Ham Sandwich Indicted!

Thanks to a tip from fellow food writer and friend, Libby from  Cooks Like She Talks , Shawnie (of Manges! Mangi! ) and I were invited to a cheese tasting hosted by NYC's famous Murray's Cheese Shop. Anyone who spends any time with us knows Shawnie and I are suckers for a good creamy brie or a pungent, tangy blue -- and have driven 13 hours one way for a cheesy experience (see our road trip to  Rhode Island  last summer). A quick trek across town to meet the Murray's team and savor their wares was a no-brainer.   Murray's , if you're not familiar, is New York City's oldest cheese shop, founded by Murray Greenberg in 1940.  Over the years, Murray's developed a reputation as a premier cheesemonger, featuring a rotation of over 300 cheeses and their very own aging caves below their main store in Greenwich Village.  More recently, they have been building a partnership with regional grocery stores to share their love of cheese with the whole nation, s...

Making salsa has become a summer ritual for me--it's a perfect way to preserve those delicious tomatoes that are piling up at farmer's markets, and the flavor combinations are incredibly flexible and open to interpretation. Our hot central Ohio summer has provided us with great peppers as well, and there's really not a better way to make use of them. This year, as I am living without a functioning kitchen, my salsa making happened during the last of a series of canning classes I taught at Oakland Nursery.  Over a dozen folks came out to chop, dice, and put up a dozens of jars of salsa and tomato jam.  Twenty pounds of tomatoes later, everyone went home with a couple of jars of delicious tomato products.  Just for fun, we also did a heirloom tomato taste test, taking advantage of huge variety of colors, flavors and textures available. Over the years, I've tried and tweaked several salsa recipes, but find myself using one from Mary Anne Dragan's Well ...

Mention Pittsburgh and food, and chances are someone will bring up Primani Brother's sandwiches or Iron City Beer (oh, and maybe you're familiar with Heinz' products).  And while those are Pittsburgh icons in their own right, there's more culinary action going on in The Steel City than just giant sandwiches, bottles of IC, and ketchup.  One of the best spots in town to get a true sampling of Pittsburgh food culture is along the northern side of the city on the Allegheny River, in a warehouse filled district known as The Strip. Conveniently located on the Allegheny River, The Strip became an industrial hotbed in the 1800s, as iron, steel, glass, and aluminum mills sprang up on the shoreline. By the turn of the century, produce wholesalers began moving into the area, with auction houses and warehouses flooding the area.  Fast forward past an actual flood, the decline of railways, and the proliferation of grocery stores, and the produce merchants in the area dwindl...

About two weeks ago, my partner-in-crime and I purchased and moved into a our first home...a giant step in relationship building and home ownership.  Our Craftsman-style bungalow was built in 1920 and it's--lots of natural light, a huge yard that next year will hopefully be full of gardens and chickens, a huge front porch, and a cramped, awkward, ugly kitchen. As the kitchen is probably the one place in the house where the P.I.C. and I spend the bulk of our time, we realized that the only option was a remodel, and quickly.  Walls start coming down in a week, and a new stove and hood are waiting for us in the garage.  It's very exciting and we're looking forward to having a more functional and attractive place to work, hang out, and entertain. In the meantime, I've been testing out the old-new kitchen with a few projects as time has permitted...peach cobbler, stuff on the grill, lots of salads.  I've found that it's tricky-but not impossible-adjusting to ...

Pack a picnic! Wear white! Feast with Friends!   Fête en Blanc  2012 is set for Friday, August 10 at 7pm, somewhere in Columbus. What is it, you ask? Well,  Fête en Blanc  is a semi-underground, outdoor picnic for which guests bring their own picnic dinners, tables, chairs, and white garb to a location that is not disclosed until a few hours before the event.  It's been a French summer tradition for the last twenty or so years and is now an international phenomenon called D î ner en Blanc . Last year was a huge success...even with a day full of rain and some muddy ground.  Two hundred people showed up in white outfits and brought amazing food and drink, feasted by candlelight, then danced to the retro-sounds of local band The Randys.   This year's event is shaping up to be even bigger and better! For more information, check out the Fete website, here .  You can order tickets through the website, or at the eventbrite page....

Drinking vinegars, or shrubs, are all the rage these days. Shrubs are fruit infused vingegars sweetened with sugar, and they are delicious mixed with some soda water or any given liquor. Shrubs have been around on the fancy-cocktail circuit for a while (I had a shrub cocktail at Nopa in San Franciso in 2009, and they're making a splash at Andy Ricker's Thai street food mecca  Pok Pok in Portland, Oregon.  His "Pok Pok Som Drinking Vinegars" are so popular that he's producing them for sale outside of his restaurant, and they're now available at Weiland's in Clintonville.  On the local blog scene, last week the lovely Rachel Tayse chronicled her creation of a rhubarb shrub on her blog Hounds in the Kitchen .  You should check it out. Over at the Ham Sandwich HQ, I had a dozen pounds of strawberries, courtesy of a seriously focused hour of picking at Schacht Family Farms last Saturday.   My freezer is not big enough for twelve pounds of frozen str...

Want to learn a valuable life skill to survive when the zombies finally come?  Join me for a series of canning classes at Oakland Nursery this summer...I'll be teaching how to make jam in June, pickles in July, and salsa and tomato sauce in August.  Classes are $25 each, or all three for $65...it's a bargain! Plus, I'll be sharing some other tips on preserving your summer fruits and veggies. All the info can be found HERE .  I can promise delicious treats, a quality educational experience, and prize giveaways courtesy of everyone's favorite garden center: Oakland Nursery!  See you there!   

