Writing about food since 2004.
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Keema Pau
Have you ever been in a cooking rut? Sometimes I literally have no idea what to make for dinner even though I have a cookbook shelf overflowing with books and I read about food on the internet for 85% of my day. Thankfully, I started this new podcast and my guests send me recipes to…
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Rosemary Dijon Rack of Lamb with Crispy Potatoes
Would you believe that I’ve cooked lamb necks, lamb shoulders, lamb legs, but never that most famous lamb preparation of all… a classic rack of lamb? The reason’s actually pretty simple: rack of lamb is expensive. And as confident as I am as a meat cook, I’m always scared that if I splurge on something…
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Claire Saffitz’s Meyer Lemon Bundt Cake
Bundt cakes often look better than they taste. That’s because, at the end of the day, you’re dumping a bunch of cake batter into a big heavy mold that needs to cook for a while to have stability, but also (very often) dries the cake out in the process. So how do you make a…
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Dirty Chai Earthquake Cookies
I have a vivid memory of being in Venice with my parents in the early 2000s (it’s documented here) when my brother and I decided to freak out our mother by drinking espresso after dinner. We were actually always a coffee-after-dinner family but the coffee was always decaf. To this day, my parents still order…
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Crispy Pierogi with Pork and Dried Fruit
The best pierogi I’ve ever eaten in my life — one that ruined all other pierogi for me — was at Michael Symon’s now-closed restaurant Lola in Cleveland, Ohio. I still remember what it looked like: a half moon of crispy dough stuffed with beef cheeks. It was maybe one of the most decadent things…
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Baked Pasta with Fontina and Roasted Mushrooms
Some new friends were coming over the other night and I asked them what they ate and they said “we eat meat but mostly vegetables” and that’s when I knew I was going to serve them a pound of cheese. It’s not that I was trying to fatten them up or punish them for being…
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Makoviy Rulet with Apples and Poppyseed Paste
Baking a recipe at home is hardly a political act and yet, as a show of solidarity, you can’t really argue against it. With all of the horror going on in Ukraine right now, it feels important to honor and celebrate Ukranian culture, especially its recipes. If that sounds like homework, let me put it…
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Marbled Matcha Pound Cake
Sometimes I make mental note of a food-related thing that leads me to buy another food-related thing and then that food-related thing sits around for a very long time until I look at it and remember the original food-related thing that led me to buy it in the first place. That’s the case with the…
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No-Bacon-Necessary Pasta with Porcini Rosemary Tomato Sauce
Every so often, I think about my dog and the fact that I could never eat him. Then I think about how he looks like a piglet and how I do eat pigs by way of bacon. But if I do eat bacon and bacon comes from a pig aren’t I eating a version of…
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We Sold a Cookbook!
If you know anything about me you know that I love two things more than anything else: (1) cooking and (2) Broadway musicals. A few years ago, I was lucky enough to become friends with one of my favorite Broadway actors, Gideon Glick (we met up at The Russian Tea Room), and over the pandemic…
