Posted by Lucy Baker, May 14, 2008 at 1:15 PM
When I was 17, I spent the summer in Italy. After traveling through Rome, Florence, Milan, and Venice, I lived with a host family in Sicily for a month. I kept a journal while I was there, and wrote in it religiously every night. A few years ago I found the dairy beneath a pile of books in my childhood bedroom. I thought it would contain a detailed account of my entire trip; instead it was basically one long, exhaustive list of everything I had eaten. I guess I was a food writer before I even knew what it meant to be one.
Today's Cook the Book recipe, excerpted from Wine Bar Food, is for arancini. Here is what I had to say about these delicious, golden-brown bites the first time I had them: "For dinner, they took me to get a 'piccolo arancia [sic]' which is a fried ball of rice with cheese, tomatoes, and meat inside. At first I thought I wouldn't like it, but it was actually wonderful! After that…I had banana ice cream, which was good, but I liked the granita better."
Traditionally a Sicilian dish, this recipe is given a Roman twist with the addition of ground lamb. Perfect for a cocktail party or a casual dinner appetizer, these arancini can be made in advance and frozen for up to a month. Enjoy with a glass of hearty, black current-flavored Nero d'Avola.
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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 Ed Levine, April 27, 2008 at 8:45 AM
If you love pancakes (who doesn't?) and you love rice pudding (some people don't, I do) you'll appreciate Campanile chef-owner Mark Peel's recipe for breakfast rice pancakes, which I've adapted from an out of print book he wrote with Nancy Silverton, At Home: Two Chefs Cook for Family & Friends. Brown or white rice work equally well with this dish.
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Posted by Adam Kuban, April 12, 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.
When I've overdone it during the week, I like to keep things simple on the weekends. And this week I overdid it, with two burgers* in one night, a fair amount of drinkin', and a three-second ride on a mechanical bull. The easy comfort of risotto bianco is sounding really good right now. The recipe that follows is adapted from the one in Alice Waters' book The Art of Simple Food. It doesn't really say in her book, probably because it's second nature to Ms. Waters, but with something as basic as risotto, you really have to use good-quality ingredients. Homemade chicken stock is ideal. I have some in my freezer, so I'm going to hit my stash for this. And I'll just pick up a good Italian Parmigiano.
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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 Kathy Chan, April 4, 2008 at 8:00 AM
"The Spam musubi is a ridiculously simple creation, composed of four ingredients, yet its extremely high rating on the scale of tastiness cannot be denied."
Editor's note: Robyn Lee here at Serious Eats HQ came in a couple weeks ago with that Hawaiian mainstay, Spam musubi. We were all intrigued, wondering where she got it. "My friend Kathy made it; I took pictures." We asked, Do you think she'd be up for teaching us all how to make them? And so, hot on the heels of Tuesday's musubi intel, Kathy checks in with an awesome how-to. —Adam K.
Of all the foods people associate with Hawaii, Spam musubi seems to be most popular, with echoes of lau lau, lomi lomi salmon, and kalua pig trailing just behind. I've heard the terms Spam sushi and Spam sandwiches, but, no, get it right: It's Spam musubi.
Back home in Hawaii, musubis are found at every convenience shop on the islands, 7-11 included (and, I must say, their musubis are pretty darn good!). Musubis are sold in school cafeterias and right alongside butter mochi at local bake sales. Picnic? Someone's mom is bound to make at least two dozen. Sleepover? Either dinner that night, or straight out of the fridge for breakfast.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, February 25, 2008 at 1:00 PM
My boss used to tease me when I would bring black beans and rice to work for lunch. He thought, as far as I can tell, that this was my subtle way of asking for a raise, but I had no ulterior motives: I am devoted to beans and rice. Make a big pot on Sunday and you have a remarkably healthy, sustaining lunch set for the week. Long ago, when cooking my own beans seemed like too much of a challenge, I enjoyed Zatarain’s black beans and rice; since then I’ve experimented with many different recipes and have come to enjoy boiling up a bag of beans myself (it makes me feel rather smugly frugal, perhaps a little more self-satisfied than is absolutely attractive, but that is the price we sometimes pay as cooks). Madhur Jaffrey’s recipe for Costa Rican Gallo Pinto (“Spotted Rooster”) has had my eye for some time, and last week I finally tried it.
