Fruit and Vegetable | The Rambling Epicure

Spontaneous Cuisine: Lebanese Zucchini Salad Recipe

Published by Jonell Galloway + Tuesday, July 16, 2013 Permalink 0

Spontaneous Cuisine: Lebanese Zucchini Salad Recipe

by Jonell Galloway

Mezze: summer vegetables with a new twist for your picnics

What are summer vegetables for us are year-long vegetables for the Lebanese and Syrians.

Choosing your courgettes or zucchini

Zucchini should be dark green and firm to the touch. Avoid wrinkly-looking courgettes, which are not fresh.

Choose young, small ones. The taste is more delicate and sweeter. Larger older courgettes often have large seeds, and tend to be bitter.

Recipe for mezze-style courgette (zucchini) salad

This is a kid-friendly recipe.

In Europe, sometimes it has to be sweet potato pie instead of pumpkin for Thanksgiving

Published by Jonell Galloway + Wednesday, November 21, 2012 Permalink 0

Tom and Maggie’s Thanksgiving Sweet Potato Pie

We’ve been making Thanksgiving dinner together for oh so many years — ever since we were in college in Paris. Since the pumpkin in France is always too watery, no matter what method of cooking we used and what type of pumpkin, we had difficulty getting it to set, so we decided to use sweet potatoes, which give a much more predictable and reliable result, which is absolutely necessary when preparing a Thanksgiving feast for a crowd of 20 or 30 convives. In addition, we’ve grown to like it better (perhaps because we know it will always set, unlike pumpkin?).

Who is Sylvie Shirazi? Our latest food photographer find

Published by Jonell Galloway + Thursday, December 1, 2011 Permalink 0

Sylvie Shirazi runs a food blog called Gourmande in the Kitchen, where you can find her recipes. You can see her professional photography at Sylvie Shirazi Photography.

Continue Reading…

Make your own pumpkin pie spice for pies and lattes

Published by Jonell Galloway + Tuesday, November 22, 2011 Permalink 0

Save money on those pumpkin spice lattes by making your own pumpkin spice with this recipe. Click here to see recipe.

Find variations on this spice recipe here.

And if you get a craving for pumpkin pie spice lattes from time to time, here’s a low-calorie version. For an all-out version, whipped cream and all, you might go for this recipe. For a simple version using fresh pumpkin purée, click here.

I’m having baked sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving!

Published by Jonell Galloway + Monday, November 21, 2011 Permalink 0

by Jonell Galloway

Sweet potatoes are a traditional part of a American Thanksgiving dinner. Every family has its own favorite or traditional recipe. Here’s mine, in all its simplicity.

I love sweet potatoes for their natural flavor and texture, so I simply scrub them really well and bake them, with the peeling on, at 200° C / 400° F until they’re soft enough to eat. The time depends on the time and variety of sweet potato. I then cut them crosswise into chunks (still leaving the peel), put them into a serving dish, and slather them with butter with sea salt, which I buy from my cheesemonger.

No marshmallows, no brown sugar, no maple syrup, just au nature.

It’s interesting to watch Europeans’ reactions to them. At first they’re puzzled, but on their second bite, they usually find them interesting and like them.

Note: If you peel them, they will dry out in the oven.

Simple Sustenance: Cumin-Lime Pumpkin Mash

Published by Esha-Chhabra + Thursday, November 17, 2011 Permalink 0

by Renu Chhabra

Savoring Fall

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.–George Eliot

Fall is a perhaps the earthiest of seasons. Crisp air, fallen leaves, and trees changing hues make it a season to savor before winter sets in. For me, it’s a pleasant reminder of the holiday season ahead. But most of all, fall brings us an abundance of harvest.

The first thing that comes to my mind is pumpkin – the good old orange ball, greeting us at farm stands and grocery stores. Big, small, mini, round, and some not so round — they all whisper, “Take me home with you!” How can you ignore these scrumptious beauties? Even though they are not the easiest of fruits to peel, if you can win that battle, there are endless ways to enjoy them, sweet or savory.

It’s apple season: Matefin à la pomme / apple pancakes/pie

Published by Jonell Galloway + Thursday, September 29, 2011 Permalink 0

by Jonell Galloway

O Délices discovered this recipe on blog de Guillemette.

This is a traditional recipe from the Savoy, so it’s not so far from us in Switzerland.

The original name comes from the French mâte faim. Peasants prepared these potato pancakes in the morning before going to work in the fields. It was meant to keep them going until lunchtime.

This version uses apples instead of potatoes, and is perfect for the apple season, which has just started here in Switzerland.

Food Poetry: Artichoke, by Henry Taylor

Published by Jonell Galloway + Friday, September 16, 2011 Permalink 0

Christina Daub, Poetry Editor

The pangolin of the vegetable world, the artichoke repels as much as it attracts. Is it armor or petals that surround its hidden heart? The slow-mo antidote to the seven-bite standup lunch, it ought to be the poster-it for the Slow Food movement.

Years ago I was told artichokes are one the foods one should never eat on a first date… the painstaking biting and sucking, the buttery dribbles, fingers and stain-potential all too risky, too exposing, too unladylike.

Even poet Henry Taylor admits to having “studied in private years ago/the way to eat these things…” Here’s his experience:

Artichoke

“If poetry did not exist, would you have had the wit to invent it?” –Howard Nemerov

He had studied in private years ago
the way to eat these things, and was prepared
when she set the clipped green globe before him.
He only wondered (as he always did
when he plucked from the base the first thick leaf,
dipped it into the sauce and caught her eye
as he deftly set the velvet curve against
the inside edges of his lower teeth
and drew the tender pulp towards his tongue
while she made some predictable remark
about the sensuality of this act
then sheared away the spines and ate the heart)
what mind, what hunger, first saw this as food.

___________________________

Henry Taylor ‘s collections of poetry include Crooked Run (2006), Understanding Fiction: Poems 1986-1996; The Flying Change (1985), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize; An Afternoon of Pocket Billiards (1975), and The Horse Show at Midnight (1966). Taylor has received the Witter Bynner Foundation Poetry Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He has also translated several works from Bulgarian, French, Hebrew, Italian, and Russian.