
It’s funny how your neighborhood becomes the lens through which you see the New York restaurant scene. When it’s twelve degrees outside and wind is slapping your face like Joan Crawford in “Mommy Dearest,” are you really going to trek to the Upper East Side from Brooklyn to check out a new two-star bistro? Or…

If you told me twenty years ago, when I first started cooking, that one day I would be able to spontaneously whip up a French apple tart, I would have balked. “What am I? A French grandmother?” But that was before I knew how to pinch together a pie dough in a matter of minutes,…

Every neighborhood needs a Rucola. We’re very lucky here in Boerum Hill because our Rucola is Rucola.

I don’t root for sports teams, but I do root for restaurants. When Ruta Oaxaca Mexican Cuisine opened in our neighborhood (Boerum Hill) a few months ago, I was jazzed that we were getting not just a widely-praised Mexican restaurant, but one that specialized in Oaxacan cuisine. We were in Oaxaca last year and the…

If you’ve never had a Concord grape, imagine the flavor from a purple lollipop or purple gum, then imagine nature producing that flavor instead of a factory, and you’ll get the idea. A Concord grape tastes like the cartoon version of a grape; the flavor of a grape that we all have in our head…

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Garnishes are a game-changer when it comes to a pureed soup. What could pass easily as baby food, becomes something much more substantial and more interesting to eat when you add lots of little bobs and bits. I’ve noticed, when I’ve gone out to fancier meals, that pureed soups are almost always presented as a…

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There are certain ingredients that food people adore that make normal people cringe. Take cabbage, for example. Last week, I told Craig I was going to cook a cabbage for dinner and it was as if I’d said, “Instead of going out for cocktails, let’s get our flu shots!”