musky undertones” said Time-Life’s Lamb in 1981.
I would love to go all out, lamb-wise, and stuff and roast a foresaddle of lamb, the front half, that serves 20, or a baron, the hind end. But lacking lots of lamb-loving friends (and lots of cash) I will have to console myself with simple lamb preparations like savory stews and marinated chops and these simple tasty grilled burgers made with ground lamb.
Lamburgers with Fresh Herbs
1 to 1-1/4 pounds ground lamb
2 fat cloves garlic, minced
1 small onion, finely chopped
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
1 tablespoon chopped fresh herbs such as rosemary, thyme and spearmint
1/4 cup dry red wine
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon salt
Pita bread or rolls such as Kaiser
Plain yogurt
1 cucumber, seeded and grated or minced
Mix all but last three ingredients together gently but well. Shape into four patties and chill in the refrigerator for 30 minutes or more. Grill over charcoal until cooked medium and serve in pita bread or on rolls with the fluff scooped out, topped with dollops of the yogurt spiked with the cucumber.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 8:15 AM EDT | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Updated: Tuesday, October 11, 2005 10:32 AM EDT
Saturday, October 1, 2005
Why Tripe?
“Who will join me in a dish of tripe? It soothes, appeases the anger of the outraged, stills the fear of death, and reminds us of tripe eaten in former days, when there was always a half-filled pot of it on the stove.”
–Günter Grass
If you can’t stomach the idea of eating animal stomach, reconsider your sad, deluded ways, and make trippa alla fiorentina, which is in my opinion heaven on earth: tender, savory, and truly toothsome.
And hey, a little fear-of-death stilling never hurt anyone, did it?
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 11:37 PM EDT | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Sunday, September 11, 2005
Sage old age
Mood: not sure
Topic: Cooking
It’s said that with age comes wisdom, a thought surely invented only to console. The extinction of so many brain cells seems to counteract any wise thoughts that might come along. However, I realized this morning as I cooked myself a scrambled egg, that after about thirty years of doing it I have finally figured out that if I don’t put the egg in the pan until after the toast has been toasted and buttered, I won’t face a plate of cold eggs.
My method is unlike anyone else’s but the absolute only way I like them. I have to use a certain 7-inch well-seasoned cast iron pan, no other pan will do, and I set the gas flame at just above 2. Then I let the pan get good and hot, toss in a pat of butter, and tilt the pan to spread it around as it sizzles. As soon as the sizzle subsides but before the butter burns, I break in the egg, sprinkle it with salt, pepper and Tabasco, and stir it up with a fork.
I am never wearing my watch when I scramble an egg so I don’t know how many seconds it takes to cook, but it is surely very few. When it’s ready, it has just barely lost its runniness and much of the white and yellow is still distinct.
For me that is scrambled egg perfection, but I know that many food experts and egg aficionados would vehemently disagree, including the one I live with.
Am I wise now? Maybe not, but I have finally learned to make scrambled eggs exactly the way I like them.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 9:55 AM EDT | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Thursday, September 1, 2005
Sorrow in The Big Hard, So Hard
Mood: blue
Topic: food writing biz
The last bit of summer has flown by breathlessly, August like the blink of an eye. Now summer is leaving and leaves are falling and fall is sooner than soon.
I am horrified by the situation in New Orleans and Mississippi, too much suffering and misery, too much of Bush’s concentration on the wrong Gulf.
I visited New Orleans only once, for a week a few years ago, and I fell madly in love, such that the wild city has haunted me ever since, becoming a setting for a novel in progress, inspiring my cooking and eating, drawing me to want very badly to return some day. Now the suffering of its citizens, the destruction of its unique cosmopolitan and exotic charms, the beauty of its architecture, people, music, food….it is all immensely tragic, and I am reminded not so much of the recent Asian tsunami but also of 9-11: another irrevocable, unpreventable, uncontrollable horror. I have to have faith that the area will heal and rebuild, that all the homeless ones will find new homes, new lives for themselves.
On a more personal note, last week I did my cooking demo at the local county fair. Although I was surely nervous and my show did have its flaws, I was quite pleased with the way things turned out. The Goddess of Garlic couldn’t make her afternoon show, so I filled in and was much less nervous. It was wonderful experience, overall, and I was glad that I could do it and I can’t wait to do it again.
Words of inspiration came from the recently deceased 115-year-old Henny van Andel-Schipperof of the Netherlands, whose advice for longevity was to keep breathing and eat pickled herring. Good advice!
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 2:30 PM EDT | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Updated: Thursday, September 1, 2005 2:45 PM EDT
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
S’lovely to be so busy
Mood: happy
Topic: food writing biz
The next week or so will be be crazy with a deadline for a real food article (Afghani food), my presentation at the Dutchess County Fair on fresh tomato appeteasers, and the usual weekly “Ravenous” deadline (next week, okra!).
