By Elin Raun
Lasagna , on the contrary, is British. Or so they claim . In a feud finding its origins in the first cookery book believed to be published in Britain (during the reign of Richard II in the 14 th Century), British researchers declare the dish, widely believed to be Italian, as their own. After much jockeying between cooks and diplomats, no one can be sure. Perhaps the Rom...
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...
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...
I’m a sucker for simple, easy-to-prepare pasta dishes that depend on an inspired combination of good, fresh ingredients. The last revelation was from Diana Seed’s The Top 100 Pasta Sauces and involved, similar to this dish, a smoked fish (salmon) and heavy cream. The way cream binds everything together and lends a richness to envelope the smokey-yet-fresh taste of the fish--to th...
I came across a book at the Strand Bookstore some time ago called The Top 100 Pasta Sauces , and was intrigued. Slapped on a cover was a gold circle that declared it had sold “Over 1 million copies,” and I felt a bit like I’d missed the boat, as this was an old used one that somebody was through with. Flipping through it I found beautiful colored pencil sketches, which gave th...
While our enthusiasm for cooking has grown immensely over the past year, we still feel mostly reluctant to toss our recipe books aside and approach the task with our own original ideas and ingredients. A sense of improvisation comes with confidence, and as the acting theorist Konstantin Stanislavski suggests, cultivating concentration and trusting one's instincts. Instincts. We don't do...
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...
Pasta Carbonara
Serves 4.
Recipe adapted from Cucina Rustica
Get a huge pot of salted water boiling...