Content about Food
January 27, 2011
It's just around the corner on February 3rd. Here's a link to the 10 Good Luck Foods of the Lunar Calendar's new cycle. How do you satiate your dumpling craving?
http://www.chow.com/food-news/54874/10-good-luck-foods-for-chinese-new-year/
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January 26, 2011
Some pasilla chiles and avocado leaves make all the difference.
If you happened to stumble across the recipe for “Seasoned Black Beans” in Diana Kennedy’s Oaxaca al Gusto there wouldn’t be much to immediately keep you from turning the page. Dont get me wrong, it is housed in a beautiful book, it is just that besides the boring name and lack of picture, this is all Kennedy says in the headnote: “This fried bean paste is used for filling tamales, for tetelas, or to...
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January 25, 2011
What's your favorite way?
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...
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January 23, 2011
A breakdown of a three year span in food trends. The Chinese sausage looks delicious!
http://www.chow.com/food-news/67943/the-best-2010-food-trends-report-ever/
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January 22, 2011
A new site for finding and sharing great food in your area. Let us know what you dig up! http://www.foodspotting.com
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January 22, 2011
Ever wonder where marshmallows come from?
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/food/2011/01/its-a-marshmallow-world/
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January 22, 2011
Welcome to our redesign!
We would like to welcome you, at long last, to the newly designed home of The Paupered Chef. Let us all breathe a sigh of collective relief. We’re back.
Well, things look a lot different. The pictures everywhere on the site are bigger, and we've laid out the homepage so that the articles we write get some prime real estate on the site. We've also instituted a Tumblr-style blog below, where we'll be ruminating,...
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December 31, 2010
With one secret ingredient
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...
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The British television star that has inspired us time and again
The River Cottage TV show begins with a ridiculously cheesy cartoon showing a curly haired driver fleeing a polluted city for an idyllic paradise, complete with jumping fish, smiling cows, and some friendly pigs. During the course of three seasons of River Cottage and the many years of spinoffs, host Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall manages to kill and eat every single one of those creatures and many, many more. This isn't some hippie feel-...
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December 14, 2010
How to make chopped (not pulled) pork
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....
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December 7, 2010
A mad dash for LA's best food in one afternoon.
We had four hours to eat in L.A., a period of time which all of us agreed wasn't long enough. While most people would have simply given up and spent the time driving around Hollywood or lounging on the beach, we plowed ahead, sure we could catch a plane and sample some of the best food in the city along way. So our afternoon in L.A. was spent cruising the endless sprawl of concrete and zig zagging through the streets in search of the...
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December 1, 2010
How to rescue a childhood horror.
The hatred of brussels sprouts: a childhood universality. It's part of growing up.
But is it really fair? As children, we harbor a distaste for most vegetables, from peas to asparagus, but a special place in hell is reserved for the sprout named after Brussels, and it seems to extend to adulthood. Most kids hate asparagus, but most adults love it, especially with a little hollandaise or topped with a fried egg. Not the humble sprout....
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November 8, 2010
Thailand-style fried chicken
The crackliest chicken you can imagine.
I caught your attention with that title, didn't I? Well, the same thing happened to me, when I stumbled on a recipe in The Atlantic.com's food section in a post about Bangkok street vendor fried chicken--the recipe for which the author cajoled from the street vendor, then scaled down for use in the kitchen. And yes, he called it better than Southern fried chicken here in the U.S.
Bangkok is...
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A fool-proof method discovered.
If you don’t want to go to all the bother of soaking and cooking them, canned chickpeas work extraordinarily well
- James Beard, Beard on Food
I wanted to go to all the bother of cooking dried chickpeas from scratch. Why? Well, because I never had cooked dried chickpeas before, and I really wanted to see whether taking the time to cook them from scratch would make for a more delicious and cheaper hummus. I had already toyed...
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October 13, 2010
On a search for the lesser-known ingredient in hummus
Is store bought tahini best?