Not to mention soccer (yes, I’m a “soccer mom” now, and I love it!), birthday parties for three children this weekend, and two festivals, one of which I have volunteered to help at, cleaning up after its potluck dinner. Cleaning is far from my forte but at least I’m helping…
When I come up for air after all this end of summer craziness (end of summer, sob, sniff, don’t remind me), I have a mile-long list of work projects: queries to write for articles, letters to agents to sell my food anthology, front of the book blurbs for food magazines, which have to be done “on spec,” meaning all written and perfected before submitting. I have the topics but just need the angles. And the time to write them.
And the web site, http://www.jenniferbrizzi.com, still needs a lot of perfecting, notably that maddening navigation bar. But in spite of its lack of perfection, as of this morning it has gotten 110 hits, only 100 of which are me constantly checking to see how any hits it has!
Maybe if I stopped using so many parentheses when I write, I’d shoot to success!
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 10:36 AM EDT | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Friday, August 12, 2005
Rejection sucks
Mood: irritated
Topic: food writing biz
I e-mailed three (3) panel proposals to the IACP (International Association of Culinary Professionals) for their conference in Seattle next spring. They e-mailed me back two (2) form rejections. I e-mailed them in hopes that they were still considering one…no dice…three rejections…no Seattle for me.
Bummer. My sweet husband’s telling me that someday the IACP will be begging me to do panels. That helps. I dream on…
“If eels only looked a little less like eels more people would want to eat them.”
–Clement Freud
“There is no love sincerer than the love of food.”
–George Bernard Shaw
“I really, really love eels.”
–Jennifer Brizzi
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 11:32 PM EDT | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Not chilly enough for chili?
Mood: hungry
Topic: Cooking
I know, I know, it’s too hot for chili, but I had some ground venison that was gifted to us by a guy with a new vegetarian girlfriend, and ground meat doesn’t keep long in the freezer.
Here a recipe for the chili I made yesterday. It was killer, zippy but not too hot, with a rich, complex flavor.
Venison Chili
Lean and flavorful venison is my favorite meat for chili, although sometimes I make it with ground turkey or no meat at all. My chili recipe has evolved a lot over the years, and the ingredients vary each time I make it. Sometimes I add beans, sometimes I don’t. And the dried chile assortment varies according to what I have on hand.
2 dried chipotle chilies
1 dried puya chile
1 dried chile de arbol
2 tablespoons canola oil (when I have it I prefer corn oil for this)
1 and 1/2 pounds ground venison
2 teaspoons coarse sea salt
Freshly ground pepper to taste
6 cloves garlic, chopped
1 large onion, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
1 fresh jalapeño, seeded and chopped
1 tablespoon salt-free chili powder (I use Penzey’s)
1/2 teaspoon Mexican oregano
1 teaspoon cumin
1 bay leaf
11 fresh plum tomatoes, coarsely chopped (I would normally use canned but my garden is currently overflowing with gorgeous plum tomatoes)
1 12-ounce can Labatt Blue beer (you can certainly use whatever brand you have hanging around)
1 can small red beans (I used the excellent Mi Casa brand), drained and rinsed
Fresh chopped cilantro for garnish (optional)
Bring a small saucepan of water to a boil, then remove from heat. Place dried chilies in it and set aside for half an hour or longer.
Meanwhile, heat the oil in a large heavy saucepan on medium heat, then brown the meat until it loses its pink color. Add the salt, pepper, garlic, onion, celery and fresh jalapeño. Cook, stirring occasionally, until onions are translucent, about 15 minutes.
Deseed and mince the soaked dried chilies. Add them to the pot, along with all the remaining ingredients except the beans. Bring to a vigorous simmer, then lower to the barest simmer and cook for one hour, stirring occasionally. If the chili gets too dry, you can add a little water. Add beans and heat until cooked through. I love to serve this with lots of cilantro on top but I didn’t have any on hand this time. Sour cream and/or grated cheddar or Monterey jack cheese would be lovely, too, if your tummy tolerates them.
With this intense chili, I served wedges of the following quick cornbread for dunking:
Corny Cornbread
You’ll notice that the first ingredient is bacon grease from that jar you keep in the fridge. You do have a jar in your fridge, don’t you? Even if you only have bacon once in a while, keep that fat to put a little dab in your greens, for flavoring the corn oil you fry chicken in, and for this cornbread. The fat makes the crust crispy and tasty. Okay, okay, substitute butter and it will be almost as good.
You will need a 10-inch cast iron skillet, and if you don’t have one, you must buy one, from a yard sale or my favorite kitchen supply store, Warren Kitchen & Cutlery.
I always thought corn bread had to include buttermilk, be sugarless, and have more corn meal than flour, but I finally hit upon this combo, and it’s now my standard recipe.
