Category: Food

Almost ice cream

You do have an ice cream machine, don’t you? They actually work, and they’re not very expensive.

I’d be lying if I claimed that I can make a frozen dessert that’s just as good as ice cream but healthier. But it’s possible to make satisfactory substitutes, and with less work, too. Making real ice cream is a big job. You have to cook a custard, then chill it for hours, then freeze it. And the ingredients are heart-stoppers — egg yolks, cream, and sugar.

Bananas work remarkably well to make no-cream ice cream smoother and less icy. The ice cream in the photo is made from a banana, some dried dates, plain soybean milk, a touch of nutmeg, and a few drops of vanilla. Whiz it in the blender, then put the mixture in the ice cream machine.

An Omega-3 sustainability quandary

I recently came across an Omega-3 factoid — that mackerel contains almost twice as much Omega-3 as sardines. The truth is, I don’t really like either of them but see them as medicine. With mackerel, probably the richest source of Omega-3, there is a sustainability question.

There are many types of mackerel, caught in many different places. The smaller the mackerel, the lower it is in the food chain, making it less likely to contain contaminants. King Oscar says that its skinless and boneless mackerel is caught in the North Atlantic between Norway and the Faroe Islands. That sounds like a place with pretty clean water. But, according to the Marine Conservation Society, overfishing has caused a decline in the populations of North Atlantic mackerel.

Walnuts are an excellent source of Omega-3, and I already eat a lot of them. Another way to boost one’s intake of Omega-3 from walnuts is to use a toasted walnut oil as a seasoning. La Tourangelle’s roasted walnut oil isn’t all that expensive, as premium oils go, and a tablespoon of it contains 1.4 grams of Omega-3. It’s made from California walnuts. It’s very good in homemade dressings. You can get it from Amazon.

Eventually I’ll use all of the six cans of King Oscar mackerel that I bought. Other than that, I think I’ll stick with walnuts and walnut oil.


⬆︎ Pasta salad with walnuts, celery, onion, cherry tomatoes, chopped dried figs, and raisins, with a dressing of roasted walnut oil, honey, and a dash of vinegar.


⬆︎ The mackerel looks kind of gross, doesn’t it? The pesto (with lots of garlic) helps mask the (to me) unpleasant taste of the mackerel.

I found some celeriac!


Mashed celeriac

A few weeks ago, I wrote here about my curiosity about the root vegetable celeriac, which I had never had. I was thrilled to find some yesterday at the Whole Foods store in Winston-Salem. I bought two of them.

I understand that celeriac can be prepared in many ways, raw or cooked, including roasting or making it into a slaw with apples. For my first experiment with celeriac, I decided to treat it like mashed potatoes. I boiled the celeriac for about 25 minutues, then mashed it with butter, cream, and salt. It was delicious.

Though the taste obviously can be compared with celery, I don’t think I can compare the texture with any other vegetable. Some online recipes suggest puréeing the celeriac in a food processor, because it doesn’t mash as smoothly as potatoes. To me that would be a mistake, because I like its texture.

The history of celeriac is fascinating. It was familiar to the ancient Greeks, and it was mentioned by Homer. It became very popular throughout the Mediterranean and made its way deeper into Europe. It’s new to most Americans, including me. We might think of it as occupying the potato niche in Europe before Spaniards brought potatoes to Europe in the 16th Century. When I took my first bite of my mashed celeriac, it seemed strangely familiar and ancient, as though, if there is such a thing as reincarnation, I had eaten it in past lives.

I hope that celeriac will become better known in the U.S. after the recent film “The Taste of Things,” in which celeriac appears twice — first in the garden, and later in the kitchen. There is a celeriac recipe in my 1948 edition of a Scottish cookbook that was first published in 1925. It’s called “celery root” or just “celery” in that cookbook, as though celery root was better known in Scotland than the above-ground celery stalks and leaves. They are different plants, though of course they are relatives.

I was able to find some celeriac seeds (on eBay), and Brittany and Richard, from whom I buy vegetables each week, are going to try to grow some for me. The seeds are tiny. According to the last report I had, after three weeks in their greenhouse, the seeds still had not sprouted. I still have some hope. Brittany and Richard say that they don’t think they can grow celeriac profitably, because it takes a long time to mature. But they’re growing some partly as an experiment, and partly for me. If celeriac was easy to find hereabouts, it would always be on my grocery list.


In the bin at Whole Foods. It was between the parsnips and rutabagas at $2.99 a pound. The label identified it as organic and grown in Canada.

