Category: All Posts
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How to Roast a Really Flavorful Chicken
I’ll admit it; for a long time I was really intimidated by the thought of cooking any whole animal. I didn’t want any fish eyes looking back at me, I didn’t want to hear the lobster “cry” as it was dropped into the pot of boiling water, and I sure didn’t want to reach my…
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How to Make Compound Butter
Gaining confidence in the kitchen is all about taking small steps. Making your own compound (flavored) butter, can be a great first step. You need little more than a few sticks of butter and the spark of an idea — and in just a few minutes you will have made something that’s almost too beautiful…
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Girl Scout Cookie-Inspired Samoa Cream Pie
We had a bit of a Samoa situation this year (okay, in all fairness we have a bit of a Samoa situation every year but usually the situation involves little more than me wishing I hadn’t eaten all my Girl Scout cookies so quickly). There was a bit of a mix-up with our order this…
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How to Make Braided Easter Egg Bread
For the better part of my adult life I’ve whined and complained about not having much of a cultural heritage, especially when it comes to food and recipes. Everyone I know has some secret recipe passed down from their grandmother or some beloved collection of family dishes, their ingredients and instructions written on scraps of…
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How to Make the Most Delicious (and Addicting) Maple Cream
Please don’t get me wrong; I’m thrilled that the weather has finally warmed up in New York (after trekking half a mile each way through the snow and ice just to make it to my office and back — and feeling most days that hypothermia was no more than a tiny gust of wind away…
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Dark Chocolate Truffles
Aside from saving me tons of money (I am a bit of a “regular” at some of New York’s best — and most outrageously priced — chocolate shops), the thing that I love about these boutique-quality, dark chocolate confections is that they make a great base recipe for other types of truffles. If you want to make…
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Intuitive Cooking and Lentils Two Ways
Cooking isn’t as difficult as we make it out to be. Nor is it as complicated as some overly detailed recipes lead us to believe. (I’ve actually seen a recipe that says, “Be sure to use a pan with a ¾-inch side height”. Really?! What happens if my pan has a 1-inch side height? Will…
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How To Make Buttermilk Biscuits From Scratch
There are a lot of “wrong” ways to make Southern-style buttermilk biscuits. Full disclosure; this is probably (technically) one of them. I didn’t special order White Lily flour (a flour that is milled from soft winter wheat and widely used in the South to make light-as-air biscuits), I didn’t even use cake flour (which makes a great substitute…
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Salvatore’s Sandwich
There are two things I remember clearly about Salvatore — his nose and his sandwiches. Let me explain. Every weekday at 11:30 a.m. Mrs. Lang (our second grade teacher) would walk two lines of children (boys on the left, girls on the right) away from the small pod of elementary school classrooms that surrounded an…
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In Search of the Abu Dhabi Lemon Mint
It wasn’t until I had been in Abu Dhabi for almost a full day that I truly realized just how far I had traveled to be there. It was just about to be 5:00 am and despite the fact that I had to be at a meeting in four hours, I hadn’t slept all night…
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How to Make Pasta From Scratch
I promise you, once you feel the velvety softness of fresh pasta dough beneath your fingers you’ll never eat dried pasta again. Forget fresh pasta’s superior deliciousness; there is something so rich and luxurious about the texture of the homemade dough. The way it pushes back as you knead it, the way it is transformed into a voluptuous golden ball —…
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Drinking Chocolate
My first job when I graduated from culinary school was a temporary position at the historic 21 Club. I was hired to work during the busiest time of year (Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and Restaurant Week), at times serving between three and four hundred desserts during a single dinner service. I gladly took the position, knowing…
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