Olive oil decoder ring
My kitchen prayer have been answered today…I’ve been waiting for someone to write about selecting olive oil in precisely this way. I didn’t discover this without being encouraged toward Samin Nosrat’s blog by a fortuitous email from Tasting Table today- thanks to them!
A firm reminder of my English heritage- this is above my desk for inspiration on the difficult days.
A bit of brightness in winter
My first day running the shop at Marlow & Sons, the outgoing store manager (Tom Mylan) told me that all the produce we ordered should be local save for the acceptable cheats. I asked for clarification and he responded with a look of suspicion— ‘citrus of course’.
Of course.
Now that I live in the upper left hand corner of the country citrus is even less of a cheat because my sister who never left California has a prolific Meyer Lemon tree in her yard.
Every Christmas I head north with a bounty of meyer lemons. This year’s have been tossed with some satsumas and pieces of beach wood that, if arranged carefully, perfectly resemble a weathered duck.
Two of my favorite things to make with these lemons are Meyer Lemon Budino, and a classic Lemon Curd.
Four generations of happy cows
Another installment from my Cheese by Hand (2006) essays
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“Where else could you go and find 1500 women getting along together?”
John Fiscalini, owner Fiscalini Farm
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There is nothing like capping off ten days in the National Parks of the Southwestern United States with a night at the Tropicana in Las Vegas. The primary reason for this travel decision was money; not money at the tables rather money to be saved by spending a mere $45 for a hotel room. This was the cheapest place we ever stayed if you don’t count the nights we camped or stayed with friends and family.
If Las Vegas was the brutal re-entry into our commercial, consumer culture then the drive through the mountains into Los Angeles was a grim reminder of one of the costs of that culture- smog so thick that we couldn’t see what we were driving into. We tooled around cheese counters in L.A. before plowing north to Modesto, California for our visit with Fiscalini Farm. I have driven the boring stretch of Interstate 5 between Northern and Southern California many times. This time was one of the worst. It was a scorcher, there was traffic and we were coming down off our mini-vacation.
My apprehension about our visit to Fiscalini Farm was growing. Like many others drawn to the artisan cheese movement, I was in love with the romance of the industry, the bucolic imagery, and the heroic stories of back-to-landers righting the wrongs of industrial agriculture. I had never visited Fiscalini but I knew that they were milking 1600 Holstein cows and that those animals lived in confinement- not exactly the picture I had in my mind of an artisan-cheese creamery.
