Posted by Blake Royer, May 6, 2008 at 6:30 PM
This dinner is ready in as much time as it takes to cook rice. It has five ingredients, and is totally un-nutritious. It's also luxurious and subtle, and takes very little effort. The secret? Heavy cream, for one—but also a little thing called pastis, an anise-flavored liqueur that stood in for absinthe while it was still illegal. It's an obscure ingredient, I'll admit, and not everyone has it banging around in their cabinet. But allow me to recommend that you consider buying a bottle, if only because it's integral to the Sazerac cocktail, one of my favorite drinks in the world. And because it will probably outlive you.
The recipe comes from Pierre Franey's classic cookbook The New York Times 60-Minute Gourmet. So this is what passed for gourmet in 1979: bring on the heavy cream. Not that I'm complaining—the cover on my old copy promises "gourmet recipes and menus that reach absolute perfection in a matter of minutes," and that's exactly what happened to me. The taste was familiar, because the pastis flavor is similar to tarragon, an herb commonly used in French cream sauces. In fact, if you really don't want to invest in a bottle, a little fresh tarragon thrown in with the shallots might work just as well.
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Posted by Lucy Baker, April 29, 2008 at 3:45 PM
Turn this Greek yogurt and honey into a light, creamy dessert.
When it comes to cream-based desserts such as puddings, mousses, and flans, panna cottas have always been my favorite. Add to that Serious Eats' collective obsession with Greek yogurt, and it was easy to choose what to make for this week's magazine recipe review: Yogurt Panna Cottas with Honey from the May issue of Food & Wine.
The recipe was created by Marisa Chruchill, a San Francisco-based pastry chef and cooking instructor, and a former contestant on Top Chef. In her version of the Italian classic, tangy fat-free yogurt replaces the heavy cream. The results are not only decadent and velvety, they're also downright healthy—only 120 calories and a trace of fat per serving.
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Posted by Lucy Baker, April 22, 2008 at 3:30 PM
Sometimes a few simple ingredients come together to create something spectacular. The individual elements compliment each other so well that, when combined, the results are so delicious they border on magical. Think bacon and eggs; chocolate and strawberries; hot dogs, ketchup, and mustard.
To my mind, few dishes are as effortlessly flawless as a classic caprese salad composed of tart tomatoes, creamy mozzarella, and fragrant basil. And while I wouldn't normally mess with perfection, I was intrigued by a recipe in the May issue of Bon Appetit that replaced the tomatoes with slices of fresh mango, and added radicchio to the mix.
A caprese salad with tropical and bitter flavors? I had to try it out for this week's magazine recipe review.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, April 22, 2008 at 2:00 PM
Last fall I caught up with an old friend over dinner. Slender, tall, beautiful, and very stylish, she has a fancy high-paying job that requires her to travel a lot, eat in swanky restaurants, and generally be glamorous. Average height, average build, and mousy-haired, I spend most of my days working at home in yoga pants and a sweatshirt from the children’s department at Target and get truly excited about the prospect of a Saturday night trip to Brooklyn for dinner out.
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Posted by Blake Royer, April 17, 2008 at 4:15 PM
Considering the length of most recipes in Judy Roger's Zuni Cafe Cookbook, the eponymous cookbook of her San Francisco restaurant, finding a quick dinner recipe is something of a feat. Every page of her book is awash with meticulous detail about the cooking process, from advice about the shape of diced onion pieces to the flavor a fish stock ought to have when it's just finished (minutes too long on the stove and it can go muddy). Her roast chicken recipe, for example, runs four pages. Yet despite the laborious descriptions of technique (or perhaps because of it), everything I've made from that book has been outstanding: a monkfish stew, that roast chicken, and now, this soup. As she mentions in the recipe's introduction, it's a soup of delightful flavors and unexpected textures.
