FoodPress

Here’s the advice: make this dish, because it may be the best thing I’ve ever eaten. The dish in question, “Sweet Potato Agnolotti with Sage Cream, Brown Butter and Prosciutto” – is from the The French Laundry Cookbook, and while it is insanely calorific, it’s also cheap and – relative to the rest of that book, anyway – easy. I’ll admit up front to leaving out one element of the dish – the brown butter – for reasons that will become apparent by the end of this post.

I love a good roast chicken. There’s just something homey and warm about a good, old-fashioned chicken dinner. I have made countless roasted chicken recipes over the years. I’ve fed my family some wonderfully flavorful, delicious chickens and some other chickens that we’d prefer not to remember. I’m always on the lookout for another good roast chicken recipe and I was thrilled when I ran across this one in Fine Cooking magazine last week.

In the spirit of daydreaming about farming and all things homemade, Trevor and I have been dabbling in cheesemaking recently. I’d love to say that it’s as simple as following a recipe and that we were pretty much ready to run out and buy a cow, but making cheese is hard. It’s more science than cooking. Very precise science. Like, whip out your digital thermometer and pH-meter precise science.

Usually I wouldn’t consider bread to be a sufficient MM offering, because…well, because man cannot live by bread alone. As much as I love bread, and love baking it, it’s always felt like a side dish. When I started out to make Stecca, an olive-oil brushed, salt-sprinkled loaf from Jim Lahey (of My Bread), I thought it was going to be an accompaniment to the dinner I had planned for Little Bit and me.

I sure hope you’re some place warm right now and can send some of the heat over this way. Or better yet, just send me a plane ticket (or 2) to Tahiti-k? I can pay you in cookies ONCE I warm up because I’m freezing my ends off this morning! But I do see some light at the end of this winter tunnel… the sun is finally out and the purple tulips I’ve been growing in my kitchen are starting to bloom.