Writing about food since 2004.
Category
Recipes
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What’s Up With These Black Chickpeas?
At Cookbook, the delightful store in Echo Park where I bought my first bag of Rancho Gordo beans, I came upon a bag of black chickpeas. “What’s up with these black chickpeas?” I asked the nice people there. “They’re just like regular chickpeas,” said Robert, one of those nice people. “Except…well…they’re black.” With a sales…
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60 Second Aioli
Infomercials rarely inspire awe, and yet I vividly remember watching a commercial for a handblender–this was back in the 90s, I think–that showed a glass jar filled with eggs and oil; then the hand blender plunged in, the host pressed a button, and magically it became mayonnaise. It was like watching a David Copperfield special…
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The Best Curry of Your Life
Go ahead and imagine the most flavorful bite of food you can. What makes it so flavorful? Is it the amount of salt? The amount of heat? The amount of fat? The amount of acidity? All of these factors come into play in this recipe for lamb curry from April Bloomfield’s A Girl and Her…
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One Bag of Lentils, Two Dinners
There are two kinds of people who cook at home: the first kind chooses an elaborate recipe, buys all of the ingredients, spends hours cooking it, invites friends to eat it, spends hours cleaning it, and takes the rest of the week off. The other kind has long-range vision, makes a large batch of something…
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Fresh Springtime Pasta with Farmer’s Market Asparagus and Fava Beans
After hauling home fresh asparagus and fava beans from the farmer’s market, I stood on a chair and made a loud declaration: “I will not adulterate these beacons of springtime with a convoluted recipe that obfuscates their natural glory!” Getting down from the chair, I thought about my declaration and realized that to live up…
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Marinated Roasted Cauliflower Salad
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about sponges. Well: not actual sponges, but sponge-like behavior. Specifically the sponge-like behavior that occurs when you cook something–pasta, beans, vegetables–and then add them to an incredibly flavorful, incredibly potent mixture (a sauce, a dressing) allowing all that flavor to get sucked up inside. This is why it’s always…
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Lynn’s Paradise Biscuits
Once upon a time, my friend Patty told me that the best biscuits she’d ever had in her life were at Lynn’s Paradise Cafe in Louisville, Kentucky. “They were huge,” I remember her saying, “and buttery and fluffy and AMAZING.” When Patty told me this (back in 2009), I was working on a project that…
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If You Have A Grill, You Should Be Grilling Pizza
Our friends Mark and Diana, who live up the street from us, have made a terrible mistake. The mistake is this: they fed us grilled pizza and now we’ll be demanding it on a regular basis. How did I not know this? I mean, I knew this–I’ve watched Ina Garten throw a grilled pizza party…
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Pineapple Upside-Down Cake with Toasted Coconut Ice Cream
If you’ve ever seen “Fiddler On The Roof,” you probably know the term “yenta.” A yenta, in Yiddish, is a busybody, a meddler; in “Fiddler,” though, she’s a specific person, a matchmaker. My whole life, I’ve always been something of a yenta. I love to get involved with people’s life decisions, telling people where to…
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The Ultimate Eggplant Parmesan
Mario Batali’s recipe for Eggplant Parmesan–which I consider, in my humble opinion, to be the Ultimate Eggplant Parmesan–does something most Eggplant Parmesan recipes don’t: it honors the eggplant. Instead of coating slices of eggplant in egg and breadcrumbs, frying them in a skillet, and piling them up with tomato sauce and cheese until you have…
