Content about Parmesan
April 3, 2009
Nick learns from his mistakes and makes a good deep-dish pie at home.
I was determined not to fail this time. My last attempt at deep-dish wasn't an absolute failure, but it was close. It was too soggy and messy, and had none of the glorious qualities that my favorite Chicago pizzeria, Pequods, displayed. I theorized about all kinds reasons for the failure, thinking it had something to do with the crust. Then I just gave up and asked you all to help me. Ended up I was way off...
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January 13, 2009
How long do you cook ravioli? I wondered this precisely the moment after I plunged my handmade ravioli into a raging cauldron of boiling water. It didn't occur to me that it might be an issue. I had always thought you pulled them as soon as they floated, or was that just gnocchi? When I consulted my recipe in The Silver Spoon it said I needed to cook them for 10 minutes, which sounded absurd. I had only cooked my homemade tagliatelle...
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November 16, 2008
I've had a tumultuous history with fresh pasta. Though I adore dried pasta in all its forms and permutations, my adventures with the fresh can best be described as a disaster. I've wasted hours and honestly lost friendships to the stuff. For this I've relegated fresh pasta to something I may order at restaurants but never, ever make at home.
Perhaps I wasn't giving it a fair shot. When Blake and I first attempted to make...
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January 18, 2008
What's more fun than a make-your-own-pizza party? Not much. My friend Austin was in town from Providence, Rhode Island, where he teaches Spanish, Latin, and mythology. Often when we get together it's an excuse to do a lot of cooking. Throughout college he would make Nick and me ridiculously good brunches with fresh chorizo, eggs, and breakfast potatoes, and occasionally expose us to his Texas chili, which has an entire...
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November 8, 2007
Back when I was writing about corn risotto and the magical risotto pancake, I was kicking around the Internet trying to discover exactly how to make one correctly. Recipe after recipe called for a very specific risotto preparation, one I'd never even heard of, something called Risotto alla Milanese, or Milan-style Risotto. It's flavored with chicken or beef stock, a simplified base of only sauteed onions and olive oil, and this...
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The other day I was watching Iron Chef and Lidia Bastianich was a judge on the show. I'd never seen her in this role, and, frankly, it was scary. The woman is a strange blend of passion and unsmiling seriousness. Generally people who love food are laid back and groovy, and enthusiasm is usually tempered with a good dollop of sheepish self-consciousness: "I know I'm obsessed, and it makes me a dork, but I'm so excited I...
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October 1, 2007
Perhaps spurred on by Blake’s admittedly tasty-looking pickle butter, I finally caved in and decided to write about one of my favorite snacks. Though a tad less refined, and even a bit shameful, it’s something I absolutely adore. I wish it were more interesting. But it’s simply a thin crust pizza with a fried egg on top. Not exactly a revelation, but it’s quick and surprising better than it has...
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September 9, 2007
I’ve been gathering cook books by whatever method I can...and beggers usually can’t be choosers. I borrow nearly anything I can lay my hands on. I owe lots of money to the library. And whenever I get to head home I usually make it out with an armful books my mom hoarded over the years ( I promise I’ll return them!). One of those was The Louisville Courier-Journal Cookbook. By all stereotypes, it...
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Since moving to Boerum Hill, groceries have been tough. We used to live steps away from a B61 bus stop, which takes you directly to Fairway, where almost any food or ingredient can be bought, and at reasonable prices (though their produce isn't always the best). But now going to Fairway truly is a hassle, and I don't think we've since been. Shopping in Manhattan is fine in small doses, but the prices truly make it prohibitive...
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A couple months ago I was eating at Otto, which is the place to bring friends who are visiting: a bit touristy, but very affordable; good to great food that’s easy to share; and most importantly, they have olive oil gelato, which floors just about everyone who tries it. One thing we always do is order lots of the $4 vegetable dishes, like tiny radishes with anchovy-mustard sauce, or salsify with blood oranges.
This particular time,...
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It happened again. I'm just minding my own business, slowing making my way through Bill Buford's book Heat, and I get to passage where Alex, a former chef at Babbo, describes how Frankie, his screaming superior, had taught him how to make pasta Carbonara:
You render your guanciale, and make a sauce with and the egg whites, and then, after you've plated it, you add your yolks, uncooked.
That night I had pasta Carbonara at 10:30. I...
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March 15, 2007
I'm not sure why, but it wasn't until last week when my mom handed me a fresh copy of Heat, that I realized I had forgotten to read it. I'd read another Bill Buford book, his manic and terribly disturbing Among the Thugs, along with his New Yorker profile on Batali and a narrative on his experience slaughtering animals in Tuscany, the latter two of which are included in some form in Heat. The rest was just details, I thought, I'd...
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October 11, 2006
Someone is really concerned about us.
We eat a lot of meat and not enough vegetables. Nick spent a week devouring ham and now his face is the color of plain file folders. (I'm in the office--this is the only simile available to me.) We're facing vitamin deficiencies, colon problems. We're afraid to go outside. Because if we just ate a bunch of raw vegetables, we'd have nothing to tell you. We're offering up our bodies for the sake of...
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January 21, 2006
Trust this recipe, and never lose faith: it is actually quite simple, and can be used as a launching point for lots of other inspired ideas.
I remember vividly the first time I thumbed through a cookbook with a sense of purpose. I was home on a break during my freshman year of college, and my mom had been relating to me her excitement about a book my sister sent from London. She excitedly exclaimed that “it had even been autographed.” I smiled and nodded approvingly, unaffected. It was a cookbook, after all. My sister worked at a Hyatt in...
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January 19, 2006
This is the easiest recipe this side of Dominoes, it’s pretty gourmet, and if you can boil water, you’re 83 percent there.
One thing I’ve found difficult about cooking is that it’s really hard to start when you’re hungry--you have to plan ahead. Once you get started you get your momentum going, and there’s always ingredients to snack on, but it’s the getting started that proves difficult. The inertia works against you at first. Since I get lazy when I get hungry, I end up heating canned soup.
This evening, with...
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All content copyright Nick Kindelsperger and Blake Royer.
