This recipe is like a southern housewife who just flew back from the Bahamas. There’s nothing that smells of home, sweet home like a fresh-baked pan of cornbread, but who wants to forget the intoxicating aromas of the tropics so soon? Heck, a compromise. And to return to reality from that little hyperbole, this dish [...]

Tomorrow is going to be a silly day. I’ve got a nine o’clock call time on my agenda tomorrow morning, when I’ll start the day by making 300 servings of cornbread with one oven. I can’t wait to not sleep.

This weekend, I had the pleasure of running into not one but two different old roommates of mine, whom I haven’t seen in ages and didn’t even realize lived in the city in one case. I know these women intimately, but for some stupid reason have fallen out of touch with them over the years. [...]

Here’s a project I’m truly proud to have my name attached to: The Neighbors Project. And the nifty new “Bodega Party in a Box” from the non-profit organization’s Food & Liquor store initiative, which aims to put more fresh produce on the shelves of corner stores (aka bodegas). Inside the box, there’s a cookbook filled [...]

This recipe started with a lot of leftover bread. I didn’t know what to do with it; it was stale, so I ground it into coarse breadcrumbs in the food processor. Okay, so now I have breadcrumbs, I thought. What to do? This was great fodder for, let’s see, meatballs? Frying batter? Savory stuffing? Nothing [...]

Trial: I get on my bike to run some errands, including a grocery store trip to get ingredients for a classic French salade nicoise. I have a craving for slick, smushed beads of brininess otherwise known as olives. It’s almost ninety degrees outside. I get out of the store, unlock my bike, and get on [...]

I was a proud glutton on Saturday. Not that co-hosting a Great Hot Dog Cook-Off isn’t reason enough to celebrate (or pack on five extra pounds), but through it all, we made over $1500 for the Food Bank for NYC from ticket sales and cash donations at the event. Fourteen chef-contestants made trays full of [...]

To put it in more discerning culinary terminology, these might actually be galettes, the rustic hand-shaped pastry with filling. But as Merriam-Webster defines it, a galette is a flat, round pastry with filling, and these are heart-shaped (ahem, almost). “Tart” usually implies a similar dessert that takes shape by way of a tart pan, and [...]

The Great Hot Dog Cook-Off is less than one week away, time for our chef-competitors to put on their thinking caps and channel their most dogged determination. Obviously, I’ve been putting myself in their shoes lately, and this is what I’d do if I were entering the Veggie Dog category next Saturday: layer a heap [...]

It doesn’t have quite the ring of “black beans and rice,” nor the symbolic weight as one of the world’s most popular comfort foods, but here we are anyway: Black beans and flour, eggs, butter, herbs, cheese and tons of olive oil (mostly utilitarian for the latter, as ravioli glues together without this). And like [...]