The goal is to make hummus at home with no shortcuts. I’m an apprehensive hummus fan at best, having dipped one carrot stick too many into something chalky and pasty, which claimed to be hummus but was purchased quickly from the grocery store. You could say that I’ve been ruined by the silky smooth texture of real hummus, the kind the comes with a sheen of rich olive oil on top, which is spiked by...
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October 5, 2010
The kiwi could change everything
The kiwi that could change everything
I keep returning to Korean barbecue, and once I get it in my head, nothing else interests me. The amazing flavor of the meat--beefy and complex and sweet--and the unique butchering and cooking method, which renders the normally tough short rib into a grillable pleasure. These things are crack to someone who loves to eat and is fascinated with cooking.
So here's what we know about Korean-style...
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September 29, 2010
Tweaking the classic Chicago hot dog (aka The Superdawg)
Though it pains me to say this, the Chicago hot dog has one little flaw. It’s not always an issue, but it’s there just the same. Most of the seven toppings which make up a proper Chicago-style Hot Dog can be had at any time: mustard and relish are condiments, celery salt is a seasoning, the sport peppers and pickle come from a jar, and onions can be freshly cut up at any time of the year. No...the flaw is that damned red tomato...
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September 21, 2010
A summer alternative with grated apple and almonds
Oatmeal at Cafe Fanny in Berkeley
I think I've always loved the idea of oatmeal for breakfast: it's simple to make, it sticks to your ribs until lunch, and it's economical. I don't always put a lot of time into breakfast, or much thought, save the occasional calm morning of a slow-fried egg on toast or scrambled eggs with chives from the windowsill garden. Oatmeal seems like a good, honest solution. Though I've...
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September 16, 2010
Plus a recipe for Oaxacan-Style Peanuts with Chile and Garlic
Forget the chips.
You know the drill. You walk into a Mexican restaurant anywhere in the country. You sit down. Within moments -often before drink orders are taken- a bowl of tortilla chips and salsa are rushed out to the table. You immediately dig in. Time disappears. Before you order, before you even think about ordering, salsa stains the tablecloth and all the chips are mysteriously gone. That’s just how it goes. Right?
So...
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August 27, 2010
Our solution for what to do with too many tomatoes
There isn't much argument that summertime is the peak season for cooking. It never gets easier than in August: the produce is top-notch, everywhere, and cheap. Locavores are finally settling down and enjoying themselves instead of passing judgement on the rest of us for buying zucchini out of season. You can make dinner by cutting up tomatoes and fresh mozzarella and calling it a masterpiece. My CSA vegetable delivery is overflowing...
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August 25, 2010
These are the five things I can't stop thinking about
I went to Mexico to eat, and I handpicked the region of Oaxaca specifically because I figured I could eat there best. It’s a place where chiles, chocolate, and tomatoes have been growing for thousands of years, and where the holy trinity of corn, beans, and squash make up the local diet. Forget Italy, France, or Spain. Oaxaca is where my favorite food in the world comes from.
I spent two weeks walking its old colonial streets while...
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August 19, 2010
A pineapple and a few weeks is all you need
When I think of Mexican cuisine, I think of balance. Mexicans love acidity in their cooking, and that's what makes it so appealing to eat. Though it's a function of living in a warm climate--the same reason Thai cuisine is also fond of citrus, it's a necessary form of preservation--the culinary benefit has outlasted the necessity.
When you have something rich and heavy in your taco--like, say, hunks of pork shoulder that have...
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August 11, 2010
Chicago's famed restaurant revamps their cafe
Spiaggia isn’t the sort of restaurant you waltz into on a whim--you have to wear a jacket to eat there, its gorgeous dining room has floor-to-ceiling windows, they have a cheese cave, and, oh, it’s really, really expensive. But the secret is that Spiaggia also has a cafe. It’s casual, intimate, and the food is superb. The attention to detail that is expected of a high-end restaurant like Spiaggia filters down to its more...
