Category

Recipes

  • Feasting Before The Feast (Or: Another Sunday Gravy)

    Feasting Before The Feast (Or: Another Sunday Gravy)

    Our old friend and neighbor Rob was in town last week and, craving an Amateur Gourmet-cooked meal, swung on over with our friend Luke (am I allowed to say “our Oscar-winning friend” Luke?) on Sunday night. Like a good Italian grandmother, I had a pot simmering on the stove all afternoon and by the time…

  • How To Make a Sidecar

    How To Make a Sidecar

    My planned Christmas gift for Craig this year was a copy of The P.D.T. Cocktail Book by Jim Meehan and Chris Gall, based on the drinks at P.D.T. (Please Don’t Tell) in New York which was just named the best bar in the world by Drinks International. It’s a bar that’s hidden inside a hot…

  • Porchetta At Home

    Porchetta At Home

    We’re all aware of Porchetta the destination, aren’t we? Located on East 7th Street in New York’s East Village, Chef Sara Jenkins (who I met and interviewed a few months ago) has created a universally beloved destination for pork lovers. The menu there features two main choices: porchetta on a sandwich or porchetta on a…

  • Eggs, Biscuits & Bacon

    Eggs, Biscuits & Bacon

    I make a mean weekend breakfast. The variables often change; sometimes it’s a frittata, sometimes it’s waffles. The only constants are freshly ground coffee and paper towel napkins because who uses cloth napkins at breakfast? Lately, though, my mean weekend breakfast looks a lot like the breakfast you see above: homemade biscuits, crispy bacon and…

  • Hummingbird Cake

    Hummingbird Cake

    Sometimes it’s nice to choose a theme for a dinner party. It makes it easier to pick an appetizer, a side dish, an entree and a dessert. At last week’s dinner party, the theme was The South (we had three Southerners in attendance) and I served up Rachel Wharton’s Pimento Cheese as an appetizer, the…

  • How To Fry Chicken For A Crowd

    How To Fry Chicken For A Crowd

    When scheming of ways to dazzle your guests at a dinner party, fried chicken is often tossed aside as too difficult to pull off. And for good reason: if you fry chicken the traditional way, where you start it and finish it in a thick layer of hot oil, you can only fry a few…

  • Melissa Clark’s Sticky Cranberry Gingerbread

    Melissa Clark’s Sticky Cranberry Gingerbread

    You may be wondering about a post that was on my blog on Friday wherein I made Melissa Clark’s Sticky Cranberry Gingerbread live on webcam (using LiveStream) and then interviewed Melissa Clark on my cellphone afterwards. Many of you attended, though you missed the ending when the cake came out of the oven because LiveStream…

  • Lasagne alla Bolognese al Forno (Or: The Ultimate Lasagna)

    Lasagne alla Bolognese al Forno (Or: The Ultimate Lasagna)

    Growing up, if I visited a friend and that friend’s mother was cooking dinner, one word would make me run away screaming. That word was “lasagna.” Theories for why this was the case: (1) I grew up in a non-lasagna household; (2) it was a non-lasagna household because (a) my dad hates cheese and (b)…

  • Romaine Salad with Cornbread Croutons & Buttermilk Garlic Dressing

    Romaine Salad with Cornbread Croutons & Buttermilk Garlic Dressing

    Many of my best food memories from childhood occurred at chain restaurants. It’s an old story by now–how my parents didn’t cook, yadda yadda yadda–and we ate most of our weeknight meals in Boca Raton at restaurants owned by athletes (Pete Rose’s, Wilt Chamberlain’s) or country-wide chains like Chili’s, Friday’s and The Cheesecake Factory. At…

  • Nepalese Chicken Tarkari

    Nepalese Chicken Tarkari

    Nate Tate and his sister Mary Kate Tate (yes: their real names!) are the authors of a brand new cookbook, “Feeding The Dragon,” that documents their travels around China (nine regions, 9,700 miles) and the recipes (100) that they collected on their journey. I first encountered the book when they asked me to write a…