Cabbage rolls

Some of the most beautiful leaves in the garden are the outer leaves of cabbage. They’re usually wasted, though. Some are removed at the farm, some at the grocery store, and some at home. But if you can get them fresh enough, there are things you can do with them.

Last week when I picked up my weekly vegetable box from Brittany and Richard, I pre-arranged to get, this week, a cone cabbage that they would cut while I was there, outer leaves and all. Then I’d rush home and make cabbage rolls. This dish was in progress in the kitchen less than an hour after the cabbage was cut.

The stuffing is brown Basmati rice and crushed Brazil nuts, well seasoned. The sauce is a basic red sauce. I didn’t bother to even steam or boil the cabbage leaves before rolling them. They seemed tender enough, and I cut out the thickest part of the stem.

It’s a wonderful thing being able to get one’s vegetables fresh and organic from a farm only a couple of miles away. One of the things I realized today, as I took things out of the box and got them ready for the fridge, is that the growing of the vegetables is only part of the luxury. The other part is that the vegetables have already had their first wash, and they’re ready for the kitchen or the fridge. I also get to do a garden walk-through during my weekly pickups and even poke my head into the greenhouses.

As I mentioned last week, I’ve not completely quit gardening. This year I’ll grow tomatoes, cucumbers, and basil in my own garden.


The cabbage, fresh from the garden


I also got some beets today, with the beet greens in perfect condition. Click here for high resolution version.

Hazelnut chocolate bombs

Recently a friend gave me a pound of California hazelnuts. What to do with them? I hit upon making no-bake hazelnut chocolate bombs.

Whiz equal parts (by volume) hazelnuts and dates in a food processor. I used about a cup of each. Add cocoa, and, if you have them, some chocolate chips. I added enough Grandma’s molasses to make them hold together into bombs. As the mixture becomes sticky, it will form up into a big ball in the food processor. Some brandy would have been a nice addition, but I didn’t have any. I rolled the bombs in date sugar to make them less sticky. I’m storing the dough in the refrigerator and will roll them into balls as needed.

You could use any kind of nuts. They take no time at all to make. They’re very high calorie — about the same as ice cream, I’d guess — but they’re more nutritious than ice cream and even have a lot of fiber. And, in spite of all the calories, they’re a better form of carbs than cookie-cookies.

The first box of 2024 produce


Bok choi, snap peas, green onions, cone cabbage, lettuce, and broccolini

It’s only the 3rd of May, and I just picked up my first box of 2024 vegetables. Again this year, I’m outsourcing the gardening. A young couple who live about two miles away, who moved here from Chicago, are making a living from their little farm. This year they’ll have three seasons of community sourced agriculture boxes each week — spring, summer, and fall.

They are superb gardeners. Over the winter they added a second greenhouse (for starting their vegetables from seeds). They do organic, no-till gardening on remarkably little land. None of the space they have is wasted, with some room left over for blooming things that feed the birds and bees. They sell most of their produce at a high-end farmer’s market in Greensboro, which is open on Saturday mornings. I believe I’m their only local customer who picks up at the farm, which is a bit sad. Most rural people just don’t care about fresh vegetables anymore. Very few people garden, and based on what I see local people buying in the grocery store, their diets are terrible. As much as rural people complain about grocery prices, you’d think they’d get a clue.

I have a standing appointment for pickups on Fridays at 11. They pick my things early in the morning, wash it, and put it in their chiller. When I pick it up it’s fresh from their garden.

Again this year I’ll grow tomatoes and herbs (especially basil) in my own garden plot. But I’ll get everything else from Brittany and Richard.

The Taste of Things


Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel

I have some complaints about the plot of “The Taste of Things,” but the plot really isn’t the point. The point is the food and what happens in the kitchen and at the table. The amazingly beautiful food in this film makes me feel like a complete slob in the kitchen.

Did anyone really cook and eat like that in the 19th Century? Was anyone in the 19th Century really that far ahead of us in presentation? I tend to doubt it. But the point, I think, has to do with the deep roots of high cuisine, what we owe to the French, and the importance of having a garden just outside the kitchen door.

This film was released in U.S. theaters earlier this year. It’s now available for rent or purchase on Apple TV and Amazon Prime. I actually bought it rather than renting it. There are a great many things happening in the kitchen that move a little too fast to properly study. I’ll want to review the kitchen work. The film opens with Juliette Binoche in the garden harvesting celeriac. The kitchen work moved too fast for me to see whether the celeriac reappears in the kitchen, but, if it does, I’m very curious about celeriac.

