Posted by Nick Kindelsperger, April 1, 2008 at 4:30 PM
I wasn’t sick, but I did have a lot of leftover chicken. For some unknown reason, I was struck by the need to make the most chickeny chicken soup possible. I had loads of onions and carrots and enough thick stock to make a real meal happen—but I was put off by the long process. The fiancée and I had some wedding plans to attend to and not much time to spend. A crazy chicken soup would have been too much so I downgraded my plans to this highly spiced soup I found on Epicurious.
Continue reading »
Posted by Nick Kindelsperger, March 26, 2008 at 5:00 PM
At various times throughout this meal, I assumed failure. I hardly ever make curry, especially an African-based one I found in The Ethnic Paris Cookbook
. But it looked so easy that I had to give it shot, even if my instincts were rebelling. For one, besides some cloves, it only uses turmeric for spice. To act as some kind of insurance, I tossed out my aging old plastic bottle of the yellow spice and bought a brand new bottle from my local outlet of Penzeys Spice. Still, I had doubts.
Continue reading »
Posted by Robin Bellinger, March 25, 2008 at 11:00 AM
Mothers & Menus is a New York City meal delivery service designed for families living through those first few crazy weeks with a new baby. Its founder, Karen Gurwitz, was frustrated after the birth of her first child: she wanted to lose her pregnancy weight, but since she was breastfeeding she worried about cutting out too many calories. Wouldn’t it be great, she thought, if someone else would figure out what she should eat and deliver it to her every morning? Such a service didn’t exist, so she invented it and committed to using whole and organic foods as much as possible.
Mothers & Menus sounds wonderful and flexible. But if it doesn’t fit into your budget (it certainly doesn’t jibe with mine) and you like making your own food (as I do), you might want to take a look instead at Gurwitz’s cookbook, The Well-Rounded Pregnancy Cookbook.
Continue reading »
Posted by Adam Kuban, January 19, 2008 at 6:00 PM
Each Saturday evening we bring you a Sunday Supper recipe. Why on Saturday? So you have time to shop and prepare for tomorrow.
As the name of a recipe, I've loved "Country Captain" since first reading about it I don't know when. It sounds so quaint and of-another-time, leading to speculation about who the original captain was and, stretching it, what he may have looked like—I imagine him as a combination of the Gorton's fisherman and Colonel Sanders.
I was reminded of this dish recently while reading through David Kamp's The United States of Arugula, which gives an interesting history of "the American food revolution." In a footnote, Kamp mentions that "the curry craze may well have been instigated, or at least stoked, by the Associated Press's widely read Cecily Brownstone, who started at AP in 1947 and was most famous for her recipe for Country Captain, a chicken dish served in a curry sauce studded with almonds and currants." The recipe, Kamp says, is thought to have come from Savannah, Georgia, and a nineteenth-century sea captain there who had visited India.
This article about Brownstone and the dish she made famous, however, offers a different origin story—and illustrates just how closely Brownstone presided over the recipe's history and various interpretations:
"Using a breast, can you imagine?" she said in a recent telephone interview. "I don't want to give names—I really don't want to get into that—but can you imagine that someone actually used cream? Cream! And they called it 'Country Captain'! It is very discouraging."
The recipe I'm going to attempt, given in James Beard's American Cookery, is Brownstone's. I'm adapting it here for this week's Sunday Supper.
Continue reading »
