Guess what? It’s a great time to pick dandelions. No, not to de-weed the lawn, like you were grudgingly made to as a kid to pitch in with household chores. To eat them! Because they’re great right now. Wait for them to grow a few more weeks and they’ll be more brittle and less palatable. And check out this comparison:
Well, I’ve just completed a little experiment I’ve begun to call Opposite Week. Following a week’s worth of not eating out – the usual course – I threw myself into a strict diet of only restaurant-prepared foods for one week straight. It was fun, weird, nauseating and wonderful all at times. I tried to plan my days and nights eating more or less like an average working twenty-something, and not go out to nice restaurants all the time. I did, … Read More
Okay, so maybe that’s a pretty big pig. Last week, I shared with you four lessons I learned in the geeky, futuristic world of high-tech food science. Perhaps I should have preceded it with this post, on a much more primitive practice: butchering. Still, it requires no less skill, experience and serious passion to hack up a hog than it does to turn sauces into silly string. I’m grateful to have learned these lessons at a sold-out pig butchering class … Read More
Warning: This product contains raw egg. It has, however, been tested in the Brooklyn kitchen of Not Eating Out in New York, and ingested at a gathering of cupcake enthusiasts in Manhattan, held by the blog Cupcakes Take the Cake. It was deemed delicious by all, and no subsequent injuries were suffered that I am aware of.
Isn’t that term just scary? Doesn’t it make all you wholesome, organic, farm-to-table types just squirm? Indeed, “food science” used to be a derogatory way of describing the process by which overly processed foods are hatched in labs. Michael Pollan may have made a mockery of the industrial food industry’s overuse of it in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but like it or not, molecular gastronomy is everywhere right now. After being embraced by chefs like Wylie Dufresne, among many others, these … Read More
A big, virtual blog hug to Ms. Lucinda Scala Quinn, Executive Editorial Director of Food at Martha Stewart, co-host of Everyday Food, cookbook author and overall veteran champion of home cooking. Lucinda chose NEOINY as one of her “favorite blogs” in a lovely round-up of editors’ picks. Wow! (Thanks to fellow “favorite” Zach from Midtown Lunch for the tip!) In case you missed it, you can also watch clips from Martha Stewart’s recent show all about blogging on her blog. … Read More
It’s really the last week of summer. The skies are really becoming darker sooner, and that chill breeze in the evening is really happening. But on the flipside, and in celebration of late-summer local fruits, this watermelon pie is also real. I didn’t think it would make it past the dream stage for a while.
To repeat a joke my brother once made when I was in the same situation, I’ve got a lot of thyme on my hands. Fresh thyme. Which means it’s going bad soon. It took a while for me to place why I’d gotten the large stash of spindles tucked away in my crisper drawer (oh right, those squash-stuffed Jamaican-style patties) today. I’ve got a lot of the dried kind, too. If only time were as plentiful as my thyme, then … Read More
If you’ve been watching the Food Network lately, you may have seen a teaser for a new series called Ask Aida. Its premise is that home cooks pose a question to culinary expert Aida Mollenkamp — how do you make a roux? Quick weeknight supper? That sort of thing. Then Aida goes on to reveal her secrets to making the dish/technique a success. Word on the street has it that my likeness appears briefly in a commercial for the show … Read More
Some people like to do a lot of canning, jamming and pickling this time of year, to preserve summer’s harvest of ripe fruits and vegetables. Others simply chop them up and throw them in the freezer. In something of a cross between jamming and throwing in the freezer, I decided to take up the age-old tradition of boozy sorbet-making.