I’ve been ranging rather far of field lately, so I thought I’d try something that’s literally close to home. No, I know, the spring horse racing season is about six weeks in the rearview mirror. Even so I get no end of requests for it. Add to that the fact that I only recently came […]
READ ON
I spent my 4th of July in Mayberry, basically. It was fantastic. We traveled about 25 miles to drop in on the small town of Rutherfordton, North Carolina. This place must have been inhabited by Brits at one point in its history, because instead of pronouncing it “ruther-ford-tun”, locals just call it “rolf-tun.” Brits are the only people who can look at a word like “Leicestershire” (by all rights “lye-kester-shire”) and pronounce it “lester.”
READ ONReader Lee clues me in to a book that seems right up my alley: The Localvore’s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-mile diet by University of Toronto faculty member, Pierre Desrochers. It appears to be in the same spirit as my my anti-Michael Pollan screeds but with a lot more real data. Some key quotes about it are on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, check them out. The farm-rapping is fun, too. I know what I’ll be reading tonight!
READ ONI’m a yankee born and raised, but I only relax in the South…the deeper the better. The people are genial, the fish eager and the bread is made from corn, corn, corn. North Carolina was precisely what the doctor ordered last week, though I arrived for some of the worst trout weather in memory. The extreme heat was only interrupted by intense rain, so even the mountain streams were running warm and muddy. It takes an extremely skillful fisherman to coax a trout — which hunts primarily by sight — to bite down on a fly in conditions like that.
That’s not me, so, I switched to bass. Lake Lure, in the mountains of North Carolina near Asheville, is the most picturesque manmade lake I’ve ever seen. Fishing it at dawn fills up whatever reserve it is that gets depleted by trips to the mall and Payless Shoes. Bobbing gently in a bass boat in a shady cove, and sneaking a lure under a stand of trees where you just know the fish are hungry, you’re perfectly, pristinely aware, yet thinking of nothing. Only the taughtness of the line across your fingers as you wait for the telltale twitch.
READ ONJuly is vacation time for the Pastry family. We’re headed to the North Carolina mountains to do a little recreating and hopefully catch some trout. Back soon! – Joe
READ ON
This may be a garden-variety sweet among the Greeks, but done well it sings like a siren from a Homeric poem. One taste and your friends and family will have to restrain you from diving bodily into the pan, from whence you might never return.
READ ON
Thin as this dough is, it’s about three times as thick as the store-bought stuff. But you know we’ve all been down the pre-made filo dough road before. We know where it leads: a quite good, if very expected, texture and taste. Make filo yourself and you won’t have the extreme flakiness, but you’ll still have plenty, plus a little extra crunch, chew and depth of flavor. I recommend the experience highly. The dough is stretchy and forgiving, really fun to work with. Just prepare yourself for a few failures at first. You’ll still get enough sheets out of a regular batch to build a very nice pastry.
READ ONReader Sammi wants to know if I’ve ever eaten “real” galaktoboureko before. Well I’ve never eaten it in Greece, though I’ve been to Athens. But I have eaten it in my home town of Chicago, in Greektown, a place that holds a special place in my heart to this day. Greektown is your classic big city, immigrant-created, Americanized ethnicity ghetto. It’s not much populated by Greeks, at least not anymore. The originals have long since moved to the suburbs. Today Greektown is mostly full of restaurants and shops, some of them glitzy and catering to tourists, others more subdued, catering to immigrants and/or their descendants who still want a genuine taste of the Old Country.
READ ON
Filo fail! The wrapping-the-dough-around-the-pin method that I’ve seen demonstrated simply isn’t working for me. Next I’ll try the straight roll, which I believe will have better results. I also think I’m a little over-obsessed with getting my filo thin. It should be thin of course, but no normal human can get filo as thin as the store-bought stuff. I’ll tell you this though, that dowel rod has earned a place of permanence in my pin collection. It’s fantastic.
READ ONReader Linda comments that she uses Cream of Wheat in her galaktoboureko filling. That’s perfect. It’s made of durum wheat, but a fairly fine grind, a much closer approximation to medium-ground Greek semolina than durum flour. Plus it’s a lot easier to get. Why didn’t I think of that? Thanks a million, reader Linda! I’ll make the change right away.
READ ON