Guess what? It’s a great time to pick dandelions. No, not to de-weed the lawn, like you were grudgingly made to as a kid to pitch in with household chores. To eat them! Because they’re great right now. Wait for them to grow a few more weeks and they’ll be more brittle and less palatable. [...]

Well, I’ve just completed a little experiment I’ve begun to call Opposite Week. Following a week’s worth of not eating out – the usual course – I threw myself into a strict diet of only restaurant-prepared foods for one week straight. It was fun, weird, nauseating and wonderful all at times. I tried to plan [...]

Okay, so maybe that’s a pretty big pig. Last week, I shared with you four lessons I learned in the geeky, futuristic world of high-tech food science. Perhaps I should have preceded it with this post, on a much more primitive practice: butchering. Still, it requires no less skill, experience and serious passion to hack [...]

Warning: This product contains raw egg.
It has, however, been tested in the Brooklyn kitchen of Not Eating Out in New York, and ingested at a gathering of cupcake enthusiasts in Manhattan, held by the blog Cupcakes Take the Cake. It was deemed delicious by all, and no subsequent injuries were suffered that I am aware [...]

Isn’t that term just scary? Doesn’t it make all you wholesome, organic, farm-to-table types just squirm? Indeed, “food science” used to be a derogatory way of describing the process by which overly processed foods are hatched in labs. Michael Pollan may have made a mockery of the industrial food industry’s overuse of it in The [...]

A big, virtual blog hug to Ms. Lucinda Scala Quinn, Executive Editorial Director of Food at Martha Stewart, co-host of Everyday Food, cookbook author and overall veteran champion of home cooking. Lucinda chose NEOINY as one of her “favorite blogs” in a lovely round-up of editors’ picks. Wow! (Thanks to fellow “favorite” Zach from Midtown [...]

It’s really the last week of summer. The skies are really becoming darker sooner, and that chill breeze in the evening is really happening. But on the flipside, and in celebration of late-summer local fruits, this watermelon pie is also real. I didn’t think it would make it past the dream stage for a while.

To repeat a joke my brother once made when I was in the same situation, I’ve got a lot of thyme on my hands. Fresh thyme. Which means it’s going bad soon. It took a while for me to place why I’d gotten the large stash of spindles tucked away in my crisper drawer (oh [...]

If you’ve been watching the Food Network lately, you may have seen a teaser for a new series called Ask Aida. Its premise is that home cooks pose a question to culinary expert Aida Mollenkamp — how do you make a roux? Quick weeknight supper? That sort of thing. Then Aida goes on to reveal [...]

Some people like to do a lot of canning, jamming and pickling this time of year, to preserve summer’s harvest of ripe fruits and vegetables. Others simply chop them up and throw them in the freezer. In something of a cross between jamming and throwing in the freezer, I decided to take up the age-old [...]

This twenty-fourth Reason of the Month for Not Eating Out marks a milestone: Whoa, it’s been two whole years. That’s 187 recipes, 89 ruminations, 10 foodie profiles, several cooking events, a couple videos and whatever other crap I fill these pages of not eating out with later. What better way to celebrate this special eve [...]

Happy Labor Day. In my neighborhood of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, this holiday doesn’t just signal the end of half-day Fridays and seersucker; it ushers in the beginning of the new season with a two-mile long parade of elaborate floats, costumes and music, a street-wide carnival, and several performances at the Brooklyn Museum, all in celebration [...]