Sunset, Wednesday, 25 November 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

This view is turned a little bit south from the usual perspective ... for those who know the area, looking more or less toward Charlottesville Airport from a mile east of 29.

Now ... in my sincerely misguided effort to be all things to all people, and in the belief that almost everyone who’s on the web at this moment is desperately seeking Thanksgiving dinner advice, I offer a little something culinary to go with the sunset.

After years, many years, of following the family habit of simply serving whole roasted yams, I switched last year to Roasted Yam Puree With Brown Butter, a recipe from the November 2004 issue of Bon Appétit. It was a hit, but probably only because I remembered that Patrick O’Connell, of The Inn at Little Washington (Washington, Virginia), had a Brown Butter recipe (the brown butter directions for the Bon Appétit yams seemed dangerously general and vague). I got O’Connell’s brown butter from The Inn at Little Washington Cookbook, but you can find it here. I think it’s critical to the success of the yams.

For what it’s worth, I’ve been roasting something like 7 or 8 pounds of yams and using more than a cup of butter. This year (I finished them just now, before sunset) I roasted garnet yams a good 90 minutes instead of an hour – a long, emphatic roasting for a sweeter, almost caramelized flavor, which then makes the puree more complex when combined with brown butter.

Happy Thanksgiving and good night!

Sunset, Monday, 7 September 2009 (Labor Day)

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Behind sunset, vast blue night and bright stars.

Part of the day was devoted to making peach ice cream, adapting a recipe from The Inn at Little Washington Cookbook: A Consuming Passion, by IALW chef-owner Patrick O’Connell. Despite the Inn’s reputation for complex, almost theatrical dishes, the recipes in this book are really accessible. To make what may be the best peach ice cream you’ve ever had (I think the secret is the vanilla), just do the ice cream part of the three-part “Peach Intensifier” dessert, cutting it in half for a small home ice cream maker. Just don’t mix white and yellow peaches – I’m not sure white peaches will work at all, but I know from sad experience that they don’t work with yellow.

If you have peaches coming out of your ears and are in dire need of this recipe, just contact me and I’ll write it out for you. In our case, the ice cream–making was occasioned not by Aunt Millie’s Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, peaches, but by our very own Crozet, Virginia, peaches, which have been fantastic this year.

And if you’re thinking it’s trivial for me to go off on a tangent about cooking – what, in this blog, are you kidding? – this morning I happened to catch NPR’s On Point, and a segment with an author who says humans are the apes who ultimately mastered fire and learned to cook. (Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham.)

Now, let’s see about those unbelievably human Mark Bittman Brussels sprouts ...