Author Archives: Shannon

What Puts the Key in the Lime?

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key lime pieFlorida is a good place to contemplate important matters of nature like the mating habits of bottlenose dolphins (colorful) and the take-off techniques of loons (unfortunate). On a recent trip to visit my parents, I also found myself thinking about the mysterious fruit, the key lime. Even though I spent many of the Christmas vacations of my childhood throwing fish heads to pelicans on Marathon Key, I believed that key lime pie was just lime pie that you ate in the Keys. I’m not sure it fully sunk in that the key lime is actually a fruit unique from the Persian lime (also known as the gin and tonic lime, at least to me). Here are some fun key lime facts:

  1. They’re not green. Or rather, the ones you should be eating are not green. The ripe ones are bright yellow.
  2. Most of them don’t come from the keys, at least not since the 1926 hurricane that wiped out most of the lime groves of Florida. Now we get key limes from Mexico.
  3. They’re native to Southeast Asia, so I was probably eating them all the time in Cambodia in place of Persian limes without ever realizing it.
  4. They’ve been known to cause phytophotodermatitis upon contact, making human skin extra sensitive to light. No word on how long this effect lasts, but it sounds like bad news for sunburned tourists in a tropical climate.
  5. They are smaller and seedier than their Persian brethren, and their flavor is more tart and bitter.

Okay, so none of those facts make them sound terribly appealing, particularly the last two. But because they have a stronger flavor, you don’t need much juice to get a strong limey flavor, which makes them ideal for cooking.

I suspect, though, that the real reason that key limes and the pies they go into are so popular is because we associate them with sunshine and sand and Ernest Hemingway and pelicans and fish heads. They’re a vacation on a plate. I mean, look how happy this guy looks. Continue reading →

Easter Peeps and Mucilaginous Root Pulp

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marsh mallow

Althaea officinalis (or Mother of All Peeps)

Ah, the glorious Easter baskets of yore, that would come to the rescue just as last year’s Halloween candy had dwindled to nothing but Bit O’ Honeys! Among the jellybeans and Cadbury eggs there was always at least one box of Peeps, those Technicolor chicken- and rabbit-shaped marshmallows. In my house, however, they were always destined to play second fiddle to the painstakingly nibbled chocolate rabbit and they usually ossified into little chick-shaped rocks before I got around to eating them. It wasn’t until adulthood that I began to understand the beauty of the Peep.

There are a lot of Peep haters out there, my husband among them, probably because they taste like nothing, really, beyond enamel-destroying sweet, but their origins are arguably the most noble of any Easter basket classic. While poking around on FoodTimeline.org, I noticed that marshmallows shared the same origin date, 2000 B.C., as apples. Yes, you read that correctly. Proto-peeps are as old as apples! (I’m not too clear, actually, if 2000 B.C. is the date of the first wild apple or merely the first time apples were cultivated by humans for food, but still…).

Marshmallows are called such because of the marsh mallow, a wild plant that ancient people ate in many forms. You can eat the flowers, you can eat the greens like lettuce or you can boil the roots to obtain a “mucilaginous substance.” This substance was used as a cough remedy, but there’s also evidence that as early as 2000 B.C., Egyptians were mixing the mallow mucous with honey to make a sweet confection, reserved for royalty and gods. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, you Peep haters. Continue reading →

Name that Jelly Belly

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Though the snow is falling in New York today, Easter is nigh, and it’s time to brush up on your jellybean trivia before a giant rabbit invades your house to leave you candy. My personal favorites are Jelly Belly brand beans because they come in oh-so-many flavors. Anyone can distinguish between them by taste, but can you tell them apart by sight alone? See how many of these signature flavors you can guess. If you get ten or more Bellies right, consider yourself holiday-ready.

Note for serious Jelly Belly fans: These are all part of the classic 50 flavors, not the off-shoot mixes.

Don’t follow the link until you’re ready for the answers… Continue reading →

Post-St. Patrick’s Day Stewed Leprechaun

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leprechuanEveryone indulges their mischievous and somewhat bawdy antics on St. Patrick’s Day, of course, but what is one to do with the surplus of leprechauns running around the house after the holiday? We have more than most—though I’m only about a third Irish on a good day, I have a name that makes me sounds as if I’m straight off the boat from County Cork, and the little devils just come flocking. To call them a nuisance would be an understatement: they harass the cats, they poop in the shower, they drink all the Scotch in the house out of spite. I think it will be a solid month before I can get the smell of pipe smoke out of the couch, and the red hair I keep finding on my pillow…let’s just say I’m not certain it’s from their heads.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s not that I find leprechaun slaughter an enjoyable task. (In fact, I prefer the term “leprechaun harvest” whenever possible.) But it’s important to remember that they’ve lived a good life, free to roam and tell dirty jokes wherever they like. And a little ether on a rag and then a quick whap against the edge of the sink is a process I find most humane.

