Photo: Courtesy of Lady Gouda

“I’m telling you, this breakfast strata will save your a- -.”

So proclaims Lady Gouda.

Be it an impromptu family gathering, brunch with friends or simply a moment for comfort food, Lady Gouda’s breakfast strata warms up for the challenge.

An egg n’ cheese, bread n’ bacon soup when it slides into the baking dish, the strata slowly bubbles and browns, a combination of bread pudding and quiche, and it’s ready to eat within minutes of being removed from the oven.

A slight variation: I used Vermont Smoke and Cure bacon instead of Lady Gouda’s suggested Canadian bacon. But did it mess up the recipe? Absolutely not! The best part about the ever-ready strata is how it incorporates the whims of the chef. Mixing meats? Using sweetbreads, or perhaps a healthier, nuttier bread? A sprinkling of herbs, maybe? The strata brings them all to the table “…and results in fantastic leftovers.”

Photo: shimelle/Flickr

Besides the star line-up of chefs, delicious food offerings and the chance to talk with professionals really dedicated to their work with food, one of the most exciting things planned for the Let’s Talk About Food Festival this Saturday is the Kitchen Conversations installation.

Think of it as a mobile recording studio. Think of it as a foodie ‘take’ on Story Corps (but substitute a recipe box for the silver trailor). Or think of it as your favorite aunt’s comfy breakfast nook. It’s a bit of all of these, in fact.

And now think: what is your favorite food memory? We each have one. A meal, a flavor, a moment in time over food, perhaps in a certain setting or on a particular occasion, that encapsulates something critically important and ultra-personal to each of us.

This weekend, you’ll get the chance to record that memory. Festival goers will be invited to enter a custom-built set called “Kitchen Conversations” and sit down with an interviewer to share a funny, moving or meaningful story related to food. The recordings made on site will be edited down to broadcast-quality narratives with audience appeal. Continue reading →

Photo: Terence S. Jones/Flickr

LOCAL TREATS

Help Allston, One Bite at A Time
The 14th annual Taste of Allston will be held this Saturday, June 25th, 12pm to 3pm. The event highlights local restaurants and will feature cuisine from dozens of countries representative of Allston’s ethnic communities. Guests can sample fare from local chefs, bid in a silent auction and enjoy live music. Proceeds benefit Allston Village Main Streets.

Help at the Farmers Market
Reminder: Cambridge Center Farmers Market is featuring a how2heroes live cooking demo each Wednesday of the summer. This weekly event brings different local chefs to the market to demonstrate how to prepare tasty, innovative dishes with your newly-purchased produce. Next Wednesday, William Kovel, head chef at the highly anticipated Catalyst, will visit the Kendall Square market.

More Truck Eats
Hungry Bostonians, rejoice! Last week the City Council announced that food trucks would be given access to more than 20 new sites across the city. The ordinance makes locales by Boston University, the South End and the Back Bay truck-friendly for the first time. Read more, and make suggestions for other desired locations.

Eating Well at Smolak Farms
Every Wednesday from June 29th to August 24th, Smolak Farms in North Andover is hosting Whim, an outdoor summer dining experience. Each week a different New England chef will prepare a local feast from the farm’s produce. In collaboration with Edible Boston, Gilt City, and New England Cooks, the night features a prix fix menu, a farm tour and hayride. For tickets, visit Gilt City.

Continue reading →

Beer (Photo: Flickr/Afagen)

In the last few years the number of local craft brewers has been steadily growing. There’s some seriously good beer being made in and around Boston by such relatively new, small-scale operations as Pretty Things, Blue Hills and Clown Shoes.

Recently, Jane Ward of Local In Season profiled Night Shift, a small brewing company from Somerville that is slated to enter the local microbrewery scene this fall. She visited their current brewing headquarters/lab/apartment to learn more about the brewing process from two of Night Shift‘s founders, Michael Oxton and Mike O’Mara. She offers a glimpse of the ins and outs of building a small brewery. Most important, though, are the descriptions of  Night Shift’s various beers, which incorporate all sorts of unusual, locally sourced ingredients from Taza chocolate to Mem Tea.

Dora the Donkey (photo: Robin Cohen)

In anticipation of the Let’s Talk About Food Festival taking place this Saturday at the Museum of Science, PRK will be whetting your appetite, so to speak, with an array of posts that introduce you to some of the folks from Boston’s food communities participating in the event.

Today, meet Robin Cohen — the avocational writer, gardener and recipe creator behind the Doves and Figs food blog. Based just north of Boston, Robin is passionate, prolific and finishing up her first book. At Saturday’s festival, Robin will man her own booth, “Canning for Foodies and Nerds,” and take folks step-by-step through the process of making a simple old-fashioned jam and canning it safely. She will also explain some of the science behind canning.

For now, however, in order to give you a sense of Robin’s broad interests, we offer the first in a series of posts that will build a profile of the active, rich farming community of Hardwick, Massachusetts – one of the subjects of her forthcoming book.

