Recipes and food adventures with Adam Roberts
Category
original recipes
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Rustic Vegetable Ragu
Cooking without a recipe. How do you do it? You start with ingredients. My favorite way to do that is to open my refrigerator to see what’s there: on Friday night (when Craig was working late and his parents were flying in from Seattle) I saw carrots, I saw celery, I saw onions. I decided…
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What’s Up With These Black Chickpeas?
At Cookbook, the delightful store in Echo Park where I bought my first bag of Rancho Gordo beans, I came upon a bag of black chickpeas. “What’s up with these black chickpeas?” I asked the nice people there. “They’re just like regular chickpeas,” said Robert, one of those nice people. “Except…well…they’re black.” With a sales…
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One Bag of Lentils, Two Dinners
There are two kinds of people who cook at home: the first kind chooses an elaborate recipe, buys all of the ingredients, spends hours cooking it, invites friends to eat it, spends hours cleaning it, and takes the rest of the week off. The other kind has long-range vision, makes a large batch of something…
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Fresh Springtime Pasta with Farmer’s Market Asparagus and Fava Beans
After hauling home fresh asparagus and fava beans from the farmer’s market, I stood on a chair and made a loud declaration: “I will not adulterate these beacons of springtime with a convoluted recipe that obfuscates their natural glory!” Getting down from the chair, I thought about my declaration and realized that to live up…
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Marinated Roasted Cauliflower Salad
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about sponges. Well: not actual sponges, but sponge-like behavior. Specifically the sponge-like behavior that occurs when you cook something–pasta, beans, vegetables–and then add them to an incredibly flavorful, incredibly potent mixture (a sauce, a dressing) allowing all that flavor to get sucked up inside. This is why it’s always…
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Chanterelle Risotto with White Truffle Salt
Here’s a friendly tip: make yourself buy an exotic ingredient even if you’re not sure what you’re going to do with it. For example, a few weeks ago I was at the Spice Station in Silverlake and I bought a little bag of white truffle salt. I bought it because after sniffing from the giant…
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Lemon Butter Chicken with White Beans
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.
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Rancho Gordo’s Good Mother Stallard Beans with Lamb Sausage (By Way of Echo Park)
The best dinners are the ones that have a story. This is one such dinner. It started on a typical day: I was driving to Silverlake to eat lunch at Forage (one of my favorite places to grab a bite here in L.A.) and to have coffee and do work at Intelligentsia. Only, it was…
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How To Turn Leftover Chicken Into A Tasty Soup
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…
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Three Chicken Dinners: Meyer Lemon Stuffed Chicken Breast, Italian Sweet & Sour Chicken & Chicken with Lentils and Marsala Gravy
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…
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