Sweet corn, savory herbs, juicy tomatoes — what more could you want? Summer brings out the best on our plates. (Summer also means that my refrigerator tends to be a bit bare since a lot of my future meals are anchored to my garden dirt.) And now that we’re — sniff! — at the tail [...]
Continue reading about Guaranteed Summer Hits: Sweet Corn & Fresh Herbs
American cuisine has some instant-hit classics — corn bread, macaroni and cheese, bison burgers — but compared to other cuisines, we really don’t do much with tubers. Potatoes are pretty much the extent of our tuber dabbling. And who doesn’t like potatoes? Stands to reason other tubers would be tasty, too. If you hang around [...]
While it’s simple enough to use a roux-based sauce to make a cheesy cream sauce for pasta, sometimes it’s easier to just toss a creamy, easily melted cheese directly into the hot pasta. Especially when you stumble upon a cream cheese made with goat’s milk. (Admittedly, I’m a huge fan of goat’s-milk and sheep’s-milk cheeses.) [...]
Chowder is one of America’s great culinary contributions: a hearty one-pot meal that you can customize to your stomach’s delight. While many chowders sprang out of a seafood tradition (think Manhattan and Boston clam chowders), there are also vegetable-based versions. I created this one to make use of plentiful summer crops like corn and tomatoes [...]
I love eggs, especially the eggs with the bright orange yolks that I get from my farmer every week. (Thanks to the proliferation of farmer’s markets and community-supported farms, even urban dwellers can get honest-to-goodness eggs laid by hens who spend their days scratching in the dirt for tasty bugs…as opposed to eggs from factory-fed [...]
Sometimes you might be in the mood for a crunchy taco, sometimes you might want a soft taco. The only problem with the latter is that it’s hard to find Qualitarian soft taco shells — the majority of the store-bought ones have all kinds of chemicals in them to keep them soft and supple. And [...]
Continue reading about Alternative Soft Tacos (in a French Kind of Way)
I can’t be sure about this, but I’m guessing Italian panzanella sprang out of that greatest of all culinary traditions: using up the leftovers. After all, who hasn’t grown up hearing “waste not, want not”? The original Tuscan recipe calls for making a caprese salad — tomatoes, basil, fresh mozzarella, red wine or balsamic vinegar, [...]
I’d never made the connection between custards and soufflés until I was listening to a podcast of “The Splendid Table.” The topic of discussion was how to go about cooking custards — in a tray surrounded by water or on a dry rack? I’d wondered the same thing myself from time to time but had [...]