Normally I add two tablespoons of light brown sugar to the dry ingredients when I make this bread without the fresh corn, but with August’s supersweet corn, sugar isn’t needed.
3 tablespoons bacon grease
3/4 cup cornmeal (I order mine from Anson Mills in South Carolina)
1 cup flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup milk
1 egg
One ear fresh, local, in-season corn, boiled ten minutes, cooled, and the kernels cut off
Preheat oven to 425° F. Put the bacon grease in a 10-inch cast iron skillet and put it in the oven to melt while you’re mixing the rest of the ingredients.
In a medium mixing bowl, stir together the cornmeal, flour, baking powder and salt. Add the milk and egg, mix well, then fold in the corn kernels.
Pour the mixture into the greasy skillet and bake for about 25 minutes, or until golden on top and a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean. (If you use the light brown sugar instead of the corn it will cook quicker.)
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 11:09 AM EDT | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Updated: Wednesday, August 10, 2005 11:16 AM EDT
Thursday, August 4, 2005
Hail to the Chef!
Now Playing: A miserable occupation
In yesterday’s New York Times there is a heartbreaking story about Floridian Luis Diaz, who has been in jail since 1979 for a string of eight rapes that he didn’t commit.
Recent DNA evidence may finally free him, but noteworthy is that at his trial in 1979 there were many discrepancies between reality and how he was described by the rape victims. One example was that his family and his co-workers at the restaurant where he worked as a fry cook testified that “he reeked of grease and onions after working long shifts behind the grill.” The victims all denied the existence of that odor on the rapist.
Besides breaking my heart–Diaz left a wife and three children when he went to jail–the story reminded me of how I would offend myself after long shifts of working in kitchens. Especially if I fried anything, I would stink a most unappetizing smell, like rotten garlic sauteed in four-year-old cooking oil. Awful. It took a huge effort to scrub it out of my pores and hair at the end of the day, if I had any energy left. If I smelled like that every time I cooked a meal, I’d give up cooking. (Maybe.)
Chefs and cooks feeding hungry people in the summertime have a miserable existence. It’s a labor of love to stand over a hot stove for ten to twelve hours when humidity and heat are at their max, not to mention dealing with the foot pain, the sweating, and if you’re chubby as many cooks are, the horror of chafing in places you’d rather not be thinking about.
As we speak, thousands of chefs and cooks are toiling in hellholes to feed us. I couldn’t do it. I mean, I’ve spent many hours in hot kitchens, but now I have the option of grilling it all outdoors or ordering takeout when it’s too hot to cook.
In a couple weeks I’m doing a chef demo at the local county fair and will wear a particularly fine, soft, and very clean chef’s jacket. I will feel like I am an impostor pretending to be a chef, though, because my shift will be less than an hour, and I can go home and change into a tank top and shorts and sit in front of the air conditioner with a tall glass of iced tea or a beer.
Thank you, chefs everywhere, for sweating and chafing for us so that we might eat.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 9:55 AM EDT | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Updated: Thursday, August 4, 2005 10:07 AM EDT
Wednesday, August 3, 2005
I feel like I just jumped into the deep end of the pool
Mood: accident prone
Topic: food writing biz
Well, I’ve gone and done it.
I just e-mailed the link to my web site http://www.jenniferbrizzi.com to a large collection of my friends and family, racy first bit of “Her Feet” and all. Perhaps they will all disown me …
It’s rather scary, although presumably as my friends and family they will be kind. Likely they will all be too busy to bother with it.
Yikes.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 11:18 AM EDT | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Friday, July 22, 2005
Gigs
Topic: food writing biz
Sofia’s begging me to take her to the library, and how can a Mom refuse such a request? So this will be brief.
I’m going to be doing some chef demos at the huge Dutchess County Fair next month and then at the not-so-huge Sheep and Wool Festival in October. How exciting! I hope I have an audience.
And I’m going to write an article on the food of Afghanistan for FACES magazine.
The website, http://www.jenniferbrizzi.com , is getting presentable at last. There are still a couple kinks to work out, notably the nightmare of the navigation bar, but it’s getting there!
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 2:49 PM EDT | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
Brief kid-less bliss
Mood: happy
Now Playing: Good grub in Connecticut
Topic: Eating
After years of wanting nothing more than to be a Mom, it was delightful last weekend to have four meals without my two tiny tots while my sister Calico kindly watched them for me.
After dropping them off Rolando and I stopped at Lenny’s Indian Head in Branford, just east of New Haven, for a Shore Dinner that began with a pitcher of Bass Ale. Then came a cup of Rhode Island chowder, which I haven’t had since my eight years in that state. Rather than a tomato or milk-based broth, its base is a murky rich gray-brown clam broth. I don’t like clam chowders that taste like clam-flavored thick white sauce, and this was a real rustic, killer soup. With it came two sweet raw cherrystones on the half shell, something else I don’t think I’ve had since 1993 when I left Rhode Island.
