Posted by Robyn Lee, May 1, 2008 at 12:30 PM
The following recipe is from the May 1st edition of our weekly recipe newsletter. To receive this newsletter in your inbox, sign up here!
In Lidia Bastianich's latest cookbook, Lidia's Italy, she shares recipes from her favorite ten places in Italy. This springtime recipe for risotto with spinach comes from Friuli in northeast Italy and shows the basic risotto-making technique used in Friuli. Instead of spinach, she suggests using greens more common to the region, such as nettles, wild asparagus, or sclopit, if you can find them.
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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 Lucy Baker, April 8, 2008 at 2:00 PM
It's salad season. But I don't mean that in a negative, it's-almost-time-to-put-on-a-bathing-suit kind of way. I mean because the markets are once again full of fresh, vibrant produce, from artichokes and baby beets to radishes and watercress. And because the vegetables are in such abundance, they cost a fraction of what they did all winter. Cheap and delicious—what could be better?
One of my favorite spring veggies has always been asparagus. Whether simply broiled with a drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkling of salt and pepper or showcased in a sophisticated soup (I love Jerry Traunfeld's version with fresh thyme), I just can’t get enough of its sweet, crunchy, herbaceous flavor. For this week's magazine recipe review, I decided to prepare the quinoa salad with asparagus, dates, and orange from the April issue of Cooking Light.
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Posted by Lucy Baker, March 18, 2008 at 2:15 PM
When I have a craving for a really decadent dish—macaroni and cheese, say, or rice pudding—I prefer to make it for myself as opposed to ordering it in a restaurant. This is for two reasons: first, I think that rich, comforting foods are best enjoyed at home; second, when I am the cook, I am in control of the specific ingredients and the portion sizes. The end result is, I believe, always a little bit healthier.
For this week's magazine recipe review I made the orecchiette carbonara with leeks from the April issue of Bon Appétit. Spaghetti carbonara is something I would never eat out, for fear of popping a button off my pants in public. There is just no way to tell how much butter, oil, and bacon fat is being used. I was drawn to the version in Bon Appétit because it didn't use heavy cream (unlike some less traditional carbonaras), and because it called for fresh, seasonal leeks. Also, I happened to have a lot of eggs on hand.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, March 5, 2008 at 2:00 PM
As an undergrad, I spent a semester studying in Russia. Our host mothers urged hot kasha (referring to any kind of porridge) on us in the sub-zero mornings, and they served a different kind of kasha (buckwheat groats) as a side dish in the still-freezing evenings. When the time came to leave, one of the most pressing questions for many of us was, “Will I be able to find kasha in the United States?” Obviously, none of us had ever lived in cities with large Eastern European immigrant populations or been members of health-food co-ops, or we would have known that buckwheat groats aren’t hard to find at all.
Cooking them properly is a different matter. The first time I tried, I got it just right: the grains were separate, firm, and nutty. Since then I have tended to produce mushy messes that are edible but not appetizing. The Joy of Cooking recipe for kasha varnishkes yielded very nicely cooked buckwheat groats, but also the realization that I don’t particularly like this particular dish, which is kasha with mushrooms, onions, and bowtie pasta.
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Posted by Blake Royer, January 31, 2008 at 4:15 PM
No, it's not as good as the real thing. It doesn't have the creaminess, the richness, the elegance. But I wanted a big bowl of creamy starch for dinner, I wanted it quickly—and real risotto will never be quick. This was a pleasant surprise: the orzo spends four or five minutes boiling to accomplish most of the cooking, then a short simmer in stock with some fresh thyme and orange zest completes it. Like the real deal, butter and Parmesan are stirred in at the end—unlike the real deal, this was ready in 15 minutes, including waiting for the boiling water.
The flavors are exceedingly subtle, and The Best of Gourmet: A Year of Celebrations recommends it as a side dish, which is probably wiser. If I made this again, it would be next to a roast chicken. It's more of a wingman. But if it had to be a main course, maybe some shallots or onion, sautéed beforehand in butter along with that thyme and orange zest, would boost the flavors; the parboiled orzo could be added to that along with stock. I'm also curious how long this would take without the pre-boiling: just dry orzo added to stock, simmered until tender and absorbed, more like a real risotto. Has anyone tried that?
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Posted by Alaina Browne, April 26, 2007 at 3:45 PM
In early 2003, Heidi Swanson, an enthusiastic cookbook consumer, made a resolution: "When you own over 100 cookbooks, it is time to stop buying, and start cooking." From that resolution sprang a food blog—one of the earliest, in fact—called 101cookbooks (soon to be followed by Mighty Foods). Things have come full circle, and Heidi finds herself writing cookbooks these days. The recipe that follows is adapted from her latest, Super Natural Foods.
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