Posts by Adam Zolkover

Fowl is Fair

   Adam Zolkover

The residents of the McNeil Avian Center at the Philadelphia Zoo were particularly friendly on this visit.  It is an excellent exhibit, anyhow, in which most of the birds roam free with the guests, bobbing across the walkways and peering back at cameras with a kind of frank, birdie curiosity.  But today — perhaps because it was a winter weekday and the crowds were thin — the birds seemed in a posing mood.  Here are two, snapped from no more than an arm’s length away.

Fowl is Fair: Victoria Crowned Pidgeon
Victoria Crowned Pidgeon
Fowl is Fair: Ringed Teal
Ringed Teal (this was one happy duck.)

It’s neither food nor politics, but I thought you all might enjoy them, anyway.

Beet Pancakes with Orange and Tarragon

   Adam Zolkover
Beet Pancakes with Orange and Tarragon

My kitchen sometimes seems to have a problem of over-abundance. It’s not a bad problem to have, you understand. It’s much better than the other thing. But in part because of where my produce comes from — CSAs, farmers’ markets, Sarah’s garden, and the like — I have a kind of limited control over what comes into the house. Which means that fairly often, I end up with strange surfeits or even stranger imbalances.

Six pounds of cabbage and no onions, you say? For me — not an uncommon occurrence.

This is a problem, I seem to recall, that I wrote about last summer when the issue of the day was squash. Zucchini has notoriously high yields anyway, I think I said. And by the height of the season — just about the time it’s no longer novel — there’s so much of it around that farmers are selling it for next to nothing, and you’re forced to resort to leaving midnight care packages on your neighbor’s steps just to keep your own stock under control.

Black Eyed Peas With Ham Hock

   Adam Zolkover
Black Eyed Peas with Ham Hock

We’re cutting it awfully close to the wire, here, for making a New Years themed blog post. But I wanted to share this one in particular before the calendar turned.

The thing with this recipe, and with black eyed peas in general, is that they’re good luck when eaten during that liminal space as we step from one year to the next. The thrust of the tradition is that they represent coins and prosperity. And that our eating them represents incoming cash.

Two Old Men Eating Soup

   Adam Zolkover

A recent exchange with my friend Daniel reminded me of this painting.  It’s called Viejos comiendo sopa — Two Old Men Eating Soup — and it’s one of Francisco Goya’s Black Paintings, the series that he did at the end of his life, after the Napoleonic Wars, after bitterness, depression, and deafness had taken him almost entirely.  Its companion, Saturn Devouring His Son, is more famous, and somewhat more gruesome.  But this one has two old men eating soup.

Viejos comiendo sopa (Two Old Men Eating Soup) by Francisco Goya

Mmm … Soup…

Christmas Cookie Quickie

   Adam Zolkover

It’s been a holiday-scented whirlwind of baking around here.  Because like I told you in the eggnog post — this year is all about the Grinch reduction effort.  What we’ve got are some (festively shaped) gingersnaps from David Lebovitz, my own winter spice oatmeal cookies, and a batch of homemade canine treats that I’m sure are delicious — just not to me.

Christmas Cookie Quickie

Folks who are getting cookie care packages this year — you know who you are.  Everybody else: make some! You’ve got the recipes.

Homemade Eggnog; or, Liquid Holiday Cheer

   Adam Zolkover
Homemade Eggnog; or, Liquid Holiday Cheer

This year, I’m doing my best to get into the holiday spirit — or at least to curb my inner Grinch. I have resolved to stay away from those end-of-the-year triggers that traditionally set me on edge: the malls, the peppermint lattes, and those supermarket-side bell-ringers whose infernal tintinnabulations plague my shopping*. And I’ve decided instead to embrace those customs that actually do inspire cheer.

So I’m making my list (and checking it twice). I’m baking desserty treats filled with warm winter spices. I’m listening to Jethro Tull’s “Ring Out, Solstice Bells” (beware, video!). And I’m mixing up experimental batches of eggnog.

Yes, I said eggnog.

Dispatch from the Land of Ice and Snow

   Adam Zolkover

Philadelphia’s week of inclement weather has not so far proved particularly picturesque.  But it has reminded me that I have photographs from the much more beautiful ice and snow I enjoyed a few weeks back, when I was in Central Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving.  Here are two images:

Dispatch from the Land of Ice and Snow

Dispatch from the Land of Ice and Snow

The first features an indistinct Sarah, and the second puts me in mind of Snow White.

(Both are best viewed large.)

2013 Holiday Gift Guide, Part II: Charitable Giving

   Adam Zolkover
2013 Holiday Gift Guide, Part II: Charitable Giving

A little while ago, I posted this guide to gifts for your friends and family in the 2013 holiday season. And I told you that by clicking through and purchasing any of them — or even by clicking this link to get to Amazon.com and then buying anything at all — you’d be supporting Twice Cooked, and helping me out with stuff like hosting costs for the year to come.

I stand by those recommendations, and I stand by that rationale.

2013 Holiday Gift Guide, Part I: Mammon

   Adam Zolkover
Holiday Gift Guide

Chanukah is — alas — almost over. But the season of gift-giving has only just begun. As I gaze down into my crystal ball, the shape of the rest of December comes sharply into focus. I see cheerful holiday parties at work. I hear the clinking sounds of champagne toasts, shared with good friends. I smell the boozy spiciness of eggnog, sipped around the fire with family from far and near.

And above all — at all of these gatherings — I see presents.

A Gem from the History of Fermentation at Sea

   Adam Zolkover

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term inspissated is an adjective meaning: brought to a thick consistence; thickened.

I mention it because in the 1777 volume, A Voyage Toward the South Pole, Captain James Cook speaks of having been given several barrels of inspissated wort — syrup of unfermented beer — to carry aboard the H. M. Bark Endeavour as it sailed to the South Pacific and around the world. It was thought, he writes, that the syrup would require to be fermented with yeast, in the usual way of making beer.

But things do not, apparently, always go as planned at sea. So active was this inspissated wort — because of the heat of the weather, and the agitation of the ship — that it reached the highest state of fermentation all on its own, and evaded all our endeavours to stop it.

If this juice could be kept from fermenting, Cook writes, it certainly would be a most valuable article at sea. But alas. It was not to be.

Those same shipboard conditions that proved so beneficial to the aging of Madeira wine made this particular fermentation experiment a spectacular, perhaps explosive, failure.

And the sailors — poor sailors — were left with a sticky, beery mess to clean.