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Basic Meals—Just Add Water
Last week I wrote about our first meal in Italy with the Motturas—the fineness of the meal and the pleasures of sitting down to many courses. But many courses didn't mean many elaborate courses but rather food of the simplest order. The first course was composed of nothing more than day-old bread and a few garden vegetables, seasoned with vinegar and oil. When this was done, our host Alessandra disappeared from the table to make the soup course. It too used vegetables from the garden and water.
I've long espoused the value of water, devoting a whole chapter to its many uses in Ruhlman's Twenty, and I was pleased to see it used so efficiently here. So much so that I bought a couple of small ...
Also posted in Appetizers, aromatics, Recipes, Tips, Travel Tagged basic meals, Ruhlman's Twenty, soup, water as a tool, zucchini Comments closed
Classic Hollandaise

Making a traditional Hollandaise, yolks in a vinegar reduction (all photos by Donna Turner Ruhlman).
On Saturday night, sitting in the Ohio State Theater waiting for Jim Gaffigan to go on, I got a tweet from Elise alerting me that a website had stolen my text and Donna's photos from the following post. Elise, creator of the site Simply Recipes and vigilant crusader for blogger rights and general Internet justice, also sent me a link to the Google page to report copyright infringement. I wrote to Google, and the folks there had the theft taken down within days. So here's a prime example of the very hard work Elise does, not just her consistently excellent publishing at Simply Recipes, but also her work on behalf of other bloggers. And also ...
Also posted in aromatics, Breakfast, Food Writing, From Scratch, Kitchen Tips, Ratios, Recipes, sauce Tagged Breakfast, butter, classic, Hollandaise sauce, sauce, yolks Comments closed
Homemade Mayonnaise
I have so much crap on my desk! Being gone for three weeks it piles up. Books I have to at least familiarize myself with, dried soy beans and a tofu press, the manuscript I've got to fix, knives and rolling pins and some weird Fagor three-way cooker to figure out, emails to respond to, the ineluctable ... not modality of being ... but the ineluctable compulsion to check twitter feed. OY! But I never get tired of mayonnaise you make yourself. I don't care if it's with a hand blender or whisk. Helmann's is fine—I use that too, but it's not anywhere near homemade mayo. Two totally different products, and that's and why I love it. Its goodness is something you can't buy. You ...
Also posted in Books, Eggs, Elements of Cooking, Recipes Tagged Eggs, lemon, mayonnaise, oil Comments closed
Cultured Butter
Back at my desk after three weeks on the road (daughter college trip/week in West Palm to visit Mom with Donna and the kids/NYC biz). NYC biz fun!!! Stayed with dear friend Annie LaG, with whom I'm working on a TV project (don't hold your breath), following fab lunch at the always excellent Bar Boulud (thanks chefs Damian and Daniel! Your pâtés rock!); my book Twenty won an IACP award (yay!); had dinner with the mercurial Amanda Hesser after getting lost in Williamsburg thanks to dead iPhone 3G (ate at Isa, where two tables down was the excellent Eric Asimov, who was so kind to me at the NYTimes when he was a rising copy editor and I was a lowly copy boy in ...


















