Last night I made the best batch of biscuits and gravy ever. That's not something I ever thought I'd say out loud, but I cannot tell a lie. I started with some homemade breakfast sausage, which formed the base of a sensational gravy. The buttermilk biscuits were baked from scratch. It was nearly perfect.
The problem? The biscuits didn't rise, or at least not enough. I followed a fairly well...
I recently stumbled on an essay called The Power of the Hot Vinaigrette in Michael Symon's new cookboo k. "Cold vinaigrettes are excellent," he writes, "but add one to the hot pan you've sauteed some shrimp in, and the blended acid and oil will pick up all the flavor of the bits of protein and sugars that have stuck to the pan." He advocates for pan sauces to be vinaigrette-based, rath...
Do you remember your first Martini? Mine came while I was still working as a waiter. After a long, hard shift, all of us would sit around a table and get one free drink before heading home. Usually I went for the coldest beer I could fine, but that day I held my head high and ordered a Martini. It felt good to say it out loud, and it arrived all handsome and clean with a single olive in it. It...
You may remember awhile back my lamenting post about a favorite ingredient I couldn't find in Chicago. The ingredient that Claudia at Cook Eat Fret christened " the bacon of fish ." Something relatively undiscovered and very difficult to find in the U.S. A secret ingredient, you might say. Well, I'm done lamenting. Because I have found bottarga, the cured roe sack that's pressed and dr...
Our weekly roundup of what the two of us have written over on Serious Eats.
Dinner Tonight: Spaghetti with Bottarga and Almonds
Bottarga is the secret ingredient for this incredibly simple pasta.
Merguez Sausage with Collards and Couscous
This is definitely not your usual Southern version of collard greens. H...
Happy Friday, everybody. It's raining and blustery in Chicago, it's almost the weekend, and we're launching a new Twitter account. It's shiny and slick and, at the moment, a little bit lonely. So come follow us !
Sure, you may already follow Nick or me on Twitter individually, but in case you were really confused about who to follow--as time and again, even our most faithful read...
In today's Dinner Tonight column (the post will be up later this afternoon) I walk through a very simple garlic soup recipe from Mario Batali's Spain: A Culinary Road Trip . It's the kind of a soup I adore, being nothing more than a few cloves of garlic, good chicken stock, and a few pieces of stale bread. The one wild card is hot pimentón, which is a Spanish smoked paprika .
I...
A variation on meunière sauce with almonds
In one of the opening scenes of My Life in France , Julia Child experiences an early meal in France with her husband, Paul, a lunch at La Couronne, a medieval house turned restaurant built in 1345. After oysters, she goes on to describe an early culinary epiphany, apart of what would become "the most exciting meal of my life."
Paul had...
Our weekly roundup of what the two of us have written over on Serious Eats.
Fish Fragrant Eggplant
Your house won't start reeking of seafood when this dish is done. But honestly, there's a faint fishy flavor in the air. It's kind of miraculous. How could a dish were no fish products get close, smell of it?
Skirt St...
Welcome to Wednesday Links. This is our weekly collection of four of the most interesting food links we've discovered in the past week. Enjoy!
Reinventing Salt
[via Kottke.org ]
In order to meet goals for lowering salt in processed foods, Frito-Lay has spent who knows how much money engineering crystals that "dissolve more quickly, effectively putting the sodiu...
Blake and Nick live in Chicago and have written for The Paupered Chef and other publications since 2006.