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Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Parmigiano Reggiano Night & Giveaway!

Parmigiano Reggiano display at Eataly, NYC  Last year I wrote about my  visit to a Parmigiano cheese maker and about  Parmigiano Reggiano Night . This year,  Parmigiano Reggiano Night  is happening again. I’ve written something about the king of cheeses (and the pretenders to the crown), over at Culture  (the best cheese magazine around). Please take a look!  As you may recall, the idea of the global dinner party is is to pick some recipes, invite your friends over, cook, eat, and then share photos of your feast if you're so inclined. In the past there have been some very avant garde recipes made available, such as a broth made from the rind of the cheese, and risotto cacao e pepe , but you can make whatever you like as long as it includes Parmigiano Reggiano. There's a video about it from last year when it was celebrated at Eataly in NYC. Parmigiano Reggiano is a cheese I fear sometimes gets taken for granted. When I was at Eataly in New York last week I saw...
Friday, September 05, 2014

Zucchini Noodles Recipe

My love of pasta is no secret, but I’m cutting back. An  article in the New York Times  covering the latest research about the benefit of low carbohydrate diets has me rethinking my noodle consumption. I won’t give them up completely but now and again I can see trying something different. Something like zucchini noodles.  For a long time I’ve wanted one of those spiralizer type tools. But they are rather expensive and I just wasn’t sure how much use I’d get out of them. There is actually an easy way to make “noodles” out of zucchini or other vegetables using a box grater. You just lay the grater on its side like a mandoline ! But I’ve just recently tried out the Microplane spiral cutter and it’s an even better option. At $14.95 it’s a lot less expensive than some of the other tools and takes up very little space. It also has two sizes so you can shred larger or smaller vegetables.  The downside to using this gadget is that it takes some time to get used to it, and to figure...
Tuesday, September 02, 2014

Peameal Bacon of Toronto

On my first trip to a city I always try to experience the things that the place is famous for, especially the food. Recently I was in Toronto which is a very diverse city with all kinds of food, but the peameal bacon sandwich is one of its most iconic specialties.  Toronto was once known as Hogtown, thanks in part to the vast stockyards where in the mid to late 1800’s cured pork products like bacon were sent to the United Kingdom, where there was a shortage at the time. In 1900 over half a million pigs were processed for export in Toronto.  So what is peameal bacon exactly? It’s what we call “Canadian bacon” in the US. It’s made from pork loin, rather than belly, so it’s much leaner than typical bacon. It’s brined and cured, not smoked. It was originally rolled in ground dried yellow peas to help preserve it, but cornmeal became much more widely available in the 1900’s and also preserved the meat better.  Peameal bacon, also sometimes called back bacon, is juicy and sa...