I've been reading Thomas Keller's two cookbooks lately, one for each of his Napa Valley restaurants--Bouchon and The French Laundry--and I've doing a lot of drooling. First off, they are probably the most gorgeous cookbooks I've ever seen, physically. From the text design to the layout, paper quality, printing colors, it's all overwhelming. Then, of course, there is the matter of Keller's r...
There's a passage in Anthony Bourdain's book of bistro recipes, Les Halles , that goes something like this: "If you can't roast a chicken, you are a sorry, incompetent idiot who should dig his own grave." Apparently, roasting a chicken should be marvelously easy: throw salt and pepper on that bad boy, put into the oven, and out comes a crisp-skinned, succulent, juicy, hot dinner, twice as...
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...
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...
"Just use whatever leftovers are in the fridge."
That little statement is repeated endlessly throughout the course of one day on the Food Network and I'm not sure who they are trying to fool. It's as if those celebrity chefs aren't paid enough to send an assistant to the store to pick up some tomatoes--not that they need to. Their fantastically clean fridges come stocked with leftover t...
Traditionally, I've wondered why farmers' markets are so expensive. It's almost a given that the price per pound for things can reach double what you'd pay in a grocery store. It doesn't make any sense to me: we're cutting out lots of middlemen, the farmer and I, by communicating directly with one another. There's no shipping the tomatoes halfway around the world, no large distributor tha...
Back in the days of heroicism and yore, legends and lore, shish kebab was invented. In between bouts of maiden-rescuing, treasure-finding, and windmill-attacking, the roaming horseman of the world's countryside decided that they hadn't done enough for mankind. One evening, as the stars shone brightly and the last few vagabonds were settling lazily against rocks for a pipe and a night's slee...
To make a grill week interesting, you have to move beyond the basic hamburger, steak, boneless skinless chicken breast, and the occasional fish. We've done steak twice before , and as we espoused during the Shake Shack Alternative week , we're not big fans of the charred-on-the-grill burger (naysayers and defenders, feel free to comment away). Leave that business to dad. So,...
It began when my friend Glen T. Tremaldi, who runs a community garden in Boerum Hill, informed me of his zucchini overstock. "You should see the zucchinis I picked. The size of your calves," he said. And he wasn't joking. They were the size of melons. Then he related something about a frozen rabbit that was bought some time ago from a butcher on Court St., who had divided it up into ser...
Before the poor whore jokes start to spouting out, before we talk about how quick and easy this dish was, how lustful and robust the flavors were, I'll dispel the obvious and hopefully show how these ladies of the night were actually thrifty chefs without the benefit of access to fresh ingredients. How the whores of Italy were, actually, quite creative.
Fun fact of the day courtesy of Dian...