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July 15, 2010
A blend of bread, nuts, olive oil, tomato, and peppers
My fridge lately has been so full of food I can hardly see what’s inside of it. Since joining a CSA, I am completely overwhelmed with the amount of food I have, and how to cook it all quickly enough. The other day I realized that I had, like, 2 or 3 pounds of green onions--and not wispy little ones, big, fat ones, the white roots thick and juicy, the green shoots long and vibrant. I’d been using them as quickly as I could,...
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July 13, 2010
Two pickle recipes that take less than a day to make
You know how you see scallops at the fish market and think to yourself, I could sauté those with?...When I’m at the farmers’ market, I see bushels and baskets of potential pickles...
- David Chang, Momofuku
It's been over three years, and yet I can still vividly remember an appetizer I ate at Momofuku Ssäm Bar. In a meal filled with gloriously fatty meat laced with spice, this small plate of cucumber and...
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July 9, 2010
Or, the best carne asada tacos we've ever had
As far as I know there are only two kinds of ways to make carne asada. The first method is to take thinly sliced flank or skirt steak, sear it over mad charcoal fire, chop it up, and then stuff it into warm corn tortillas. It's almost always great. The second method is the kind that most taquerias use, which is to scoop some bits of raw steak, plop it on a grill, and sauté until it is cooked. This one is almost always bad. The...
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A delicious formula for making homemade pickles
Pickling vegetables is something that I’ve yet to get real excited about. Of all the "DIY" food movements, it’s one of the last to catch on. Why, I don’t know. Probably because a slab of homemade bacon is a lot more exciting than a jar of tangy vegetables. Which is no mark against the vegetables. Most anything next to a slab of bacon is bound to lose terribly.
But actually, pickling is rather easy when it comes...
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July 2, 2010
A Thai salad meaty and acidic, packed with cilantro and mint, served with crisp cabbage
The only time in the past two years that my wife and I have ordered takeout was this New Years, when, after cleaning up our place from our annual carnitas feast and trying to kick a massive hangover, we basically camped out in the living room on a trundle bed and ate Thai food in our pajamas. Surely, this is why takeout was invented. The idea of doing anything but drinking loads of water and watching a funny movie was out of line. The only...
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June 30, 2010
Hummus' neglected cousin
When it comes to Middle Eastern dips, hummus hogs most of the love and attention. (The New York Times recently reported that hummus is "catching on" in America, where it dominates the $325 million-a-year refrigerated flavored spreads category). You see tubs of it everywhere, and for good reason: it's a great snack to have around.
But there's another beige spread (now doesn't that sound appetizing?) that gets short...
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June 25, 2010
Urban gardening in Chicago
I've started an experiment this year: how easy is it, really, to grow vegetables and herbs in a windowsill?
When I moved to Brooklyn from Manhattan three years ago, I was rather taken with the idea of urban agriculture, romanticizing the rustic life of the small producer who grows his own vegetables, raises his own livestock, and scavenges the seas for the rest. (This fantasy was fueled rather steadily by episodes of the River Cottage...
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June 22, 2010
The Thai salad is bracingly good, a dish to banish all memory of bad takeout
Joe said we should meet for dinner at Thai Aree. You may all remember Joe for his helpful advice on J. P. Graziano's, but I still wasn't sure whether I trusted him completely. l rattled off a few alternatives, slyly attempting to change his mind, but he insisted. "The food is wonderful and the prices are great too." Fine, whatever. I didn't really have the courage to admit that I didn't really much care for Thai...
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June 17, 2010
Many a leafy vegetable has turned to sludge under my watch. No Longer.
Even though it's been around for a few years now, I am still incredibly excited to have joined a CSA this year. A few years ago, "CSA" was the big new food acronym, standing for Community Supported Agriculture, the rather wonderful setup where cooks and eaters pay in advance for the season and in return get a box delivered to their neighborhood every week or two, effectively a farmer's market haul. The farmer...
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All content copyright Nick Kindelsperger and Blake Royer.
