Category

Recipes

  • Clams with White Wine, Sweet Corn, and Basil

    Clams with White Wine, Sweet Corn, and Basil

    If you were to do a graph–and I’m not a graph person, so you’d have to help me out here–measuring the effort you put into a dinner vs. the pleasure you get from eating it, chances are there’d be a real corollary between the work put it in and the pleasure received (see, for example,…

  • Quick-Brined Pork Chops with Pan-Fried Cauliflower

    Quick-Brined Pork Chops with Pan-Fried Cauliflower

    For the past few months, I’ve been buying kosher chicken breasts from Trader Joe’s not because I prefer kosher chicken breasts but because Trader Joe’s is underneath my gym and it’s way easier to grab chicken there than to make an extra stop on my way home. The problem with this is that kosher chicken…

  • Lamb Merguez with Eggplant Jam and green Olives

    Lamb Merguez with Eggplant Jam and green Olives

    Sometimes you make dinner, and everyone nods in approval, eating pleasantly and saying, “This is very good. Nice job.” That’s most of the time. Then, every so often, you make a dinner that has people piping up a bit more enthusiastically. “Ooooh this is delicious,” they say. “Where did you get the recipe?” But only…

  • How To Host An Indoor Clambake

    How To Host An Indoor Clambake

    My usual dinner party process goes like this: a day or two before a dinner party, I grab a handful of cookbooks off my towering cookbook shelf and casually thumb through them. The goal is not to frantically search for the perfect recipe, it’s to let the perfect recipe come to me. Usually that happens…

  • Tangerine Sour Cream Pound Cake

    Tangerine Sour Cream Pound Cake

    I have a theory that Starbucks has heightened our tolerance for bad, sad pastries. There’ve been moments in my life, at an airport, at a rest stop, where I break down and order a slice of a Starbucks lemon pound cake to go with my coffee. It tastes fine. It’s not bad. It’s sweet, cakey,…

  • Bruschetta with Homemade Ricotta, Roasted Yellow Peppers, and Green Garlic

    Bruschetta with Homemade Ricotta, Roasted Yellow Peppers, and Green Garlic

    So once you have your homemade ricotta, the next question is: what to do with it? Me, I decided to be ultra-spontaneous. Well mostly spontaneous. On Saturday, I bought a nice loaf of bread, made the ricotta, left it overnight in the refrigerator to drain. Then, on Sunday, with dinner guests coming at 5:30, I…

  • Ricotta Worth Making At Home

    Ricotta Worth Making At Home

    Confession: I’ve made ricotta at home before and found the experience underwhelming. True, the process couldn’t be easier, but after dumping a gallon of milk into a pot, adding some lemon juice, turning up the heat, waiting for everything to separate, and straining out the solid stuff in a colander, I wound up with the…

  • A Golden Salad

    A Golden Salad

    Our CSA continues to be a big boon to our diet, especially on Sunday mornings when the box arrives and I get to tear it open and make something right away for breakfast or lunch or a combination of those two meals (someone should come up with a name for that). Last week’s box contained…

  • Julia Moskin’s Steak with Sam Sifton’s potatoes

    Julia Moskin’s Steak with Sam Sifton’s potatoes

    The New York Times is having a tough moment and though some are basking in the scandal, I’d rather take the Ira Glass route and turn the other way. Well not so far that I stop actually reading the Times; it’s still the paper of record, as far as I’m concerned. And though I’ve griped…

  • David Lebovitz’s Caramel Pork Ribs and Garlicky Slaw

    David Lebovitz’s Caramel Pork Ribs and Garlicky Slaw

    Many moons ago, a man in Paris wrote me an e-mail and told me about his food blog with a link at the bottom. I clicked it dubiously–we food bloggers get e-mails like this all the time–only when I clicked, the blog it took me to was unusually impressive. More importantly, the man behind it…