Learning how to make risotto at home was one of the more liberating experiences of my early culinary career. The idea that I could create a perfectly legitimate risotto by just buying arborio rice and stirring like mad, was enough to make me wonder what else I couldn’t cook. I’m not going to say it single-handedly helped launch this blog and my writing career, but it was crucial. It was the moment that I looked around the kitchen and wondered what else I could create.

Fast forward six years later, and I am still making risotto in roughly the same serviceable manner. It’s dependable and comforting, but it was starting to pale in...

If you’re a Top Chef junkie like me then you probably remember that Tre got kicked off episode 8 this season after serving a risotto that didn’t “spread.” At least, that’s what judge Tom Colicchio said. It’s always hard to know exactly why contestants are booted off the show when you can't taste the food, but this was one of those cases where you could visibly see that his risotto sat up in a bowl like mashed potatoes. “Of course he should go home,” I thought, “His risotto didn’t spread!” But then I wondered, “Hey, doesn’t my risotto...

Ah, gimlets. I've always been too much of a wuss to enjoy them. The gimlet is all harsh lime and bracing alcohol, befitting to manlier men like the British seaman who invented it, at some point in the 19th century, halfway across the Atlantic. They were looking for their allotment of vitamin C (scurvy sucks), had Rose's lime juice, and they were drinking a lot of gin. How's that for a cocktail history? Today, the gimlet is still made as it was: the gimlet is simply gin with Rose's.  Same brand-name product from 1867.

But the gimlet is a difficult cocktail to love. It's a classic, but nobody seems to like them much. But there's no arguing with its...

Kale sounds like a boring health food, but if you cook it well it's delicious. It's just that most recipes are too predictable: greens + fat + aromatics + acid.  Kale is a lot more versatile than people give it credit for.

Sure, you can plug in different combinations (kale, olive oil, garlic, and lemon juice is pretty common) and a pinch of red chile flakes is also welcome. Sherry vinegar is especially good, too, and the greens can be replaced by chard, mustard greens, beet greens, you name it. Procedure is to wash the kale, leaving plenty of water clinging to the leaves, heat the olive oil and simmer some sliced garlic (and chile flake if using) for a minute, then add the wet greens and cover until they're tender. They steam themselves then get tender. Finish with salt and acid and you've got my winter mainstay.

But it never hurts to approach it with new ideas.  Kale is a lot more versatile than people give it...

Having roasted many, many chickens in my cooking life, I've come to the opinion that there is no way to roast a chicken without some kind of opinion. You may get away with tossing an untrussed chicken into the oven with a shower of salt, maybe a lemon in the cavity, and calling it dinner, pretending to be as careless as possible.  But that's still an opinion. So is planning days ahead of time brining it and messing around with a complicated sauce and caring exquisitely about every single detail.  

If someone knows how to roast a chicken, it should be Thomas Keller.  Reading the Bouchon cookbook, you might be...

For the third year in a row, Nick and I will be spending our New Years Eve with friends eating tacos and drinking cocktails. It's become something of a tradition, fondly known as Cocktails and Carnitas, and I can hardly wait.

It's a given that the food is good. But we also believe in drinking very, very good cocktails. Cocktail. Rather than conjuring up images of sugary vodka-laced concoctions, the word cocktail evokes for us a dangerous, seductive blend of liquor, liqueurs, bitters, citrus juices, and plenty of ice. It is something balanced, remarkable, and pleasurable. A cocktail should not be an embarrasing thing you order in a club. It should be a work of culinary art.

With that in mind, here are two cocktails we debuted last year which were...

Just add sauce...

Does anyone have the recipe for Allen and Son's barbecue sauce, because I'll lay down a sizable chunk of change to get my hands on it. It's one my favorite barbecue restaurants in the country, and it's almost all down to that tangy, vineger based sauce. It doesn't coat the meat like a thick Kansas City-style sauce, but seems to disappear into the meat, making each bite acidic, spicy, and addictive. While I didn't have the recipe, I did have a jar of the amazing sauce, which a friend brought back to me from a trip to North Carolina. Though you'd think I would be completely overjoyed, instead I had the kind of...

Just a sampling.

Whether it’s research for Serious Eats, city guides for Grub Street Chicago, or "work" for this site, if you happen to call me on a Saturday you’ll probably find me in the midst of some misguided eating tour. I call it research, and yet I realize that it starts to drive one slightly mad. It’s to the point now where I can’t imagine being close to any major metropolitan area without at least trying to sample as much food as I possibly can, whether or not I'm even slightly hungry. So even though my relatives lived a good hour outside of Detroit, I convinced my wife that it was absolutely practical for us to leave the family the day after Thanksgiving and go gorge ourselves silly. You know, who cares that it was just after the biggest eating day of the year...

How turkey should taste. 

Question: What iconic Thanksgiving food would you get rid of?
Answer: Twenty percent of chefs would prefer to get rid of the turkey altogether.
- GQ's The Great Eat Like a Man Thanksgiving Chef Survey

Here’s the question: Why is everyone working so hard to not screw something up when Mexican cuisine has figured how to make one of the greatest dishes in the world?

The turkey is the bird of the New World, so it makes total and complete sense that we would cook it for Thanksgiving. What just doesn’t make sense is how we cook it. To be sure...