dianacooks.com

So my Salton 1-qt. yogurt maker from amazon.com arrived yesterday via UPS. It’s basically a plastic crockpot running on low heat. I immediately began work on a sample batch. I used four cups of organic whole milk, a 1/2 cup of powdered milk, and a packet of yogurt culture. You must scald the milk and let it cool to blood temp before putting into the yogurt maker, which takes about 1/2 hour. I put the mixture in the yogurt maker around 2:30 p.m. and by 6:30 I had a nice, firm yogurt. Then it had to go into the fridge to cool overnight.

This morning I spooned out a cup or so, mixed in some honey and Bonne Maman blackberry jam — very nice! Oddly enough, it didn’t turn 0ut as smooth and creamy as my Mason-jar-in-the-stove yogurt. And except for the scalding part, it’s a fairly carefree process. Otherwise, I can see this gadget paying for itself as I can purchase organic milk more cheaply than I can organic yogurt.

… is this simple pasta salad. Seriously. It’s the easiest thing in the world to make, and yet when friends and family visit, this is what they ask for.

I vary ingredients a lot, but the technique is basic: boil pasta in a pot of rapidly boiling and salted water. The salted water is a key element in getting maximum deliciousness out of this salad.

While the pasta’s cooking, prep your vegetables. Some of my favorite combinations are a) chopped tomatoes, basil and minced garlic b) finely chopped summer squash or zucchini, thyme, and garlic or c) what you see here, which is chopped garden tomatoes, sliced fennel, and a chiffonade of basil. Douse vegetables with EVOO, salt and freshly ground pepper. Then shred or chop your cheese of choice. Today, I did buffalo mozzarella and a liberal grating of Parmesan.

Drain pasta and dump in bowl of vegetables. The hot pasta actually “cooks” the vegetables; within seconds the aroma of the herbs and garlic (if you’ve used it) will surround you. Then stir in the cheese. Now eat.

I’m telling you — there will be no leftovers.

A peek at some of the yummy vegetables I picked up at an organic farm down in Lincoln, Massachusetts. On top, some small onions, then down to the right about a pound of small potatoes. The ferny things you see at the far right are two fennel bulbs, along with stalks and fronds. Then to the bottom left, some beautiful okra, which is extremely hard to grow in the northeast. They also had some pretty purple okra, which I’ve never seen before.

The okra will be used for a seafood gumbo I’m making in a couple weeks; the fennel went into a pasta salad for Sunday lunch (photo forthcoming).

This recipe came from Boston chef Michael Schlow’s new cookbook, It’s About Time. Actually I don’t own the book, but saw this recipe described in a newsletter and tracked it down. It’s supposed to me served with reductions of carrot and white truffles. Instead, I deglazed the pan with lemon juice, which is why you see all that slop around the fish.

I enjoyed this, but DH didn’t like the potato crust. He said the thyme tasted “burned.” Next time I’ll probably add some chili powder to the potato crust.

I’ve lived in the Boston area for going on ten years, and I’m ashamed to admit — this was my first visit to the New England Mobile Book Fair in Newton Highlands, although I’d heard about it for years. It’s basically a nondescript wooden warehouse filled with new and remaindered books. Huge. As in I didn’t even have time to explore vast sections of this place.

Why I went today: it was kind of a gray, ugly day. We’d woken up late, and as I was languidly surfing through the Jessica’s Biscuit web site, I found out the Book Fair was affiliated. Why, thought I, they must have cookbooks! So off we went. (I was heartened when, upon leaving, I told DH where we were going and he replied rather brightly, “Oh, good!” I immediately translated that into, “Buy as many cookbooks as you like.”)

Oliver’s a smart kid, so the minute he stepped into the place and smelled paper, he started whining. But then we found some little stepstools, and he amused himself by pretending he was a clerk, describing the books for imaginary customers. (”All the books are different. This book has a picture of a banana. Would you like a banana book? It’s down aisle 5-2.”)

I was good. Very good. I had picked out ten books, but I narrowed it down to six by the time we hit the register. Two were 20 percent of list price; the others were 50 to 70 percent off. Everything currently out and “hot” was 40 percent off — like the Foster’s Market Cookbook and mammoth Gourmet Cookbook. What I purchased:

*Edna Lewis’s Taste of Country Cooking, to feed my southern/soul food cookbook addiction;

*The Blue Ribbon Country Cookbook by Diane Roupe, containing over 1,000 recipes for good ol’ American cooking, some recipes of which are state fair blue ribbon winners;

*Lindy Wildsmith’s Preserves, an import from the U.K. with recipes for things like shrubs and limoncello. Could not pass up;

*Iced Tea by Fred Thompson. Purely market research for my own book proposal on summer drinks. Besides, it was only $5.98;

*And last, the prize: A copy of Eric Treuille and Ursula Ferrigno’s Bread. Many reasons why I simply had to possess this book. First off, Treuille’s affiliated with one of my favorite bookshops in the world, Books for Cooks, located in London. I also see the book referred to a lot by other food writers. And it’s a Dorling-Kindersley book, which means lots of lovely pictures to slobber over.

That’s five books, not six. Right. I ended up not buying one at the register when they had to look up the price — it was $19, but considering they’d rung up everything else and I was having severe sticker shock, I passed. Such admirable self restraint.

Right now, I have a starter going on the table for the ciabatta recipe. I am determined this fall to bake the perfect ciabatta loaf. I think with this book for reference, I’m off to a good start.

My only criticism of the bookshop: the books are filed by title, not author’s last name. I was trying to find books by Jane Grigson, for example, so I’d have to go over to the veggie section, then back to International/British, then poke around the general area. Then I couldn’t remember the name of a book written by French jam-maker Christine Ferber, so again, more fruitless looking.

I’m already having fantasies about dropping Oliver off at school in September and heading down there with my credit card ….