Food | Gourmandistan

White chili, because we have a book to sell

November 9, 2015 by Steve

White chili has run wild on the Internet. But back in the 1980s, before everyone was connected, few people had heard of the idea. That was how Tim Barnes, a restaurateur featured in our just-released book, Lost Restaurants of Louisville, was able to convince many people that he had invented it. The recipe, using white beans instead of traditional red kidney beans and chicken instead of beef, was sometimes credited to Barnes and sometimes to his chef James Aydlett. The dish became so popular […]

Categories: Beans, Chicken, Cooking, Food, Recipes, Restaurants, Soups & Stews

Making room in the refrigerator with mezze

October 29, 2015 by Steve

Our refrigerator, American-(plus! Sub-Zero!)-sized though it is, has been a bit crowded of late. Steve has been storing large amounts of local apples (though he does eat quite a lot of them), and our root vegetable hoard has kept growing with each dwindling week of our CSA. In an effort to keep ahead of things, we recently treated ourselves to some lovely mezze. Claudia Roden, whose cookbook The New Book of Middle Eastern Food we grabbed these recipes from, writes that the word mezze comes from […]

Categories: Carrots, Food, Middle East, Peppers, Recipes, Salad, Vegetarian

Lack of grater leads to greatness with ham, celeriac and leek pie

October 18, 2015 by Steve

What started as an additional reason to resent holiday cottage kitchens turned into another success thanks to Michelle, with a bit of an assist from Nigel Slater. We had originally purchased a large knob of celeriac at a farmers’ market on our recent trip to Britain, imagining a picnic somewhere moor-ish where a bit of remoulade would accompany a leftover gammon (ham, to those non-English among us) sandwich and perhaps some crisps. Unfortunately, our rental was without a grater (or, at least we thought at the […]

Categories: Celery root, Cooking, Cured meats, England, Food, Pork, Recipes

walnut-apple-calvados-caramel cake says “autumn,” avoids awful pumpkin spice

October 11, 2015 by Steve

Gourmandistan enjoys autumn, and does not generally stand in opposition to cinnamon, cloves or nutmeg. (OK, Steve admits to being somewhat more averse to cinnamon than most people.) But we do not understand the current appeal of pairing the season with something called “pumpkin spice.” We are in awe of the marketing and social forces that have combined to make whatever constitutes “pumpkin pie” flavoring almost ubiquitous, but we wish more people would seek alternative “fall” flavors that are all around them. Apple, for one. It is […]

Categories: Apples, Cake, Cooking, Desserts & Sweets, Food, Fruit Desserts, Recipes

Easy lamb chops with onion and rosemary, a holiday cottage hero

October 6, 2015 by Michelle

Gourmandistan is back from its month in England and Scotland. (It was 28 days to be exact, as a somewhat-still-bitter-at-United Airlines Michelle will tell you.) While we were thrilled to swap our American domain for dramatic geography, history and much better social infrastructure, we once again had a beautiful house but were not that taken with our kitchen. Over the years we have been fortunate enough to enjoy month-long travel, we have found ourselves in many challenging cooking environments. There have been a few notable exceptions. […]

Categories: England, Food, Lamb, Recipes, Vacation

Off for a bit of Bordering

September 3, 2015 by Michelle

Should our readers wonder where we’ve wandered off to over the next month or so, rest assured we have not forever abandoned our realm of Gourmandistan, nor our two lovely British Shorthair cats. We have simply absented ourselves once again to Great Britain, this time on the coast of the North Sea in Alnmouth, a town about halfway between Edinburgh and Newcastle upon Tyne. While we certainly hope to do some cooking, we are at the moment unsure whether we’ll […]

Categories: Food, Vacation

Plum buttercream further plumbs depths of fruit-based deliciousness

August 21, 2015 by Steve

Michelle’s discovery that most any fresh fruit juice can be used to flavor buttercream has created a bit of an unusual cake boom here in Gourmandistan. While handing over a hoarded, frozen slice of our white cake with wild blackberry buttercream to her mother, Michelle casually created another cake, this time with chocolate and red plum buttercream. The juice came from a batch of plums we luckily spotted on a recent market trip. We snatched them up to make jam (and several cold and […]

Categories: Cake, Chocolate, Cooking, Desserts & Sweets, Food, Fruit, Jams & Preserves, Plums, Recipes

Kentuckifying pasta with corn, country ham, butter and peppers

August 14, 2015 by Michelle

We are big fans of the late Judy Rodgers, even though we find some of the recipes in her fabulous Zuni Cafe Cookbook a bit confusing. However, Rodgers’ delicious “Pasta with Corn, Pancetta, Butter & Sage” isn’t one of them. We’ve enjoyed this simple-to-prepare dish many times. But, at this point of our summer season, we decided to vary it a bit. (This decision may have been influenced by our lack of sage plants, which drowned during our recent unseasonably heavy rains.) Instead […]

Categories: Cooking, Corn, Cured meats, Food, Pasta, Peppers, Pork, Recipes

Easy guinea hen gets less greasy

August 7, 2015 by Michelle

Gourmandistan was happy to learn that our favorite baker and pork supplier had decided to raise a flock of guineas and offer them for sale at our local market. We’re fans of the better-than-chicken flavor of guineas, but worried our favorite way to cook poultry would result in a too-dry dinner. Looking for an alternative, Steve vetoed any recipe that called for quartering or deboning, and pointed out that our purchase contained neither liver nor giblets, which some other ideas called for. We found a simple-looking one-pot recipe […]

Categories: Cabbage, Carrots, Cooking, Food, France, Guinea, Leeks, Potatoes, Recipes