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Posted by Nick Kindelsperger, April 11, 2008 at 4:00 PM
What’s interesting about this recipe isn’t necessarily the use of okra (I’ll get to that shortly) but the technique. The rice is cooked uncovered for ten minutes in a pot of water and then transfered to a steamer basket for an additional seven minutes. I suppose this is the poor man’s version of a rice steamer, but I’d never done it before. It’s a little more involved than the ordinary pot of rice. Luckily, it produces fluffy, slightly toothsome rice that’s really delicious.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, April 11, 2008 at 12:30 PM
A few years ago at a family meal my dad randomly launched into a lengthy panegyric to rice. He does this sometimes—proclaims a deep but previously unvoiced passion—and my mother, sister, and I roll our eyes at the poor outnumbered guy in our family and keep talking about shoes or Martha Stewart or whatever. At the time I thought, How can anyone get excited about rice? It doesn’t taste like anything.
Now I’ve come to see the wisdom of my father’s palate, and if I weren't scared of getting fat I’d eat white rice several times a week, with Indian food, soy sauce and vegetables, or naked but for a pat of butter. Why didn’t dad eat a lot of rice in college, I wonder now. One of his stock stories is how he could subsist for weeks at a time on canned tomato soup when he was putting himself through school, when he would have to sit at a bar and watch his buddies drink beer because he couldn’t afford to buy one for himself. Sometimes for a treat he would eat jelly. So why didn’t he buy himself a big old bag of rice and feast on that? Is it possible that he was scared to cook it?
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Posted by Dorie Greenspan, April 10, 2008 at 1:15 PM
Photograph by Alan Richardson
Here's my go-to cheesecake recipe, a classic that can be varied in almost limitless ways. (I've got 11 variations in my book, Baking: From My Home to Yours, and the only reason I stopped there was that it would have taken way too many pages to keep going.) It's an almost traditional New York Cheesecake—it's missing the lemon, which, of course, you could add—and it's tall and lush and, no surprise, creamy. I usually make it with a graham cracker or chocolate cookie crust, but if you'd like to make this for a Passover meal, you can easily omit the crust or use macaroon crumbs.
You'll see that I use either sour cream or heavy cream in the cake. The sour cream will give you a tangier cheesecake, more New York, I think, while the heavy cream is milder. As long as you keep the measurement at 1 1/3 cups, you can use whatever combo of the two you'd like. You can also add fruits or nuts, swirls of chocolate (melt some chocolate and mix it in with some of the cake batter) or flavor the cake with an extract or oil. Whatever you do, serve something light beforehand—the cake is rich and, even though everyone knows it, people still reach for seconds.
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Posted by Nick Kindelsperger, April 4, 2008 at 4:00 PM
I was quite the picky eater in my youth. I didn’t touch green beans, wouldn’t go near cooked carrots, and never had a salad I liked until junior high. But against all reason and logic, I did love artichokes. From the moment I started eating artichokes, I remember actually enjoying them. Perhaps it’s the activity of picking up off the petals, dipping them in butter, and pulling off the “meat” of the vegetable with my teeth. What fun food to eat!
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, April 4, 2008 at 1:45 PM
Yesterday I was glad that Lucy alerted us to the existence of Totally Baked (something has been done to the Dining Section online, and now I am bad about seeing Food Stuff). Recently I was craving a baked potato on a night when I had no patience for cooking and no potatoes in the house, so I ran out to get one at a Hell’s Kitchen establishment that will remain nameless. It was gummy, hard in the middle, and totally disappointing. Now I have another spot to try.
A well-baked potato with the right toppings offers an amount of pleasure disproportionate to the raw ingredients cost, especially with a green salad on the side. It also involves very little active time and kitchen cleanup. For these reasons it was one of my favorite dinners senior year of college, when I was cooking for myself at a school not really equipped for independent eaters. I knew how to bake potatoes, roast vegetables, steam broccoli, whisk together a vinaigrette, and make beans and rice out of a box. Oh, and heat up a can of soup. It must have been a little monotonous, but in retrospect I think I ate very well.
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Posted by Blake Royer, March 27, 2008 at 4:00 PM
I recently bought one of those Kyocera plastic mandolines
—the cheap alternative to large French models—and it's changed everything. Never mind that a cell phone company makes it; this thing works. And it makes me look like a fast, skilled cook, especially with winter salad recipes like this one. Making the dressing, which involves dumping everything into a jar and shaking like mad, is the labor-intensive part. Otherwise, I just lazily slide my vegetables over the mandoline's ceramic blade, resulting in beautiful, paper-thin, uniform slices. I toss, serve, and accept the compliments.
