There’s something that’s brilliantly, deceptively pedestrian about a quiche Lorraine. We tend to think of it as elegant, perhaps because its name is French, or perhaps because Julia Child famously made one, or perhaps because so many people — so much to my confusion — seem to find shortcrust pastry to be a challenge. But in the immortal words of The Simpsons: would a rose by any other name still smell as sweet?
Not, conclude Bart and Homer, if you called it Stench Blossom. Or Crap Weed.
Fresh baked bread: hot, straight from the oven, crust crackling as it cools on its wire rack in the chill air of winter. You wait, mouth watering. And then — like some Maenad with a sacrificial goat — you tear it apart with your bare hands and share it out, letting its steaming insides warm you all over.
Romantic? Yes. Gruesome? A bit. Rife with all manner of problems? Most definitely.
There is a well-worn proverb — one that has been worn so well, in fact, that it has been ground into a fine pallid dust by the motivational / self-help industry: give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. […]
Interestingly enough, today’s experiment is equally at home with tea and jam, or with fried chicken and greens. This, I suppose, is a product of my peculiar relationship with biscuits. Or maybe more accurately, my biscuits’ peculiar relationship with scones. As you read through this recipe, the most perceptive of you (dear readers!) will likely […]
A Dolley Madison cake, I told my friend Linda. That’s what I want to make you for your birthday. That’s what it’s called? That’s what I call it. It’s a historical recipe — supposedly her favorite when she was First Lady. It’s a sponge. With caramel icing. No chocolate, then? Linda sounded disappointed. Then: But […]
Thing one: I’d like to reassert my position that rosemary is a really excellent dessert flavor. And that it’s a terrible shame that it is not more used in that capacity. Thing two: I’d like to revise my position on summer. It’s still the most miserable time of the year here in Philadelphia, with the […]
Welcome to self-congratulation-ville, population — me. That’s right, friends. This post marks number one hundred for Twice Cooked. And it marks just about (though not quite) one year of blogging about food, politics, and whatever else it is you find on this sight. So — celebratory pigs! I’d like to thank you all (dear readers!) […]
This cake is easy. You probably don’t believe me because there’s a tiny voice in your head sputtering: False! Cakes are difficult! It’s in their nature! But if you hear that voice (dear readers!), feel free shout it down. Because I do not lie. This cake is easy. This cake is, in fact, just three […]
Making granola is simple, simple, simple. And as I think about it now, I cannot fathom why it is that I haven’t done it in years. I got it into my head to start again when Sarah told me the other day — offhandedly — that I really shouldn’t buy the pre-packaged granola. That when […]
I love spent grain bread. It’s one of my very favorite things about brewing. You see: brewing is sort of a wasteful process. You take eight or ten or twelve pounds of grain, soak it in water, and convert the runnings from that little bath into five gallons of sweet wort, and then eventually into […]