In the cold winter months, nothing beats a hearty molasses cookie. These cookies are comparable to ginger snaps, but are a little more crunchy, with a hint of molasses. I took the recipe …
Ginger
Grilled Pumpkin Salad
I’ve been feeling a little blue lately.
After making the blue cheese souffle, I wanted to find another recipe for the pungent cheese. With a crisp Fall day on hand, and several pumpkins beckoning, I decided to throw some pumpkin slices on the grill. I marinated the pumpkin slices with ginger, olive oil, salt, and pepper, and then tossed them on the grill. A few grill marks later, I combined the hot gourds with blue cheese and the salad regulars, for a real American salad.
Indeed, pumpkins are one of the continent’s oldest crops, having been first cultivated thousands of years ago by Native American tribes. During the colonial era, the tribes routinely prepared …
Pumpkin Pie with Pumpkin Seed Crust
Pumpkin isn’t just a scary face anymore.
Carving pumpkins seem to dominate the Fall season, their faces appearing on plastic buckets and billboards, their representatives occupying porch steps and window sills. When we think of pumpkin patches and Halloween, we have carving pumpkins in mind. And that’s sad. Pumpkins have become one of the few vegetables – if not the only one – that has been turned from a food into a decorative device to be discarded. Etching and cutting a design into a vegetable should not be intuitive.
Instead, we should look away from the beasts and monsters, and turn our sights towards sweeter pursuits. Pie pumpkins, unlike the carving pumpkins, are …
Pumpkin-Ginger Souffle
Nothing says Fall like the bright orange and reds that surround the season.
The glow of flickering candles set in hollowed-out pumpkins. Crimson leaves swept aside by an errant football. Classroom displays of construction-paper cornucopias and scissor-cut turkey feathers. A scarecrow, straw tumbling from his furrowed brow, as he patrols a lonely field. Thoughts of the harvest and a Thanksgiving meal.
What evokes Fall for you?…
Peach Italian Ice
Angelo Brocato’s Italian Ice Cream Parlor is an unassuming place, sandwiched between an Asian restaurant unsure about its own ethnicity, and a sports bar with saloon doors for an entrance. On one corner of the street sits a warehouse, with stacks of rolled carpet piled high in all directions; on the other corner rests Junque Antiques, the building itself looking several birthdays older than its wares.
Parking for Angelo Brocato’s is limited to an empty gravel-filled lot, or whatever spaces are available at 45-degree angles on the wide sidewalk on the river side of North Carrolton Avenue. The parlor itself occupies a one-story storefront in the mid-city neighborhood of New Orleans, a safe distance from the reverie of the French Quarter. Inside, the store displays the black-and-white portrait of its founder, and the wire-rimmed chairs, apothecary jars, and …