Here is a taste of Robin’s visits to Hardwick, MA, in her own words.
Continue reading →

Photo: bgottsab/Flickr

On lazy cooking days, nothing hits the spot like an omelet.

Both simple and potentially fancy, an omelet comes together in mere seconds. It can be served along a green salad for lunch or dinner, or toast for breakfast. It’s filling, healthy, and comforting. Rushing between classes at school, a two-egg omelet was my go-to lunch.

Though I still haven’t figured out the perfect, French method of cooking an omelet (see this Julia Child video for inspiration), no one’s really going to complain if you just fold the thing over, as I do, and as the Wannabe Chef does here. He uses my favorite filling of mushrooms and onions with an added twist – maple syrup (seriously: if you don’t like mushrooms, you need to try some seared creminis in eggs). The end result, he says, is the quintessential balance of savory and sweet. In fact, the Wannabe Chef calls it “the only omelet recipe you’ll ever need.”

Photo: akashgoyal/Flickr

This week at Public Radio Kitchen we will be dishing out savory samples of the “Let’s Talk About Food Festival” slated for this Saturday, June 25th, river-side at the Museum of Science. What do we mean by this?

To date, expert-filled panels, moderated films, documentaries, live cooking demos and educational visits to the museum by Boston Public School high-school’ers — plus Mayor Menino! and Chef Tony Maws! — have comprised the first-of-its kind, deep-dive initiative being sponsored by the MOS called Let’s Talk About Food.

Ongoing still, “LTAF” was launched last year in Boston as a series of educational programs aimed at increasing the public’s ability (and willingness) to engage in conversations about our food system, in all its iterations– nutrition, agricultural policy, sustainability, food security, food justice, environmental impacts, farm to table, you name it.

Now, those goals will reach their zenith, in a sense, this weekend, when leaders within Boston’s diverse food communities come to together to engage with the public. With you. Continue reading →

Photo: Afroswede/Flickr

I love my dad, but – and I hope he doesn’t take offense to this – he’s not much of a cook.

When I think back on his culinary contributions to the family growing up, they were always a bit dubious, if well-loved. He lorded over Bisquick pancakes and waffles on weekend mornings, and was so convinced that other family members were unworthy of this task that I didn’t learn to flip a pancake until I was 19 years old. He’s famous for leaving things in the oven and forgetting about them – I’m sure that the charred bottom of our toaster oven is simply a layer of fossilized pizza bagels. Many nights, to our mother’s displeasure, he would surprise the family with a dinner of fast food – General Tso’s, fries from a local burger shop, or a pie from one of Connecticut’s excellent pizzerias.

I wish I could say my dad would love the man-centric cookbook sent to me for review this month - Esquire’s Eat Like a Man – but, as you’ve probably discerned, he isn’t the cookbook type. Many of the book’s recipes contain vegetables, after all, something which would be enough to make my dad highly skeptical. Continue reading →

Photo: Dining With Dostoevsky

To me, good food is poetry.

Which is why I was thrilled to come across Dining With Dostoevsky, a smart, witty blog from a Californian graduate student named Junsui who dishes up a generous portion of literary allusions along with her recipes.

Junsui is going for the “dreaded ‘d’ word” (her dissertation, in Russian lit)–and in so doing infuses her posts with bits of what she is currently reading. A quotation from the Russian poet Osip Mandelshtam whets the reader’s appetite for “Perfectly Stuffed (Calamari),” the ‘stuff’ of today’s Food Therapy. Here’s the quote, first:

The sea, or Homer – all moves by love’s glow.
Which should I hear? Now Homer is silent,
and the Black Sea thundering its oratory, turbulent,
and, surging, roars against my pillow.

Heeding the call of the sea, Junsui joins forces with “The Greek”—a male character appearing in several of her posts—in making stuffed calamari for dinner. “And not just any old stuffing either,” she proclaims. Theirs was “the perfect combination of feta cheese, green pepper and tomato.”

A Greek friend joins the couple for dinner, as well as a bottle of the Greek aperitif Ouzo. What more could Dining With Dostoevsky wish for? Only “the crashing of the waves and an island breeze.” Whoa.

With such entertaining stories and lip-smacking recipes for any reader–grad student or no–Dining With Dostoevsky will expand your brain as well as your palate.

Here is her recipe for Perfectly Stuffed Calamari.

Photo: Courtesy of Poor Girl Gourmet

This pithy phrase, one we all know well, applies perfectly to what blogger Amy McCoy, a.k.a. Poor Girl Gourmet, describes in a new post. She’s been raising chicks at home, you see, with her enthusiastic husband, both of them fully prepared to raise those chicks into chickens and turn those chickens into dinner.

It ain’t easy. Though not for lack of trying, or for lack of caring for these constantly moving, fluffy little guys. Read through Amy’s informative, consumately entertaining post, and you’ll get a dose of reality. In her words, this write-up is “…not for the faint of heart, but it is all part of the reality of raising your own meat.” Wild animals be damned.