Monday, March 06, 2006

Unphotogenic food

Okay, I'm not going to win any food photography awards for this one. But the meal was good. What I should done was take a photo of the main dish while it was still sitting in its cast iron skillet - two big, beautifully browned pork chops, nestled in a bed of kasha flavored with bacon, wild mushrooms and onions. I served it up with wedges of cabbage cooked in some chicken broth with caraway seeds, some slices of boiled beets, and a spoonful of Cabot sour cream. Very simple to pull together (cook the bacon, then brown the chops in the fat, remove, cook onion in fat, add kasha, some rehydrated dried mushrooms, cook a couple minutes, throw in the bacon, the mushroom cooking liquid, a little chicken stock, put the chops on top and toss in the oven) and very tasty. Of course, the sour cream and bacon don't exactly make this the lightest dish on earth, but we've discredited low-fat diets now, right? Bacon for everyone! Walter Willett, eat your heart out. So to speak.

On a topic not culinary, but at least food-chain related, I watched a hawk scoop up a pidgeon today right in the heart of Porter Square. He sat on the top of a telephone pole with the pidgeon in his grasp, eyeing the commuters warily as if he expected one of them to try to climb the pole and take his prize away. I find it incredibly heartening to see hawks in the city. Posted by Picasa

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This sounds really good to me.

BTW we here in Pgh have a pair of hawks who have long nested on a ledge of a local skyscraper. Every year they raise some babies there, and there is a camera on the nest, which feeds into a monitor in a window I pass everyday, on my way to work. So I always get to see the eggs, when they first appear, as well as the babies.In the winter, of course, there's just the empty nest, waiting.
When they were first spotted, there was some thought that future generations would be the answer to the pigeon situation. Turns out that the babies always go far away, as each pair's territorial claim is very large. They are just lovely, though.