Every Christmas, we eat cinnamon rolls. That's just how it is. When I was little, someone would wake up early and drive over to the Cinnabon store and come back with a gooey dozen, and always make sure there was extra frosting. The things were so big and sweet that it would take most of Christmas morning to finish one, plus three or four glasses of milk. The cinnamon rolls tided us over until...
Eggy bread, a slice of white loaf dipped in egg whisked with milk and fried in butter, is simply French toast without the sweetness. It is a food I've consumed in countless American diners, and on countless Sunday mornings as a kid. But that morning I found eggy bread unrecognizable without its sheen of maple syrup and its fragrant nutmeg and cinnamon spices. Still, there it was, plain and o...
The holidays are incredibly food-centric times. From the Thanksgiving turkey all the way until the Christmas ham, it seems like the whole country is suddenly swept up into mass foodie-ism. Grandmothers start talking about their recipes. Aunts compete with casseroles. Somebody's got their secret, "this-will-change-your-life" salad, as if life-changing experiences didn't seem all that im...
First, I needed to find some pork belly with its skin still firmly on. My previous attempt removed it , along with a lot of precious fat directly underneath. My bacon didn't have nearly enough fat on it to fry up, so instead cooking up beautifully in a pan, it burned . My local butcher wouldn't sell me a piece with the skin on unless I bought 10 pounds, a fact I still find ridicu...
The bacon most of us know it is made from pork belly, but there are also variations made from other cuts, notably the cheeks and jowl, which makes guanciale --a porkier tasting, fattier cut that's a staple in properly-made Spaghetti alla Carbonara and Bucatinia alla Amatraciana . Hog jowls are difficult to find, though, especially because a butcher would probably need to order an entire he...
When I can’t decide what I feel like cooking, I’ll often visit epicurious.com and bum around until an ingredient that sounds great pops up--then I’ll start searching for that ingredient and I always find something that sounds tasty. In this case, my ingredient was goat cheese. I was doing a few searches at www.jamieoliver.com --we basically follow him and his British humor around with to...
