A few weeks ago my friend Sam decided she could no longer take care of her yogurt cultures and kombucha colony. So she offered them to me. When I went to her apartment, she was bent over a pad of stationery writing down step-by-step care instructions for each group of live microorganisms, which were bundled [...]

This post goes out to Jennifer of one of my latest favorite food blogs, Slices of Me. Jennifer asked me point-blank in an email just how I manage not eating out, every day. Of particular interest was how I maintained a social life when I couldn’t eat out with friends. So, just a few random [...]

the Ugliest Gourmet winning dish (albeit with parsley), Aubergines in Spicy Honey Sauce
Food is everything about the holidays to me, and I’m thankful this Thanksgiving for having a family who understands that. This year’s feast in New Jersey was a smaller production than previous years but you wouldn’t have known it from the type of [...]

So, nobody was exactly clamoring for me to remake a traditional British Christmas mincemeat pie this year at Thanksgiving. Blended dried fruits and the word “meat” in its name doesn’t conjure the most appetizing dessert (even though today, meat is commonly left out). It certainly never did for me, especially since I’ve only had mincemeat [...]

Spicy Honey Aubergines! And that’s our official theme song for the finale of the Ugliest Gourmet blogging contest. Huzzah to The Blog That Ate Manhattan for creating what this blog’s readers have deemed the ugliest delicious food of the bunch. All told, the results were nail-bitingly close to a four-way tie, with three votes [...]

Judgment is upon us for The Ugliest Gourmet! Let’s have a big round of imaginary applause for everyone who bravely cooked, photographed and blogged about all the treats below. This home-cooking event was devised to prove that, despite the visual ostentation that professional cooks strive for, great food doesn’t always look so great. So for [...]

Submissions close for the first-ever Ugliest Gourmet blogging contest in about ten minutes, and I scramble to bring you this humble entry. I contemplated plenty of visually off-putting dishes in the past weeks, but in the end, this simple vegetable side seemed to be the most to-the-point: Butter, broccoli and Parmiggiano-Reggiano — what’s not to [...]

You know that change is in the air when The New York Times‘ restaurant critic claims that the latest bauble of legendary restaurant family Cipriani’s gourmet empire “exists to affirm its patrons’ ability to throw away money” on the same day that eating-out bible New York Magazine’s hourly restaurant blog covers a home cooking contest [...]

Don’t be swayed by the length of this rather unwieldy-sounding recipe’s name; the latter two ingredients, candied orange peels and fresh mint, are almost inessential to the sparkling culinary gemstone that is roasted beets and fresh orange slices. “Wow” hardly nips at the issue I’m talking about here. Okay, so it’s only food — two [...]

As I’ve probably admitted more than once on this blog, in times of need, I turn the corner of my block and walk into “my” neighborhood bodega. Here I can score milk, limes, boxes of pasta, snacks, and more often than I’d like, pints of ice cream. Plus, the friendly Korean couple who own it [...]