Greenwich Meal Time

Greenwich Meal Time is my journal of recipes and seasonal foods, and all sorts of musings about cooking and eating well. I now follow the growing season in eastern NY, near the Vermont border. The recipes come from many sources of inspiration - what's at the market, what's in my fridge and pantry, what do I crave? I focus primarily on whole foods sourced from the garden, farmers' markets, co-ops and foraging, combined with flavors and spices from around the world.

Living in what was then still fairly rural eastern Long Island, not far from the Long Island Sound, I grew up in the time when children had the freedom (we were required) to run unsupervised all day. By the time I was eight I preferred solitude, to wander in the woods around our home, often on the hunt for low bush blueberries of which I could only find a handful a day, enough to make muffins. Along edges of the woods stood many apple trees, most planted as ornamentals. In fall I'd gather up baskets full of the small, tart fruits to make pies, two at a time. I used the Joy of Cooking to each myself how to make dough, and learned how through repetition I had a feel for when the dough was just right. As it was when I was in the woods, I experienced losing myself and deep focus through making pies.

The recipe collection is a catalog of my inner life: momentary enthusiasms, deep practices, and experimenting with processes - from baking bread to mastering macarons, and from steeping bitters for homemade amaro to devising fixes for culinary mistakes.

More content to follow soon. visit barbaraprice.wordpress.com

Saffron Coconut Sablés

Saffron Coconut Sablés (butter cookies) encrusted with nuts This year’s new Christmas cookie is another one for the more sophisticated palette, as addictive as your favorite homey cookies of yore but also perfect to serve at the end of an elegant holiday feast. Sablés are incredibly simple – they are old-fashioned icebox cookies, mixed ahead, […]

Forage and garden: bitter-sweet and homemade amaro

Having spent a full day indoors at the computer, the time has come to mix a cocktail (a rye Manhattan with both sweet and dry vermouth and a splash of Cocchi Vermouth di Torino) and walk in the remaining warmth of a perfect fall evening, in search of bittering agents I could dig up. In […]

Baking wheat-free: grind your own grains

The web is full of gluten-free posts, but for many of us it isn’t the gluten but some other aspect of wheat (and I’m researching this to post later) that cause our problems. For me it isn’t celiac or digestive discomforts that result from eating flour products but a facial rash. I’ll see the reaction […]

Pates de fruit

Pates de fruit are sophisticated, bite-sized squares of fruit jellies that are sanded with crystallized sugar, chewy in texture and combine the sweet, tart flavors of natural fruit juice. If you have never had one, the distant imitators are gummy candies, Chuckles, or the chocolate covered jellies from a Whitman’s Sampler. The real thing provides […]