The Wednesday Chef

Month: September 2005

  • Martha Stewart Living’s Baked Stuffed Red Peppers

    This post could alternatively be titled How Not To Prepare A Recipe. Sitting at my desk yesterday, I was going through my mental inventory of the ingredients in my fridge that needed to be used up. I vaguely remembered some fresh thyme and leftover feta haunting my fridge, and decided on a recipe clipped from…

  • SHF #12 – Regina Schrambling’s Summer Fruit Tart

    My very first food-blogging community event! I'm excited to be participating. For this month's Sugar High Friday, Elise of Simple Recipes decided on the theme of Cooking Up Custard. As luck would have it, a few weeks ago the L.A. Times published an article on fruit tarts with a base of creme patissiere (pardon the…

  • Sonoko Sakai’s Soba-Tsuyu

    At last, success! I'm not giving up on the L.A. Times just yet. I should have known that a recipe recommended by Russ Parsons would work. From the now out-of-print The Poetical Pursuit of Food by Sonoko Sakai (Kondo) comes this deceptively simple and utterly delicious meal of chewy, slippery soba noodles with a flavorful,…

  • The Communist Vegetable Collective

    Since I so often mention my CSA basket, I thought that I might also dedicate a post to it. Community Supported Agriculture is a program that has city folk support a farmer by buying shares of his harvest in advance, and thereby giving him the money he (or she!) needs to tend the farm, buy…

  • Regina Schrambling’s Zucchini-Eggplant-Pepper Polpettine

    This morning, I'm feeling dejected. Yet another L.A. Times recipe that kind of stank. It had so much promise! Delectable vegetables, freshly grated cheese, crispy breadcrumbs to bind it all together before a toasty roll in hot oil. What came out, though, were odd little balls that were too garlicky (I promise, there is such…

  • From a Venetian Fish Market

    My mother was in Venice this past weekend. On her walks around the city, she came across this sign at a fish market. Most likely dating back to the 18th century, it stipulates the minimum length allowed for sale, in centimeters, for each type of fish. Then the sign lists the fish in Venetian dialect.…

  • The Barefoot Contessa’s Plum Tatin

        This upside-down cake, from Barefoot in Paris, was not a success, but I only partially blame the recipe. As some of you might know from The Food Network or her best-selling cookbooks, Ina Garten started a catering shop called Barefoot Contessa in the Hamptons 20 years ago. A few years back, she got…

  • Everyday Food’s Roasted Tomato Sauce

      With an abundance of tomatoes at various stages of ripeness languishing on my countertops, and not enough hours in the day to just slice and eat them sprinkled with olive oil and salt, I was getting desperate. Luckily, the last time I was in Boston, I pilfered a recipe for a pasta sauce made…

  • Dorte Lambert’s Blueberry Browned-Butter Tart

    After complaining a few posts ago about the complicated recipes involving blueberries in a recent L.A. Times article, I felt badly about dismissing the recipes. After all, isn't that what this blog is supposed to be about? Trying new things, scouting out ingredients, figuring out whether you should clip and save a recipe forever, or…

  • Alton Brown’s Steel Cut Oatmeal

    Months ago, I bought a can of pinhead oatmeal. Pinhead oats are the Scottish name for steel-cut oats, which come from Ireland. I was going through a hot cereal phase during what seemed like an everlasting winter and had gotten sick of hot oat bran cereal (although with Wyman’s frozen wild blueberries and a splash…