Exploring the Intersection of Food, Culture and Identity

courtesy of Stephanie Izard

You may know Stephanie Izard as the first — and still the only — woman ever to win Top Chef. On the show, she wowed the judges with bold, inventive flavors like lamb medallions topped with pistachio, blackberry and mushrooms.

But she’s taken that experience and pushed it even further, mixing and matching the biggest, baddest flavors she can find from cultures across the world. The award winning Fergus Henderson-meets-Zak Pelaccio cuisine she turns out at her Chicago hot spot Girl and the Goat features items like yuzu harissa, fish sauce vinaigrette and escargot with tamarind and miso.

“We always want people to come in take a bite and go ‘Holy crap that’s flavorful,’” Izard says. Please check out her story in this piece I did for AP.

Sugar skulls for Mexico's Day of the Dead

Call me old-fashioned, but do we really have to start thinking about Halloween already? I mean, yes it’s October now, but I was finding candy corns and Hershey miniatures right next to my back-to-school supplies. Pretty soon, they’ll be sold with your Fourth of July firecrackers.

But at least the early warning gives you plenty of time to plan. Americans aren’t alone in their fascination with ghoulish confections. Chocolate coffins, sugary bread shaped like bones, and skulls of molded sugar are traditional fare for Mexico’s Day of the Dead, which comes right after Halloween. Sugar skulls are the most famous of the treats, made or purchased by every household and stacked into colorful mounds on street carts. In Britain, London-based baker Lily Jones, aka: Lily Vanilli, churns out cupcakes with coconut-jelly eyeballs and cakes modeled after human heads, saying that the merger of the sublime (the taste) and the grotesque (the design) is just part of being human.

“There’s a fascination with horror,” she told me in an interview last year. “It’s just imagination, something out of the ordinary. There’s a lot of beauty in it too, in the strange and the unusual.”

Recipes for her grotesque cupcakes are collected in her book “A Zombie Ate My Cupcake.”

But for a less ghoulish, more wholesome cupcake, try Martha Stewart, the never-fail go-to for spiffing up basic recipes. She’s got bats and spiders and brains like the rest of them, but somehow there is merely the suggestion of grossness – not an actual pool of fake blood that puts you off your treat. Her Wicked Witch cupcakes are about as far as I want to go.

I think that I shall never own

A biscuit nicer than a scone

Light and flaky, crumble, crunch,

I’ll eat me up a great big bunch.

HC's Cheddar-Spinach scones

Okay, so I’m not much of a poet. But damn, can I make a scone.

Most of us have probably eaten scones, though very few of us agree on how to pronounce the word. Scots, Brits, Australians and Canadians – in other words, the Empire – say “skahn” (as in “con” and “bon-bon”) while Americans generally say “skowe-n” (as in “bone” and “phone.”) Personally, I don’t care how someone says the word as long as they don’t refer to my breakfast as a “Singing Hinnie” which is apparently what they’re called in the north of England.

A quick websearch (okay, yes, Wikipedia) tracks the first mention of scones to 1513 and says that they would have been large, unleavened cakes of coarse oats – read: horse feed. These days, of course, we prize scones for their tender, crumbly flake.

These won’t disappoint. It’s all about the butter…

Cheese and Spinach Scones

adapted from Dried Cherry Scones

Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook

1 ¼ all purpose flour

½ cup spelt or whole wheat flour

¼ cup cornmeal

1 ½ tablespoon brown sugar

2 teaspoons baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon baking soda

1/8 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg

¼ cup butter, cold, cut into pieces

¾ cup frozen spinach, thawed, all the water squeezed from it

1 cup grated cheddar cheese

1 beaten egg yolk

1 cup sour cream

¼ cup grated parmesean or grana padano

In a large bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients.

Using your fingers or a pastry blender, cut the butter into the dry ingredients until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs.

Add the spinach and toss well, coating the pieces with flour and separating any clumps. Add the cheese and toss until covered in flour.

In a small bowl, combine the egg yolk and sour cream. Add all at once to the flour mixture. Using a fork, stir until combined (mixture will seem dry.)

Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface. Knead dough by folding and gently pressing for 10 or 12 strokes or until nearly smooth. Pat into a 7-inch disc. Cut into 8 wedges.

Place the wedges 1 inch apart on an ungreased baking sheet. Sprinkle with the grated parmesan or Grana Padano.

Bake in 400 degree oven for 25 to 30 minutes, until golden brown.