IDEAS IN FOOD

I am a pasta guy. I am also a bolognese sauce guy. Bolognese, well the idea behind it, is just so darn good that it crosses boundaries and allows for plenty of interpretation and extrapolation. Recently we made a white soffrito (fennel, onion, celery, garlic) and used that as the base for ground shrimp. We seasoned the mix with Old Bay and then some canned tomatoes brought everything together. In this first run we left out the traditional milk and wine, instead using a heavy dose of Chartreuse to deglaze the soffrito pan which added an intense herbal note to the base. We paired it with ricotta dumplings to a play off one of my personal favorites, ricotta gnocchi in bolognese sauce. This seafood variation showed quite well and we may be indulging in it again soon.

pumpkin pie. It's one of the few things that I've cooked in recent times. There have been a few pies, biscotti, rugelah, and the occasional thrown together meal (mostly peanut butter sandwiches) when Alex was taking care of business outside of the house. It's been a hairy and hectic few weeks and somehow eating has not been a priority so much as a necessity. Food as fuel is a new concept and one that I'm thankfully starting to leave behind me. The pies, well those are for my husband. Because he loves them and because he deserves a little something special for dealing with the chaos right beside me. He makes sure there's always food in the house, a glass of water or juice at my elbow when I'm nursing, and at least one well cooked meal (not an easy feat) every day. All this in addition to dealing with the myriad details that go along with childbirth, death, holidays, and birthdays. So the fact that he enjoys eating my cookies and pies all day long means that I will bestir myself to bake them, no matter what else falls by the wayside. It may look like a simple pumpkin pie, in reality it's so much more...

Lardo plus liquid nitrogen plus the ever campy culinary term blitzing produces one of our favorite powders to date: powdered lardo. The process enables us to create an extremely light and airy product which adds richness to dishes in a delicate manner. We have also just spooned the powdered lardo high on grilled toast and indulged in the decadence. When summer returns we may add some tomatoes to the toast though for now the lardo paired with Nantucket Bay scallops is a match we thankfully found.

We have received a number of questions about the dinner we prepared for New Years Eve and some of the components on the menu. The ingredient or item which happened to stand out was the puffed cilantro. We paired it with a chicken liver and kimchee terrine. The cilantro acted as a fine vehicle for transporting the terrine to the mouth. It was also quite tasty and not overpowering.

Feeding a baby makes you look at food in a whole new way. Babies eat when they're hungry and understand how to listen to their instincts because there are no outside influences to distract them. It's hard to believe that once we were all purely instinctual because as we grow older we listen more and more to others and let a variety of different influences affect the way we look at the world. Imagine if we could recapture a bit of that original instinctiveness today. Today as I watched and listened to the baby try to communicate her needs I considered the fact that we often second guess our ideas and temper our natural inclinations to avoid censure. All she knows is how she feels and what she needs and her only goal in life is figuring out how to communicate those things to us. Communication is rarely easy under the best of circumstances. On the other hand, the rewards for putting in the effort are great. Our goal for the new year is to learn how to communicate better with her and with each other and to recapture some of that innocence in our approach to food and cooking.

We first smoked lobster when we were in Maine. In fact, that is where we picked up the smoking bug. We used to use old linen to make a tent over a barrel smoker to create a larger space to smoke in. It must have looked pretty funny watching me duck under this table cloth with smoke billowing out for guests to see. Since these first days smoking lobsters and working with makeshift smokers we have tried numerous methods to produce a delicious smoked lobster. Recently we started brining lobsters in smoked water, then bonding the meat with Activa and finally cooking the meat sous vide at 51.5 degrees for thirty minutes. The end result is the smoked lobster I was chasing under my make shift smoking tent. We paired the lobster with nutmeg seasoned papaya, lime-peanut puree, celery leaves and a charred grenada pepper viniaigrette.

John Sconzo has shared the organized chaos and whirlwind of a weekend where slow food was the theme and a search for delicious was the mantra. Aki and I were captivated by the ingredients (people and environments are also ingredients in cooking) and not only did we drink the kool-aid we started handing it out. The weekend has greatly influenced us as cooks and people.