Mung beans are the cutest beans you can imagine! They’re my latest little favorite finds in the Grains & Legumes department. I’ve been wanting to make a dish with them ever since an Indian friend made a wonderfully simple lunch for us involving mung beans, paneer cheese, and cauliflower. I hadn’t had mung beans before, [...]
Continue reading about Fragrant Curries and Enchanting Beans
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 [...]
There’s something ever-so-charming about edible little packages: tamales, spring rolls, pasties, grape leaves…every culture seems to have a neatly-wrapped specialty. (Maybe they appeal to our sense of orderliness?) Not only are these wrappables practical to eat and fun to make, their central position in any given cuisine means that centuries of tradition have fine-tuned their [...]
Of all the grains in the world, rice might be my favorite: it makes great flour, freshly-cooked rice is welcome in everything from pilafs to grape leaves, leftover rice is perfect in savory casseroles as well as sweet puddings, and even in the U.S., there are dozens of varieties of rice on our grocery store [...]
Back in the day, I used to love going to Olga’s for lunch — I went with my mom, my friends, my co-workers, sometimes even just with myself. My favorite thing on the menu was the original lamb Olga wrapped in Olga bread. Does anyone else remember tearing into that doughy, soft bread?
Nowadays I’m more [...]
Sure, you’ve got your fancy new pasta makers with their plugs and motors and cords … in fact, some of them might be so darned newfangled that they’ve transcended outlets and gone cordless. Wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a Bluetooth pasta maker out there somewhere.
But you know what works best? An old-school, crank-it-out kind of [...]
First off, I have to say that I am not a sushi chef. California rolls are one of the simplest types of sushi you can make, and I could barely pull those off. But I will also say that making your own sushi doesn’t have to be terribly complicated as long as you have a [...]
