What can I start you off with? Would you like to hear our specials? What did you decide on? Do you need a few more minutes? Can I get you another drink? Would you like to see our dessert menu? Would you like to Supersize that? Would you like fries with that? Would you like [...]

What happens when you: 1) make a great batch of something, eat it, and love it; 2) eat it for leftovers, and love it; 3) eat it for leftovers again, and kind of loved it more the first or second time you ate it; 4) can’t stand to look at it in the refrigerator anymore? [...]

This week on WNYC, the Brian Lehrer Show has been crowdsourcing for bagged lunch suggestions. I’m a great fan of the show’s crowdsourcing projects (remember the grocery store prices map?), and this one is no exception. No longer your grade-school sack filled with a cold cut sandwich, banana and note from Mom (okay, I never [...]

So, I meet new people, and the inevitable “What do you do?” question often leads to the fact that I write a blog about not eating out. This often leads the recipient of said introduction to gauge how much he or she eats out, or not. (“I never cook,” is a common response.) Recently, [...]

There were many things that blew my socks off at a dinner Sunday night, held in a cozy Brooklyn ground-floor apartment. The basil-ricotta gnocchi was one of them. The lamb pot pies (above) were definitely another. But the one thing that really struck me the most was when, while casually biting off chunks of his [...]

Even though we’re in the doldrums of winter, I’m feeling a tremor of activity and overall excitement about local and sustainable farms. The New Amsterdam Market, a nonprofit which promotes environmentally and socially responsible food and the people behind it, has just launched an auction this week. It isn’t chock full of knick-knacks, though. Really [...]

It’s not what’s inside the soup that counts. It’s what’s on the surface. Here, we’ve got creamy roasted acorn squash soup. It could be any squash, butternut, pumpkin. It could have a splash of cream or milk or not. I don’t care. I’m sinking these crispy, salty kale “chips” into its sweet custard and lodging [...]

Two is better than one. That’s what I would be saying if I hadn’t just spent five hours making cookies on Valentine’s Day morning. (You could say it was a labor of love.) When I asked readers to choose their favorite heart-shaped cookie proposal from six options for me to make today, I never expected [...]

There’s nothing that represents true love on Valentine’s Day better than two heart-shaped cookies joined in sticky matrimony with a sugary concoction between them. Even us singles can still look forward to this: stacks of heart-shaped, icinged, chocolate-dipped, powdered sugar-dusted, and daintily decorated cooookies.

Welcome to 2009, Chili Takedown. This is no time to be splurging on pounds and pounds of beef. Sorry, heritage pork (except for your bones and spare ribs, which I’ll get to in a bit). I’m not even doing the fresh garnish doodads anymore. This is recession era chili. And I’m going back to the [...]

So I mentioned that I’m really into exploring the East right now — in food, and particularly from other Eastern cultures than the one I grew up with. So, after hiding my nose in volumes of cookbooks to piece together the esoteric recipe, and embarking on many journeys, sometimes to the farthest reaches of the [...]

I don’t really know where to start with this one. But I will say that the weirdest, funniest, most random things usually happen at cook-offs. I was sitting behind my cast-iron pot of beans at the Cassoulet Cook-Off a few weeks back, when a fellow approached me and introduced himself as Vince, a member of [...]

The problem with soaking dried beans, which isn’t a probably exactly, and wouldn’t be one in the first place if you’re a little better at stomach-eye coordination as I am, is that you’re usually left with far more beans than you had bargained for. Water plumps up the beans, sometimes creating pot overflows and dried, [...]