Entries tagged with 'Cooking with a Friend'
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Jennifer Maiser writes about locally and sustainably grown food. The Cooking with a Friend series chronicles her cooking and menu planning adventures with her neighbor, J. Calabacitas, a great summer dish. It's been a few weeks since J. and I have been able to cook together but we eased back into it together pretty comfortably. We met on a weeknight this time, which means that we needed to be more careful about our time and doing complicated, long recipes. Since both of our freezers are quite full, we went through them to see what should be cooked, and what could free up space. We had baked a large sheet of ziti during one of our first weeks together—it was before...
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Jennifer Maiser writes about locally and sustainably grown food. The Cooking with a Friend series chronicles her cooking and menu planning adventures with her neighbor, J. This week, as I was preparing pork stew to be cooked, I stopped and laughed. "I'm glad we have similar cooking philosophies," I remarked to J. I was tossing the pork with my bare hands, trying to distribute the salt, garlic powder, pepper, and flour on the pork cubes. I was being relatively safe—water was running so I could rinse my hands right away to avoid contamination—but nonetheless, the contact with raw pork may have made some home cooks squeamish. I really lucked out that it was J. with whom I started this project....
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Jennifer Maiser writes about locally and sustainably grown food. The Cooking with a Friend series chronicles her cooking and menu planning adventures with her neighbor, J. This week, as we did in week 5, J. and I purchased a CSA box of vegetables. It was chock full of seasonal produce including green beans, new potatoes, cauliflower, alliums of all sorts, cucumbers, and fennel. "Does it make you itchy," I asked J. on email, "to try this week's menu on the fly tomorrow?" We had enough vegetables in the fridge and grains in the pantry, and I figured that by adding a few protein elements we could just improvise the menu when we got together on Sunday. To add to the...
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Jennifer Maiser writes about locally and sustainably grown food. The Cooking with a Friend series chronicles her cooking and menu planning adventures with her neighbor, J. J. and I sat at the table on Sunday night wondering what hit us. This was supposed to be an easy week. Both of us are eating several meals out this week so we'd supposedly planned a light menu, and thought the cooking should be minimal. But we ended up with a menu that took longer to cook and cost more than what we'd remembered in a while. It wasn't really a bad thing, but we were puzzled that it all took so long. Looking at the list now, however, it's easy to see...
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Jennifer Maiser writes about locally and sustainably grown food. The Cooking with a Friend series chronicles her cooking and menu planning adventures with her neighbor, J. A week in Southern California turned into nearly two. By the time I returned to San Francisco I was worried that J. had moved on and was ready to break-up with our little cooking project. After discussing this over drinks the night I returned, we realized that we were both as excited as ever to continue cooking together. I drove the majority of the menu plan this week. I'm desperately waiting for tomatoes to get to the market (it will be about another month before I start purchasing them), and expect our menu to...
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Jennifer Maiser writes about locally and sustainably grown food. The Cooking with a Friend series chronicles her cooking and menu planning adventures with her neighbor, J. Eight weeks into this project, menu planning is becoming a well-oiled machine. Normally, we chat about the menu via email late in the week and then parcel out the shopping list. To tell you the truth, I can't remember when we planned our menu this week. I have a feeling that it was sometime between trying out guest bartender Eben Freeman's amazing drinks at The Alembic and a late Saturday dinner at Nopalito. All I know is that I came home with a menu plan scribbled on a piece of paper and that the...
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Jennifer Maiser writes about locally and sustainably grown food. The Cooking with a Friend series chronicles her cooking and menu planning adventures with her neighbor, J. "Please don't tell anyone," I begged J. While she promised not to tell my deep dark secret, I'm telling you now: a lot of my food from last week went to waste. Once I realized that I was eating strangely, I froze what I could of my dishes, but I still sadly ended up tossing some of our spectacular food from last week. I really despise wasting food, but didn't have much appetite last week, and when I did I ate strange things instead of full meals. When I did want something nutritious, it...
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Editor's note: Jennifer Maiser writes about locally and sustainably grown food. The Cooking with a Friend series chronicles her cooking and menu planning adventures with her neighbor, J. J. and I are definitely developing a rhythm to this project. Like clockwork, we now discuss the week's menu via email on Fridays, and then I compose the shopping list and we divvy up responsibilities. She's still learning my food quirks that revolve around my desire to buy from local farmers. This week, I didn't go to a farmers' market so she and I shopped together at Rainbow Grocery, a local co-op that sells locally-grown produce, and then supplemented a couple of items from Trader Joe's and Whole Foods. While I pay...
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Jennifer Maiser chronicles her cooking and menu planning adventures with her neighbor, J.
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A month into cooking together, we are falling into a happy pattern of preparing meals. There's a lot less discussion about where to find a measuring cup or which pan to use, and a lot more social catching up and chit-chatting about the week's events.
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