Then came as its own course some fresh sweet butter and sugar corn, then a boiled lobster perched atop a huge platter of steamer clams. It took me about an hour to make my way through that and I savored every blissful minute of it. Then was a huge chunk of watermelon with a knife and fork and some needed coffee. All but the Bass was part of the Shore dinner and it was heavenly.
A few short hours later we were still stuffed but it was time for our reservation for the 8:30 seating at Le Petit Cafe, also in Branford. When this place opened it was affiliated with Jacques Pepin and was called a “bouchon lyonnais,” but now current chef/owner Roy Ip is French-inspired and very original, creative and talented. He offers two seatings of a prix fixe dinner at $39.50. Dinners out these days are so rare that I wanted to pick a great place. This was praised by Chowhound and eGullet and Zagat, and we weren’t disappointed.
Les amuses-bouche began our meal: intensely gingery and sweet pickled chunks of beet, an assortment of cumin- and garlic-flavored olives and my favorite: crusty bread fresh from the oven and a crock of sweet butter generously studded with black truffle.
Then I enjoyed a huge diver scallop wrapped in prosciutto with grapefruit sections and a cilantro sauce. Rolando had an exquisite house-made duck and pork pate studded with Grand Marnier-soaked cherries. He had a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon and me, a nice white Bordeaux.
Then came a great salad of organic mesclun topped with warm tangy French goat cheese, then the entrees. Rolando’s was the star, a rack of NZ lamb with Provencal crust, unbelievably good, and served with a gratin of potato and celery root. My wild Canadian halibut was just slightly dry but fresh, mild and fluffy, and the best part was that it hid a pile of exquisite sauteed slices of trumpet royale mushroom.
For dessert I dug into a tart passionfruit creme brulee and Rolando had a peach tart in puff pastry, both flawless. Chef Ip kindly stopped by our table to chat (I love it when chefs have time to do that) and told me all about the mushrooms so I could describe them in my column “Ravenous” this week.
After a night in Niantic and a Mystic morning, we capped off the adventure with luscious fried clam bellies from the Sea Swirl, recommended by the tipsy barkeep at John’s Irish Pub.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 11:58 AM EDT | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Wednesday, July 6, 2005
A Tragic Passing
Mood: sad
Topic: Cooking
My heart breaks as I write this. Last night a horrible thing happened to me. It was a tragedy that–if you notice that the topic above is “Cooking”–you may realize was a horrific event that affects only me, and is not the passing of a person or the burning down of anything.
In a fit of frustrated pique, angry at having to cook when tired, and in a messy kitchen that few people clean but me, I tossed my beloved ten-inch cast iron skillet onto the kitchen rug. When my outburst passed and I bent down to pick it up, I discovered that after twenty-five years of faithful service, used twice a day, my beautiful, perfectly seasoned cast iron favorite-cooking-pan-in-the-world was broken. The handle had come off, taking much of the side of the pan with it. You would think that something so strong and fine and well-seasoned would be more durable.
I must have cooked hundreds, nay thousands, of delicious things in that perfect specimen of panhood, and when I found that it was broken, I sobbed, feeling silly for doing so, but truly heartbroken that I will not ever cook with it again.
Like falling off a horse, today I will go to Warren Cutlery and buy another ten-inch cast iron pan, but I just know it won’t be the same.
Read my Zuke jokes column, here through Thursday, July 7, then in archives.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 11:31 AM EDT | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Updated: Wednesday, July 6, 2005 11:45 AM EDT
Friday, July 1, 2005
Words, Food & Me
Mood: suave
Now Playing: Born to be a food writer
Topic: food writing biz
The first word most babies utter when they begin to learn to speak is “Dada.” Mine was not “Dada” or even “Mama.” It was “hot.” I used to think it was because I was a hot ticket, but it’s really because hot is a cooking term, and my path to being a food obsessed, food-impassioned writer started early.
My second word was food related, too: “apple.” And when I grew a little older, to the age my own children are now, when kids eat about .005% of the food items that are offered to them, I was abnormally unpicky. I would eat everything. Although I wasn’t crazy about the texture of liver or okra, I would eat them if coerced, and I ate snails, kidneys and all the green vegetables my mother put before me.
Older still, I learned to write and would practice with my spaghetti on the tablecloth, writing my name in elegant script. It was official. I was a food writer.
In tenth grade I took a mini course on Japan, for which a paper was assigned on the topic of our choice. Although at that time I had not yet tasted it, you can guess what I chose to write about.
To this day, words and food are intertwined inseparably for me. When I dine alone I love to read while I eat, enjoying two of life’s greatest pleasures simultaneously, like having sex while listening to Ravel’s Bolero (actually I’d pick Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez for that).
