I (Blake) turned 24 yesterday and, in celebration, my girlfriend thought up and orchestrated a gorgeous meal of French provincial food. From the surf to the turf, we ate, drank, and otherwise acted like shameless hedonists. Since I'm groggy and barely awake this morning, and don't much feel like working very hard, I'll just put up some pictures and perhaps post the recipes some other time...
Every weekend I quickly scan Fairway's specials to see what deal I'll get off with this week. This time, I thought it was a joke, because I saw this sucker staring back at me . Filet Mignon for $5.99, which is a minor miracle on par with shooting stars and finding a real pastrami sandwich. Considering this cut regularly fetches prices that stumble towards the $20 mark, something...
Mark Iacono, chef and owner of Lucali's, began making pizza publicly 4 weeks ago. "I didn't even tell my family that I was opening this place," he claims. When he pulled the brown paper down off the windows on Day 1, he was hoping a few neighbors might be curious, and he'd have a few weeks of experimenting and tinkering with the pizza formula before he officially opened.
Literally 30 minu...
I've been eating apples constantly this season, unable to help myself every time I saunter by the Union Square market (which is every morning, lunch hour, and evening on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday). For once in my life, I may actually be approaching the appropriate serving suggestion for daily fruits and vegetables. I love breaking through the crisp, taut skin with my teeth, the spray of j...
I screwed up. During the last throes of summer , I treated my grill with the utmost love and care. But I'm apparently a fair-weather fan, for as soon as the temperature dipped I completely forgot about it and retreated into the warmth of my kitchen. Not only did I neglect my cooking apparatus for a solid month, I didn't even bother to cover it. I didn't even set it close to a wall...
Rice, beans, pasta. These are the ways we make sure we haven't incidentally fallen into the Calorie Restriction Diet . They keep us looking flush and healthy and let us concentrate our attention on careful preparation of everything else on the plate. Just about every recipe we've cooked has one of these ingredients incorporated so that we don't leave the table hungry.
Yet I've never...
I had no idea. Abby and I are staring at this picture of skirt steak with string beans with mouths agape, salivating over the chance to make this fine meal , when we notice that nowhere in the ingredients are those beans listed. We double check, and then wonder what it was exactly that we were looking at. All they they had was something called haricot verts. "I'm not sure what that...
First off, a language lesson: refried beans are not fried twice. It's understandable that most people, myself included until I started writing this, assume a literal translation of the word "refried" and, employing razor-sharp detective skills, deduce that the beans are fried, let rest, and then fried again. But the word refried is actually an approximation of the Spanish word refrito , me...
One of the many things that happens when you cook often and with whole ingredients is that you start to face up to the creatures you are eating. When I roast a chicken at 500 degrees, handling its raw flesh and trussing it, and then take a large knife to its carcass, I still understand that this was once a feathered bird that bid its life on some farm, whether that was indoors or out. I'm...
From Jeffrey Steingarten's essay "Explaining Espresso," via his collection It Must Have Been Something I Ate :
It's no wonder that humankind's most persistent activity over the past few hundred years has been inventing new ways of making coffee. How many coffeemakers you have at home depends on 1) your age 2) your love of coffee 3) your love of toys, and 4) your total inability to...
Blake and Nick live in Chicago and have written for The Paupered Chef and other publications since 2006.