Right before it was yesterday’s news and tossed on the cultural junk pile as passé, everything was the next big thing. Devotees of Anthony Bourdain will know that as of two weeks ago, Croatian cuisine is the new black. Prior to all this, somewhere between Spanish food blowing up into our collective consciousness and the advent of Ecuador in the global gastronomic stakes, in 2010 Portugal flickered briefly into view, largely on the strength of David Liete, before vanishing under the rising tide of new and undiscovered.

Not so for Dan Gilbert and Carla Gonçalves of Philadelphia’s Koo-Zee-Doo for whom the discovery of Portuguese food by the public was just the beginning. Winners of a highly coveted James Beard Award also in 2010, they have continued to take traditional Portuguese food to the next level and justify its increased popularity.

Now that we have a child, we’re very often late to the party when it comes to hot new restaurants. Not that we could ever have been accused of having our finger on the dining-out pulse anyway, given that our preference for restaurants runs rather more towards the traditional and wholesome than the trendy and transitory. So, it wasn’t until late winter of this year that we guilted the in-laws into putting the baby to bed and finally got the chance to visit Koo-Zee-Doo.

Happily this Portuguese charmer in Philadelphia’s Northern Liberties was both worth the wait and, as far as we could tell, entirely unchanged for its new-found fame. That it was also around the corner from the 700 Club, where there is not only soccer on the TV but, to our great surprise, hand-pulled ales, meant by the time we showed up for our reservation, we were beerily jovial.

The third course on the tasting menu – outstanding value at only fifty sheets a head – was Koo-Zee-Doo’s take on the traditional Portuguese soup, caldo verde, of smoked chouriço* sausage, kale, and potatoes simmered in a beef broth. Of all the six outstanding dishes we sampled that night, this was the simplest and perhaps the best. Instead of a broth, this soup resembled more a British leek and potato or a warm Vichyssoise in texture, as the potato had been blended with the stock. Slim strands of kale ran through the soup like green threads in a linen jacket, stitched together with tiny buttons of chouriço. Most impressively, from both a visual and gustatory perspective, was the use of a daring curl of chouriço oil, almost as a question mark inviting the diner to compare it to its traditional version.

It was a perfect reinvention of a classic without any of the deconstruction rubbish that still seems to plague trendy restaurants trying to be clever. And speaking of clever, all we have done here in our version is switch out the beef stock for a ham broth which, we think, adds an additional porky depth to the whole thing. I’m not sure whether Koo-Zee-Doo received its James Beard Award solely for its use of chouriço oil, but if I were judging the contest they probably would have. Now that we’ve learned about it, it’s quite simply an indispensable ingredient, and the next big thing, at least until something else comes along, in our kitchen.

*Note: Portuguese chouriço is very similar, if not completely identical, to Spanish chorizo. Do not substitute Mexican or other New World-style chorizos unless you want the result to be completely different. It would probably still be delicious, just different.

Named for the grandson of Puerto Rico’s first governor, the southern city of Ponce is blessed with appropriately distinguished architecture. The equal of few in the Americas, it is a delightful surprise for the visitor. That conquering Americans were responsible for the preservation of the city’s historic district is equally surprising.
Prior to defeat in the Spanish-American war, Ponce’s status as an important industrial city in the Spanish Americas was secure. Built on sugar, coffee, rum and banking, and populated by a rash of European immigration, the Victorian era saw the city’s burghers erect their ostentatious modernist-influenced palaces that now adorn Ponce’s plazas and boulevards like so many gingerbread mansions. However, following the American conquest of the island, trade and investment was diverted through San Juan, while Ponce slowly diminished into the comparative poverty of a regional backwater. Happily, this allowed the city to avoid much of the ugly concrete blight of the island’s capital, retaining its charming air of former opulence.

If the dining scene is more limited than in the heavily touristed parts of Puerto Rico, plenty of good food is still to be found in Ponce, and it feel distinctly more authentic because of the restaurateur’s imperative to cater to the palettes and wallets of the locals. From the delicious helados at King Ice Cream (go for the maiz/yellow corn topped with powdered cinnamon) to the traditional homemade dishes synonymous with La Casa de las Tias to the variety of frituras available at the myriad snack bars lining La Plaza del Mercado, there is as much to delight the taste buds as there is for those with an appetite for culture.

