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This is it, kids. This has to be the last recipe I share from April Bloomfield’s new book, A Girl and Her Pig, or pretty soon I’ll look like that pig slung over her shoulder on the book’s cover (slaughtered for divulging too many cookbook recipes). If you’ve tried any of the recipes I’ve posted…

Of all the shameful things a home cook can do, the most shameful is letting leftovers go to waste. I’ve been guilty of this; maybe I’m craving sushi instead of yesterday’s lentil soup, and the lentil soup sits, gathering mold over the weeks, and getting tossed when it might’ve provided a perfectly satisfying second night…

What you see above is one of my favorite meals I’ve ever made at home. It came about rather organically: after raving about Rancho Gordo beans in this post from last week, I went back to Cookbook (the store where I bought that first bag) and stocked up on more.

One benefit of making a complicated, classic dish like bouillabaisse, as I did last week, is that the process of making it becomes its own version of cooking school. You follow the steps but as you do so, you learn things. For example: making a fumet (or fish stock) may be labor-intensive but your efforts…

If you cook the same thing over and over and over again, eventually you get really good at it. That’s what happened with me and chicken: I’m really good at cooking it. And though there are many who find chicken boring, that’s usually because chicken, when stripped of its skin and bones, is, indeed, very…

In 2003, a funny thing happened. My parents were visiting Atlanta, where I was attending law school, and they were staying at a nice hotel in Buckhead. They asked me to meet them there for a drink and, as often happened when I’d sit with my parents in a hotel lobby sipping a gin and…

Remember yesterday when I posted about making salsa verde with a mortar and pestle? And remember this morning how I linked to a Huffington Post piece I wrote about roasting a chicken? Now it all comes together in this post, a post that begins with a confession: last week, I made a meal on Monday…

Snooki may like to smoosh, but when it came to the root vegetables that I brought home from the farmer’s market last week, I was in the mood to smash. I was making roast chicken (my go-to weeknight dish) and my standard practice is to stick some root vegetables under or around the chicken, to…

It’s been tricky to keep the contents of my cookbook a secret. For example, certain chefs have led me to purchase certain cooking equipment and/or ingredients that have transformed the way I cook at home. Do I share those revelations here or do I wait for you to experience them in Spring 2012, when the…

When I was writing my first book, I had a chapter called “Stretch a Chicken” in which I was going to try to stretch one chicken over as many meals as I could. That chapter never materialized but last week I found myself stretching a chicken without really thinking about it. I made two dinners…