Lee Bros.

Apropos of earlier discussion about the uselessness of non-technique cookbooks, I have a confession.  Lately I've been cooking nearly everything out of a new book: The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook.  I picked it originally when it was mentioned on Smitten Kitchen, and I've already used it to produce not only cornbread salad and buttermilk dressing, but hominy with fresh mushrooms, okra-corn pudding, and soon perhaps an experiment in mock South Carlolina barbeque.  It's a book that not only has a good relaxed Southern personality, but also good, relatively manageable, recipes.  It will almost certainly be appearing repeatedly in future posts. 

[Here is their website.]

Assorted Food Links

1. The French don't love Julia Child.
   
2. Snickerdoodles!
3. Have you ever tried good tequila?
   

Ad hoc Italian Stir-Fry

Mark Bittman reports:

I found myself with the ingredients for a quick stir-fry: shreds of cooked chicken, two or three kinds of mushrooms, asparagus trimmings (the flower ends had mostly been used at a television shoot), basil.  But I also had a loaf of bread I wanted to eat, so I was caught in a cross-cultural conundrum: eat bread with a stir-fry, or try make an Italian-style stir-fry. The second seemed more logical.  And I tried — I used olive oil, I added a bit of white wine, I threw in a few thyme sprigs, I finished the dish with more olive oil and even a bit of lemon. But it really wasn’t very successful. I sat there munching on my bread and eating the dish and thought, contrary to much of what I usually think, that sometimes the style of cooking will conquer the nature of the ingredients. A stir-fry is somehow always going to seem Chinese.

I was faced with a refrigerator of leftover odds and ends and decided to attempt something similar.  Maybe I just have lower standards, but I surprised myself by how happy I was with the result.