I do love a good fool. Not the kind that walks on two legs (or tries to), but a gag, a practical joke, and especially when it has to do with food. Like translucent off-white cubes of soft-cooked celeriac instead of tofu bobbing in an otherwise traditional miso soup. It’s a culinary deception, and I think it’s in [...]

A stack of new cookbooks sits on my coffee table, and I can’t put them down. I’ve got pickling books, a bread book, an Italian book and a Japanese homestyle cookbook. It’s all very overwhelming, but I’m taking them one at a time. So after pickling some lotus root, gratineeing some cauliflower, and baking a [...]

Another soup, is it? Yes, indeed. Sometimes you just gotta do — and cook — what feels right. And spending this past gusty weekend sniffing and sneezing beneath scarves and wearing sweats around the apartment just spelled “soup’s on” to me. Not only is hot soup therapeutic to eat, but I wouldn’t be the first [...]

“I can’t cook eggs. My mother couldn’t cook eggs, either. I just can’t.”
This was once stated by an old roommate of mine. Genetically handed down or not, we all sometimes have mental blocks with kitchen skills. I found that I don’t have the patience to fillet a fish property, opting to throw in the towel [...]

On Friday, as I sat in the converted shipping container outside of Roberta’s Pizza that’s home to Heritage Radio Network preparing for the first Cheap Date episode with my guests Keith and Rachel, we were interrupted by a series of loud, clanking noises coming from the roof above. “Can they stop farming now?” I think I [...]

I once ordered a stack of “harvest pancakes” from the menu of a small diner. They came to my table beautifully browned, light and fluffy, and studded with dried, sweetened cranberries and kernels of canned corn. Well, it’s “harvest time” now, and instead of reaching for these preserved legacies of previous ones, I’ll make use [...]

A while ago, I was asked by the New York Daily News to cook a “romantic” meal for two that cost less than $15, including the bottle of wine. When the story ran, the paper concluded that I had given special meaning to the term, “cheap date.” While this might sound a little so-so, at best, for a single in New York, [...]

Whether you’re cooking for one or preparing a huge feast, there’s always some obstructions in your path — a too-small kitchen, not enough flour. Instead of cursing bloody hell, let’s have fun with that concept, and cook up something great given five obstructions. It’s a cook-off — yes, another one! — with a twist, and [...]

I was going to call this recipe “Kitchen Sink Soup,” since the standard household equipment is a common way of describing anything that could be anything in the way of food. Kitchen Sink pizza, salad, pasta — we’ve heard it before. But you know what? “Kitchen sink” just doesn’t conjure very appetizing images to me. [...]

You can’t exactly sit through a restaurant meal and claim to have the best culinary know-how of a group by pooh-poohing this, or extolling that. Well, maybe you can to an extent, and many people do — and I have, too. But it’s much more convincing, in my opinion, if you walk into a social [...]

Okay, it’s not summer anymore, and Indian summer has not yet arrived. Instead, this is about the time of year people start taking flu shots, and sweaters and scarfs out from hibernation boxes and changing their sheets to flannel. I do all these things minus the flu shots. But I do have a good way [...]