Spicy and Sour Tomato Lentil Soup (Rasam)

This week marks the publication of my friend Chitra‘s cookbook, Vibrant India. If you’ve been reading this blog a while—or if you just like home cooking as much as I do—you may have found that cheap, healthful, and seasonal are some essential beacons to guide everyday recipes. And Chitra’s home cooking—and, hence, her cookbook—have these traits in spades.

Gumbo with Chicken, Shrimp & Squid

Happy Fat Tuesday. I’m feeling the extra weight from last weekend’s pre-Mardi Gras dinner party with friends. Any holiday is an occasion to celebrate with food. But when it’s Creole or Cajun food that’s associated with it, you don’t want to miss out.

Goulash for 2017

posted in: Recipes, Soups & Stews | 1

It’s the start of a bright new year. And what bright, yet wintery dish to ring it in but a paprika-stained stew that’ll feed for many cold nights to come? I have no hard-and-fast rules or resolutions for 2017, but lately I’ve been plagued with wanting to cook things that I know are delicious, comforting, warming and cozy, but don’t get enough time to make so often. Hungarian beef goulash is one of those things.

Caramelized Onion and Kale Soup, French Onion-Style

Weekends are a time to put things on the back burner. I mean that literally, of course. It’s a time to slowly melt a great pile of onions to sweet, sticky bliss, bubble a pot of marinara sauce, or make chicken stock for the sake of good cooking sometime else. Sometime less languid than the weekend.

Spicy Korean-Style Seafood and Tofu Stew with Spinach (SoonDuBu Jigae)

I was craving Korean food the other night, so I made something that could approximate it. Haunts of stuff that one might get while on a group outing to Koreatown with friends, that sort of thing. It’s not difficult to pull off a hardscrabble version of such dining-out memories, as long as we aren’t talking some Escoffier-esque French gastronomy classics. These cravings can overwhelm, but if you’ve perhaps tried your hand at cooking similar things before, or just have especially … Read More

Split Pea Soup with Root Vegetables

It wouldn’t really be a soup if it were only one ingredient, right? That’s the thinking behind this weekend concoction where I deposed my growing stash of random root vegetables into a not-strictly-root-vegetable soup. By definition, soup is a mingling of stuff in liquid form, often creating a harmony of flavors that tickle your tastebuds as it soothes your soul. So do your kitchen a cleaning with this approach to your next winter soup.

Super-Tasty One-Pot Squash Soup

I had to get one of my wisdom teeth pulled the week of Thanksgiving. For two days before that, my mouth was in indescribable pain. Eating was fraught with complications, unless it was during a window of about one hour when my painkiller was cranking at its best. After the surgery, it wasn’t all roses, either. But in the process of catering to my particular eating restrictions, I came up with the best-ever method of making a creamy, pureed squash soup. The “silver” … Read More

Potato Leek Soup with Salmon and Spinach

I know most people don’t have an extra piece of fresh salmon sitting around, leftover, too often. I don’t either. But oh, when you do have some leftover salmon, life is good. You need to get yourself into this situation more often. Let me help you finagle the way in.

Eggplant Coconut Curry

When the farmers market still looks like summer but the air starts to feel like fall (and I absolutely love it when and if this happens), it’s a good time to make a slow-simmered vegetable curry. We’re not quite in winter squash season, and lord knows we make all sorts of wintery stews with those. And roots? They can wait in the ground for now. So let’s enjoy the harvest’s final hurrahs of a certain nightshade that must be cooked … Read More

Cauliflower and Sweet Corn Bisque

The first cream of X soup (or “bisque”) I ever fell in love with was cauliflower. My mom and I ordered it at a diner in New Jersey once when I was little; we ate the whole cup full and had to order another (should have gotten the bowl). That creamy, white velouté was something exotic to both of us, I think, but mild and unassuming at the same time. I found an appreciation for dairy, which my young palate had been … Read More

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