Spicy Mac

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 how sharp it is, it seems, the cooking process ends up giving it a bland name. Oozy and saucy? Not without creating a beschamel first, a flour-based milk sauce which by nature makes a cheese less cheesy but seems to be the agreed way to make the sauce saucy. Unless you use some type of "processed cheese food." Maybe I should have just thrown him a box of Kraft whenever the dish comes up. But everything at least deserves a makeover.

Root Vegetables Roasted with Sausage

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 as I baked this helped lift me out of an early spring slump -- and eating it didn't hurt, either.

Carmelized Onion and Jalapeno Quiche

"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 people still think of it as one of the more fussy, frilly and feminine of the brunch species; but what man, really, doesn't like quiche? My theory is that they just don't know how to make it! So this recipe is dedicated to the late Mr. Bruce Feirstein... (Though I should probably be the last person to speak against his stereotype-enforcing book; the companion to Real Men Don't Eat Quiche was Joyce Jillson's Real Women Don't Pump Gas--and I can't pump gas!)

Turkey Black Bean Chili with Okra

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 a pen. A turkey burger? Not even close... but ground turkey in chili? Seconds, please. Besides, you're bound to end up draining most of the juices when "degreasing" your pan after browning ground beef anyway.

Bourbon Sugar Cookie Crunch Ice Cream

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 nightcap?

Chicken Fried Steak Fried Chicken

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 the state. Some things, like fried chicken, are so classic that they inspire new classics like the chicken fried steak. But one of the nice things about chicken fried steak -- and I suspect many will agree -- is that it's a solid, tender piece of meat that you don't have to pick up and smear your face with grease to eat.

Super Crunchy Nutty 2-Step Granola

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 to any kind of dance craze? There has been a bit of a granola craze going on as far as I can tell -- everywhere I turn, from health food store to bakery, I seem to find another brand of locally produced, often organic, rustic homestyle-looking granola that I'd never seen before. Like Ambrosia Granola, or Donala Granola, and there was another Brooklyn-begat brand that I can't remember the name of that looked really yummy, too. My favorite one for a while had been Baked bakery's "house blend" granola. But at $7.50 for a small bag, it's definitely an indulgence.

White Pepper Ice Cream

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 Haagen-Dazs again -- sweet. The first batch, a basic vanilla ice cream made from the recipe in the Cuisinart machine's instruction booklet, was refreshing, sweet, and tasted so much like Breyer's vanilla it scared me. Who knew it was just cream, milk, sugar and vanilla? Immediately, fresh pineapple ice cream sounded tempting, green tea tickled my fancy (as did other teas, like what about Earl Grey?), but there was one question that had been lingering in my brain since middle school, and that was: White pepper ice cream. Sweet or spicy?

Red Bean Hummus with No-Knead Bread

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 French baguette from the recipe. Knowing well enough that the bread needs to cook inside a dutch oven, or other large, covered vessel able to withstand a 450-degree oven, I went ahead and let my dough rise in an oblong, tube-like shape, eyeballing the length of the 7-quart dutch oven it would need to cook inside. My estimation proved much too hopeful; when it came to dropping the dough into the pot it had no room but to curl into a snakelike C shape. So perhaps this is a new pastry born from the dutch oven no-knead bread recipe: C bread. This one had a bit of rosemary blended in the dough and a sprinkle of kosher salt on its crust.

Chile Rellenos con Pollo y Patata and Roasted Tomato Salsa

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 that most anything when stuffed inside a smoky, roasted poblano pepper will taste good -- that is, if you like smoky, roasted poblano peppers.

I Cracked Peppercorn (and does anyone care?)

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 recipe-turned national bread craze created by Jim Lahey of Sullivan St. Bakery.

Cranberry Curry Chicken Pie with Leftover French Bread Crust

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, this meal was a quick alternative to baking a real chicken pot pie. I shouldn't even call it a pie, really, since the "crust" was made up of only French bread slabs placed on top of the baking dish, which heated to a nice "crusty" texture on top, and soft and spongey on the bottom.

Potluck Pad Thai

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. We ate a lot of food.