Crazy about Cardamom

I tend to get crushes on certain recipes, falling in love with particular flavor combinations and cooking them over and over. My children used to greet new dishes with "This is good, Mom, but don't go crazy with it." Translation: "We don't want to eat it 3 or 4 times a week for the next couple months."

Sometimes the dishes igniting my infatuation are elaborate; other times, quite simple. This fennel treatment falls firmly into the latter category. It comes from Tamasin Day-Lewis's marvelous "The Art of the Tart." Intended to be swathed in creme fraiche and Taleggio cheese and baked into a tart, these fennel slices taste terrific as a side dish on their own.
And, a note to my grown and living-on-their-own children: I've been serving this only once a week.
Well, twice at the most. It's just so easy and so crazy-good.

Sauteed Fennel with Cardamom
3-4 bulbs fennel
2 Tb. butter
4 Tb. each olive oil, white wine and water
The crushed seeds of 8 cardamom pods

Remove the tough outer layers of the fennel (saving some of the fronds), then quarter the bulbs and slice thickly. Put the fennel into a heavy-bottomed skillet with the butter, olive oil, wine, water and cardamom seeds.
Bring to bubbling, reduce to simmering, cover with a lid, and cook gently until the fennel is no longer resistant even at the core, about 10-15 minutes. Remove it with a slotted spoon, reserve, and bubble the juices until stickily reduced and syrupy.
Pour the juices over the fennel and sprinkle with some of the chopped, feathery fronds.

On My Coffee Table

I usually don't play the meme game, but I couldn't resist this one from the Gorgeous Redhead at Gorgeous Things. Gorgeous Things is a sewing blog -- elegant, near-couture-level plumage. Those who know me well would be astonished that I hang out there, seeing as I haven't threaded a needle since The Horror that was Home Ec Class. How did I even find her blog?
I fell in love with her posts at Project Rungay, where her avatar shows her ear lobe to ear lobe with my boyfriend, Tim Gunn. (Does Tim know he's my boyfriend? No, but I plan to enlighten him soon. I'm confident he'll be thrilled.)

So: the rules:
1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

I'd been reading "Don't Try This at Home: Culinary Catastrophes from the World's Greatest Chefs" edited by Kimberly Witherspoon and Andrew Friedman. For a brief moment I considered cheating on the page # here--just a few digits lower would have put me into a Tamasin essay, but I'll do the right thing.
From "Hope for Snow," by Seattle chef and restaurateur Tom Douglas.

After the anger toward my pregnant wife subsided for "making it snow," I had a lemons-into-lemonade moment. Saigon Restaurant in the Pike Place Market, one of my favorite little holes in the wall, makes a delicious bowl of pork wonton soup. This must have been my inspiration, because somewhere during the first hour of service it occurred to me to make a lobster sausage with raw lobster meat and to fill wonton wrappers -- which we happened to have a case of in the refrigerator.

A nice little essay. But if you buy the book, DO NOT MISS Tamasin's chapter: an account of cooking a pheasant dinner in her Cambridge dormitory room. With a brace of pheasants that had gone hideously, maggotty bad.

Tagging:
Eric
Kevin
Sonia
Henry
Carol

4 Questions 4 Tamasin Day-Lewis

At the beginning of February I wrote about Tamasin Day-Lewis's wonderful book, "Where Shall We Go for Dinner?" And now I'm eagerly awaiting an even newer work: a big fat compendium of her recipes -- 1,000 of them -- titled "All You Can Eat," due in May. To complete my personal Tamasin triathlon, she recently agreed to answer four questions. I could have asked her a thousand.

1. CE: Last year, I had a wonderful biking trip in Puglia including a delicious multi-course meal at the home of a man active in the Slow Food movement.

I know from "Where Shall We Go for Dinner?" that most of your culinary experiences in the region weren't nearly as happy. Was that one of your worst food trips?

TDL: No, the trip to Puglia was hellishly . . . more »

A Valentine for Food-lovers

I've collected Tamasin Day-Lewis's books ever since 1983 when I found "The Englishwoman's Kitchen" -- a slim little volume filled with extremely non-glitzy photographs of decidedly eclectic cooking spaces. I particularly love "The Art of the Tart" and "Tarts with Tops On" but treasure all her books -- not only for their splendid recipes but also for her impassioned and eloquent writing style. And then I got my hands on her latest.

Every once in a while I start to read a book and quickly realize it's a soup-for-dinner situation. Not because I discover a great soup recipe -- soup-for-dinner books usually aren't even cookbooks -- but because I am so engrossed in the reading that I abandon all possible household chores. Laundry remains unfolded, bills unpaid and the simplest possible dinner gets served. ("There has to be a container of soup somewhere in this freezer.")
"A Food Romance" chronicles the adventures of Day-Lewis and her American boyfriend as they pursue great food from Somerset to San Francisco, Puglia to the Pyrenees. She writes of her detemination not to let the tourist throngs spoil her time in Venice:

one has to consciously ignore and not be annoyed by the crowds as thick as they are down Oxford Street; likewise by the gawping and clicking, the bumping and jostling, the fact that even the hidden corners, the back-street restaurants, are full of people just like us also trying to avoid people just like us.

and of curing jetlag with fried chicken at Blue Ribbon on New York's Sullivan Street

maize-coloured parcels of insanely crisp, hot, spicy, battered chicken with buttery mash, collard greens and the infamous bowl of runny honey to dip your chicken into. Strange, but it's just the thing to order hot off the plane from England when the time clock is playing havoc and you need pots of comfort food and sleep.

She writes of brunch with Julia Roberts and school holidays with her brother Daniel (yes, that Daniel Day-Lewis), of her father, poet-laureate Cecil Day-Lewis and his great friend Kingsley Amis, of famous chefs and noted restaurateurs. But she also writes of people whose names you wouldn't recognize-- like Lidia, who had been making agnolotti for nearly 50 years for a tiny restaurant in the village of Valdivilla or Guiseppe del Console who makes an intensely fruity olive oil with the "aroma of artichoke and bitter almonds and olive leaves" in Corato, Puglia.
For a year, she traveled and ate and cooked and questioned and reflected and then she wrote about it all. I loved every page. Consider giving it as a Valentine's Day gift -- with love from you to you.