Macaroni and cheese bores me. However, my boyfriend, as with most other American males I’ve ever encountered, adores it. Say the magic combination and his face lights up like a firefly. I thought I’d already given my best shots at the dish, to lukewarm results — no matter how much cheese you put in, nor [...]

I love food in film. I love food television. There has been much said about the semiotics of food in media — specifically on sex and food media. Now why is that? Well, you can read an encyclopedia entry on the term “food porn” now, and you can also check out a recent article in [...]

I’d like to think of this as less a recipe than an olfactory cooking cure. Somewhere along the ranks of boiling a slow-cooked pot of chicken soup — it’s those hours of comforting smells, I’m convinced, that ease the common cold long before its consumption. The savory, sweet and spicy smells emitting from my oven [...]

“Give a man a quiche and you satisfy his need for quiche for a day. Teach a man to make quiche, and you give him quiches for life.” –New Half-Chinese Proverb
And teach him also that you don’t have to make it for breakfasts…
No doubt quiche was given a bad rap in the eighties. I guess [...]

Who would dare question a cooking commandment passed down from Julia Child? Hooray to Julia Moskin in the New York Times for making one pretty promising case for something we were all too embarassed to fess up to doing: cooking with cheap wine. Cream of the crap wine. “Two-buck Chuck” wine, as referenced in the [...]

We all know that ground turkey is the new hamburger if you’re looking to go easy on your heart. But I never found this a satisfactory replacement unless it was used in a sauce or stew of some type — in which juices from all kinds of ingredients run free and wild as piglets in [...]

Thanks to everyone who offered delicious and wacky ice cream flavor suggestions on my last experiment with white pepper ice cream. I apologize, however, that I haven’t gotten around to trying any of them because I’ve been drunk on this bourbon-drenched one. Sweet, creamy and simple, this was my kind of ice cream — or [...]

I nominate Culinate.com for this. Sure, there’s Gothamist for local news and gotta-know-about-it-but-not-really-go-to-it events, there’s foodie sites like Serious Eats and Chow where you’re encouraged to chime in on things like creative authentic Mexican uses for icky black banana goo and who makes the best pita in the world. There are always, always blogs. But [...]

A completely uninspired twist? A seemingly pointless reverse-effect pastiche? Maybe, but it made for some of the greatest chicken sandwiches I’ve ever had. Since seeing the recipe for chicken fried steak on The Homesick Texan, I was homesick for some of that, too. Let alone I’ve never been to Texas and have no roots to [...]

Ah, the good ol’ two-step. Like the dance, this one carries a myriad of variations. Then again, I never did learn the dance, in any style, and now I kind of wonder what happened to that swing and formal dance revival that took hold of the city several years ago. For that matter, what happened [...]

I got an ice cream maker. I was watching the episode of Good Eats all about premium ice cream and how simple it was to make, and the next day I ran out to buy an ice cream maker. For $50 I’ll never have to go to the corner bodega to grab a pint of [...]

Since the no-knead bread-off at the Brooklyn Kitchen last week, I haven’t been able to stop making bread. Thoughts of forging a foccacia from the technique, or elegant dinner rolls have been clouding my mind as well. At least one of those urges had been released the other night, when I tried to make a [...]

I am convinced that stuffed peppers, like soup, are a true leftover invention, and that’s just what I stuffed my poblano peppers with for these chile rellenos. In most cases the preferred grain would be rice, but since I had some potatoes I used them along with some leftover chicken. I’ve also come to suspect [...]

Being the breadwinner, they say, isn’t always fun. I can think of one exception, however, where that’s pure pish posh: winning the No-Knead Bread-Off at The Brooklyn Kitchen. Alright, I tied for best bread in show, beating out three of the five different loaves made by locals who each took twists on the no-knead bread [...]

Curry is only optional here. I had begun this dish with the thought of splashing in the remaining cupful or so of white wine I had left in the fridge and maybe sprinkling some rosemary in the pie mixture; instead, I drank the wine. Something in between a mild chicken curry and a stuffing mixture, [...]

I have never been a very delicate eater, I’ll just put that on the table. Along with my elbow, lots of crumbs, and all the salt and pepper that missed the plate. I wish I could blame this completely on a “cultural clash” of sorts, as if to say that when one is raised in [...]

Right, so last Sunday. Oscar night. Did you see all the people who were expected to win win? Check out the lovefest of Al Gore (remember when we used to think he was too stiff to appear in public?), see any antics from Sacha Baron Cohen? I didn’t. I was at a potluck party instead. [...]