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Posted by Jenn Sit, January 30, 2008 at 11:00 AM
Jambalaya
adapted from Maryana Vollstedt's The Big Book of Casseroles
- makes six servings -
Ingredients
1 to 1 1/2 tablespoons olive oil
1 pound chicken breasts
1 pound Andouille sausage
1 cup chopped onion
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 green bell pepper, seeded and cut into 1-inch pieces
1 cup long-grain white rice
1 large can (28 ounces) whole tomatoes, chopped, juice from can included
1 cup chicken stock
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1 bay leaf
Freshly ground pepper and salt to taste
Your favorite hot sauce to taste (I like Cholula in this recipe)
Chopped fresh parsley
Procedure
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a Dutch oven over medium heat, warm 1 tablespoon oil. Add sausage and chicken until cooked through and slightly browned. Remove to a plate. Add onion, garlic, and green pepper and saute until tender in a little more oil. Stir in rice, tomatoes, stock, Worcestershire sauce, hot sauce, and seasonings. Return meats to pan. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer, covered, 10 minutes. (The dish may be made ahead up to this point and refrigerated, but bring to room temperature before baking and allow an extra 15 minutes in the oven.)
Cover the casserole and bake 35 minutes. Remove bay leaf and discard. Sprinkle with parsley and serve.
Posted by Jenn Sit, January 8, 2008 at 1:15 PM
Growing up in an Asian American household, it was always strange for me when I went over to a friend's house for dinner and there would be butter all over the fluffy white rice. Rice to me was always simply served plain to balance, but not interfere with, the bold savory dishes—plus, nothing beats the distinctive nutty scent of jasmine rice. My boyfriend shares this preference for plain old rice, but when I visited his family a few years ago, his mom made a really delicious green rice dish that blew me away and sounds just like Mollie Katzen's recipe for very green rice from The Vegetable Dishes I Can't Live Without. Herbs, garlic, and scallions are pulverized and mixed with rice to make a healthy but tasty and eye-catching side. Add some poblano peppers into the green mix and you'll have a great burrito stuffer, too.
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Posted by Ed Levine, January 6, 2008 at 12:30 PM
This week's Cartoon Kitchen features Serious Eats' cartoonist in residence Larry Gonick's spin on a wild rice pilaf. Enjoy! —Ed Levine
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Posted by The Gurgling Cod, December 15, 2007 at 5:00 PM
Sunday Night Soups, where each week The Gurgling Cod shows up to offer a soup appropriate to the week's upcoming Sunday Night Football game on NBC.
This weekend, Sunday Night Soups returns to its NFC East comfort zone. The Redskins head north on 95 and take exit 16W to the Meadowlands, where they will find the Giants waiting for them.
You can get many different kinds of soup in both D.C. and New York, the nominal homes of these franchises, which are in fact located in Landover, Maryland, and East Rutherford, New Jersey, respectively. Neither Landover nor East Rutherford has its own signature soup, and we did the Maryland crab thing last week.
One thing that does distinguish this matchup is a heavy University of Miami flavor. Players on both sides will be wearing patches or decals in honor of former Miami Hurricane Sean Taylor, the Redskins safety who was murdered last month in his home. The Redskins feature the inimitable Clinton Portis, as well as Santana Moss, both coming straight outta Coral Gables.
For the boys in blue, Miami product Jeremy Shockey is a tight end-cum-nightlife impresario, not to mention punter Jeff Feagles. More important, it's that ever-growing period known as "the holidays," where work, friends, and family conspire to pump you full of food in a way that might make you wonder if they plan to make a terrine out of your liver. Thus something with more nutritional merit than those Scotch eggs you scarfed at the last holiday party (wait—that was me) and a Floribbean flavor seems in order. Thus, black bean soup.
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Posted by Nick Kindelsperger, July 27, 2007 at 4:00 PM
There are simple soups, and then there is this guy. I pulled this one from the Silver Palate Cookbook, an old '80s standby. It's a solid collection, and one that I've flipped through often. But I was struck when I came across this little ditty, a soup that looked much too simple to possibly be any good. I decided to put it to the test.
The most difficult part of the recipe is tempering the egg so it doesn't curdle. Otherwise, it's not much different from boiling rice and tossing in some lemon. But somehow, this soup tastes much more luscious and creamy than it has any right to be. They say it tastes good both hot and cold, but I'll vote strongly for the former.
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