If I’m eating something good and someone begins to talk about something bad, their recent bout of diarrhea, perhaps, or how the cafeteria stew yesterday resembled vomit, my appetite will completely dissolve in mid-bite, and I won’t be able to continue eating. For a minute, anyway.
In my life I’ve considered careers as an architect, artist, actor or teacher of English as a foreign language. I’ve been a nurse, a cook and a waitress. But I didn’t realize what I should have known all along, that from the very beginning I was destined to write about food.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 3:04 PM EDT | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Sunday, June 26, 2005
I’m so excited, I just can’t hide it, I’m about to lose control and I think I like it.
Mood: on fire
Now Playing: Sweet sweet summer
Topic: Cooking
I procured both fresh lard and tart cherries this weekend and I’m going to make a cherry pie. Is there anything better in the world? Well, yeah, my family and all.
I can almost taste that pie…it’s too hot today to bake but maybe tomorrow….Yummylicious. If you think I’m disproportionately excited it’s only because you have never tasted my cherry pie. You poor dear.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 2:57 PM EDT | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Monday, June 20, 2005
Prof dev
Mood: not sure
Now Playing: Whereupon Ms. Brizzi confesses her deep-seated urges to be famous, or at least to make a living
Topic: food writing biz
Last week I e-mailed off three proposals for panels for next spring’s convention of the International Association of Culinary Professionals in Seattle. For each one I would be the moderator with two panelists, because to be sole lecturer, you have to be a real, well-known food person, not the wanna-be I feel that I am some of the time.
One is about seafood of the Pacific Northwest, one about wild mushrooms ditto, and one called Write Like Bach, whereupon I would convince two of the country’s most eloquent food writers to sit on a panel with me and teach fledging food writers how to become great writers.
Most likely the IACP will not accept any of these proposals, and life will go on. Possible but much less likely is that they would say yes to all three and I’ll be busy at the conference, or best yet that they will say yes to one and I’ll make $500, get a free day of conference, get to see my old friend from second grade who lives in Seattle, my second cousin who is book editor of the Seattle Times and the Kaplans who were in Vietnam with us and have two boys adopted from there, one of whom is Sofia’s age. And I will increase my recognition and be on my way to…something….being a real food writer, recognized in my field, etc.
If it happens, I will have to speak in front of lots of people, something I have always been lousy at. It would be wonderful , though, and now it’s time to set the thought aside and go on to other things and in the beginning of August I will find out.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 9:27 AM EDT | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Sunday, May 22, 2005
Huh?
It has been hard to log onto Angelfire lately. I have been trying all night with no luck. Finally it’s working.
http://www.jenniferbrizzi.com is taking me far too long to perfect. Hours of work have resulted in a half-done site with lots of problems, the current stumper being image-loading.
“By nature and doctrines I am addicted to the habit of discovering choice places wherein to feed.”–William Sydney Porter (O. Henry), The Heart of the West, 1907)
“An onion can make people cry but there’s never been a vegetable that can make people laugh.” –Will Rogers
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 12:01 AM EDT | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Updated: Monday, May 23, 2005 2:09 PM EDT
Wednesday, May 4, 2005
Time Mgmt.
Mood: d’oh
If I could eliminate cooking and eating from my daily life, I would have unbelievable amounts of free time.
Just this morning, part of my all-too-brief kid-free work hours, I spent an inordinate amount of time preparing a shad for slow baking: rinsing, tail trimming, thin-slicing onions and clipping herbs to stuff inside it, wrapping it carefully in three pieces of foil, then having to do it over because I forgot the four strips of bacon that was supposed to be laid on top.
Preparing, eating and cleaning up after dinner each night takes me about three hours. That’s three hours that could be spent balancing my checkbook, scrubbing the shower , improving my mind by reading a classic book, or cleaning my room.
I try to blame my husband for expecting fresh meals from scratch every night, for not providing me with a dishwasher or helping with the dishes, but it’s really not his fault. It’s wholly mine. I love to cook. And even more than I love to cook, I love to eat (how can anyone like cooking but not eating?–I’ll have to ask the next skinny chef I meet–that’s a topic for another day).
Breakfast and lunch and a myriad of snacks, too, take time to prepare, consume and clean up after. It’s a good thing that I’m making cooking and eating my life’s work–it’s the only way to justify all the time I spend on it–otherwise it would be called gluttony or the squandering of time better spent doing more constructive things!
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 11:42 AM EDT | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Friday, April 22, 2005
Risky? Risque?
Mood: flirty
Now Playing: Naughty food
At the risk of this blog being found and overrun by aficionados of Internet porn, here is a list of words from my new Magnetic Poetry set, themed “Cooking,” that would not be out of place in a Magnetic Poetry set themed “Sex.” I think its creators were being a little naughty when they included a word like “wiener” with candy, toast and oyster.