One such dish we had not come across previously is mamposteao. A rice and bean side, similar to, but distinct from, arroz con gandules, we took advantage of mamposteao’s presence on several Ponceno menus to conduct some research into this exciting concoction. At El Rincon Argentino – exactly the kind of fusion restaurant we can get behind with its combination of Argentine focus on beef and the Puerto Rican passion for the fantastic starches – we ate a great pile of it to accompany an even larger skirt steak while cool breezes off the Caribbean Sea gently ruffled our hair.

Then on the next two consecutive days we enjoyed it as a side dish to what may be the world’s finest spit-roasted suckling pig in the mountain town of Guavate, and again with some frankly amazing rotisserie chicken and longaniza sausage at Viktor Pollo, El Maestro del Pollo Asado, a giant trailer off the main highway near the coastal town of Santa Isabel just east of Ponce.

Each time it was very slightly different. Bright yellow rice and pink beans were constants, but with varying ratios of onions, peppers, garlic, tomatoes, and, in some cases, ham and chorizo. Even the spelling of it was inconsistent, gaining or dropping a penultimate “d” from place to place. What makes mamposteao/mamposteado unique is the cooking technique of being an assembly of ingredients combined shortly before service into a delicious, nuanced result. The temptation is to recommend the version with the most ingredients, but, in some respects, the watchword for success with this dish is not unlike what has kept Ponce so untarnished: leave well enough alone and let it become somehow greater than the sum of its parts.

I almost can’t believe it myself! Not only is We Are Never Full updating twice in a week, I am the author of the two posts. I told you I would try and hold on to my promise from the last post. To celebrate our attempt to get back in the blog game we are offering a pretty awesome contest. A few weeks ago we were incredibly lucky to be offered a copy of Lightroom 3 to try. We knew our pictures needed some help and, after having some time to feel comfortable using the product, it is my absolute go-to photo correcter, not only for the blog, but for my personal pictures. Adobe has just released the newest version of Lightroom (Lightroom 4) which is getting rave reviews and offers new features such as the ability to create and print photo books with easy-to-use templates. You can even color correct stuff in a digital video! Would you like a copy of Lightroom 4? If so, we’re giving one away. See the contest rules at the end of this post (after the recipe).

Now, to things just as exciting as a free copy of Lightroom, we’re digging into spring wholeheartedly. I remember seeing this dish in a food magazine years ago and it was one of those images that stuck in my head. The winter version of this dish isn’t a colorful or particular beautiful dish (beauty really is in the eye of the beholder), but to me it was gorgeous and extremely rustic. This is the type of food Jonny and I love to eat the most even though we may showcase some of our more daring dishes on We Are Never Full. Last September, we traveled to Maine for a long weekend, one our first times away from our then 11-month old. We had a ball (as you can imagine) even though it rained virtually the whole time. In our last hours in Portland, we ran to seek cover from the rain into a place we had been eyeing up for days – Rabelais book store (we later discovered it was a pretty darn famous and beloved place) – a store dedicated to out of print and hard to find (and easy to find) food and drink books. We must’ve been in that book store for hours and were very close to spending more money in that damn shop than we had on the whole Maine trip. After begrudgingly putting away 12 cookbooks we just couldn’t afford to buy, we couldn’t let go of Puglia in Cucina. We had to pay the conversion of euros to dollars and knew this would be a pretty pricy purchase (say that 10 times fast) but we couldn’t let go of it. The photos are amazing and the loosely translated recipes are simple and super authentic (Donkey Stew, anyone?). On page 88 was the recipe I had burned in my head from years ago – Fave e Cicoria (Fava beans and chicory). Well, favas are in full swing right now and it was the perfect time to make a fresh version of this traditional Puglian dish.

This dish is normally made with dried fava beans and is actually a winter dish, made when the chicory is able to be freshly picked. We decided to try it with fresh fava beans and, wow, I could eat the fava puree as a dish by itself. This would make a really elegant first course to a spring-centric meal. I think using frozen fava’s would work well after fava season is long gone. Use reconstituted dried fava beans for a traditional touch. Because we do not grow Italian-style chicory, I used escarole (which is a form of chicory) and it worked well. If you have never tasted Italian chicory, know that the flavor is heads and shoulders above what we offer here. It’s called puntarelle and is actually the new/young/tender chicory shoots. It’s unbelievably delicious and I so wish we could easily buy it here. It is often used to make another traditional Roman dish, aptly titled “puntarelle” which is sauteed greens with a garlic and anchovy sauce.

Give this beautiful seasonal and spring dish a shot at home while fresh favas are still available. You will NOT be disappointed and will be licking the sides of your blender as if you just whipped us some cookie dough! Now scroll to the bottom to see how to enter to win a copy of Lightroom 4 (after you check out the recipe, of course).

