Spontaneous Summer Giveaway

Feeling like the sweltering heat of summer is getting you down? Our friends at Good Commons encourage you to get out of dodge and head to the great Northeast for their Farm to Table Green Mountain Getaway, August 12 – 15. Yes, we know it’s in a couple of days, but what better excuse to play hookie than a weekend of farm-fresh cuisine, local excursions, and special appearance and canning workshop by author and “real food” advocate ___________________.
Who is their special guest? Take a look at the itinerary, send your answer to info@goodcommons.com, and you may win a FREE slot for this incredible weekend. It’s all-inclusive, with round-trip transportation from NYC on their private bus, all meals, daily excursions, yoga classes, and more. Winner* will be chosen at random from eligible entries at midnight tonight so his/her great escape can be planned!
*Valid only for Farm to Table Weekend, no exchanges or cash value. Not valid with other offers.

GCpromo

Feeling like the sweltering heat of summer is getting you down? Our friends at Good Commons encourage you to get out of dodge and head to the great Northeast for their Farm to Table Green Mountain Getaway, August 12 – 15. Yes, we know it’s in a couple of days, but what better excuse to play hookie than a weekend of farm-fresh cuisine, local excursions, and special appearance and canning workshop by author and “real food” advocate ___________________.

One ES reader will win a FREE slot for this incredible weekend. To enter, just take a look at the itinerary, send an email to info@goodcommons.com and in the body of the email answer this (very easy) question: Who is their special guest? It’s all-inclusive, with round-trip transportation from NYC on their private bus, all meals, daily excursions, yoga classes, and more. Winner* will be chosen at random from eligible entries at midnight tonight so his/her great escape can be planned!

*Valid only for Farm to Table Weekend, no exchanges or cash value. Not valid with other offers.

What the Hangover Ordered

hungover pizza

Three bags of potato chips. Opened. Some stale. Some not salted enough. All next to me in bed. None of it curing my craving for pizza.

There was absolutely no way I could get dressed and leave the house for the second time that day. Not even to go downstairs to pay the delivery person.

>>>Mental Scan of Kitchen<<<
Day-old bread
Tomatoes
Cheese

While this may seem strange, I decided that cooking dinner was somehow less effort than buying it. I’m weird. I’m a food writer. What can I say.

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Uniformly Different, Uniformly Delicious

photo (7)

So JoeHoya totally stole my Part II thunder.

With my extreme abundance of tomatoes over the weekend, I made two go-to tomato recipes simultaneously: tomato sauce and gazpacho. Of course it was an obvious way to turn almost rotting tomatoes into something edible, as Joe Hoya pointed out.

And he’s right. Gazpacho is uniformly delicious but not uniformly similar in ingredients. In fact, tomatoes aren’t even a constant in some recipes.

As I rummaged through the tomatoes I noticed that a good half were yellow and the rest were a mix of red, purple, orange and green. I reserved the yellow for the gazpacho while I used the other colors for my maroon colored sauce.

Yellow Gazpacho

Roughly chop about 3 pounds of yellow tomatoes, non-rotting parts only. Immersion blend the following: yellow tomatoes, peeled, de-seeded and sliced cucumber, chopped Hungarian Stuffing Peppers (carries a bit of heat, way more flavorful than a green bell pepper and they are in light in color to match the yellow tomatoes), oil, white wine vinegar, salt and white pepper.

Cracked black pepper, to me, is one of the most attractive finishes to a dish. But for some reason I became really interested in preserving the pale yellow color of the cold soup. Cue the white pepper.

For color, however, I sliced in half sugar baby tomatoes. At least that is what I think that variety of tomato is called: they are slightly larger than sun golds, have a red exterior with white zig zag lines on the skin.

Also for some texture there are a few croutons, half floating on the surface. I simply cubed left over bread, tossed it with kosher salt, freshly cracked pepper and oil and placed it in a 350 oven for about 20 minutes.

The Charm of Sloppy Seconds

sloppy seconds

Waking up before 9am on Saturday has a few perks, most of them edible. Working at the farmers market, at least my gig there, isn’t strenuous. Eager shoppers, without cash, walk up to the Manager’s Table, pass me their debit card, I swipe while asking them to sign up for our newsletter and hand them the appropriate amount of tokens.

I tweet fruit observations and celebrity sightings, gobble up sun gold tomatoes and more or less banter with strangers about food for a few hours.

And then I get to take home the good stuff. Well, not exactly the good stuff. Really the free, almost rotting stuff. Ten pounds of bruised and battered tomatoes. Tomatoes slit apart and oozing juice and seeds. Tomatoes on just this side of rotten.

These seconds, as they’re dubbed at the market, need to be loved and loved quickly. I had less than 24 hours to make the most of out of them.

Part I

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A Consummated Love Affair: Eggs and Potato Chips

potato chip eggs

Without a doubt potato chips are my favorite snack food. Cheese (extremely sharp cheddar) is next and a combination of a plate of Herr’s Ripples with cheddar, spicy mustard and a pickle is my ultimate combo. With all this love, however, I’ve never incorporated chips into my cooking. (Though I  always wanted to try Herr’s Potato Chip Cookie.)

This was until I saw DC food writer Monica Bhide tweet about chips in an Indian-spiced egg dish. Holy Crap! How have I never thought of combining my two favorite things to eat. Finally! My love for salty crunch and creamy egg can be together at last! And because I now work from home full time I decided to try this out last week for lunch.

Egg Over Green Chili Potato Chips

Because I cooked this on the fly I didn’t have all of Monica’s set ingredients, which you can check out at her site. Here’s how I handled the situation.

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How Not to Fry an Egg

I know it’s almost cliche to bitch about the heat at this point. But whatever. It’s hot. And when it’s hot and we’ve been inside for 8 hours, moaning from a wedding-induced hangover, we start to play MythBusters.

In case you don’t have a boyfriend who thinks that decoding the Seinfeld double dipping hypothesis and the slippery banana peel joke are utterly important viewing, than you should try out MythBusters on a lazy weekend afternoon. You might be mildly entertained.

Anyway. It was hot. The heat index screamed 113 degrees in Durham, North Carolina. We decided the only proper way to appreciate the heat was to attempt to fry an egg outside. So we tried.

Our experiment lacked integrity from the start. It was later in the day, we fried the egg on a piece of tin foil that had not been left in the heat long enough and the egg might not have even been at room temperature. It became shady. But we did throw some butter in that aluminum foil nest.

We briefly looked at some promising stories of outside-fried eggs and thought we could make it work.

It didn’t. But that doesn’t mean we won’t try again. Or that you don’t have plenty of horror stories of your own to share.

If You Can’t Crack an Egg…

Get the Fuck Out of the Kitchen.

But before I get to the Ez Cracker

Just yesterday 80 commented to me what a useless device an electric can opener is. I agreed. Just because we can electronic-ize something, doesn’t mean we should. It’s so easy to use a manual can opener. An electric can opener is a waste of counter space. A waste of counter space plus a device that can only perform one task.

So you can imagine if I am that offended over a can opener you can only guess my utter disgust for this totally fucking useless device.

REALLY?! We need a plastic contraption to crack an egg? You can’t just hit it against your counter top? It’s not hard. Children do it all the time. In fact, it’s one of the first things to teach a child in the kitchen. Honestly I don’t even know how to keep going. I can’t think of anything else to say except if you need this plastic crap to crack an egg get the fuck out of the kitchen.

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