Of course there was going to be fool given the date, and of course there was going to be rhubarb, since the first new season’s stalks finally made their way into my local supermarket.
I love rhubarb inordinately. My mother loves rhubarb too – stewed to a pale pink pulp, poured over yoghurt, topped with vanilla ice cream, crumbled – you name it, she’ll eat it. When I was little she’d buy bags of rhubarb and stand at the kitchen counter chopping it and dropping it into the oven dish. I’d be given a stick of raw sour rhubarb to chew on, and a little bowl of sugar to dip it into. For every bunch I buy, one stick is sacrificed to re-creating this food memory. Continue reading
Partly it started because my sister Sarah and her boyfriend Matt came to stay with us in New York from London. Sarah is a wine buyer, so we left that bit up to her, while Jon went zooming off to the shop to pick up the ingredients for gin and tonics, margaritas, seabreezes and lots and lots of beer.
Is anyone else still coming to terms with the spring forward loss of an hour in the mornings? It doesn’t seem to have gotten any easier as the weeks go on.
This pasta sauce is literally translated as tart’s or whore’s. The idea being, I believe, that only slovenly women would make a sauce entirely out of store cupboard ingredients. That said, there’s an alternate theory that says the sauce’s sharp salty spicy nature is conferred upon the woman who cooks it.
Chicken cacciatore is a quick cook tomato-based chicken stew. Essentially you make a tomato sauce, then cook chicken pieces in it and tip in a drained can of beans towards the end of the cooking time. But, in a rewarding example of the whole being more than the sum of its parts, it tastes rich, complex and hearty – just the thing for a cool spring evening. Ha! Cool Spring Evening. It’s snowing here in NYC. Under a week since Jon was wearing shorts and we were eating guacamole on the balcony. March is fickle. 