On a quest to find an easy, fast dessert to bring to a friend's house for dinner last week, the internet gods heard my plea and sent a newsletter from King Arthur Flour into my inbox.  Contained therein was the exact recipe I wanted: rich, chocolaty cookies with whopping total of six ingredients.  Consisting solely of egg whites, cocoa powder, powdered sugar, vanilla, and salt, they were like macrons that decided to take a few weeks off from fancy-land to kick back in a hammock, drink painkillers, and not bother with makeup. They've got a crispy exterior that gives way to a melty-soft middle--similar to real macrons, but without the airiness, since the egg whites are not whipped first. The original recipe is here ; below I've listed my modifications.  I made them smaller than suggested, as they are pretty rich, and a few of them go along way to taming any chocolate/sweet tooth you may have.   I think sandwiching two of them together with s...

Ramp season is rapidly fading, so last weekend I stocked up on a bunch while I had the chance.  Since I still had some pickled from last year, I decided to try something a little different.  Inspired by the almighty internet, I tried my hand at making a ramp confit. To confit something is to cook an ingredient in fat, then store it in that same fat. Most typically, meats are confited--duck or goose confit is fairly common, and while it sounds fancy, it's essentially duck pieces slowly cooked in rendered duck fat then submerged and stored in the cooking fat.  It is an ancient means of preservation, as the fat keeps out air and bacteria, and was used (back in the day) to store food without refrigeration.  Vegetables can also be preserved via confit, and there are recipes out there using mushrooms, onions and garlic.  With ramps being part of the same family as onions and garlic, it made sense to give it a go and try to hang on to ramp season a little whil...

It's been a crazy few weeks at Ham Sandwich HQ.  A murderer got his just desserts (don't kill people, kids, it's not cool...and you'll go to prison), the Ham Sandwich celebrated another year on the planet ( Ad Hoc at Home AND The French Laundry  cookbooks? swoon ), and triathlon training started. Along with that last little project comes a revamping of some eating habits, which is good, I suppose, but unfortunate since I've been in a baking mood for a while. (I'm looking at you, butter-loaded recipes by Ree Drummond and sweet dough recipes in April's Bon Appetit... ) Week 1 of training started with this dish for dinner (and several lunches): polenta cakes with black bean and corn salsa (two times the corn!) and a shrimp and mango ceviche, courtesy of the talented and charming BF.  Polenta, essentially coarse grain cornmeal, is easy to cook with and pairs wonderfully with a million different things.  You can cook it and eat it right away, spooned o...

Mushrooms are one of my all time favorite fungus. And Brie is one of my all time favorite cheeses.  So it made total sense that I try Ree Drummond's Brie Stuffed Mushrooms from her new cookbook, The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Food From My Frontier .  Unsurprisingly, it's a delicious combination, tied together with a "gremolata" of parsley, garlic, and green onions (and a splash of white wine).   The brie has to go somewhere, so you remove the stems from the mushroom caps. You could throw them away, or you could chop them up and add them to the parsley/onion mixture....which is what I did. Why let those delicious bits go to waste? To assemble, you just stuff pieces of brie in the caps, and sprinkle the sautéed parsley mix over it all. Baked in an oven for 15 minutes, the cheese gets melty, the garlic roasts, and the dish makes your kitchen smell like complete decadence. They were earthy and cheesy, and the brightness of the parsley and onions kept them fr...

After a day of dealing with the aftermath of man's depravity, it's deeply gratifying to come home and see this happening on my porch: Lettuce sprouts! Hooray for growing things!

If you're a woman who likes to cook, chances are you've heard of Ree Drummond--a city girl who meets and marries a cattle rancher in Oklahoma, with home-on-the-range adventures ensuing.  She cooks, bakes, home-schools her children and writes about all of it. I've only made one other Pioneer Woman recipe--her buttery, decadent cinnamon rolls--and found this to be a good opportunity to further explore her cooking. For our first foray into Ree Drummond's new cookbook, The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Food From My Frontier , my friend and fellow food blogger Shawnie Kelley (of  Manges! Mangi! ) decided to dive in head first with a meal of three dishes and a cocktail.The theme for dinner number one: recipes with alcohol in them. To start, we whipped up a batch of frozen Mango Margaritas, pictured above. As far as frozen cocktails go, these were pretty good...but then, it's hard to mess up tequila and fruit.  They're strong...1.5 cups each of  tequila and triple sec, and...

That's a really terrible picture, but hopefully the intoxicating deliciousness of this cake will make up for my lack of food photography skills. (I was working on a deadline, people wanted to eat it.) Just in time for St. Patrick's Day, here's a chocolaty, boozy, cake that will do you right by St. Patrick, Leprechauns, and the IRA. (Just kidding, bomb jokes are not funny. But seriously, this cake will blow you away. Ok, I'm done. Seriously.)  I made this for my friend's birthday last week...as it seems we've developed a bit of a pattern of baked goods-as-gifts. (Last year, it was these peanut butter and chocolate cupcakes .)  The cake was still warm when I applied the glaze, so it didn't quite stay on as well as I would have liked.  Thankfully, it could be ladled up off the plate. It's a riff on this cake that I wrote about last year....and I think it's an excellent improvement.  The Guinness gives it a rich depth of flavor, and the B...