Here, in no particular order, are the words that jumped out at me from the side of the refrigerator when I noticed a few tinglingly sexy ones:
love
crave
roast
plump
moist
linger
steam
tender
devour
nibble
smoke
raw
succulent
satisfy
hunger
tongue
wiener
come
cream
sweet
ripe
mouth
bone
bun
spice
swallow
Now many might say that I have my mind in the gutter to consider some of those sexy, when they are so clearly merely food words. Well then I say to them, consider these, too, which while they may not shout out “SEX!”, would not be out of place in an erotic tale:
toast
full
dough
boil
clam
oyster
sauce
honey
fruit
raw
delicious
eat
pinch
meat
I never knew that the exterior of my refrigerator could be as much fun as the inside. What hours of fun I’ll have late at night with those little magnets!
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 1:24 PM EDT | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Monday, April 18, 2005
Funny Ha Ha
Mood: silly
The conference was awesome. I had such a good time being around 699 other writers. It made me feel like not such a weirdo. Laughed my ass off and learned a lot of useful stuff. All the panelists said you have to have a website, and no, I didn’t finish mine in time but since I only handed my business card out to one other writer, I guess it’s okay.
In one panel, business writer Gwen Moran said of food writing that it’s not all chocolate and red wine, but actually “brains, bone marrow sauce and squid ink.”
I love it!
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 12:08 PM EDT | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Ay yi yi
Then all around from far away across the world he smelled good things to eat…
–Maurice Sendak, “Where the Wild Things Are” (HarperCollins, 1963)
“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” said Piglet at last, “What’s the first thing you say to yourself?”
“‘What’s for breakfast?’ said Pooh. ‘What do you say, Piglet?”
“I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” said Piglet.
Pooh nodded thoughtfully.
“It’s the same thing,” he said.
–A.A. Milne,”Christopher Robin Gives Pooh a Party (E.P. Dutton, 1926)
It’s all about the children, and lately it really has been. Too crazy ’round here to do anything but cook and mostly clean–apologies to my legions of fans who have surely bookmarked this page and turn eagerly to it each day before breakfast to see what clever bits of tripe I will bestow upon them. Sorry, fans.
Although I am crazed with getting my stinkin’ website ready for the ASJA conference Saturday, at least the party is over, so I can breathe a bit. Forty-seven people have actually left my house clean, thanks to a gloriously sunny, warm early April day and my extreme cleanings prior to it. I will never clean like that again.
Tonight I cooked a Spain-inspired fish stew, with a goodly-sized piece of the freshest cod, a chunkily diced Russet, gobs of saffron, Pinot Grigio and garlic, and splashes of onion, tomato, parsley and clam broth, all simmered to loveliness and thrown over oiled croutons made from the simplest rolls that had been sliced and toasted. Aaah.
The website http://www.jenniferbrizzi.com is proving quite difficult and time consuming. If there are any food-impassioned web gurus out there willing to help a website-starting virgin make her name known on the Internet, email me at jerosoma@yahoo.com. Tanks.
Enuf fer dis day…
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 11:27 PM EDT | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Getting there
Mood: cheeky
The web site is up and on its way, still needs a lot of work, but is encouragingly happening. Don’t look at it until it’s done, well, alright, peek if you must, but it has a ways to go. It’s very exciting, though, but too time consuming for a busy mom with weekly columns due and a major birthday party for one kid in a week and change and an extremely messy, filthy, cluttered house. Our house is tiny, and I mean teeny, and a zillion people are coming…Aaaagh.
Well, foodwise, I’m serving either dabo kolo or sambusas, two Ethiopian fried appetizers–one with a filling, fried chicken wings, pigs in blankets (can’t resist, and people do eat them), chips, dips, etc. asparagus frittata or egg squares, baked ziti, cold cuts with the fixin’s or a giant sub, green salad, bean salad, with the requisite beverages for the wine-swilling crowd that’s coming.
Beautiful day today, spring is finally here and purple crocuses are blooming all over my garden beds. I’m making that Brizzi household standard pasta tonight, with a sauce embellished with anchovy and flakes, a sauce I could make in my sleep, that my husband wants to have every night. But it’s simple and good.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 4:43 PM EST | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Updated: Wednesday, March 30, 2005 4:46 PM EST
Friday, March 25, 2005
I’m online this week
Mood: happy
This week’s column on a non-baker’s experiences with bread is online and in this week’s Woodstock Times. Although the Kingston Times and some of Ulster Pub’s other papers run it every week, it’s averaging about every two weeks for Woodstock, who already had a few food columnists before I came along. The WT is currently the only one of the five papers that puts it on the Web–I’ll have to see what I can do about that.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 9:39 AM EST | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Living Large
Mood: mischievious
I haven’t quoted anyone in a while, so here are a couple gems I just came across, from Oscar Wilde:
“Moderation is a fatal thing–nothing succeeds like excess.”
and
“We are all of us in the gutter.
But some of us are looking at the stars.”
