Category: Cooking

November is here and the Thanksgiving articles are starting to hit the presses. First out of the gate is a piece by C.Z. Cramer entitled Amore Locavore in this month’s Portland Magazine.

We live in the best of times here for the renaissance of a traditional, locally raised and grown, genuine Thanksgiving. We can recreate the gourmet version of the Pilgrim experience, as if those wilderness decades of green bean casseroles with canned cream of mushroom soup, marshmallow-capped yams, and frozen Midwestern birds never happened.

Program host Margarita Martinez and a film crew from the WGBH TV show Neighborhood Kitchens paid a visit to Emilitsa last month where Martinez and chef Demos Regas worked together to prepare a series of dishes from Emilitsa’s menu including one of my favorites the Melitzanosalata eggplant spread.

In the latest entry from Immigrant Kitchens, Lindsay Sterling learns how to make Nicaraguan Pineapple Pork from Jenny Sanchez (read the story, get the recipe and see the photos).

First, to the butcher. Ten minutes of bilingual banter and confusing hand gestures finally resulted in the desired meat cut: a rack of St. Louis style pork ribs that the butcher had run through the saw lengthwise twice, which cut the ribs perpendicularly into thirds. At home Jenny and I cut between the ribs so we ended up with a pile of bite-sized bone-in ribs. This struck me as a brilliant idea. If gnawing on bite-sized bones is what people love about chicken wings, they’re going to get a kick out of this.

Down East magazine has published an excerpt from the new Harbor Fish Market cookbook. The excerpt includes details on the market’s history, advice on buying and storing fish and a set of recipes.

Nine Custom House Wharf in Portland has been the site of a fish market since sometime in the late 1800s. It became the Harbor Fish Market when the Alfiero family purchased it in 1966, a joint venture between Ben Alfiero Sr., and his older brother John Alfiero. John handed over the reins to Ben in 1975, and through the next few years, Ben’s three sons, Nick, Ben Jr., and Mike, joined in. They worked as a team of three brothers and father until Ben Sr. retired in 2000.

In the latest entry from Immigrant Kitchens, Lindsay Sterling learns how to make Pho from Hieu Nguyen (read the story, get the recipe and see the photos).

My friend’s husband, Hieu Nguyen, grew up in Dalat, Vietnam, until he was five. He remembers Vietnam’s gorgeous rolling hills, beaches, rainforests, and lakes as a cross between Vermont and Costa Rica. He hasn’t been back since he left in 1975, the day before Saigon fell. He hopes one day to visit with his wife and kids. In the mean time, he lights incense and cooks a Vietnamese chicken noodle soup, called pho, combining his grandmother and mother’s methods with his own, discovered after years of cooking it every Sunday for his family.

In the latest entry from Immigrant Kitchens, Lindsay Sterling learns how to make Congelese Mini-Waffles from Ariane Kambu Mbenza (read the story, get the recipe and see the photos).

In the latest entry from Immigrant Kitchens, Lindsay Sterling learns how to make Chicken Biryani from Sudha Chalicham and Venu Chaganti (read the recipe and see the photos).

Then they added another quarter cup of whole dried spices: bay leaves, black cardamom pods, black cumin, cinnamon bark pieces, green cardamom pods, star anise, cloves and mace. Mace is the dried casing of the nutmeg nut. Each piece looks like a thumb-sized dried jellyfish.

In the latest entry from Immigrant Kitchens, Lindsay Sterling learns how to make Beef and Flatbread from a Somali immigrant (read the recipe and see the photos).

She taught me how to make chapati, an everyday Somali dish of beef, root vegetables, and flatbread in her outer Portland condo, while nine of her kids were at school, the oldest was upstairs, and the three-year-old was bowling with potatoes on the kitchen floor.