Anyway, they make a first-rate soup. So come in out of the harsh March winds, sit down to a steaming bowlful and thank your lucky stars that St. Patty’s Day comes but once a year. For the recipe of what’s in the bowl, keep reading: Continue reading →

The Asparagus Cometh: Asparagus Salad with Mustard Dressing

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asparagus saladHark! What is that glimpse of green that is once again appearing in the produce aisle? It is asparagus, those elegantly slender and vibrant stalks, one of the first vegetal signs that spring is on its way.

“But, lo!” you are probably saying. “What’s with the pee thing?”

It has been noted by many trustworthy sources that asparagus has some unusual after-effects. In 1702, the author of Treatise of All Sorts of Food noticed that the stalks “cause a filthy and disagreeable smell in the urine.” Most who have experienced this phenomenon seem to agree with him about the off-putting nature of the smell, though Proust (always hell-bent on being an outlier) said that asparagus “transforms my chamber-pot into a flask of perfume.”

I would like nothing more, dear readers, than to offer my own opinion on this matter, but I just don’t smell it. (And before you offer, no, I do not want to smell your pee.) I always assumed that there was some difference in the way people processed this vegetable resulting in my unremarkable urine, but a groundbreaking study in 2010 opened up the possibility that I (along with about 78% of the population) might just lack the olfactory receptors necessary to detect the asparagus odor. (So even if I did consent to smell your pee, I might not be able to tell the difference.)

Regardless, I think this is a small price to pay for some delicious asparagus. To me, it tastes like a plate full of spring. Here’s an easy recipe to kick off your asparagus season: Continue reading →

Rollin’ the Recipe Dice: Lemon-Herb Vegetable Mélange and Easy Cactus Salad

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recipe diceAh, the cruelty of early spring, when the skies are gray and the produce selection is still scarce. The season has left me in a decided creativity slump in the cooking department. So it was high time that I broke out the recipe dice from my friend Mignon, who cleverly managed to combine my love of food and nerdy games into a single Christmas gift. Here’s the concept: you roll fourteen dice, each with cute little pictures of ingredients on each side. You’re allowed to re-roll a certain number of them, but you’re supposed to try to use all the ingredients in a single meal.

Okay, let’s get this out of the way: I cheated. But only a little, I swear! I took out the meat die, which is legitimate for vegetarian play, I think. I also had just made a huge batch of cauliflower soup just a day or two before and staring at the cauliflower heads in the supermarket made me vaguely depressed, so I threw that one out, too, though under different circumstances, I think it could easily be added to the mélange recipe below. I would like to point out, however, that I used the other twelve dice, even though I rolled nopales on my re-roll, the equivalent of pulling a Q in Scrabble, and went to four grocery stores before I found them. Here are the ingredients I had to work with: artichokes, Brussels sprouts, cheese, cous-cous, garlic, lemon, mushrooms, nopales, onion, peas, rosemary and tomatoes.

The dice definitely got me to think outside the box. And I’ll probably make both of the recipes again (though probably not in the same meal). In case you’re having your own kitchen slump, here are the two recipes I came up with: Continue reading →

Laura Ingalls Wilder, Where Did I Go Wrong?

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syrup and snowThis time, I’m afraid, there’s simply no hope of convincing the neighbors that I’m not completely insane. This morning at 7 a.m., I was outside in the swirling snow, shaking snow from a shrub into a cake pan, a bottle of maple syrup clamped tightly in one armpit. I am thirty-one years old, but the vestiges of my Little House on the Prairie fetish are still on display for everyone on my block to see.

When I was very young, my sister read the entire Little House series out loud to me, and man, did I love it. Sure, Mary was kind of a bore, but Laura was clever and charming and brave—all things that wee Shannon aspired to be. And I was enthralled with the idea of pioneer life. If my family ever had to move into a sod house for some reason, I was prepared to milk a cow, knit some mittens, and whip up some corn pone in order to help us through the long winter. I went so far as to insist that my parents buy me the Little House on the Prairie Cookbook, which explained how to make delicious treats like hardtack.

Laura and MaryFast forward to a few weeks ago, when New York was on the cusp of getting its first real snowstorm of the season; a scene from the first Little House book came back to me in a flash. Hadn’t Laura made maple candy by dripping syrup on fresh snow? Wouldn’t it be a hoot to do it myself? Alas, the timing of that storm was all wrong, and by the time I was out and about the next morning, it had turned to rain and slush. So this time, when I woke up to a couple of inches, I was determined to make it happen. Mind you, I haven’t read the book in question, Little House in the Big Woods, in well over two decades and my copy of the cookbook is probably still in a crate somewhere in my parents’ house, but as I remembered it, they just packed some snow in a pan, drizzled syrup over it in snazzy designs and—Voila! Candy!

