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Chicken Paprikás

I would also like to second Trattoria Marcella. It is an outstanding bargain. The best true Italian (rather than Italian-American in “the hill”) in the city.

I have been taking advantage lately of historically low milk prices: in Chicago, a gallon of whole milk is just $2.28. I’ve gone through at least one a week, making lots of yogurt, ricotta, milk solids, and creamofwheat.

I only recently discovered how much fresh, homemade ricotta improves everything it touches. A half cup is probably what you would get from 3 cups of whole milk?

I remember looking through cookbooks, many of them, off the shelves when I was a kid. No one stands out.

Because it is delicious, and comes with the added bonus of offending superstitious people.

dried chili mango!

Before this post I just thought beards were somewhat unattractive. Now I know they are truly disgusting.

http://malecki.blogspot.com/2008/08/veneration-august-lunch.html

Success: I believe I have perfected Challah. It is the only bread to which I can apply changes with a very good sense of what the outcomes will be. This includes fermentation times, flours, sugars, and shapes. Even my no-knead bread is volatile, puffy and holey one time and dense and chewy the next. I don’t get it.

Failure: I made some oatmeal muffins (ugh, I tried to find a link to my regular recipe and couldn’t.. +fail now) and forgot the flour. So it was individual tasty servings of baked oatmeal, nice with some cream (or steamed milk, one of the ways a good cappuccino machine spoils you) but muffins they were not.

A salad with stuff I love that make my boyfriend cringe: rare steak, barely poached gooey egg, raw fresh chick peas, and a dirty martini.

Crispy-chewy rustic macarons are also available in Paris, albeit slightly adorned. Sometimes – of course, not all the time – they have them at the magnificent Aurore-Capucine in the 10th. I have had orange and violet ones.

Once while ordering at Aurore-Capucine, with its hand-stamped business cards with the hours handwritten on the back (tuesday to saturday, 10 to 8), a woman in line asked me, “how do you know this address?” The truth is I found it when I was just wandering around on a Saturday afternoon.

I'd like to make better Thai – get away from the (good, but not great) maesri pastes and make my own.

I love tuscan beans and tomatoes and have written about its most perfect expression with fresh beans and late-summer tomatoes.