Category

easy recipes

  • Smoky Eggplant Dip

    Smoky Eggplant Dip

    The best recipes are both simple and effective. The least amount of steps for the most amount of impact? That’s my idea of a good recipe.This recipe is inspired by a recipe from Paul Kahan’s cookbook, Cooking for Good Times. Paul Kahan is the chef at The Publican in Chicago and I know his name…

  • Cara Cara, Blood Orange, and Kumquat Marmalade

    Cara Cara, Blood Orange, and Kumquat Marmalade

    Ever since I saw Paddington 2 (a seriously great movie), I’ve wanted to make orange marmalade. The problem was that every recipe that I read involved letting the fruit soak overnight. Overnight! Does Paddington let the fruit sit overnight in the movie when he has to feed all those prisoners? Methinks not. Consequently, I spent…

  • Quick Queso with Chorizo (and Other Tex-Mex Delights)

    Quick Queso with Chorizo (and Other Tex-Mex Delights)

    Sometimes it’s nice to cook for friends who favor a particular cuisine because it steers you in a new direction. Normally, I default to European/Mediterranean things like pastas and chicken with couscous and preserved lemon and stuff like that. My friends Jim and Todd (you know them!) are Tex-Mex fans and so, when I cooked…

  • The World’s Easiest Chocolate Tart

    The World’s Easiest Chocolate Tart

    When we were in Berlin this past July, at a restaurant called Renger-Patzsch, our dinner ended with the perfect punctuation mark of a dessert: a chocolate tart with apricots and vanilla ice cream. It was memorable for its combination of elegance and simplicity; a tart isn’t easy to do, but this one, somehow, seemed effortless.…

  • Easy Homemade Potato Chips

    Easy Homemade Potato Chips

    I’m so mad at myself. I figured out how to make homemade potato chips in such an easy, head-smackingly simple way, I’m going to make them all the time and gain a million pounds. It all started when I thought about the shallow-frying technique I used to make pita chips and tortilla chips; why wouldn’t…

  • Foolproof Apple Pie

    Foolproof Apple Pie

    I’m a pie fool which isn’t the same thing as being a fool for pie. Julie Klausner recently pointed out in her podcast that Jews are cake people, Christians are pie people. From my own life experience, I find that to be true: my Jewish parents and grandparents, when at a social gathering, would put…

  • Easy Tomato Soup and Grilled Cheese

    Easy Tomato Soup and Grilled Cheese

    Sometimes I write recipe posts where I share a recipe at the end and other times I write recipe posts where the recipe is embedded in the post itself. There’s a reason for that! Recipe posts where the recipe’s at the end are the kinds of recipes where specific amounts matter; recipe posts where I…

  • Spicy Spatchcocked Chicken with Cous Cous Salad & Salsa Verde

    Spicy Spatchcocked Chicken with Cous Cous Salad & Salsa Verde

    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…

  • Stewed Borlotti Beans with Polenta

    Stewed Borlotti Beans with Polenta

    My favorite way to cook, the cooking that makes me happiest, is the kind of cooking you do on the fly: no planning, no prepping. You just see what you have already on hand and you make dinner. And often that dinner is way better than the dinner you spend a week prepping for, shopping…

  • Easy Pumpkin Bread

    Easy Pumpkin Bread

    For as long as I’ve been cooking, I’ve been making the pumpkin bread you see in the above photo. (Proof: see this old post from 2004.) It’s one of the easiest recipes I know–dump a bunch of stuff into a bowl, stir it together, and bake it–and the rewards are rich: the scent of cinnamon…