New York City. The saying goes that if you can make it here you can make it anywhere. But I think they were talking about young, cute, single and childless 22 year olds (which I’d like to believe I once was and, damn, that was a fun time). I don’t think Sinatra was talking about older, married, overworked parents making a decent wage but still in the lower-middle class because they live in NYC. We’re tired. Very tired. I know, I know, bust out the violins to play a sad song for our tragic city-living lives but this is a bit of a way to apologize for our lack of blogging over the past year and a half. Living in NYC may seem magical for many but for us it’s beginning to become more like hard work than “magical fun”.

No matter where you live, being a good employee, a homeowner (or, in our case, renters) and a hands-on parent is tough work. But, for some reason, being all of those things in NYC seems just a notch more tiring, stressful and, well, annoying. Walking everywhere is wonderful (when it’s not raining, snowing, freezing cold or extremely windy), invigorating (sometimes when it is raining, snowing or freezing cold) and healthy but with a child it sometimes becomes a pain in the ass, especially if you just need one or two things from the grocery store (and that grocery store is a 20 minute uphill walk and your kid is fighting you to get in the stroller). Being a renter is anything but a dream here. A $2000 to $3000 a month rental gives you barely enough space for your family and you are left with only just enough money to buy the absolute necessities. If you want to pay less in rent it means a longer commute, less square footage and often further from a large park. Being a good employee means constantly competing with “the best of the best” in order to prove your worth (and that’s after walking 15 minutes to the subway and, if you are lucky enough taking in the “sights, sounds and smell” of the Penn Station/Port Authority area). Sometimes it all just leaves you, well, worn out.

I know I sound like a grumpy, old person and many of you may think I’m being a crybaby. “Listen to her! Spoiled brat! Complaining about living in what’s thought of as one of the greatest places on earth! She doesn’t know real problems.” But a girl can vent a bit, right? Especially to you guys, right? Really it’s more of me airing out my guilty conscience about not having the time or energy to blog. Rant over – we’re working to improve. I would love to know how other super-busy parents (or super busy people without kids) have time to blog regularly. Suggestions welcome.

Although our blogging has been slow, it doesn’t mean we haven’t been cooking. We have about 40 dishes that have been photographed – just nothing written for the blog. One cold, wintery October Saturday (our only day of snow during an otherwise warm NYC winter), we were dying to eat duck. We had bought a whole one the day before and had thought about making Peking Duck but due to end-of the week tiredness (brought on by all the things mentioned in the rant above) we chose to down two Negroni’s each and order dinner in instead of preparing the Peking Duck. That wintery Saturday morning I figured I was too late to start making the duck dish that overwhelms many, whose preparation traditionally takes more than three days and is called “incredibly complex”. But I needed to eat Peking Duck and didn’t have three days to ensure I did so. We decided to see what it was like to cut some corners and streamline the recipe.

Peking duck is the type of super traditional dish you usually don’t half-ass. But I am here to tell you that it is possible to have delicious, crispy and satisfying Peking Duck in 12 hours. I feel like a bit like a poser here since we normally like to try to be as traditional and authentic as we can in preparing dishes that have real, serious history (and one that causes people to be outright pissed off if you don’t do it the right way) and, in the case of Peking Duck, have “rules”. I normally wouldn’t mess with a dish that is over 600 years old but, in this case, I kinda had to. We didn’t have the time and we didn’t have a bicycle pump. I was desperate and tired and needed to eat duck Peking style to turn my frown upside down – and I wasn’t dragging a baby, stroller, toys and whatnot through the snow to get it in Chinatown Brooklyn. So we shortened the Peking Duck preparation time and, guess what, it was good. Really good. Note the things that we didn’t do: we didn’t dry it out for 24 hours, we didn’t pump air in between the fat and the skin via a bike tire pump, we did not cook it vertically over a wood fire and we also didn’t cut it into 120 perfectly thin slices. Is this really Peking Duck? Maybe not in your eyes. But to us (sleep-deprived, burnt-out Brooklynites) it was and it did its job damn well! Our version took 12 hours from start to finish and it was delicious. I think separating the skin from the fat is the one thing I would try and do differently next time to get the skin that much crispier but I highly recommend, if you have 12 hours, taking the short cut and trying our “Quicker” 12 hour Peking Duck recipe. Once we have that meat hook, I imagine this dish to really take very little effort to make!

