Cassoulet and Rillettes: A Post-Thanksgiving Trip to France

The greatest Reason For Not Eating Out is having leftovers in the fridge. And the greatest reason for having leftovers in the fridge, of all days of the year, is perhaps Thanksgiving. If you made the requisite roast turkey for the grand dinner, you’re bound to have lots of bits and pieces of turkey meat clinging to the carcass, no matter how much of it you and your family ate. Many cultures can teach us a thing or two about that. But this year, … Read More

Black Bean Soup (with the Kitchen Sink)

It’s very easy to hide a great deal of things in a pot of black beans. Good things, bad things, all kinds of things — and no one may notice. Cooked to a velvety sauce, with strange lumps that once used to be part of a bean suspended throughout, the soup is thick as tar and opaque brown-black as fudge. You don’t know what’s hiding in it.

Week of Eating In Days Four and Five: To Travel and Not Eat Out

posted in: Ruminations | 14

That is the question. It is quite possibly the most perplexing thing about not eating out. We live in a culture that travels a lot — whether it’s just a twenty-minute commute to work each day in a car or perpetually being “between” two coasts, or countries, by plane. I wonder about our wandering if it isn’t the reason why take-out or fast food was created in the first place. Eric Schlosser certainly makes a causality seem logical in his … Read More

Chilaquiles Con Leftovers

Note: This is not a recipe. Ceci n’est pas une recette. It is more a suggestion, and as so many traditional peasant dishes are, a great way to use up leftovers. Like chilaquiles, a common breakfast in Mexico. Now, whenever there’s a bag of stale tortilla chips leftover from some party, it’s a common breakfast for me, too. Alright, and midnight snack. Dinner? Why not. And seconds, please.

Seared Turnips with Leftover Vegetable Stir-Fry

There is a dish in Cantonese cuisine called turnip cake. Then there is a dish with turnip cake, chopped into cubes, and stir-fried with bean sprouts, scallions, some other veggies and often peanuts. I’m quite certain this latter dish was a leftover invention. The very best turnip cake (which is actually made from radish but I’ll get to that later) in my opinion is seared to a beautiful crisped surface, and is soft and mushy on the inside, like glutinous … Read More

Cabbage, Pear & Pistachio Salad (and Leftover Chutney)

posted in: Events, Recipes | 7

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? I know. Even with my favorite foods, there comes a limit to my tolerance to it after consecutive encores. That’s where the brazen versatility of … Read More