Category: Cooking

The Boston Globe has an article about the canola crop being grown in Maine and pressed into cooking oil by Maine Natural Oils.

Rodney Chamberland has been working straight out plowing and planting over 100 acres of seed potatoes. The farm’s potatoes come first.

Then, Chamberland plants rotation crops. One he’s seeding this spring will turn into 30 acres of flowering yellow canola. The crop not only improves the potatoes he’ll grow on the same land next year, says Chamberland, but its seeds will also be pressed into one of the Northeast’s only regional cooking oils: Maine Natural Oils.

The article also quotes Leslie Oster from Aurora Provisions,

“I am more than all for it,” says Leslie Oster, the general manager of Aurora Provisions and a Slow Food Portland organizer. “Now, if we could just get someone to invest in a full-scale wheat production mill.”

Tasting in Tongues has started writing a weekly post where author Paul Gagne describes how he cooked up the food sourced at the Portland Farmers’ Market. The latest menu includes a “pork chop on a bed of the parsnip/potato puree with a sprinkling of the balsamic reduction”, Greek salad and fiddleheads with red quinoa.

L&A Farm was selling rhubarb this morning at the Deering Oaks Farmers’ Market but it was going quickly. One of the other vendors still had some fiddleheads as well as some asparagus. And there was the usual spring line-up of flowers, seedlings, cheeses, etc.

Lindsay Sterling from Inside Immigrant Kitchens has published another installment in her series on authentic ethnic cooking in this week’s Portland Phoenix.

Cooking Indian food by myself for the first time felt like skydiving; it went against all my instincts. I had one thing going for me: an Indian woman, Aruna Kilaru, had shown me exactly how to do it two weeks before. Aruna, a botany teacher and school principal from Hyderabad, India, had been visiting her daughter and son-in-law in Maine. I met them in, of all places, the office supply store Staples.

This week’s Portland Phoenix provides guidance for cooking up your own Eggs Benedict at home for those times when “it might have been better for your constitution (and reputation) to stay home in your bathrobe.” If you still want to venture out check the Sunday Brunch List for your options.

There are several terrific places where this brunch might go down in Greater Portland, but they are all likely to share one ingredient: a line stretching out the door. Your arrival in last night’s party clothes and disheveled hair barely elicits a nod from your equally hung-over companions, already there staking out a place on the waiting list.

Today’s edition of the Portland Daily Sun includes an article on the kosher seder being held at Shaarey Tphiloh.

At 8 p.m. tonight, the synagogue will open its doors and provide the Passover meal. About 55 meals are expected to be readied, Herzfeld estimated, noting that 45 people have signed up and anyone else who calls and expresses interest will be welcome.

Micucci’s is planning on releasing a series of house branded pasta sauces. The sauces are the creation of chef/baker Stephen Lanzalotta. The set of four sauces include Puttanesca Sauce, Original Pasta Sauce, Marinara Sauce and Vodka Sauce.