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 1:37 PM EST | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Why Tripe Soup?
Mood: celebratory
The sweetbreads were crispy and tasty–I did them simply, a 15 minute poaching in water acidulated with lemon, then a dip in seasoned flour, then a searing and sautéing in buttter and olive oil, a squeeze of more lemon. I had never cooked them before and had only eaten them twice or thrice. They were great.
I promised a few entries ago to tell you why this blog is called “Tripe Soup.” Well, it began last year as an idea for a local newsletter about eating in the part of the Hudson Valley where I live. It was to have a logo similar to this one, that I drew late one night after a little wine and a lot of practice. Then I made it into this logo with the help of logobee.com.
I was going to distribute my newsletter, the first issue free, in local bookstores and food stores with a tiny black lace bagful of hot pink M & Ms. It was going to be mostly about local food. But after I put a lot of thought and work and planning and pretty much laid out the first issue, I realized that I can’t take my two tots to fancy restaurants or even into food stores where a dirty little paw squeezing the Stilton would be unwelcome.
So I decided to make it a website, with my irreverent, sometimes funny, always passionate comments on food and eating, designed not to teach cooking but to entertain those interested in eating whether they cook or not. Before it becomes a website, it’s having an incarnation as a blog about succulence, savoriness and enjoying life while eating, but in essence bits of worthless, sometimes offensive rubbish…
“Tripe” is defined as:
1. the entrails, generally; hence, the belly, generally used in the plural (obs)
2. part of the stomach of ruminating animals when dressed and prepared for food
3. anything worthless, offensive, etc.; rubbish; trash [Slang}
I call it Tripe Soup because it’s about eating what makes you feel good, what makes your eyes, ears, nose, tongue (taste and texture) happy, not what’s trendy, chic, or LITE. Like tripe, it may shock or disgust you. It isn’t sweet and bland but chewy and full of tang. My goal is to induce drooling, to make you hungry.
The subtitle of the original newsletter was “Not your Grandmother’s Newsletter,” although my focus is on the kind of food she cooked.
Let me know what you think of the logo. I’m always happy to get feedback. Here are some links to some of my “Ravenous” columns:
Hooked on Cookbooks
Lowcountry Highs
To All a Good Soup
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 12:01 AM EST | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Updated: Thursday, March 24, 2005 7:59 PM EST
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Need Tea
Mood: lazy
I’m sleepy, procrastinating work, doing everything I can not to spend the last few kid-free minutes I have this week (usually four and a half hours/week, if I’m lucky and the day care person doesn’t call in sick) actually writing the first draft of next week’s “Ravenous.”
It’s an exciting week, workwise. Got an iBook laptop Monday (thanks, sweetie), so I can work anywhere and anywhen, downstairs after the kids go to bed–if I have any energy left, that is–away from home, on vacation, in New York City. If I master its advanced operating system, how to get online and install Word, I’ll be good to go.
My website, http://www.jenniferbrizzi.com, is coming along–wait, don’t check it yet, it’s not ready. I’ve been plugging away at the content and layout, and eight versions of a potential logo arrived Monday. They look gorgeous; I picked one and sent back some comments, and the final version should be ready for the world soon. I’m very excited that I will finally have a way for editors to see my stuff easily, as well as anyone else who’d like to read it, too. There will be a link to Tripe Soup on it, as well as links to many of my columns, present and past. Lots of fun!
On the cooking front, I’m doing some sweetbreads this evening for the first time, as soon as I figure out how to make them crispy and tasty. Tomorrow is corned beef and cabbage day of course, with one of my biggest fans and best friends here to share it: Melissa. I haven’t seen her for months and she’s as nutty about food as I am. I’m making that buttery soda bread with caraway seeds, golden raisins and currants, too. Mmmmmm.
Back to work …
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 1:41 PM EST | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Updated: Saturday, March 19, 2005 8:26 AM EST
Wednesday, March 9, 2005
On Blogging & Blogging On
Mood: loud
I have looked briefly at a couple of other food-related blogs (for some reason most blog sites make my computer crash), and they seem to be mostly diaries of what was eaten, kind of like the food diary I used to keep when traveling. But instead of pasta con le sarde, it will be something like “Grabbed a bagel with butter and some coffee off the cart on 47th St. on my way to work. The bagel was soft, there was too much butter on it, and the coffee was bitter and old. Guess I should try to get to work earlier.”
But if that’s what food bloggers do (no offense meant to any food bloggers–I know they’re not all like that, by a long shot), maybe I should write about what I ate today, instead of giving you quotes from other writers like I usually do. I won’t mention breakfast–it wasn’t that exciting, nor was lunch’s beef vegetable soup from the freezer that I jazzed up with freshy sautéed garlic and crushed red pepper flakes. But the egg salad was exceptional, with a minced Sicilian anchovy and a cornichon, chopped Spanish olives and capers and scallion, dash of Cholula (Mexican hot sauce), dollops of Hellman’s and Bornier mustard, salt and pepper of course. Mmmm dreamy. And I don’t even like egg salad.
