Macaroni and cheese bores me. However, my boyfriend, as with most other American males I’ve ever encountered, adores it. Say the magic combination and his face lights up like a firefly. I thought I’d already given my best shots at the dish, to lukewarm results — no matter how much cheese you put in, nor how sharp it is, it seems, the cooking process ends up giving it a bland name. Oozy and saucy? Not without creating a beschamel first, … Read More
I love food in film. I love food television. There has been much said about the semiotics of food in media — specifically on sex and food media. Now why is that? Well, you can read an encyclopedia entry on the term “food porn” now, and you can also check out a recent article in Harper’s magazine all about food on TV and its sexual connotations. But if you ask me, plain and simple, it’s because making food is just … Read More
I’d like to think of this as less a recipe than an olfactory cooking cure. Somewhere along the ranks of boiling a slow-cooked pot of chicken soup — it’s those hours of comforting smells, I’m convinced, that ease the common cold long before its consumption. The savory, sweet and spicy smells emitting from my oven as I baked this helped lift me out of an early spring slump — and eating it didn’t hurt, either.
“Give a man a quiche and you satisfy his need for quiche for a day. Teach a man to make quiche, and you give him quiches for life.” –New Half-Chinese Proverb And teach him also that you don’t have to make it for breakfasts… No doubt quiche was given a bad rap in the eighties. I guess people still think of it as one of the more fussy, frilly and feminine of the brunch species; but what man, really, doesn’t … Read More
Who would dare question a cooking commandment passed down from Julia Child? Hooray to Julia Moskin in the New York Times for making one pretty promising case for something we were all too embarassed to fess up to doing: cooking with cheap wine. Cream of the crap wine. “Two-buck Chuck” wine, as referenced in the story. Or my personal fallback, too-tired-to-care Yellow Tail. In the story, she gives taste tests of several dishes cooked with prestigious, expensive wines versus cheap … Read More
We all know that ground turkey is the new hamburger if you’re looking to go easy on your heart. But I never found this a satisfactory replacement unless it was used in a sauce or stew of some type — in which juices from all kinds of ingredients run free and wild as piglets in a pen. A turkey burger? Not even close… but ground turkey in chili? Seconds, please. Besides, you’re bound to end up draining most of the … Read More
Thanks to everyone who offered delicious and wacky ice cream flavor suggestions on my last experiment with white pepper ice cream. I apologize, however, that I haven’t gotten around to trying any of them because I’ve been drunk on this bourbon-drenched one. Sweet, creamy and simple, this was my kind of ice cream — or nightcap?
I nominate Culinate.com for this. Sure, there’s Gothamist for local news and gotta-know-about-it-but-not-really-go-to-it events, there’s foodie sites like Serious Eats and Chow where you’re encouraged to chime in on things like creative authentic Mexican uses for icky black banana goo and who makes the best pita in the world. There are always, always blogs. But a refreshing foodie site (and one that happens to be based — though not editorially-focused — in Portland, which I just so happen to idealize … Read More
A completely uninspired twist? A seemingly pointless reverse-effect pastiche? Maybe, but it made for some of the greatest chicken sandwiches I’ve ever had. Since seeing the recipe for chicken fried steak on The Homesick Texan, I was homesick for some of that, too. Let alone I’ve never been to Texas and have no roots to the state. Some things, like fried chicken, are so classic that they inspire new classics like the chicken fried steak. But one of the nice … Read More
Ah, the good ol’ two-step. Like the dance, this one carries a myriad of variations. Then again, I never did learn the dance, in any style, and now I kind of wonder what happened to that swing and formal dance revival that took hold of the city several years ago. For that matter, what happened to any kind of dance craze? There has been a bit of a granola craze going on as far as I can tell — everywhere … Read More