Capital Spice

Norman Rockwell's "Freedom from Want"

Whether you’ve decided to roast, grill, smoke or fry your turkey, the final step can make or break your presentation.  Even the most beautiful bird, with a crisp and golden skin, can end up looking like a pile of hacked-up meat on the plate if you don’t carve it properly.  A well-carved turkey, on the other hand, allows guests to fully appreciate the quality of your cooking.

On Wednesday evening, I had the pleasure of attending the second class in Jason Tesauro’s “Modern Gentleman” series at the Morrison House.  Titled “Birds & Brews,” the evening was dedicated to two subjects: craft beers and turkey dinners.  While the Dogfish Head beers that Devin Arloski shared with us were delicious, the real education of the evening was a freezer-to-plate walk-through of how to brine, cook and serve a traditional Thanksgiving turkey by Chef Dennis Marron.

With Chef Marron’s guidance, even a first-time carver can quickly dispatch a holiday bird.  And if you think you’re the only one who doesn’t know how to do it…think again.  It was a matter of moments between Marron’s honing his knife-edge and all of us gathering tightly around him to make sure we didn’t miss a step.

A chef’s step-by-step guide to carving – and the recipe for his turkey brine - after the jump. (more…)

Sometimes there’s just too much to ‘splain to contain it all in one place.  Especially when it comes to Thanksgiving.

For those of you who remember our experience with a smoked turkey on “Fakesgiving” last year, check out Endless Simmer’s inaugural podcast today.  Mike shares airtime with Top Chef’s Fabio Viviani, Elizabeth Karmel from Hill Country Barbecue and championship barbecuer Clint Cantwell.  They’re all talking turkey and sharing different techniques to step up your Thanksgiving game.  Check out the podcast and then vote for your favorite preparation style (hint: smoke it out!).

If you’re pressed for time and looking for step-savers, Mike put together a list of local restaurants that can help with some (or all) of the turkey day preparations.  Check it out over at DC Foodies, where Mike regularly posts the “Foodie To-Do List” of upcoming events.

And keep your eye on this space for some turkey carving tips and tricks courtesy of the Morrison House’s Chef Dennis Marron.  We’ll be learning from the chef at tonight’s “Modern Gentleman” program and bringing back what we learn to share it with you.

With the temperatures dropping and damp air outpacing autumn’s crispness, we’ve been in the mood for a hearty seafood dish. While some entertaining hosts disagree, I think there is no better reason to try a new dish than friends coming over for dinner. Besides, Itty Bitty Betty and The Bacon Terrorist are always game. As friends with a mutual appreciation for food and cooking, they are a forgiving audience if things don’t go as planned.

Regardless my hand immediately reached for one of our foolproof cookbooks From the Earth to the Table. This wine country cuisine, whole-foods focused cookbook has been the source of some our favorite meals including our favorite spicy tri-color tomato soup and ricotta and herb tart.  The night’s beverage list was weighted heavily on beers, making baked mussels with serrano chiles and fresh mozzarella the perfect choice.

For avid shellfish fans, Mike and I rarely cook them at home instead preferring to leave the shucking and serving to the professionals. I was nervous about giving our friends food poisoning with my amateur shellfish ways. Still, mussels are reputed to be easy to prep and spotting a bad mussel is pretty straightforward  (anything with a closed shell after cooking time is complete). I soldiered on.

results and recipe after the jump! (more…)

It’s a big week for DC food bloggers, with two worthwhile events coming up over the next few days.

If you’ve noticed there seem to be a whole lot of folks writing about the DC cooking, dining and drinking scene lately, you’re not alone.  Whether your taste runs to do-it-yourself recipes at home, recreating restaurant classics, or writing about restaurant experiences around town, there are plenty of new blogs out there for you to check out.

Sure, that means we end up spending a lot more time reading about food…but is that really such a bad thing?

