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Archives for January 2010

Brown Rice

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Making the perfect pot of rice is no easy task.  In my first few attempts, it boiled over, came out gummy, and stuck to the bottom: the trifecta of bad rice.  But with some practice, and a few google searches, I came to perfect my rice.

Rice is finicky, like a set of rabbit ears on an old television.  The more you handle the rice, the worse it turns out.  With rice, delicacy is the watchword.  Like those thin metal rods, you need to place the pot of rice in the right place, and then leave it alone, trusting it to work as it should.

In practice, this means …

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Sweet Potato “Pie” or Yamakopita

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When it’s not ripping and breaking, or tearing and fraying, phyllo dough can be quite a treat.

Phyllo dough is paper-thin sheets of raw, unleavened flour dough, most typically found in Mediterranean cuisine.  Indeed, the dough is most often associated with spanakopita and baklava – but little else.  Which is perhaps why one of the leading producers of the dough has a running contest involving phyllo.

Always a sucker for a good recipe contest, …

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Vanilla Eggnog Popovers

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As I’ve noted, popovers can be a fickle lot.  Sometimes they don’t pop.  Sometimes they explode.  And sometimes, they simply refuse to come out of their cups.

But when everything comes together, when the popovers pop and glide effortlessly out of their cups, and the warm dough heats your fingertips, the results can be stunning.  To give these popovers a winter touch, I used…

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Sun Dried Tomato Hummus

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Try as I might, I’m slow in the kitchen.  For me, prep times are not so much the letter of the law, as they are guidelines, or helpful recommendations.  A ten-minute prep time is, before I know it, the better part of a half-hour.  Where the prep time is an hour or more, I remember to set aside my morning or afternoon.

For that reason, I’m always looking for a quicker way of doing things.  A way to save time without necessarily cutting corners or sacrificing in taste or flavor.  But sometimes, the slow way is the only way.

The first time I made this hummus, I cooked the garbanzo beans for over an hour, before processing them.  And the hummus was fantastic!  The second time around, I decided to see if I couldn’t save myself 90 minutes of cooking.  I could not.  The uncooked garbanzo beans produced a hummus with a granular and fibrous taste.  It was not to be.  Sometimes, it seems, the slow way…

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