Here’s what I ate on Sunday:

Chicken chilaquiles with green sauce and black beans for brunch made by Sam and Richard.

Baked brie and mango spread on crackers for a dinner appetizer made by Sean and Meredith.

I’m ashamed to say that I’ve never picked up a fennel bulb and cooked with it, and am not quite sure if I’ve tried it before. I had a leftover fennel bulb after using some of the sprigs for a jarred experiment I’ve been working on (more on that to come), so it was high [...]

Last Sunday I spent a couple of hours making sauce, dough, preparing the toppings and putting it all together in a cheesy, sausage and jalepeno pizza to share with a couple of friends. We all had a great time. Then afterwards, I got really sad when I realized, thinking about the cost calculator section of [...]

that’s a spice satchel in the middle which should have been removed for the shot
It might seem a little redundant for a blog only about food that’s cooked at home to post a recipe for something “homestyle.” But I defend my usage here to emphasize the fact that you will never see or eat this [...]

Of course, I have been discovering all the classic French sauces with the help of my copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and am scandalized by the amounts of butter and fats they require. I just have never cooked (aside from baking) with that much butter before. My immediate thoughts: was I really [...]

Not much to report from my little Brooklyn kitchen this week, since I’ve been living off dinner party leftovers. But I noticed a familiar phrase while biking down Smith St. in Boerum Hill the other day: a corner storefront under renovation (I think around Baltic St.) amongst a busy restaurant row, which had tall glass [...]

Isn’t it a pity New York seems to have a relative dearth of really good cajun restaurants? There’s tons of barbecue and even soul food spots, but New Orleans-style cajun cookin’ is hard to come by. Menupages.com listed only 25 restaurants in the “Cajun and Creole” category, and from just eyeballing it I noticed some [...]

And while you’re at it, slug back a few hundred calories. Just because. As someone who only cooks for one or two, I’m a natural user-upper, which means that something deep inside me feels very unfulfilled when I see half a tomato in the fridge begin to rot before it can be used. Or half [...]

Food that looks as good as a summer’s evening. And it almost was, after the temperature reached seventy degrees this Saturday in New York. I put on a light sweater and headed outside, with the tune from Amelie in my head as I strolled over to Fort Greene Park, thinking of the scene about the [...]

I just loved this article by Seth Kugel in the NY Times Real Estate section. This guy is like my antithesis-turned possible doppelganger by the end of the article. Swooned by all the multicultural restaurants and street foods of Jackson Heights, he gets a nagging urge to create and then discovers another fascinating food “find”: [...]

A few things I ate recently: burgers, pizza, and lasagna. I guess the abundance of Chinese food over the holidays has left me craving the good ‘ol stuff. And none of them very creatively executed, with perhaps the exception of the burger, because I swung by by Amy’s Bread on Bleecker St. and [...]

Five months of not eating out in New York is almost an anniversary. I should do something very elaborate next month to celebrate the half-year point, but for now, another meditation on why it’s so great to not eat out. This was supposed to be the Reason of the Month for December, but I’ve gotten [...]

I’d really like to tell you that this was a quick, fun and easy recipe that makes for a great snack to bring to parties or entertain with. But it wasn’t. It was really difficult and frustrating. Hopefully next time that won’t be the case with the experience and skills learned in the two or [...]