For us, the exciting thing is the potential to give back that the growing ranks of bloggers represent.  Some local food bloggers have been working to help local causes for years, now: DC Foodies donates ad revenues from their site to local food-related charities.  Dining in DC is working as a team captain for Food & Friends’ Slice of Life.  And Foodie Tots and the Arugula Files took the lead on a “Blog for the Bay” campaign earlier this year.

Now Adventures in Shaw is organizing a “Food Bloggers’ Spooktacular Bake Sale” to take place this Saturday at the 14th & U farmers’ market, with the proceeds benefitting Martha’s Table.  We’re officially calling all local food bloggers to pitch in and help.  If you’re a local food blogger and you want to help, there are several ways you can get involved.  You can bake some treats to contribute to the sale.  You can show up on Saturday and help sell the goodies.  And you can help us spread the word on your blog, as well.  It’s a great way to get involved and to help a worthwhile program in the process.

Once you’ve done your part to help out, put on your party shoes and join us next Wednesday night for the third monthly DC Food Bloggers’ Happy Hour.  This month, we’ll be taking over the Black Squirrel’s newly opened second floor space to get together with all of our fellow food bloggers, new and old.  Looking for an opportunity to meet your fellow writers?  Eager to spend some time with folks who are just as passionate about eating and drinking as you are?  Or just needing an excuse to check out the Black Squirrel?  These are all good reasons to join us next Wednesday.

The Happy Hour runs from 6 to 8 PM, and it’s being organized by the Arugula Files, Gradually Greener, the Modern Domestic, us, the Beer Spotter, and Capital Cooking.  You can find the Black Squirrel at 2427 18th Street in Adams Morgan.

As always, drop us a quick note and let us know if you plan to stop by.  Hope to see you there!

It’s a silly question, really.  While Gourmet may be the grande dame of food publications, it was hardly existing in a vacuum.  All the proof you need can be found over at The Bitten Word, where Zach and Clay work their way through recipes from magazines as august as Saveur and Bon Appetit and as accessible as Everyday Food and Food Network Magazine.

Here at Capital Spice, we subscribe to Cooks Illustrated and Food & Wine (we used to subscribe to Gourmet, and we’re really hoping our lapsed subscription didn’t have anything to do with its demise).  But there’s another type of food magazine out there, and a recent visit to the Dupont Circle FreshFarm Market reacquainted us with a pair of magazines that focus on our local foodshed.

On the surface, Flavor Magazine and Edible Chesapeake have a lot in common: They’re both free publications that can be found in foodie-friendly places like farmers’ markets, Whole Foods and smaller, locally-owned food shops.  They both emerged in response to the growing locavore movement in the DC area.  And they both call attention to a variety of local issues and producers that tend to go unnoticed in the national publications.

But each one brings a unique voice to the community, and together they offer a great way to stay current on what’s going on among growers, producers and eaters in the region.

A look at the current issues of Flavor Magazine and Edible Chesapeake (and some more info about each) after the jump. (more…)

We’ve already put away our gazpacho recipe for the season, and we’ve frozen enough peach puree to get us through the winter.  But we’re intent on transitioning at least one warm-weather treat into fall (and maybe even winter) by changing up the ingredients: homemade ice cream.

Anyone can enjoy ice cream and frozen yogurt in summer…and this year, thanks to our new Ice Cream Maker attachment for our KitchenAid mixer, we did just that.  We sought out a few good recipes and kept coming back to one man.  David Lebovitz, an American blogger in Paris (as Joe Yonan dubbed him in the Washington Post feature that brought him to our attention), is a former Chez Panisse pastry chef who has put together some deliciously creative ice cream flavors.  A few of them are available on his blog, and even more can be found in his book “The Perfect Scoop.”

After trying his recipe for strawberry frozen yogurt to christen the new gadget, we decided to try out one of his more esoteric ice cream flavors: roquefort and honey.  Considering the fact that the ice cream maker went onto our wish list after swooning over the Dijon ice cream that Chef Robert Weland incorporates into his gazpacho at Poste, it was only a matter of time.

