From the L.A. Times
In Italy's Piedmont region, where polenta may be better loved than
anywhere else on Earth, the cornmeal mush is a food of the fall. When
the air turns crisp with the first frost and people await the arrival
of snow, housewives labor over their cooking pots, stirring, stirring
as coarse meal slurried in water gradually thickens and becomes sticky
and delicious. To serve, it's poured out onto a wooden board in a rich
golden puddle like a harvest moon.
Cesare Pavese wrote about
it in "The Moon and the Bonfires," a nostalgic novel about a
Piedmontese expatriate's return home: "These are the best days of the
year. Picking grapes, stripping vines, squeezing the fruit, are no kind
of work; the heat has gone and it's not cold yet; under a few light
clouds you eat rabbit with your polenta and go after mushrooms."
We
do things differently in Southern California. In the first place, fall
can be even hotter than summer. Here polenta belongs to these damp
chilly days of winter.
Brownies are the perfect picnic food. I wanted chocolate, I wanted a brownie, but I wanted something a little different. I thought a cream cheese brownie would be great but didn’t have cream cheese. However, what I did have was some goat cheese. I thought, what the heck…I am going to experiment.
If you’ve noticed a theme here (other than pies), you’ll notice a love for the nuts+pie combo. Perhaps it’s a contrasting textural thang, or maybe it’s a way of rationalizing eating so many pies (i.e. nuts are healthy, right?) At any rate, this pie is a tropical breeze in a pie shell, using macadamias for crunch on top of sweet vanilla pie filling. It’s a good one from Epicurious. Enjoy!
One of the most classic dishes of French cuisine is coq au vin, that famous stew of rooster braised in red Burgundy wine. Really it does not have to be made from rooster, capon or chicken are just as much called
for in traditional recipes. The practice of stewing meat in wine is
very much ancient. Coq au vin traces its history back to Roman times
when France was a part of Gaul, which combined most of western Europe.
This dish doesn't rely on one type of wine. It can be made with any
wine, and regions throughout France do make it with their local wines.
The two best-known versions are made with Pinot Noir or Riesling.
Snickerdoodles are a New England favorite, but the exact origin of the cookie seems to be a mystery. The Joy of Cooking claims that Snickerdoodles are probably German in origin, and that the name is a corruption of the German word Schneckennudeln, which means "snail dumpling.