I've been thinking about salad a lot lately, which is strange, because how inspiring can a salad really be? The salads I grew up with were made of lettuce with a bunch of chopped vegetables--carrots, mushrooms, peppers, whatever--doused with a dressing from the fridge door. Everyone put their favorite dressing on, and that worked pretty well. It was the typical "your-choice-of-dressing" side s...
What kind of flour should I use? I had quite quickly settled on 100% Semolina flour when I first made tagliatelle, because I loved the bite that it gave my fresh pasta. When I made the first batch of ravioli, I just started there, figuring it would work for all fresh pasta recipes. But as I read more and more, I noticed that most of the recipes specifically called for all-purpose fl...
A warm comfort food that, in this case, is remarkably easy to make. Generally chowder is thick and hearty with bacon and potatoes and thick creamy base, but this version instead goes for elegant. It’s almost (but not) too thin, almost silky, surprisingly tasty considering the lack of any complicated seasoning.
By Blake Royer
On a Sunday afternoon, corn chowder is the idea. A soup bot...
Gnocchi. No idea. For years this has been the unpronounceable dish on the menu that starred me down and begged to be blurted out to the uproarious laughter of the seasoned waiter. "Did you hear what he just said?" Hell, I didn't have any idea what it was. Was it a type of pasta? Dumpling? Did it have a filling? This feeling of inadequacy kept the recognizable dish on the menu page...
Though egg mayonnaise is essentially the same thing as American egg salad, it doesn't taste like your average pitch-in. The mayonnaise was creamy but it had a lightness to it, which probably has something to do with the proportion of ingredients. Instead of deli-style New York sandwiches where a literal pound of meat is thrown on each sandwich--"It's like a cow with a cracker on either side,...
With minds planted firmly in the dirt, we probed the...
With minds planted firmly in the dirt, we probed the starchy tuber for secrets buried within, all in search of the perfect cooked potato. Armed with a bag of $2.99 Idahos, we set aflame preconcieved notions, sexed things up, and tried to find the courage (and stomachs) to eat nothing but potatoes like our poor brethren of the 19t...
(Hey everyone. Be sure to check out my most recent post on cucumber sandwiches for a slightly more authentic version.)
"...Hallo! Why all these cups? Why cucumber sandwiches? Why such reckless extravagance in one so young?"
-Jack, from Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest
After my body had officialy rejected anything of substance thanks to my w...
I remember vividly the first time I thumbed through a cookbook with a sense of purpose. I was home on a break during my freshman year of college, and my mom had been relating to me her excitement about a book my sister sent from London. She excitedly exclaimed that “it had even been autographed.” I smiled and nodded approvingly, unaffected. It was a cookbook, after all. My sister w...
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...