Tasty notes on process, editing and results after the jump. (more…)

Forget sweaters and changing leaves. Here are ten telltale signs we know it’s fall in DC.

1.       Dinner switches from gazpacho to roasted chicken

2.       Mike gets reacquainted with the Big Green Egg

3.       After a summer of crabs at Quarterdeck and Tangier Island, our go-to seafood is oysters at Johnny’s Half Shell and mussels at Granville Moore’s.

4.       Elizabeth starts baking again

5.       Pumpkin beer!

6.       We’re on the hunt for savory recipes starring leeks and butternut squash

7.       We say good-bye to the basil lemontini and hello to the warm duck Rueben at the Poste bar

8.       Too many local apples, not enough apple recipes

9.       Kiss the sunglasses good-bye. We go from al fresco dining to cozy lounges and tea houses.

10.    Fall colors bring road trips and local discoveries like Wasmund’s single malt applewood smoked whiskey.

September can be such a tease.  The air is livable and I long to stomp through crunchy leaves with a hot cider in one hand and our dog’s leash in the other. But we just aren’t there yet. White linen may have left the stage but corduroy jackets aren’t regular stars. Similarly, the cool air means the end of berry season but corn is still stacked on the vendors’ folding tables.  What goes best with an early fall warm day and cool evening breeze?  Crab and corn chowder.

As if the addition of crab to a classic corn chowder doesn’t make it sound appealing, how about a recipe that co-stars bacon and chanterelle mushrooms? Sold. I’d been eyeing this recipe, from The Bon Appetit Cookbook, all summer, waiting for the mercury to drop just enough to rationalize a full-bodied savory soup. The recipe is a roadmap of the season’s best options: local crabmeat, fresh leeks from the farm, and bright crispy corn.

For me, hot soup recipes are best left to low key Sunday evenings when ingredients can sizzle and simmer on their own time while I prep the next step, glass of wine in hand. Though it can be accomplished with only two hands, I recommend tackling this recipe with the help of a sous  in the kitchen. If only for the witty banter.  

Recipe after the jump! (more…)

A few weeks ago, we received a comment from Jack who made a few tweaks to our favorite recipe for homemade half-sour pickles.  His version added onions and turmeric to the mix, which we expected to give the pickles a more pronounced vegetable flavor.  Considering how popular our pickle post has been, we were eager to see how Jack’s variation differed from the original.

We stopped by the H Street FreshFarm Market and made a beeline for Richfield Farms’ stand at the rear of the market.  Their cucumbers have proven to be perfect for pickling in previous efforts, so we wanted to use them again this time.  While we were there, we may have picked up the ingredients for a batch of gazpacho, too…have we mentioned how often we make it in season?

Jack’s recipe and our thoughts after the jump. (more…)

Tim Carman at the Washington City Paper tipped us off to Kim O’Donnel’s “Canning Across America” effort with a write-up over at Young & Hungry yesterday evening, and it put us in a thoughtful mood.  Though we don’t have the equipment to do full-on long-term storage canning, we try our best to prolong the flavors of summer here at Capital Spice.

We can’t get enough of our homemade half sour pickles (and apparently neither can you!).   We’ve even tried our hands at quick-pickling a variety of other vegetables to make our our giardiniera-style snacks.  And we’re very popular around the holidays when handing out jars of bourbon-soaked cherries and peaches.  While we may not be raising our tongs in solidarity with canners across the country this weekend, we definitely support the cause.

As much as we might enjoy making smoky, tangy gazpacho (using both heirloom AND hybrid tomatoes from the farmers’ market…Jane Black would be proud), it can get a bit pricey to go around throwing 5 or 6 pounds of tomatoes into the food processor each week when you’re shelling out $3, $4, even $5 per pound.  Thankfully, there’s a way to make your share of season-stretching recipes without breaking the bank – even if you don’t have your own backyard garden or orchard to pick on.  They’re known as “seconds,” but they’re the first thing I go for at the market.

The joy of “secs” after the jump. (more…)