Sooner or later you’re going to be asked whether you’ve seen this film. You want to be able to say yes.

A snapshot of Scottish cooking, 1925-1946


Newly rebound in cloth, with the old cover used as a label

I hope I am wrong, but I am reluctantly inclined to conclude that traditional Scottish cooking is almost completely lost, just as my native cuisine, Southern American cooking, also is almost completely lost. Though there are older people who remember it (both here and no doubt in Scotland), and though there are even a few living souls who can still cook that way (both here and probably in Scotland), few people do (both here and probably in Scotland). As for Southern American cooks, most have thrown in the towel and, in the name of cost, convenience, and saving time, even use ultraprocessed foods. Others, like me, clean it up to make it healthier — even better. I’m not by any means suggesting that good cooking is a lost art. In many ways, the state of the art has gotten much better (though by no means cheaper), thanks largely to the great cooking schools, to travel, and to the better sort of restaurants.

Still, one can’t revise a traditional cuisine without knowing what it used to be. My reasoning was that, if the 1943 edition of Irma Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking is a good reference for American cooking, then there might be a reference on Scottish cooking from the same period. I scoured eBay for old books. A book that is frequently mentioned in references on Scottish cuisine is from 1909, The Cookery Book of Lady Clark of Tillypronie. That book, though, seems to be both rare and expensive. I wonder, too, if it isn’t a reference that is too fancy, given that Virginia Woolf wrote about it in the Times Literary Supplement in 1909. I’m also much more interested in provincial cooking than in the cooking that was done in the big houses of lords and ladies.

I came across a couple of copies of a more humble, and much less expensive, reference: The Scottish Women’s Institutes Cookery Book, sixth edition, 1946. Though this book went through multiple editions after 1925 and clearly sold well, I suspect that few copies survive because the book was cheaply bound, with heavy staples and a paper cover. People probably just threw them away after they fell apart. The book was conceived and printed in Edinburgh. The gathering of recipes was about as honest as you can get. Members of the Scottish Women’s Institutes from all over the country were asked to send in recipes.

After I received my copy, I resolved to rebind it and try to preserve it. To have used it in its tattered condition would have caused further tattering. Preserving it meant removing the staples (which had gotten rusty), improvising with heavy sting to hold the pages together, and making a new cloth cover.

I have often said that the best soup I ever had in my life was a Scotch broth that I had in a small restaurant in Edinburgh. That was in 1985, on Princes Street, I believe, downhill from the castle. That soup probably was the most authentic Scottish cooking I’ve ever had. Though the barley is essential, I suspect that Scotch broth can’t really be made without bones. I remembered the Edinburgh soup as green but probably misremembered that the green came from peas, since the green in this recipe comes from leaves and leeks. A runner of beef, I believe, is a lean piece of steak from the shoulder. A Swede turnip is what Americans call a rutabaga.

This cookbook, as well as the eleven Waverley novels that I have read so far, strongly suggest that much of the Scottish pride in its cuisine relates to game. The treatment of vegetables, though, is barely short of cruel. I am very curious about a vegetable that appears to be still common in Scotland but which is hard to find in the U.S. That’s celeriac, which this book calls heart of celery or just celery. I’m still looking for some celeriac because I’ve never had any. But a friend who recently found some in the Asheville Whole Foods said that it’s smooth, like potatos, and reminded him more of apple and pine than celery. Sooner or later, I will find some celeriac.


The front cover was intact, but …


… I had to remove it to restore the binding.


Having removed the rusty staples, I improvised on the rebinding, using string.


Click here for high resolution version

Potatoes to the rescue


Barley biscuit, with potato in the dough

My quest for bread that is both truly good and truly healthy probably will go on for the rest of my life. Bread is probably my favorite food. I could live on San Francisco sourdough bread, Havarti cheese, wine, and strawberry preserves. Though I probably wouldn’t live for long.

A combination of barley flour and whole wheat flour (about four parts barley to one part wheat) makes a tasty biscuit or quick bread. Barley has a wonderful taste. But the bread is dry, with a mealy texture. Potatoes both moisten the bread and improve the texture.

Lately I’ve been cooking potatoes in advance and letting them chill before I use them. The chilling both improves the potato’s glycemic index and makes the potato a better food for the microbiome. Just mash the cooked potato into the bread dough.