In actuality, this is not what happens when you put maple syrup on snow. Continue reading →

A Fair Fight?: Not-So-Fun Facts from “A Food Designed to Addict”

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scooby-snackI’m not sure anyone who loves to eat as much as I do can properly call herself a health nut. I did, after all, write a wistful tribute to Dairy Queen Blizzards on this blog just a couple of weeks ago. And I do have a deep belief in free will and the necessity of people taking responsibility for their own actions. (When I got called for jury duty on a personal injury lawsuit, the corporate defense attorney found me delightfully amusing before the plaintiff’s lawyer dismissed me.) Those two facts combined mean that I often have mixed feelings in the junk food debate. Yes, I like Cheez-Its, but I don’t eat them every day, and that kind of restraint doesn’t feel all that difficult. So should we really be able to hold food companies responsible for the obesity epidemic?

Well…actually, maybe we should, at least partly. A recent article in the New York Times magazine by Michael Moss makes a compelling case that the public doesn’t stand much of a chance against the unhealthy foods that the junk food kings are pushing. Really, you should just go read the actual article right now. But for the record, here are the tidbits that I found most interesting…and disturbing:

The Bliss Point
Any Malcolm Gladwell fans out there will already know about Howard Moskowitz, the guy who revolutionized the food market by testing in excruciating detail every possible permutation of a product (61 versions of Vanilla Cherry Dr. Pepper, say, to find the perfect balance of vanilla and cherry and, um, pepper-ness). He calls that balance the “bliss point,” and he finds it through surveying thousands of taste testers and crunching the numbers across dozens of factors. Which is all rather fascinating, but here’s the nagging thought I couldn’t get out of my head as I read about his process: can you think of anything that sounds less like cooking? Continue reading →

Grub Match: Foodie Throwdown in the Nation’s Capital

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grub match DC

If the stereotypical New Yorker is loud and rude, what’s the stereotype of someone from Washington, D.C.? If the first D.C. Grub Match is any indication, that person is driven, discerning and a model of good taste. Also, a tall, skinny white female whose name begins with M. And so it was that I found myself deep in the heart of Alexandria with Martha, Mignon and Margaret as they prepared to fight it out for the title.

Round 1: Lyon Hall (Martha’s pick)
Things got off to a smooth start with high praise of the food at Lyon Hall. The word “amazing” was used liberally to describe everything from the sausage to the spaetzle. Though the menu is rife with pork products, even our vegetarian contender Mignon found plenty to like at Lyon Hall, particularly the happy hour specials like the warm pretzels with three different dipping sauces and the pickled vegetables that change weekly.

Margaret did find a few weak spots on the menu, however: “When it came to the cassoulet I was a little disappointed because they didn’t cook it all together, they put some stuff on the side…the whole point is that everything is mixed and delicious together.” Also, she felt that the dessert selection didn’t live up to the high standard set by the savory dishes. Even so, Lyon Hall managed to dodge any serious punches during this round.

Interlude: Vince makes a guerilla grab for the title.
Here’s another difference between a New York Grub Match and the D.C. version: in NYC we make do with beer at a bar, while in D.C., Vince, Martha’s paramour, makes a seriously bitchin’ brunch for everyone. He actually baked loaves of brioche two days beforehand for the express purpose of making it into French toast topped with berries and freshly whipped cream. Which begged the question: was he trying to upend Grub Match by being some sort of dark horse candidate? Things just got interesting. Continue reading →

Margaret’s Grub Match Pick: Crème Café & Lounge

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cremeThe third and final contender in our special Washington D.C. edition of Grub Match is international attorney and chicken and waffles aficionado Margaret Dennis. Her pick is Crème, a brunch favorite in the northwest quadrant of the city that serves up Southern specialties. Here’s more from Margaret on why she loves both comfort food from home and surprises from abroad:

Do you have any food pet peeves?
“Artistic” (i.e., tiny) portions.  I’m all for savoring my food and not wolfing it down like I’m starving, but if I’m paying to eat out I’d like to leave full.

You’re headed to a deserted island to live on grass and coconut milk–what’s your last meal before you go?
A deliciously prepared cassoulet.  You really can’t beat it on a cold winter’s night.

You’ve come into uncountable gobs of money—who do you hire as your personal chef?
Deb Perelman of the Smitten Kitchen food blog.  Not only are all of her recipes outstandingly delicious, she always has amusing commentary, and I feel that would be a useful trait if someone were standing in your kitchen all day making food.

What’s the single most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten?
That’s pretty hard to pick.  I’ll go with one key memorable one.  When I was 15, I spent the summer with a family in a tiny village in Alsace, France.  At one point we went over to the grandmother’s house for homemade tarte flambé cooked in her grandmother’s clay oven.  It was one of the first time’s I’d been abroad and I’d never realized food could taste that different from what I was used to in the U.S….and that fabulous. Continue reading →