What can I start you off with? Would you like to hear our specials? What did you decide on? Do you need a few more minutes? Can I get you another drink? Would you like to see our dessert menu? Would you like to Supersize that? Would you like fries with that? Would you like that a la mode? Would you like to have that wrapped up? Are you sure you wouldn’t like any coffee or dessert?
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
This week on WNYC, the Brian Lehrer Show has been crowdsourcing for bagged lunch suggestions. I’m a great fan of the show’s crowdsourcing projects (remember the grocery store prices map?), and this one is no exception. No longer your grade-school sack filled with a cold cut sandwich, banana and note from Mom (okay, I never got those either… sniff), brought-from-home lunches are a trend in offices these days that can be as satisfying as the next-door sandwich shop — or, … Read More
So, I meet new people, and the inevitable “What do you do?” question often leads to the fact that I write a blog about not eating out. This often leads the recipient of said introduction to gauge how much he or she eats out, or not. (“I never cook,” is a common response.) Recently, someone replied saying that the only thing he cooked was a frozen veggie patty now and then.
There were many things that blew my socks off at a dinner Sunday night, held in a cozy Brooklyn ground-floor apartment. The basil-ricotta gnocchi was one of them. The lamb pot pies (above) were definitely another. But the one thing that really struck me the most was when, while casually biting off chunks of his garlic sauce-smothered lamb breast and duck fat confit hors d’oeuvres, Tamarack Hollow Farm founder/farmer Mike Betit said, “The first two years [of starting his farm], … Read More
Even though we’re in the doldrums of winter, I’m feeling a tremor of activity and overall excitement about local and sustainable farms. The New Amsterdam Market, a nonprofit which promotes environmentally and socially responsible food and the people behind it, has just launched an auction this week. It isn’t chock full of knick-knacks, though. Really embracing the spirit of community, sharing and learning about sustainable agriculture, many of the “items” for auction involve the food purveyors, farmers and conscientious chefs, … Read More
It’s not what’s inside the soup that counts. It’s what’s on the surface. Here, we’ve got creamy roasted acorn squash soup. It could be any squash, butternut, pumpkin. It could have a splash of cream or milk or not. I don’t care. I’m sinking these crispy, salty kale “chips” into its sweet custard and lodging a pebble of a pine nut onto a spoon for the ultimate scoop. Call me shallow, but sometimes beauty just isn’t that deep.
Two is better than one. That’s what I would be saying if I hadn’t just spent five hours making cookies on Valentine’s Day morning. (You could say it was a labor of love.) When I asked readers to choose their favorite heart-shaped cookie proposal from six options for me to make today, I never expected such a dramatic split. There seemed to be warring sides: traditional all the way (red velvet cream cheese frosting), and Asian-inspired (green tea red bean … Read More
There’s nothing that represents true love on Valentine’s Day better than two heart-shaped cookies joined in sticky matrimony with a sugary concoction between them. Even us singles can still look forward to this: stacks of heart-shaped, icinged, chocolate-dipped, powdered sugar-dusted, and daintily decorated cooookies.
Welcome to 2009, Chili Takedown. This is no time to be splurging on pounds and pounds of beef. Sorry, heritage pork (except for your bones and spare ribs, which I’ll get to in a bit). I’m not even doing the fresh garnish doodads anymore. This is recession era chili. And I’m going back to the basics of peasant home cookery — that is, minimal amounts of meat, used for flavor mostly, cheap winter vegetables, and lots and lots of B-E-A-N-S.