© 2012 The Joy of Cooking Trust and the MRB Revocable Trust
recipes
With Passover just around the corner and Spring taking its sweet time this year in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, we thought it would be a good time to revisit our old, comforting friend: Matzo Ball Soup. You can fancify this recipe any way you please...
Flour and water. That's all you'll need. Really.
I know, it's hard to have faith in just flour and water--those of us who bake bread have come to love the deus ex machina of instant yeast: its frothy upsurge and predictability. But wild yeasts are no slouches, and they are easily harnessed for bread making, as thousands of years of our ancestry would tell you.
The sap is rising. We're moving into a brighter, warmer season, casting off the cumbersome and unwieldy. I envision a collective unburdening--people liberated from their turtlenecks and woolen mittens, dusting off their lives, and putting on something vastly more comfortable.
I need no excuse to heavily season dishes when everyone lets me... I love curries, moles, adobo-type brasies, and pretty much anything else that requires a chin-stroking perusal of the spice cabinet. But as Spring approaches, even I start making simpler preparations to highlight one of our favorites: nice, crisp asparagus.
For a person of Irish descent, you think I'd get more worked up over St. Patrick's Day than I do. Oh sure, I'm quite proud of my Irish roots. I took Irish step-dancing lessons, and even had a regulation curly wig for competitions (that's as far as I'll go into that matter). I also enjoy drinking beer as much as the next person (hold the green dye, please), but for some reason St.
One of the small mercies of life is that February only has 28 days. I know there are real reasons for it, involving Romans and lunar calendars and such, but I like to think of it as a small blessing--the fact that cold, gray February is just a little shorter.
Salads don't come naturally to me in the winter months. Perhaps it's a sense of pessimism reinforced by my dormant, gone-to-seed garden. It could also be related to the often pitiful salad greens at our supermarket--almost always discolored, wilted, and soaking wet from being sprayed with water for days on end. In any case, the circumstances hardly inspire me to toss a salad.