Ah, the avocado. I'm not sure where it can't be used--sandwiches, tacos, burritos, soups, or salads. The last, particularly, has been of interest lately, as it adds some healthy heftiness (is that a real thing?) to any otherwise wimpy salad. But not content to merely place it in my salads, I wondered what it might be like on it.
But I was worried it might go too far. When it comes...
Sometimes, you get a craving for a totally inappropriate thing, at a totally inappropriate hour, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. Your mind is made up; the universe has decided. You submit to your instincts and go far, far out of your way to make it a reality. In New York, it's famously easy: you can call somebody, and 15 minutes later you've got banana ice cream with a...
Brussels Sprouts have quite an affect on people. After seeing me mess up some perfectly fine sprouts , the people spoke and they resoundingly told me to roast. The comment section offered no less than 5 different versions of this affair, and not knowing exactly where to start I went for the simplest recipe. Meg's recipe called for nothing but a little olive oil, salt and pepper, an...
Honestly, there's a real need for these signs. When we were venturing around the mercado square in San Antonio, a land of slightly schlocky and catchpenny Mexican crafts, every third vendor warned against this practice, where gringo , giggling tourists pretended to experience Mexican culture by putting on outrageous hats and saying " Arriba, Arriba " like Speedy Gonzalez. How to a...
Feeling a little bit under the weather and a bit perturbed with my job, I returned home last night needing some kind of a cure. Like hot chocolate made by your mother, I needed a home remedy with exactly zero medicinal value, which would warm me up and send me straight to bed. I didn't have any chocolate, but I did have a great big bottle of Bourbon and one idea.
I wanted a hot toddy, eve...
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...
These are called Brussels sprouts, and unless you had some especially mean parents growing up, this might be your first time together. Even I, who had been force-fed green beans for the first 10 years of my life, never had to touch them because my dad hated them so much. I don't think I'm the only one. I've never seen them on a menu, and have never been confronted with them at a friends...
There is "no doubt early man cooked his meats using dry heat," claims Madeleine Kamman, author of the esteemed Making of a Cook and a very friendly-looking lady who I sometimes wish was my grandmother. She speculates that he might have discovered this gastronomic feat in the instance of two different accidents, producing two enduring ways of cooking meat. The first, a discovery...
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...
“In the United States, we have the grandest plat convivial of them all, the holiday turkey, which we share with 245 million other Americans, including the members of the armed forces, for whom the government spares no expense in jetting turkeys about the globe. There is an uncanny and intoxicating sense of oneness in enjoying a dish with a quarter billion of your fellows. No fus...
Blake and Nick live in Chicago and have written for The Paupered Chef and other publications since 2006.