⬆︎ Right side up on potassium

The daily requirement for potassium is shockingly high. Most people, it seems, are deficient in potassium. In fact, many people probably get more daily sodium than potassium. That would be “upside down on potassium,” which is not at all a healthy thing.

Low-sodium V8 juice is nice way to get some potassium insurance. It’s supplemented with potassium chloride, though the vegetable juices are naturally high in potassium. Per cup, it has 850mg of potassium, 140mg of sodium, and 45 calories. That’s a good deal, nutritionally. I also find that V8 juice helps me cut down on wine consumption, because V8 juice goes very nicely with meals.


Fried oysters — from the Chesapeake Bay

⬆︎ Trucked in and fried

Once or twice a year, I get an irresistible craving for fried oysters. Here in the American South, at least within easy trucking distance from the coast, the art of frying seafood is extremely well understood. Any town of any size will have a fried fish house.

I’m in North Carolina. North Carolina does produce some oysters, but most of our oysters here come from the Chesapeake Bay. Last year, the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia and Maryland had the biggest oyster harvest in 35 years:

“The Chesapeake oyster is still in the very early stages of a comeback after a tremendous amount of investment in reducing pollution to the Bay, years of diligent fishery management, and significant successful state and federal investment in oyster restoration. To keep oyster numbers growing, harvest increases must continue to be done slowly, incrementally, and cautiously, as VMRC staff recommends.”

I never appreciated just how vast the Chesapeake Bay is, and how much coastline it has, until I flew over the full length of it, north to south, on a flight from New York to Greensboro. Such flights normally would take a more westerly course over land. But on that particular day, a line of inland thunderstorms pushed air traffic east. It’s good to hear that the Chesapeake Bay — a classic commons — is making a comeback after years of abuse. We understand very well now that a commons must be regulated, or it will be abused and depleted.


Daffodil shoots

⬆︎ February. What a relief.

Everybody I know, no matter where they live, said that January was miserable. Now that February is here, things are looking up. The daffodils should be blooming here in a couple of weeks.

⬆︎ Asimov’s robot novels

The first of Isaac Asimov’s robot novels, The Caves of Steel, was first published in book form in 1954. I had wanted to read it as escape fiction, but I’m afraid it must now be read as historical fiction. The plot is so-so, and the anticipation of the future misses the mark. It’s really just a murder mystery set in the future. But the writing is good.

I bought both The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun (which is the second robot novel) in a hardback book club edition that I think was published around 1961.

⬆︎ The extended editions

I’m finding that I like the extended versions of The Lord of the Rings films better than the theater versions. The scenes that were cut from the theater versions clearly were cut to reduce the run time, not because the scenes that were cut were inferior. The restored scenes include a lot of beautiful dialogue straight from Tolkien and a lot of excellent character development.

The extended versions can be streamed from HBO Max.


From a neighbor’s game camera

⬆︎ There are now two white deer in these woods

The oldest white deer in the woods here is at least eight years old, because it was eight years ago that I first got a photograph of her. There have been rumors of a second white deer for quite some time. But only a week or so ago did a neighbor get proof of it on a game camera. There are two white deer in the same frame. One is smaller and may be a yearling.

White Girl, in my driveway, three days ago, shot from an upstairs window. It was odd, but just before White Girl was in the driveway, a red fox was standing in the same spot, then scampered into the woods. I asked a neighbor, who has lots of game cameras and who has given names to a lot of the wild critters, whether the deer and the fox are friends. “I think they just use the same trails,” he said.

Tomato pudding

I rarely make tomato pudding. But, when I do, I wonder why I don’t make it more often. It’s a comfort food.

Irma Rombauer’s recipe from the 1943 The Joy of Cooking is very basic. It’s canned tomatoes, bread crumbs tossed in melted butter, and brown sugar. The pudding goes into the oven for 25 minutes, tightly covered to keep it moist.

The pudding in the photo is dark, because I used dark bread and roasted tomatoes. The Joy of Cooking is a white-bread sort of cookbook, so its recipe calls for white bread crumbs.

I have never made bread pudding, but the tomato pudding made me think of what a fine winter comfort food bread pudding could be. Irma Rombauer offers multiple versions of bread pudding — bread pudding with meringue, caramel bread pudding, chocolate bread pudding, lemon bread pudding, pineapple bread pudding, bread pudding with spices and dates, apple bread pudding, and rhubarb bread pudding.

The bread pudding with spices and dates sounds pretty good. The recipe uses milk, sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, pineapple juice, chopped dates, nut meats, egg, and day old bread. It’s comforting just to read the recipe.