Writing about food since 2004.
Category
Recipes
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Diana’s Birthday Lamb
Cooking a big meal for a friend’s birthday is something that I enjoy, especially when that friend is Diana. But, inevitably, the party will end, the dishes will be stacked in the sink and, most devastating for a food blogger like me, there will 1,000 pictures of the meal in my camera and I’ll feel…
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Easy Doughnuts (Sfince)
A dangerous thing to say after dinner is: “Do you want doughnuts?” It’s a dangerous thing to say, because almost certainly the other person will say “yes” and then what do you do? Especially since most doughnut recipes require time for the yeasted doughnut dough to rise? Here’s what you do: crack open Mario Batali’s…
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Spiced Eggplant Salad
Every relationship has rules. For example, in some relationships the person who makes dinner doesn’t have to do the dishes. In others, the person who cleans the bathroom doesn’t have to take out the garbage. In my relationship with Craig, there’s one overriding rule that must be obeyed or everything will crumble to pieces. That…
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Strawberry Pancakes
I never liked pancakes growing up (the syrup made them too soggy, I preferred waffles) but I like them now mostly because they’re easy to whip up on a Sunday morning, especially if you have one of the following dairy items on hand: buttermilk (most preferable), regular milk (also preferable) or, as I learned today,…
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Rockin’ Ricotta
When you’ve been blogging for almost five years and many people read your blog, you start to receive things in the mail. Cookbooks, for example. I get many cookbooks in the mail, also general food books like books about oysters. I have a book about oysters on my shelf that I’ve never read. Sometimes, though,…
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Tuesday Techniques: Cheese Soufflé
We all remember those episodes of bad sitcoms where a character would be making a soufflé and insist that everyone stay quiet in the kitchen lest their precious prize collapse. Then, of course, an Urkel or a Punky would knock over a tray of pots and pans, the soufflé-maker would cry out and hilarity would…
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Abbaye de Citeaux, The Soon-To-Be-Forbidden Cheese
I was wary of getting an iPhone because I didn’t want to be so reachable. With just a plain, ordinary cellphone I get enough calls; with an iPhone I’d also get buzzed every time I got an e-mail. And with all the PR e-mails I get to my Amateur Gourmet e-mail address that’s a lot…
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Smoked Salmon Dip
Cooking is a funny process. If I gave you a spoonful of cream cheese and a spoonful of sour cream and told you to put them both in your mouth at the same time you’d gag and say, “Sick, man, get out of my face.” But if I mixed that sour cream and cream cheese…
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Food Bloggers Have The Best Recipes (Luisa’s Potato Focaccia, Molly’s Chocolate Granola)
Newspaper recipes don’t excite me. With their perfect margins, their definitive type, their antiseptic language, I very rarely open the Wednesday Food Section of The New York Times, read a recipe, and run home to make it. Perhaps it’s a function of old media vs. new media, in that the old media feels creaky and…
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Tuesday Techniques: French Apple Tart
I would like to begin this week’s “Tuesday Techniques” column–a column which appears regularly on Wednesdays–with a discussion of the word “technique.” I think people are intimidated by the word. It implies a “right-wrong” dynamic, something hammered home by Tom Colicchio on “Top Chef” when he criticizes improper technique. “You don’t know how to cut…
