Sometimes all you need to make a quick and tasty meal is two top-quality ingredients, eight minutes, and a pan. (And sometimes all you need to come up with such a simple idea is not having many ingredients in your fridge. If necessity is the mother of invention, then needing to make a trip to [...]
Rice is served on every continent and in nearly every country; from Asia to Latin America, it’s the staple ingredient in hundreds of cuisines. Perhaps unsurprisingly — rice is the most-consumed grain in the world — there’s a specific kind of rice to go along with all those different culinary traditions. (Christian Teubner’s The Rice [...]
Continue reading about Rice: What You Might Not Know is Delicious!
Maybe it’s a childhood memory or maybe it’s something I dreamed, but it seems to me that super-tiny shrimp were popular in cold salads when I was a kid. I have absolutely no idea what they were called…I just remember thinking they were the cutest things ever. Can’t remember what they tasted like, either. Whether [...]
When it comes to produce, I’m a big fan of the “two-fer” deals: you buy beets with the greens attached and you get two veggies for the price of one, you buy one papaya and get fruit + edible garnishing seeds for the price of one. Rapini (or broccoli rabe, as it’s often called) is [...]
Even if it’s a frigid mid-winter day and you’re hunkered down inside watching a blizzard blow by outside, opening a coconut will make you feel downright tropical. Once it’s open, you can drain the water and then notch out chunks of fresh, sweet flesh to eat out of hand. (They’re particularly good frozen.) You can [...]
Mirepoix is a fixture of classic French cuisine: it’s a mixture of diced and sautéed carrots, celery, and onions used as a base for soups, stews, stocks, and sauces. You can add other vegetables and whatever herbs you’d like to tailor it to your tongue; like the staple Latin sofrito blend of garlic, onion, and [...]
It’s a tangy, invigorating flavor that’s distinctly Asian and distinctly difficult to find fresh: lemongrass, one of the core flavors in many curries, pastes, soups and stews originating in the Far East. If a cook is in a pinch and is looking for a substitute, lemon rind is the closest she’ll get…but although lemons lend [...]
I love snap peas and I love shrimp, so I thought, “Why not combine them?” And with the addition of the water chestnuts and baby corn, this stir fry hinges on the exotic. (Note: you’ll find the water chestnuts in the Asian food section at the grocery store. You might have to search a bit [...]
You may have seen the giant, dark-green leaves and wondered how to use them. Chard (also called Swiss Chard and Green Swiss) belongs to the cultivated greens family. (As opposed to “wild” greens such as purslane and nettles, which have to be foraged.) Like all green, leafy vegetables, chard is high in iron, vitamins A [...]
This tiny grain makes a great addition to both vegetarian stir-frys and savory chicken dishes. Like couscous and rice, you prepare quinoa by simmering the grains in liquid until all of it is absorbed and the grains are light and fluffy. Unlike couscous, however, quinoa is a non-wheat grain–people who cannot tolerate gluten can freely [...]