Conventional wisdom dictates that one should never eat at an empty restaurant, especially early in the week, but if there is absolutely nowhere else open and you have no choice, do yourself a favor and avoid the seafood. Happily, Vieques, a 55-square mile island off the east end of Puerto Rico, and former bombing range of the US Navy, if it doesn’t exactly flaunt convention, certainly defies it. And Tito Bloque, the only restaurant off the malecon in the village of Esperanza, and therefore the only empty restaurant, personifies that defiance.

Blazing overhead strip lights do nothing to obscure the restaurant’s complete absence of customers. In fact, when the only visible human forms in the place are a signed photo of Charles Bronson in his Death Wish era and an old man dozing in a hammock fashioned from a Puerto Rican flag, the feeling of unwelcomeness is only accentuated.

Undeterred, we enter. Geckos dart up the walls and the noise of our flip-flops on the tiled floor rouses the somnolent geezer. Stirring, he opens one eye. Trying our best to look casual and friendly, we ask if they’re open, offering a cheerful “Hola, buenas tardes!” “Claro que si, jovenes.” (Yes, clearly, folks.) comes the affirmative reply, stating a fact that seemed far from obvious to us.

He gestures vaguely to our left mumbling the word “menu”, and we wander over to a counter in front of the empty kitchen. Staring helplessly for a few long moments at a shelf of half empty rum bottles and a refrigerator decorated sparsely with cans of Medalla beer, we look back to our right and notice that the man has once again been overtaken by his slumbers. Shrugging at one another, we are about to turn on our heels when a spritely woman in her mid-sixties appears before us, eyebrows raised in impatience. “Hola” we repeat, and, even more gingerly, inquire about provisions she may have. “¿Cuál hay comer esta noche?(What is there to eat tonight?) “Siempre lo mismo” (Same as usual.) she replies, brandishing a pair of tired-looking menus.

Feeling somehow compelled to stay and eat after having so obviously disturbed this elderly couple’s quiet evening, we ask her to pick something for us.* She tells us that she’ll make the conch salad and whole fried fish, to which her shut-eyed husband – finger wagging in the air for emphasis – recommends she add some octopus because he prefers the salad as a mixture of seafood. After making a face at him as if to say “Octopus?! These are Americans, you know!”, she looks at us and asks, somewhat testily, if we eat octopus. When we confirm that we do she is sufficiently mollified that our requests for side orders of plantain and breadfruit tostones elicit no debate. Then, on our way across the dining room to our chosen table, the recumbent gent offers us a go on his bug spray. “Are they bad tonight?”, I ask. “It depends.” He replies enigmatically.

Sitting in the empty restaurant, clutching cans of beer, smelling strongly of deet and feeling somewhat strange about the whole thing, I endeavor to break the ice and ask our weary friend what the Spanish word is for geckos. Seemingly impressed that I know the Spanish word for lizard (lagarto), he comes over and slouches at our table, baring his bumpy old man’s chest through an open shirt, and asks us where we’re from. As we explain, his wife brings over a basket of still-hot homemade arepas with garlic butter. She congratulates me on my primitive Spanish, and asks if I’m Puerto Rican. Incredulous, given my pale, Northern-European looks, I deny it and fear that our cook may be blind. When she explains that she asked this because so few visitors try to speak Spanish in Puerto Rico that she figured we must be somehow different from regular Americanos, we suddenly feel rather pleased and more comfortable with our surroundings.

Slathering our arepas with pungent butter, we proceed to question her husband, elbows still on our table, about Vieques and Esperanza. We learn that he’s originally from Fajardo, on the east end of Puerto Rico but moved here forty years ago. Warming to his theme, and mistaking my ability to speak the language with aural comprehension, he begins speaking at an unfeasible velocity before taking me over to a framed newspaper article on the wall next to Charlie Bronson, and encouraging me to read what’s there about the history of Vieques and his restaurant.

Studying it, the limitations of my reading comprehension are also laid bare and though I manage to translate the phrase “Sin Tito Bloque, no habria un Vieques” (without Tito Bloque, there would be no Vieques), all I manage to deduce is that the restaurant was named for a local notable who faced off against the American Navy in advocating for the island’s return to its Viequense residents. I am pleased to return to the table to find nothing more intellectually challenging than generous servings of warm conch and octopus salad and giant rounds of breadfruit awaiting me. Amy’s fish is equally sized, a spanking fresh red snapper (chillo) scaled but not finned, deep-fried with the minimum of flour and perfectly seasoned. Also on the table is a bottle, formerly home to a fifth of Palo Viejo rum, now an inch deep in a venomous-looking homemade salsa picante. Nodding at it, our hostess makes a pained face and cautions us to use it sparingly.

