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I get so annoyed, sometimes, watching America’s Test Kitchen. As I’ve mentioned before, my Saturday ritual is to watch all of the PBS cooking shows and America’s Test Kitchen is the one that took me the longest to warm up to. Whereas Lidia’s Italy lets you peer over the shoulder of a real Italian grandmother…

Sometimes I scroll through the older images on my phone to remember what life used to be like before Covid and I suddenly remember that back in January (what feels like a lifetime ago) we took an epic trip to Japan. The trip was both the result of a spontaneous impulse (“What if we go…

I’m not normally quid pro quo when it comes to food, but when you make something as delicious as David Lebovitz’s mint chip ice cream, someone’s gotta give you something pretty good for dinner before you offer them a whole container. Good thing I’m friends with Harry and Cris. Cris is from Bordeaux (that’s in…

Super excited to share with you loyal blog readers my brand new podcast, LUNCH THERAPY, which just launched today on iTunes. The concept is a riff on that old Brillat-Savarin quote from Iron Chef: “Tell me what you eat: I will tell you who you are.” Only here, it’s “tell me what you eat for…
If you had trouble loading up the blog this week, that’s because, in my naiveté, I thought I could just tear everything down without any consequences. Turns out: I screwed something up with the server and the blog stopped loading for most people. BUT! Now we’re on a new server and things should be working…

Tom Colicchio’s always like “you didn’t develop any flavor” on Top Chef and most people are probably like “what’s he talking about?” My quick answer is: “He’s talking about making things brown.” Generally speaking, when you’re cooking something, you want it to turn brown (or, to use a prettier word, you want it to “caramelize.”)…

For a while, our friend Cris has wanted to cook us dinner. The fact that we didn’t make it happen immediately won’t seem like a big deal until I tell you that Cris is French. Yes, we had the opportunity to have dinner cooked for us by a French person and we didn’t take him…
I’m no oatmeal expert, but I do make a lot of oatmeal. OK, maybe I am an oatmeal expert. For a while, I was toasting the oats in butter (a trick I once wrote about here) which kind of makes the oatmeal taste like buttered popcorn. When I’m feeling indulgent, I’ll cook Irish oats and…

Mushrooms are scary. Eat the wrong one, and it can kill you or make you think you’re Jesus (luckily, if you think you’re Jesus and it kills you, you can raise yourself from the dead). As a child, I absolutely loathed raw mushrooms in salads at pizza restaurants. That was my first impression of mushrooms:…