Yogurt Culture

A few weeks ago my friend Sam decided she could no longer take care of her yogurt cultures and kombucha colony. So she offered them to me. When I went to her apartment, she was bent over a pad of stationery writing down step-by-step care instructions for each group of live microorganisms, which were bundled away in tight-lidded plastic containers next to sheets of cheesecloth and other paraphernalia on her counter. After a few demonstrations of these steps, Sam packed everything into a brown shopping bag, careful so as not to let the containers tip, and handled them over to me. I felt like I two babies had plopped on my doorstep.

Hungry Holiday

the Ugliest Gourmet winning dish (albeit with parsley), Aubergines in Spicy Honey Sauce Food is everything about the holidays to me, and I'm thankful this Thanksgiving for having a family who understands that. This year's feast in New Jersey was a smaller production than previous years but you wouldn't have known it from the type of emphasis placed on every aspect of the meal.

Cranberry Orange Mince Pie

So, nobody was exactly clamoring for me to remake a traditional British Christmas mincemeat pie this year at Thanksgiving. Blended dried fruits and the word "meat" in its name doesn't conjure the most appetizing dessert (even though today, meat is commonly left out). It certainly never did for me, especially since I've only had mincemeat once before as a straight-out-of-the-can pie filling. This was at a Thanksgiving long ago, and I recall reading the ingredients on the can: It was essentially a heavily spiced puree of apples and raisins. This irked me. Why mess around with dried and canned fruits when there was plenty of fresh apples and cranberries to go around? Worse yet, nobody seemed to know that this was in fact what was in the can.

Great Greenish Gobs of…

Spicy Honey Aubergines! And that's our official theme song for the finale of the Ugliest Gourmet blogging contest. Huzzah to The Blog That Ate Manhattan for creating what this blog's readers have deemed the ugliest delicious food of the bunch. All told, the results were nail-bitingly close to a four-way tie, with three votes each for the Gnocchi, Corned Beef and Tomato Pie, Kitty Box Cake and Maraq Molokheyia bil Dajaj. Some of these recipes sound so good I still want to make them sometime anyway.

Which is The Ugliest Gourmet?

Judgment is upon us for The Ugliest Gourmet! Let's have a big round of imaginary applause for everyone who bravely cooked, photographed and blogged about all the treats below. This home-cooking event was devised to prove that, despite the visual ostentation that professional cooks strive for, great food doesn't always look so great. So for once, the pressure of beauty is off -- and in fact, turned on its head. What will these bloggers have the freedom to cook up with the opposite of great appearance in mind? Let's have a look! But before we do, a word on how the contest works: In the next four days, ending midnight, Tuesday, November 20th, you may vote for the dish that you feel deserves the title of The Ugliest Gourmet. The dish you vote for should be something you want to eat -- figure in 50% for ugliness, and the other 50% for deliciousness. (Take a look at the contestants' blog posts for more details, too.) To vote, simply leave a comment on this blog. Please state somewhere in the first sentence of your comment the name of the dish and blog that you're voting for. I'll tally these up on Wednesday, and whoever receives the most votes/comments wins -- and will get to see me cook their dish for my family on Thanksgiving. So, without further ado, here are the entries: Charissa of Foracious Journeys created this Spinach Parsley Scramble -- lots of tasty greens bound with egg. "I realized how ugly this was going to be when the eggs started to turn green from the wilted spinach," she wrote on her blog.

Parmesan-Pureed Broccoli

Submissions close for the first-ever Ugliest Gourmet blogging contest in about ten minutes, and I scramble to bring you this humble entry. I contemplated plenty of visually off-putting dishes in the past weeks, but in the end, this simple vegetable side seemed to be the most to-the-point: Butter, broccoli and Parmiggiano-Reggiano -- what's not to love? Oh yeah, that gross green muck that it turns out looking like.

Roasted Beet and Orange Salad with Candied Orange Peel and Mint

Don't be swayed by the length of this rather unwieldy-sounding recipe's name; the latter two ingredients, candied orange peels and fresh mint, are almost inessential to the sparkling culinary gemstone that is roasted beets and fresh orange slices. "Wow" hardly nips at the issue I'm talking about here. Okay, so it's only food -- two foods to be precise. But sometimes, all's it takes, as they say, is two to tango.

The Bodega Challenge

As I've probably admitted more than once on this blog, in times of need, I turn the corner of my block and walk into "my" neighborhood bodega. Here I can score milk, limes, boxes of pasta, snacks, and more often than I'd like, pints of ice cream. Plus, the friendly Korean couple who own it treat me like a neighbor, and will let me get away with a few bucks if I'm short, since they know I'll be back. Have I ever put together an entire meal with ingredients solely from a bodega? Probably. But the Brooklyn Kitchen recently challenged any contestants to do so with flying colors for their first-ever Bodega Challenge. The theme: a Thanksgiving side dish. The occasion? The contest was held as part of the kick-ass kitchen store's one-year anniversary party. Whoo! I can't believe it's already been a year since I attended their first event last November.

The Chowder Surfer in the Rye: Cooking with Ben Sargent

It’s November and the end of the warm water surf season, that is, to New York-based surfers like Ben Sargent. To the rest of us average human omnivores with tastebuds that signal richness, warmth, nostalgia and most of all deliciousness, however, it is most certainly the beginning of chowder season. Fortunately for us, Brooklyn's own Chowder Surfer is here to share both of these high seasons all year 'round. Ben Sargent, self-taught chef, former proprietor of New York's surf bar Hurricane Hopeful, and star of the only online TV series chronicling the adventures in chowder-making via surfing (or is it the other way around?), was kind enough to chat over a steaming pot of home-cooked chowder for this blog.

Cream of Cauliflower Soup

This is going to sound terrible. But until today, I had been prejudiced towards vegetables based on color. I adored deep colors. I bought produce according to my preconceived notion of their superiority alone. And when I passed the lowly, pale white cauliflower, I turned up my nose without giving it any further thought and went, 'peh.' And reached for a more becoming candidate in the Brassicaceae oleracea family, like Brussels sprouts. I was a vegetable bigot.