The old man retires to his hammock once more and we are left to enjoy our dinner, which is phenomenal. As authentically Puerto Rican a meal as we will find during our trip. Later on, after she has brought me a complimentary second-helping of conch salad, he returns and explains that breadfruit, like plantains, are eaten both green and ripe, as a starchy side-dish and to make sweet desserts, respectively. More questions follow about tropical fruits and how they’re grown locally, and his wife rejoins us to tell us that all the vegetables in the sofrito base for the salad in were grown out back, and that her husband raises the chickens, guinea hens and land crabs featured on the menu. Fascinated by the concept of farming crabs, our interest prompts an invitation to return the next day for lunch so they can show us their operation.

Evidently feeling certain by this point we are in fact a different type of Americano visitor, they begin to describe a series of run-ins with the Yankee tourists to whom their next-door neighbor recently rented his house over their complaints about the crowing rooster and the barking of their dogs, and how it was ruining their vacation. Clearly still incensed by this, they warn us, presumably on behalf of all American tourists, that if all we want to do is sit on a beach reading a book and enjoy the same conveniences as at home then we shouldn’t visit Vieques. Point already made, they seek to drill it home, rather unnecessarily given the restaurant’s appearance, saying, that if they really wanted Americans to eat at Tito Bloque they would be “f—king us with table cloths and new menus”.

As we prepare to leave, full and reeling somewhat from all we’ve seen and heard, we finally introduce ourselves and learn that her name is Isabel, but that she’s known universally as Puche, and that our sleepy host was none other than Tito Bloque himself. Suddenly, everything fits into place, and we exit the restaurant past a wooden machete painted like the Puerto Rican flag emblazoned with the slogan “Defiende tu Cultura!” (Defend your culture!).

* We didn’t actually disturb their quiet evening at all. Apparently, being the only customers of the evening is almost customary at Tito Bloque. The unusual aspect of our visit was that they ended up being moderately welcoming. More often that not, they’ll simply playfully mock you to your face.

With wine there is probably more room for personal interpretation and opinion than in any other area of gastronomy. The sheer variety of wines available from across the globe encourages this, but the reputation of the wine connoisseur and his often ridiculous descriptions of the perfumes to be nosed out of the glass makes wine-tasting seem a spurious and silly pursuit to some and downright intimidating to others.

So, while the tasting notes accompanying a bottle of Campo Viejo 2010 Tempranillo may suggest flavors of blackcurrant, licorice, baking spices and earth, and taste to us pleasantly of the sawdust of the tannery floor or of plums on the branch, the reader may feel free to disagree and suggest their own playful similes. Or, alternatively, disagree and say that it’s rotten stuff and not worth drinking. Similarly, they may question our motives entirely at recommending a wine of which we were offered a free trial. And that would be perfectly acceptable too.

What is beyond dispute though, is that Campo Viejo is, and has been, Rioja’s premier bodega for at least the last forty years, and that Rioja itself, in spite of competition from a host of up and coming growing areas around Spain, most notably Priorat in Catalunya, Duero in Castilla y Leon, and Yecla in Murcia, remains the standard against which all Spanish red wine is judged. Even prior to Spain’s re-emergence as a gastronomic powerhouse, Riojan wines were garnering plaudits for their leathery, tannic quality which gave them a wonderful mouth-feel and classy, dry bouquet but which didn’t weigh down the palate. And, for generations before that many of Bordeaux’s more famous houses supported the fruit forward reputation of this region’s wines importing tempranillo from Rioja to put meat on the bones of their medoc and cabernet sauvignon blends in years when it was thin and weak.

Founded in 1959 in the stark countryside outside of the regional capital of Logroño, Campo Viejo has been constantly evolving as a winery since then, both in their wine-making techniques and styles of wines produced, and with their new and stunningly modern facility. Best known for its line of crianzas and reservas, aged at least 12 and 18 months, respectively, in oak barrels, Campo Viejo’s 2010 Tempranillo represents a new style of younger, non-oaked wines for this esteemed house that winemaker Elena Adell has designed to be fruitier and more generous. Whether you like this style is entirely up to you, it is a marvelous coincidence that we received a free sample and did end up liking it a lot. Even had we paid for it, at $9.99 it is at the right price point for every day drinking and competes directly in that price and style bracket with many of the regional wines coming out of Portugal these days.

To test its appropriateness for the simple flavors of a weeknight meal, we made an extremely straightforward, rustic Andalusian dish, pork chops in the style of Jerez, pan frying the chops and then making a light sauce of dry Oloroso sherry, minced garlic and roughly chopped almonds. The two worked nicely together and we would recommend trying them together. Again, readers are encouraged to exercise their own judgment over whether they agree.

