We’re not in Kansas anymore… if you can equate that with “home” in any case. Driving up and down the steep, scary hills of San Francisco in a borrowed car, I’ve actually passed a road called Kansas St. but none named after New York. It’s good to get away. I’ve taken off for the West Coast, leaving my apartment to a friend and the garden in good hands, to sink into a different vibe. This is my first report from … Read More
Perhaps you’ve tried one or another of these cold side dishes at Japanese restaurants: slips of seaweed dressed in a sweet sesame dressing, or crisp-tender green beans tossed in a savory, miso-based sauce. Well, I decided to put one and two together, with a fresh clutch of not-so-green beans from the market.
I’ve been trying to perfect this recipe for a while. Not so much a recipe, but the technique to a perfect fish sandwich. What type of fish to use? How to batter and fry the fillets? What to serve on it? Well, each of the three variations made over the last three Saturdays were all pretty darn good, regardless. It’s a fish sandwich, with fresh toppings. What can go wrong?
In my experience (and I’ve been to lots of them), local food cook-offs don’t get much better than this. Twenty-four obsessive people finagling over hot grills and their creative toppings/hot dog treatments, beer funneling into the audience from the kegs at Kelso Brewery, and 100% of the event’s proceeds being donated to the Food Bank For NYC… I’m not sure why this event is held only once a year, but it’s now in its sixth enactment, and bound to be … Read More
What do you do when it’s too hot to cook, but you only have vegetables that don’t work so great raw? You stir-fry them, and stick them in a fridge to cool down. It only takes a few seconds of cooking, promise. And they’ll taste great with cold, slippery noodles coated in sesame oil.
There’s a lot of excitement in the city, but sometimes you have to step back from it for a while to see the big picture behind the Big Apple. That’s what happened to Anna Mumford, who’s working on a documentary film, Mumford Farms, now in its final leg of fundraising. After working tirelessly for various food justice causes and filming urban farms, local food advocates and events, she took a stint on her family’s farm in Indiana, and came back … Read More
Who needs rice with black beans when there’s sweet corn, zucchini, tomatoes, onions, Swiss chard, and if not peppers just yet, then new, sweet-tasting potatoes, in season now? That’s my summertime take on the Latin American classic, with the black beans on the bottom this time.
I find the mild flavor, mild texture, and outrageous color of roasted beets so enjoyable that I’ll pop them into my mouth whole like popcorn. Only, it’s not all the time that I get to roasting a few beets, especially when it’s been as warm as the last few weeks in New York. However, I did roast a lot of very good beets the other day — good, because they were just in season at the farmers’ market (rather than … Read More