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Posted by Gina DePalma, March 25, 2008 at 8:00 AM
The cluttered and dusty used bookstore on my block has become one of my favorite haunts, mostly for a sometimes campy and ever-revolving selection of old cookbooks. The Myra Breckenridge Cookbook displayed in the window last week made me laugh right out loud, but inside I found an even greater treasure—an old copy of Elizabeth David's Italian Food. It is impossible not to be inspired by David's evocative and vivid writing style, and thumbing through the dog-eared volume while imagining her travels through Italy in the early 1950s has become my new afternoon ritual.
The pages recently fell open to reveal her recipe for Carrots in Marsala; it instantly seemed so mouthwatering I had no choice but to head straight for the market.
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Posted by Nick Kindelsperger, March 19, 2008 at 4:30 PM
It wasn’t until recently that I realized the term "risotto" could be applied to all sorts of dishes that didn’t have an ounce of rice involved. It’s a liberating idea in theory, but one I haven’t really followed through with in practice. Although I never thought turnips would be the gateway, we actually picked this recipe because of the turnips, not the risotto tag. The fiancée and I just came to the conclusion that we probably hadn’t ever bought turnips before. It was about time.
Halfway through preparing this recipe, I predicted disaster. It didn’t smell that wonderful, and all that oil looked excessive. The resulting dish was a tad heavy, but I suppose that all rice-based risottos are, too. Luscious, warming, and filling probably give a better description. It's yet another Mario Batali
recipe that seems a little too simple until it hits the plate.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, March 19, 2008 at 2:45 PM
I didn’t discover Indian food until I was 21 and living in New York City for the first time, and I didn’t try cooking it until my husband and I started dating a few years later. His family, he explained, loved this cookbook author called Madhur Jaffrey—had I heard of her? As it happened, I was working for Knopf, her publisher, but had never taken home a copy of her 1973 classic An Invitation to Indian Cooking. Indian cooking seemed forbiddingly complicated, and besides, the current edition of the book was just a little paperback whose cover featured a campy picture of Jaffrey dressed in a sari, smiling benignly over a still life of ingredients despite the fact that we readers seem to have surprised her in the act of chopping cilantro.
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Posted by Blake Royer, March 11, 2008 at 4:30 PM
The French may have ratatouille, with its newfound cinematic fame, but they aren't the only ones: a similar stewed vegetable dish can be found in many other cultures from the Phillipines to Turkey to Malta. There is something magical about tomatoes, onions, zucchini, eggplant, and garlic stewed together.
But I say the Spanish are the ones really onto something: namely, the fried egg. I once had this dish in a tapas bar in Madrid and vowed to make it myself someday. It arrived at our table hot and steaming with a fresh, barely crispy fried egg; bread in hand, we dug into the bowl, breaking the yolk and watching it melt into the vegetables. It softened the tomato's acidity and took the dish to new levels of creaminess.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, March 10, 2008 at 1:00 PM
Though I am always looking for new ways to eat quinoa, Heidi Swanson’s lemon-scented quinoa salad from 101 Cookbooks never loses its place in my rotation. It comes together in a flash, it’s healthy and boldly flavored, and it’s substantial without weighing you down. I’ve packed it up not just for work but for long plane trips, too, so far without any objection from the TSA. (I love Continental for trying to serve food, but their mysterious hamburgers and barbecue sandwiches are not for me.) Though lemon and cilantro play leading roles in my kitchen year round, that brightness is, I think, especially welcome in March, suitable for dreary days and balmy ones alike.
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Posted by Blake Royer, March 6, 2008 at 4:15 PM
You can barely call this a recipe: it involves thinly slicing a couple ingredients, adding some olives, and tossing with olive oil. But it's just one of those magical combinations that works. Fennel and citrus belong together, but the addition of olives adds a little twist to the citrus acidity, giving it a briny undertone. The whole lemon goes in, including peel, which adds some textural interest.
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Posted by Blake Royer, March 4, 2008 at 4:30 PM
My girlfriend and I had just returned from a weekend of eating pizza in New Haven, Connecticut, and, frankly, salad was the only option for our stomachs after days of cheese and grease. But we were hungry, too, and a pile of leaves wasn't going to cut it. More problematic was that cooking after a few hours of traveling was the last thing I wanted to do. The takeout menus beckoned.