And then we discovered the answer (at least part of the answer) – LIGHTROOM!

It may be widely known in the food blog “world” that Adobe Lightroom and/or Photoshop is a must-have in order to produce the most professional looking pictures. If it is, we have obviously been living in a cave. Ok, we have. It’s called a dimly lit apartment in Brooklyn. It’s like a cave but much, much more expensive. The main difference between Photoshop and Lightroom is, to me, Lightroom is more suited to the photo (or food) blogger. Someone who doesn’t need to create or distort images (like making Cindy Crawford’s mole disappear) but one who wants to make an image better (like that dreamy Tuscan tree picture above).

Today’s post is not about giving you a tutorial on how to use Lightroom. Why? Because I am still learning how to use it. Although it’s not difficult to learn, I still only have above basic knowledge. Even with this basic knowledge, look what I’ve been able to do! Not saying these pics will make it into a food magazine (or even those super-picky food picture sites we’re all desperately trying to get on) but I think they look better than they did before!.

Many of us have been using Flickr’s photo-help application Picnik which, sadly, is “closing” April 19, 2012. Lightroom is far better than anything available on the web for free (or even something that is cheap) – this is the perfect time to invest in Adobe Lightroom.

EXHIBIT A: The ugly colors of this Tuna Tonnato – a dish that is actually delicious but its “sauce” already may turn people off. To help convince people to eat this dish, we definitely needed to make this picture better and take it out of having a 1970′s “beige” kodak moment (not that there’s anything wrong with that – in fact, Lightroom has a way to make any picture look 1970′s with the click of a mouse!)

As you can see, not only did we lighten and sharpen the image, we were also able to specifically bring out some of the more important colors – namely, the green of the dandelions. One thing I really like about Lightroom is the ability to increase or decrease a specific colors. It’s amazing how you can make certain things pop that just didn’t pop when taking the picture.

EXHIBIT B: An old food pic we once believed was AWESOME – it wasn’t, but the dish was (but it was our first real strong attempt at plating). Fried (yes, fried) Lamb Chops with Balsamic Reduction.

We did kind of “over sharpen” the Lightroom picture. It gives it a bit of a “painting-like” quality. I kinda like it, although the lemon has a sort of anemic quality now. You may not. And that is ok. I also was able to lighten in without compromising the clarity and, again, attempt to make some of the other colors pop a bit more.

EXHIBIT C: This well-thought out plating of an excellent Canary-Islands dish, Papas Arrugadas with two dipping sauces, needed help. We meant well with those clear bowls.

So, back to those clear bowls used to hold those fabulous sauces. Did you notice the shadow the bowls created on the plate? The clear bowls were the main culprit there (plus our crappy lighting job). Lightroom fixed it with a cool feature called the Adjustment Brush. Using this allowed me to paint over the problem area and then lighten it to match the plate color. Very, very cool.

EXHIBIT D: An ok picture of that all-useful egg (creates food porn in an instant!) on top of a mortadella Spuma-shmeared baguette. Ahhh, memories. That dish really kicked some ass – gotta make this oldie but goodie again.

This picture was an attempt to do something different. Although removing part of the white dish is not perfect, it does give you an idea of what Lightroom can do. If I spent a bit of additional time, it could have looked much better, but, I do think the dish pops out more for erasing part of that white plate. You may also notice that I removed that red dot of hot sauce at the bottom right of the plate. Using the Spot Remover tool on Lightroom, it was super easy.

EXHIBIT E: My sweet old Grandma Anna’s Escarole Soup that just looked a bit more like “WTF is that?”.

Lightroom allowed me to make this picture represent the dish for what it actually looked like!

EXHIBIT F: Travel pictures need some help too! This is one of my favorites that we took during our summer trip to the Cotswolds, UK.

I couldn’t believe how easy it was to transform this dull picture into a vibrant one! In fact, what Lightroom seemed to do for me was bring the picture closer to what I actually viewed with my own eyes! I remember being so disappointed I couldn’t figure out the right setting on our camera while at this beautiful spot in the Cotswolds, England. But with Lightroom, who cares. It actually looks better than what I saw in person!

