In the hazy hours of Saturday morning, between the first and second cups of coffee when the outside is just too far away and the Food Network is airing another ridiculously boring episode on commercially packaged food, I watch Daisy. Sure there are other crazy public television cooks with loads of character and sass to stretch ( look at this guy ), but Daisy does it best. And she's not p...
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...
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...
After four days of intense bonding with my 10 pound ham , the meat stopped magically improving in the fridge, and started instead to develop what could best be described as a funk. Not necessarily revolting, and I'm sure perfectly edible, the smell was offending enough. And with something less than a pound left, I didn't feel too bad chucking the slimy, sour-smelling flesh into the...
I'll have to admit the real reason I bought a 10 pound ham , beyond "I'd never done it before" cop-out, was to have enough meat to make as many ham sandwiches as I could possibly stomach in a week. Sure, that Boar's Head Black Forest ham can stuff a hero, but thick slabs of real, brown sugar encrusted ham exist on an entirely different plane of pleasure. And for three days I had enormo...
By the second day the roughly 8 pound ham I had foil-wrapped in my refrigerator had started to express its full potential. What had tasted perfectly fine the day before became a sensuous, hands on event the next, as it had somehow increased in flavor as it waited in the fridge. I wanted nothing more than to slouch over the kitchen table, picking hunks right off. How could anything...
I had no reason to buy a ham. No guests were coming over, there was no potluck to attend. It was just a Monday and I had never baked one before and wanted to try. So I hopped on my bike and set out to Fairway to secure the biggest ham I could find. Sure, I could have trained myself on some perfectly reasonable ham steaks that would have happily fed my girlfriend and me for one, maybe t...
This wasn't one of those Manhattan street fairs that blocked traffic on random weekends and offered the same tired stand of roasted corn, corn dogs, and grease laden elephant ears, block after block. Brooklyn's Atlantic Antic (rated number one street festival by Time Out!) was as hodge podge as Atlantic Avenue always is, except now the music spilled onto the streets and so could the beer (...
(Hey Everyone! Check out an updated version of pulled pork and a recent trip down to North Carolina in search of the real thing.)
My bike careens to the left until I start to feel the rush of a truck. I cut back right, trying to make up for my error--I guess this is a line I’m crossing--but for some reason I can’t ride straight.
I blame the night before. Sure...