For dinner I’m slow braising lamb shanks and baby lima beans. Both were frozen before cooking so we’ll see how three and a half hours at 300º F does. Probably the limas will turn to mush, but a tasty mush it should be, with it’s red wine, marjoram, thyme, bay, smidgen of tomato paste, lots of garlic and a fine soffritto. I’ll let you know.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 3:10 PM EST | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Monday, March 7, 2005
Monday morning musings
Mood: caffeinated
Thanks to ghostrider from eGullet for stopping by. Having someone read an entry and comment on it is a real treat, especially a kindred spirit as concerns high living.
Marcella Hazan, who is well into her seventies, was feted in Italy last year for her lifetime achievements. According to Saveur mag, she was seen drinking some kind of noxious hard liquor and smoking. I really think worrying is worse for you than all that bad stuff you consume, although I worry *and* consume bad stuff, so I get the double whammy. Usually what I worry about is what people are going to think of me while I’m eating that whole plate of fries or puffing on that butt.
I’m now procrastinating the column that’s due this morning, and for which I have only notes so far, no first draft yet, and two very demanding small children running about. This week “Ravenous” is about my collection of 383 cookbooks, and should be fun to write. It’s an eclectic assortment; my favorites are ones like “Road Kill Cooking,” “Moose Mousse,” and “Fried Coffee and Jellied Bourbon.” For real.
Anyway, it should be online on Woodstock Times’ website by Thursday or Friday (www.ulsterpublishing.com), if any of my legions of fans wish to peruse it. Listen to me, one comment from a reader, and I’m acting like I hit the bigtime. Hubby’s says he’ll get me a laptop for my b-day tomorrow, so I’ll be able to write at night when the kiddies are asnooze, and get more done.
The sexy Jennifer Brizzi logo arrives next Monday, too. Can’t wait to see it.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 9:15 AM EST | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Saturday, March 5, 2005
Why am I here?
Now that I’m working on my third entry, it’s past time to consider the purpose of this blog. I’m not really into reading other people’s blogs so I don’t know what function they are supposed to serve. Is it a diary, a journal? No, too public. I guess it will be a combination of quotes I like (easy, I have tons of them, and can type them out quickly), plus very short musings on a variety of topics that will mostly be food-related.
In truth, it is a way to procrastinate dealing with the toppling mountains of clutter that surround me, the Queen of Clutter that is my mind, the sludge and dust and filth of my house and my body (I do shower daily, but neglect the upkeep and maintenance my forty-something body needs, like regular exercise, clean living, and nutritious low-fat eating).
Overwhelmed with too much housework and child care, and too many writing projects going on at once–weekly column, a variety of articles in a variety of stages of completion, and two novels–this blog is my little refuge where I will post tiny snippets of some sort of wisdom. I will probably not write every day, but will try to do it a few times a week. Soon I will tell you why this blog is called Tripe Soup, although you may well have already figured it out.
Sometimes I will be too lazy to think for myself, and will just give you a quote, like this one:
“Lettuce is like conversation: it must be fresh and crisp, and so sparkling that you scarcely notice the bitter in it.”
–Charles Dudley Warner
Arrivederci…
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 10:16 AM EST | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Updated: Saturday, March 5, 2005 10:26 AM EST
Thursday, March 3, 2005
Julia’s Long Life Secret
Mood: silly
A few years before Julia Child died, after a full and long life, she visited the Culinary Institute of America. “A nutritionally conscious CIA student” according to the school’s President, Tim Ryan, asked Ms. Child the secret of her long life.
“Red meat and gin!,” she said.
Way to go, Julia. I met her in April 2000 and she was so shrunken with age that she was only as tall as me (5’10”) but her handshake was firm and her smile warm.
I’m sure Julia enjoyed her red meat and gin in moderation, and perhaps the real secret of her long life was that she wasn’t afraid of a little red meat and gin once in a while.
Worry is the real killer, whether about the state of the world, or whether to have the boneless chicken breast or the rib eye, the juice or the gin. And that is the way Julia lived. And lived long.
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 10:59 AM EST | post your comment (1) | link to this post
Updated: Wednesday, March 30, 2005 11:53 PM EST
Tuesday, March 1, 2005
Welcome
Mood: cheeky
Now Playing: Introductory words of questionable wisdom
Greetings, earthlings! Happy to be bloggin’ along with the rest of the world, sharing short snippets on life with anyone who wanders along.
I leave you with a quote from the late James Beard:
“A gourmet who thinks of calories is like a tart who looks at her watch.”
See you soon!
Posted by Jennifer Brizzi at 2:56 PM EST | post your comment (0) | link to this post
Tripe Soup 2 
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