So, you may be wondering what the hell was the point of those beautifully washed out, almost turn-of-the-century photograph-looking picture of the Tuscan trees at the the top of the post. Well, the coolest, absolutely coolest Lightroom feature I found were these things called “Presets”. With the click of the mouse you can turn any photo into 52 different preset color settings (or black and white). Some are very cool, like the one I used in the once vibrant Tuscan tree picture (Aged Photo preset) or that 1970′s photo preset (Bleach Bypass for more of a 70′s feel or Yesteryear fore more of a 60′s feel). I really hope you consider purchasing Lightroom whether you have a food blog or don’t – the possibilities are endless.

Rarely on time, and never on trend, we are perennially late to the party. Yes, we may have been blogging about offal since way before David Chang made it cool, but we have yet to purchase our first ironic message tee featuring butchery terminology or get our forearms inked with a selection of cutlery. This may be even more surprising given that we live in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, where the hardcore of Williamsburg’s hipsters would move if only they were cool enough. But if further illustration of our being behind the times were necessary, look no further than our brand new facebook page, now only a week old (feel free to “like” us, as the kids say).

It’s also very typical of us to cook unseasonably based entirely on whimsy. We made the heaviest Colombian dish on a sweltering 95 degree day, and a ceviche in November. However, in a radical departure from our conventional untimeliness, we recently got way ahead of ourselves (and everyone else) and made a wonderful spring time saute of lamb’s liver and baby carrots with an anchovy-rosemary butter sauce.

A dash at classic French technique, plenty of butter and some excellent early season baby vegetables made it a perfect dish for the mild winter we’re having this year which, regardless of the prognostications of Punxatawney Phil, has provoked our little patch of crocuses into bloom during the first week in February.

“Reach out your arms, as far apart as possible – one high, one low – then just bend your wrist, but do not look!”, instructed the waitress. “Oh, and beginners like you must stand over the barrel,” she added. I followed her advice exactly but still ended up with a soggy shirt-front and damp shoes, wasting half a bottle.

Even though the cider was cheap, learning to pour it like a local wouldn’t be and accepting I could be thirsty for a long while before I acquired the knack, I invited my hostess to demonstrate proper form. Sure enough, her aim was perfect and my glass was soon two inches deep without the loss of a drop. “Now, drink it! Fast!” she cajoled. “Before it goes flat!”

I hadn’t counted on necking shots of cider at lunchtime, and wondered if I was playing the straight guy in a game of haze the foreigner, but as foamy, appley goodness cascaded down my gullet it started to make sense. Then, after taking my order for broiled razor clams and hake in cider, the waitress turned on her heel for the kitchen, leaving my glass empty. Now eager to drink some more, but reluctant to soak myself further, I reached for the bottle. “No lo mueva!” warned a finger-wagging old guy to my left. “She will pour for you when she returns. And, you should leave a drop in the bottom of the glass. It’s good luck.”

Thanking him for his advice, I sat back and looked around the white-washed room from my seat against the wall. Cut-off barrels half-filled with sawdust littered the blue-tiled floor between tables, along with the usual jumble of crumpled napkins, discarded toothpicks and cigarette ends. Through the open window, small gaily-painted fishing boats bobbed up and down, and their creak and bump as they nagged at their moorings offered a pleasant counterpoint to the hoarse cries of seabirds.

Luarca, on the Asturian coast of northern Spain is still a working port and, the tasca where I sat, the place to enjoy the morning’s catch. From the ruddy faces surrounding me, it was entirely possible that my hake had been landed earlier in the day by a fellow diner. The globe is so well traveled these days that it’s virtually impossible to find anywhere you’re the only foreigner, but in this place, during the off-season, I had managed it. In fact, I was the only guest at the only open hotel in town. An anomaly I was quick to appreciate, because it allowed me to slip into the natural rhythms of local life and prompted me to assume the most humble status, that of being nobody at all. Sure, it removed me from many things, but there’s an advantage to that when all you want to absorb is atmosphere – the feeling that five hundred years could pass in this place and the faces wouldn’t change. What Cees Nooteboom described as “the feeling that everything except time has stopped.“

My razor clams arrived, redolent of garlic and spicy with piperade, followed by tender hake with softened apples, their acidity perfectly balancing the sweetness of the reduced cider sauce. A side of fried potatoes appeared as another two inches of cider found its way neatly into my glass. Lazily enjoying it, happy and relaxed, I barely noticed when it was all gone and the waitress returned. “Postre?” she asked. “Hay queso de cabrales, flan, y frutas frescas, o si usted prefiere, un poco de cada uno.” I opted greedily for the latter, along with a nip of orujo, she returned quickly with a little of each – blue cheese, stick to your teeth caramel pudding, and a pear. “Ningunas manzanas?” I smiled. “Haven’t you had enough apples yet?” she joked back.

