Category

Recipes

  • Cavatappi with Anchovies, Garlic, and Red Peppers

    Cavatappi with Anchovies, Garlic, and Red Peppers

    Following a recipe can sometimes feel like you’re on a mad voyage with a crazed captain determined to set your kitchen ablaze in a quest to capture that ephemeral, culinary white whale. “Are you out of your mind?” I wanted to yell at Melissa Clark, whose Pasta with Caramelized Peppers and Anchovies inspired this particular…

  • The Last Word Cocktail

    The Last Word Cocktail

    Mixing drinks at home has never been a priority. We’ve been known to stir up a Negroni now and again — it’s such an easy drink, I basically eyeball it — but the days of Craig shaking up Sidecars at dinner parties has been in steep decline ever since I noticed how much more clean-up…

  • Nectarine Plum Pie with a Brown Sugar Crust

    Nectarine Plum Pie with a Brown Sugar Crust

    So I’ve been organizing all of my old posts into categories. It’s a huge process — over 3,500 posts covering a 15 year span — but it’s also oddly satisfying; like cleaning up a hoarder house. My goal is for you to be able to click “cakes” and to see every cake recipe I’ve ever…

  • Stuffed Onions, Peppers, and Tomatoes with Sausage and Rice

    Stuffed Onions, Peppers, and Tomatoes with Sausage and Rice

    Drinking before you cook has its benefits. For starters, it loosens you up; makes you less anxious about whether the salmon will sear perfectly or the Étouffée will be an Étoufail. On the flip side, drunk cooking might lead to cooking accidents and/or a viral web series. On weekends, I like to enjoy a good…

  • Anytime Pasta with Scallions, Peas, and Parmesan

    Anytime Pasta with Scallions, Peas, and Parmesan

    Pour one out, if you will, for the imported Italian bowl that you see above: I bought it on eBay a few years ago, it was my pride and joy, and yesterday — after doing the dishes — I was putting ramekins away high up in a cabinet and one of them fell and broke…

  • Louisiana Red Beans and Rice

    Louisiana Red Beans and Rice

    Calling a cookbook “essential” is a bit cliché, but that’s not the case with Toni Tipton-Martin’s Jubilee, this year’s James Beard Award winner for Best American cookbook. We’re in a state of reckoning right now in America, a necessary reckoning that’s had reverberations in the food world (see: Bon Appetit) and has forced many of…

  • A Most Excellent BLT

    A Most Excellent BLT

    You never know where you’ll learn a life-altering cooking technique. Longtime readers will know that I glean most of my food knowledge from Saturday afternoon PBS cooking shows (hat-tips to Lidia, Bridget & Julia, and Mary Ann Esposito), but today’s post is a result of following pastry chef extraordinaire Nicole Rucker on Instagram. Nicole wears…

  • Skillet Chicken Breasts with Corn, Peppers, and Scallions

    Skillet Chicken Breasts with Corn, Peppers, and Scallions

    Here’s the thing: now that I’m making recipes printable, I feel a new responsibility. I used to just write little essays about how I added a pinch of this and a drop of that and I’m realizing now how useless that was: the people want printable recipes! And I get that because when I first…

  • White Bean Soup with Parmesan and Kale

    White Bean Soup with Parmesan and Kale

    We’ve escaped to Santa Barbara for a week with our friends Ryan and Jonathan, forming a mini quarantine community as Covid cases blow up all over the country. It’s making me think a lot about the idea of a “chosen family,” since my biological family is 3,000 miles away in Florida, at the epicenter of…

  • Multicolored Plum Cake with Pistachios

    Multicolored Plum Cake with Pistachios

    There’s only one plum cake worth making in this world and that’s The New York Times‘s most popular recipe of all time: Marion Burros’ Plum Torte. It’s one of those magical recipes where you think there’s so little going into it, it can’t possibly be that great — you basically make a pancake batter and…