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  • How To Soften Brown Sugar Without a Microwave

    How To Soften Brown Sugar Without a Microwave

    We’ve all been there. It’s 9 o’clock at night, dinner is over, and suddenly you and your loved ones are craving cookies. All eyes turn to you and you stand up–ready to do the dirty deed–and as you march into the kitchen, confident that you can churn out cookies lickety split, you grab a box…

  • The French 75

    The French 75

    When my friends Patty and Lauren came over for dinner last week, they brought the ingredients to make a cocktail. One of those ingredients–a simple syrup–spilled all over Patty’s bag in transit, but let’s not focus on that. Instead, let’s focus on the e-mail exchange that I had with Patty yesterday about the drink that…

  • Spaghetti Cacio e Pepe

    Spaghetti Cacio e Pepe

    Here are your tools–black pepper, spaghetti, water, salt, butter and cheese–now make something delicious. Ok? Go. Maybe it’s because these ingredients are so unglamorous that I shied away from spaghetti cacio e pepe for so long. Sure, it’s a classic Italian spaghetti dish, but I’ve always favored the ones with garlic and anchovies (see my…

  • Delivered!

    Delivered!

    Well, folks, today was the big day. At 9:30 AM I met with Lizzie, my constant companion and photographer over the past year, so she could hand over the discs with all of her pictures and the match prints (hard copies) for me to deliver, along with my manuscript, to my publisher, Artisan Books. And…

  • The Most Michael Pollan-ish Plate of Food in New York

    The Most Michael Pollan-ish Plate of Food in New York

    I’ve been meaning to do this post for a while, because I really believe in it. Like many of you, I’m a fan of Michael Pollan, his book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” (which I wrote about here) and his useful and helpful food rules. I’m also a big fan of Maury Rubin’s City Bakery on 18th…

  • The Warm Chocolate Chip Cookie at Jacques Torres

    The Warm Chocolate Chip Cookie at Jacques Torres

    Citizens of America, it is my duty to inform you about something unholy, something sinful that is going on in that wicked city known as New York. Deep in the bowels of a village known as “West” is a veritable Sodom & Gomorrah of chocolate whose creator, a Frenchman!, is trying to tempt our children…

  • Tortilleria Nixtamal

    Tortilleria Nixtamal

    Yesterday I made a journey I’d been putting off for a while. Actually, it wasn’t even a journey I knew I could make. See, for my cookbook, I needed to track down fresh corn masa. I wasn’t sure where in New York I could get that until I read this excellent post on the Cooking…

  • Let’s Talk About Lettuce

    Let’s Talk About Lettuce

    I started cooking seven or eight years ago, maybe even a little further back, and it was around the time that people stopped buying whole heads of lettuce and started buying lettuce, pre-washed, in those little plastic tubs. The tubs, which are now omnipresent, have labels like “Spring Salad Mix” and “Herb Salad Mix” and…

  • Kings of Pastry

    Kings of Pastry

    My hands flew to my face several times last night. It was 1:30 AM and I’d made a mistake. At midnight, exhausted after testing four recipes, I loaded up “Kings of Pastry” on AppleTV just to see if it was something I wanted to watch. To say that I was immediately hooked would be a…

  • Pickle Juice & Chili Salt in Your Beer

    Pickle Juice & Chili Salt in Your Beer

    Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everyone! As a Jew, I’m not quite sure who St. Patrick is or why he has a day; I’m more familiar with St. Schlomo and his afternoon where you eat chopped liver and call your grandmother, but that’s neither here nor there. What is here and there is that some of…

  1. For years, I struggled with both Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and Multiple Sclerosis (MS), two conditions that severely affected…

  2. For years, I struggled with both Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and Multiple Sclerosis (MS), two conditions that severely affected…

  3. For years, I struggled with both Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and Multiple Sclerosis (MS), two conditions that severely affected…