Chicken in cider is not necessarily a traditional Asturian preparation, though it might as well be, so while this dish is modeled on the hake in cider I had that day, it is cooked for much longer. Asturian cider is produced from small, tart crabapple type fruit that are no good for eating, the juice of which is fermented for up to six months in oak barrels. It typically registers only 5% alcohol, compared to the seven or eight degrees common in French and English ciders and is rarely carbonated, hence the habit of pouring from a great height to aerate, followed by swift consumption before the froth disappears. Spanish ciders can be found in the US, but domestic varieties like Woodchuck are perfectly acceptable for cooking with. The chanterelles were added to balance out the sweetness of the sauce with an earthy, autumnal boskiness and some slices of eating apple dropped in with five minutes to go offered some crunch and acid to what is a very satisfying dish.

Most Brits associate mincemeat with Christmas – its intoxicating mix of fruit, spices, booze, nuts and mixed peel provide Pavlovian stimuli, stirring memories of cherubic choirs a-caroling, roasted poultry, and the Queen’s speech – whereas I associate it with Easter, because it was always around then that we finally ran out of mince pies. I use the term “ran out” quite deliberately, as mince pies were the kind of thing that, growing up, were considered within the realm of “supplies”, so numerous were they. Every year in early December, my industrious mother would make at least six, but often as many as ten, dozen individual mince pies, fashioned lovingly from homemade mincemeat she had prepared several months in advance.

These seasonal confections then proceeded to appear on the table each and every mealtime, during tea breaks, whenever we had company over and any other time people were sat sitting and might be persuaded to have a smackerel of something, until everyone was thoroughly sick of the sight of them. Towards the end of March, the sight of the poor, battered-looking stragglers, that had been taken in and out their box so many times that their pastry shells were all dented and crumbly, was particularly sad.

The derivation of the word mincemeat, which today contains no minced meat, is Medieval, from a time shortly after Marco Polo had returned from the East, and every cook worth his salt was finding new ways to disguise and preserve rotten provisions with the spices he popularized. Adding cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves to ground meat, dried fruits, candied peel and chopped nuts before soaking the whole lot in high octane liquor must have been a hit at the time, which probably speaks more to the concurrent lack of fresh meat than to whether this was, in fact, a delicious preparation. Either way, it caught the imagination of a nation, and though the ground meat has largely been dropped, the tradition of using these spices to perfume pie filling continues strongly.

Another reason mincemeat was such a hit way back when is because once made, it can be expected to keep, unrefrigerated for as long as 2 years – something my mother bore in mind, as she often made hers over the first weekend of the New Year giving it ample time to “improve” over the next 12 months. Throughout the year, she would occasionally rouse it from its slumbers, turning it over and adding a touch more brown sugar or booze as she deemed necessary. Suffice it to say that by the time Easter came around, and the last mince pies were served, their mincemeat contents was nearing its second birthday, and was so highly perfumed that to inhale deeply close to a warmed mincer was to risk singed nose hairs.

Following my mother’s established tradition, I was well prepared, having put together my mincemeat last January, and fed it occasionally throughout 2011, so that it was rich and boozy by the time the Holidays arrived. Unfortunately, the energetic screams of our firstborn put paid to any intentions I may have had of making batches of personal mince pies before Christmas, so I had plenty of mincemeat leftover to ring in the New Year with. Inspired by a desire to produce something that people would actually eat before the next Christian festival hove into view, I quickly prepared this mincemeat stuffed quince. You could quite equally pair it with a vanilla custard/creme anglaise or, as I prefer, a whisky-laced whipped cream, but I lost my dander somewhere along the way and just shook some powdered sugar over it to evoke the wintry season instead.

I could have used apples in this recipe, but opted for quince largely because it’s one of those fruits that was, coincidentally, first popularized in the UK during Elizabethan times and has, rather sadly, since fallen out of favor. Brought originally from Asia and sometimes known by the moniker “love apple”, quince isn’t dissimilar in taste and texture to the apple — to which it is botanically related and which would make a fine substitute here — but when you’ve got the strains of “Good King Wencelas” with its frosty and feudal lyrics echoing in your mind, quince just feels right. [For more on quince, check out our friend Rachel Eats.]

Oven-baked quince are really, really good: rich, almost custardy in flavor and not overly sweet. A perfect dessert for the Holiday period, providing enough time is taken between courses. It’s probably not worth making a batch of mincemeat just for this purpose, but they are they dead easy and quick to pull together, and will be eaten in no time, allowing you and your family to leave Yuletide flavors safely behind you before the end of January.