But we had some mesclun greens around, as well as some cherry tomatoes. Taking inspiration from the classic Salad Niçoise, we looked in the freezer for some haricot verts, and a salmon fillet to replace the usual canned tuna.
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Posted by Nick Kindelsperger, February 15, 2008 at 4:00 PM
I didn’t mean to shake things up; I was just being resourceful. Here I was with a perfectly ripe avocado and not a lime to be found. When I usually face such draughts of product, I make do. But messing up the perfect duality of avocado and lime felt like a sin. I couldn’t just let that avocado sit there and turn brown on me. It’s hard enough finding ones that are ready to eat.
I did have some frozen corn. So into the depths of Google I went searching for some kind answer. I came out with this rather novel asian-inspired guacamole that replaced the acid of the limes with vinegar and added depth of flavor with toasted sesames seeds and sesame oil. It’s certainly not a replacement for the perfection that is guacamole, but it is an interesting change. If I had to change anything, I would have left the sesame seeds out—they messed with the consistency of the creamy product. I think a toasted sesame oil would be perfect. Anyway, just like the Mexican standby it was eaten very quickly.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, February 15, 2008 at 3:15 PM
Between my junior and senior years of high school, I spent a summer studying in Paris. Although I knew enough to make a trip to Berthillon, discovered Nutella, and would hang around Fauchon staring at the piles of shining produce (decidedly unobtainable on our student allowance), I did not have a life-changing food epiphany; I developed no attachment to open-air markets and stinky cheese. For the most part my friends and I ate an inoffensive lunch of baguettes and Boursin in the Luxembourg Garden and ordered ice cream at Häagen-Dazs in between our mornings in class and our afternoons in churches, museums, theaters, and parks. We were there for the culture and the language—not the food!
So the parting words of our program director, delivered on the bus that was dropping us off at the airport, came as something of a surprise. The dapper white-haired man in his white suit and tiny sunglasses leaned on his cane and solemnly said, “If you remember only one thing about this program, let it be this: in a vinaigrette, you must use three parts oil to one part vinegar. It never fails. Try different oils, try different vinegars—your friends will think you’re a genius.”
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Posted by Blake Royer, February 14, 2008 at 4:00 PM
Need some last minute Valentine's dinner plans? Think artichokes. They're tender and subtly flavored, reminiscent of a flower, and have a heart in the middle. The possibilities for metaphor are endless. Though artichoke season isn't quite begun yet (usually in March), you can still find them available. Look for 'chokes with a very firm center when squeezed, and bright, healthy-looking leaves.
There are many ways to cook this wonderful vegetable, but one is the most romantic; we'll let Julia Child's Mastering The Art of French Cooking
show the way. It involves boiling the artichokes whole after a bit of trimming and pairing them with a rich, lemony butter. Eating artichokes this way is marvelous—leaf by leaf, you'll peel away the layers, scraping the flesh away with your teeth, as each leaf nearer the center grows more tender. Best of all, when you reach the middle and scoop out the prickly choke you're left with one big piece of tender "heart," which is basically the base and stem, and the best part to eat. If decadence = romance, a recipe which encourages the ingestion of lots of butter is a sure-fire win.
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Posted by Blake Royer, February 8, 2008 at 4:00 PM
Apparently, people are clamoring for Avgolemono, a lemony Greek chicken soup, judging from the 62 reviews for the Epicurious recipe available online, which has a respectable three-fork rating. Personally, I don't have memories of slurping this soup down in some Greek diner on my corner, but many do, especially in Chicago, and they all want a good recipe. The only problem is that actually reading these abundant reviews (a post on Too Many Chefs lead me there) reveals a shake-up: the Epicurious recipe is disparaged as inauthentic. Hardly anyone likes it. Instead, a mysterious cook known only as "Boston, MA" who left a comment in 2002, is repeatedly praised as the provider of an "OUTSTANDING," "SUPER" and "MUCH better" recipe than the original—and many people provide high ratings for her recipe instead. It's just a quick paragraph and comes from the author's experience watching her Yia Yia (grandmother) make it when she was a child. It involves 5 ingredients, including pepper.
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