Blocks of tofu stir-fried in a spicy, thick sauce studded with sweet peas is a winter comfort food for me. It clears the sinuses, tickles the tastebuds and it’s wickedly quick to produce. I never thought others would care much for it, knowing that tofu can be a tough sell. But after sharing this dish a few times over the years, many have dug in appreciatively and asked how it was done. It’s criminally easy so here goes.
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.
This dish is inspired by the classic preparation of pizzoccheri, a tagliatelle-like pasta made with buckwheat flour from Northern Italy. It’s commonly tossed with cooked potatoes and cabbage in a buttery, starchy cooking water-thickened sauce accented with grated cheese. It sounded like just my kind of dish, only getting my hands on pizzoccheri noodles this side of the pond, or making it, proved unwieldy.
Sometimes a food becomes so iconic for one dish that it’s rarely seen in preparations otherwise. This is certainly the case for split peas, which I’ve seldom eaten, seen, heard about, nor read about being used for anything else than soup. And that soup carries the stigma of being cooked with a ham bone, most commonly. This is still a soup-y dish, but it doesn’t adhere to the status quo for split peas. Because there’s really no need to.
I may never master the all-American macaroni and cheese myself. But after sampling some thirty best efforts of this dish at Brooklyn’s second Mac & Cheeze Takedown on Sunday, I may have some more clues. Mac and cheese is one of those quintessential home-cooked dishes (along with chili, the food that began the Takedown), meant to be shared by many and enjoyed by all. But as I wasn’t competing in this Takedown myself (I’d asked host Matt Timms to but … Read More
If this isn’t a refreshing way to enter winter eating, I don’t know what is. I’m talking about the leanest, meanest days for finding fresh produce, the doldrums of harvesting. Yeah, we’ll be here for a while longer. Luckily, there are always some dried fruits, nuts and grains that have been stored away for safekeeping — and only the toughest of the fresh root vegetables survive, like beets.
Chinese New Year is coming up this weekend — the Year of the Dragon is just upon us. Remembering a few good-luck foods for the holiday can be simple: anything long suffices for promoting “long life.” That includes noodles, which are traditionally served on New Year’s, often pan-fried. Make it as fancy as you want with additional ingredients, or as down-home and cheap as this one. With an assortment of healthy winter vegetables, it’s life-lengthening, in more ways than one.
Rutabagas might not look like much — a discolored turnip, a rounded daikon — but they have a fierce flavor that certainly sets them apart from the rest of the root vegetable pack. Pungently bitter when raw, their tight-walled, yellow flesh dissolves after long simmering, releasing earthy aromas and a subtly sweet taste. It pairs perfectly with cream, butter and leeks, I think, and your kitchen will never have smelled better from the combination.
Not exactly the same thing as shrimp ‘n grits, but then, these little carrots might just fool you upon first glance. Talk about making something exciting out of two not very exciting, (laughably) non-exotic, and non-expensive ingredients. Hey, you gotta start somewhere.
Winter is a time to get back to your roots. I’m not talking about taking up knitting or studying Yiddish or something else important and having to do with your heritage. I’m talking about root vegetables. They’re abundant — probably the only produce that’s abundant — when the ground is frozen, and they’re widely adaptable to many cooking techniques. They also claim a wide range of flavors, from spicy (horseradish) to sweet (parsnip), bitter (turnip), zesty (ginger), fresh (celeriac) and … Read More