Category

Recipes

  • Improvised Stuffing

    Improvised Stuffing

    The plan was to roast a chicken the way I normally roast chicken (which is to say, the best way in the world!) on a cold winter’s night in November. And then, flipping through the channels, I stopped on the Food Network (surprise, surprise) and there was Rachael Ray making a stuffing. Normally, I wouldn’t…

  • Cream Scones, 1 2 3

    Cream Scones, 1 2 3

    We are about to conduct an experiment. For this experiment you will need a person; the person should be a person who: (1) loves scones; (2) is a self-professed non-cook. The purpose of this experiment is to prove that a self-professed non-cook who loves scones can whip up a batch of cream scones so quickly,…

  • Baked Red Kidney Beans with Chorizo

    Baked Red Kidney Beans with Chorizo

    Is cheating on a recipe like cheating on a test? I wondered that as I made the “Red Kidney Beans Baked with Chorizo, Chilli, Garlic, and Olive Oil” from Simon Hopkinson’s sequel to “Roast Chicken & Other Stories,” “Second Helpings of Roast Chicken.” Simon, or Mr. Hopkinson (that feels more appropriate), calls for dried kidney…

  • Almond Cake in a Food Processor

    Almond Cake in a Food Processor

    You know the author photos you see on the back flap of cookbooks? Imagine if one of them started talking to you. That’s how I felt last week when I announced on Twitter that I was making Amanda Hesser’s almond cake (one of my all-time favorite desserts, recipe here) and Amanda Hesser herself, who’s a…

  • The Best Broccoli of Your Life

    The Best Broccoli of Your Life

    You know you’ve done something right with broccoli when the person you made it for describes it to someone else the next day as “better than biting into a steak.” Those were Craig’s words and they were a marked change from the first words he uttered about the broccoli, before he bit in: “You made…

  • Weekend Breakfasts

    Weekend Breakfasts

    Weekends are for making breakfast. I used to think weekends were for going to brunch, and we still do go out to brunch every now and then, but I’ve started to embrace the simplicity, comfort and relative cheapness of making those same dishes at home. Take the dish you see above: that’s called a dutch…

  • Braised Lamb Neck Provençal

    Braised Lamb Neck Provençal

    First of all, let’s give credit where credit is due: look at the “c” I put in the word “Provencal” in this post’s title. That “c” has the appropriate squiggle in it; I copied it from the Wikipedia page for Provencal. What does that squiggle denote? I have no idea, but the squiggle is there…

  • Weekend Baking: Crispy Salted White Chocolate Oatmeal Cookies

    This is baking weather, peoples. What better on a chilly day than to fill the apartment/house/shack with the smell of something baking in the oven? Nothing better, I say, nothing. Last weekend I had you make a chocolate cake and many of you came through; but this time I bet even more of you will…

  • Chocolate Cake

    Ladies and gentleman, this has been a rough week. My flu mutated into a cold and then back into a flu again. I hardly have the energy to type these words, I’m rapidly fading. Yet, I am filled with hope as I harken back to two weeks ago when I made the chocolate cake you…

  • Braised Cabbage

    Braised Cabbage

    Last week, on a chilly night, I wanted a healthy, inexpensive dinner. I popped open one of my top five favorite cookbooks ever, Molly Stevens’s “All About Braising,” and re-read her recipe for braised cabbage. I’d read it a few times before but was never quite convinced that braised cabbage could taste all that good.…