Just a few announcements here, as I share the recipe for the pork shanks we served at Jack last weekend.
If you’re a blogger of any sort living in NYC, you should come join us at the Brooklyn Blogfest tonight. It will be held at (hold you breath, wait for it, wait for it…) the Brooklyn […]

I don’t have much time to write out these recipes for you today, what with planning for my occasional restaurant, Jack, taking up all of my non-lawyering time right now. We are busy making sure we have all the plates we need, picking up linens, and working out some menus for months down the line. […]

This is one of our great successes this winter.
Oxtail braised with sweet spices, tons of kumquats, low and slow until the sauce is richly fragrant, smooth and thick. The meat is shredded off the bone into the strained sauce with balsamic vinegar stirred in for added complexity, and served with homemade chestnut flour pasta, which […]

Here is a meat pie to warm and satisfy you, now that winter has come and I am waiting on the edge of my seat for the first real snowstorm of the year. Loosely inspired by Moroccan basteeya, this pot pie marries a rich and savory meaty filling with traditionally sweet spices, and you can […]

Inspired by the miso butterscotch pork belly Dave and I had with our friend Allyson at Tailor earlier this fall, these ribs are meatier, heftier, and to my belly more satisfying than Sam Mason’s creation. The pork belly was just splendid, and it’s just that I personally prefer less fatty meat, cooked on the bone […]

Shortly after my bacon was complete, I just had to tell my brother, Josh, about my pride and delight. We ended up typing back and forth at each other about it, because such is our relationship - we used to IM each other while sitting in our separate bedrooms down the hall from each other, […]

My grandmother has congestive heart failure, which means that she is restricted to a low-salt diet. When she gets sick in the winter this goes straight out the window, because she tends to order in salty soup from the local take-out Chinese food place on the corner. I try to stave this off by delivering […]

Date molasses. Date molasses! I was introduced to this stuff by a friend who made a brilliant spicysweet ice cream with it (which I will one day make, play with, and post, quite probably). It’s an intensely flavored syrup that you can find in middle eastern grocery stores, and it lives in our pantry alongside […]

This post actually contains two recipes: Roasted Leg of Lamb Stuffed With Pork, Chestnuts, and Morels and Lamby Cranberry Beans with Itsy Bitsy Potatoes.
Dave and I just took the Pork and Apples class taught by Aki and Alex of Ideas in Food. We really enjoyed it quite a lot. I’m mostly thrilled that I finally […]

My family and I sailed around the Cyclades in Greece a few summers ago, and while we felt that the cuisine on the islands became tedious after a while, there were a few things we never tired of: dolmas, spanikopita, and milk pies.
My dolmas are a bit of a stretch from traditional Greek or Turkish […]

As anyone who grows vegetables can tell you, it is easy to find yourself drowning in summer squash. We’re not gardeners (I have a black thumb of death), but even so we find ourselves overwhelmed by the sheer abundance of squash this month.
Last week, Dave and I were wandering around Prospect Heights (a nearby […]

My wok has been yearning for seasonal vegetables. Since my bedroom door opens right into the kitchen, I can hear the wok at night, crying for fresh foods soon to go out of season and disappear until next spring.
I can’t sleep with a crying wok just a few yards away from my head. Something had […]

My partner, Dave, has a wonderful perk at his company, TOPP. Every other Friday, a small group of employees cooks lunch for the entire parent company. A different group each time. Everyone gets to participate.
Whenever it’s Dave’s turn, he makes my dreams come true by bringing men home to cook for me. That is, some […]

This started out as an attempt at making Fesenjan, an intense Afghani and Persian concoction of chicken in a thick pomegranate walnut sauce. Dave got a bit carried away with it, though, and with the replacement of chicken stock and pomegranate molasses for mere pomegranate juice and a big splash of Shaoxing rice wine later, […]

What do you do with a freezer full of banana rum ketchup? You make banana burgers, of course!
These were entirely Dave’s creation. He put them together one night while I was out at the gym, trying to find a boxing class that would be right for me. He timed them so that they would be […]

And now we return to your regularly scheduled LambBlog. (It’s just that lamb is so cute and so tasty!) The sour cherry braising sauce is sort of sweet and sour and spicy and very rich. It is based on our homemade sour cherry sage flower jam, though you could probably substitute sour cherries, sage, and […]

I know, I know, I am posting too many recipes which call for urfa-biber lately. I am almost at the point where I will have to offer to mail a package of urfa-biber to anyone who wants it and has something interesting to swap for it.
This recipe was adapted from Paula Wolfert’s The Slow Mediterranean […]

The best thing about these meatballs is the coating. Each meatball is dipped into a coating made of stock, dark soy sauce, and cornstarch, then seared until nicely brown before being braised further. The seared layer of soy sauce coating each meatball is a tremendous burst of flavor, and absolutely makes the dish for me.
The […]

I could tell you a tale of pork nests, and I have included a recipe below. This is a food blog, after all. But instead, there is something even more important I would like to tell you. (This is actually not the big news I was alluding to a few weeks ago. I will disclose […]

I hate shelling chestnuts. I always end up with sharp bits of shell poking the tender flesh beneath my fingernails until it hurts and bleeds. This is unappetizing, but true.
I love eating chestnuts, though. I was raised on chestnut puree as a snack food of choice, after all.
So when I came across this recipe, […]

My friend Lisa and I were out and about the other day, when we happened to wander past the farmers’ market at Union Square at around 5:45 pm. Most of the stalls were already gone, or were in the process of packing up to leave. We passed one of the few remaining open stalls, which […]

I don’t feel like I have any right to post recipes for Indian food. I mean, I’m a native New Yorker with a Hungarian/Ukrainian/Israeli/Jewish background, who used to cut class in high school to go out for dim sum just a few blocks away in Chinatown. And more to the point, there are so many […]

Colette Rossant’s Apricots on the Nile: A Memoir with Recipes is precisely that, a tale of how she grew up with her grandparents in Egypt, interspersed with recipes for the foods of her youth. The story is charming and sad, about a little girl abandoned by her flaky mother and then reclaimed against her wishes […]

This recipe is ludicrously long, but given that it comes from Paula Wolfert’s The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen: Recipes for the Passionate Cook, that should come as no surprise. If you have a weekend to spend lounging about the house and letting things cook, though, these lamb shanks are absolutely luscious and worth the time. They […]

Soup’s On! February is soup month, according to Alanna of A Veggie Venture, and this is my contribution.
This stew was mostly a stone soup, but it also turned into an excuse to try out my new curry powder, Two Knives Special Curry Blend from Auntie Arwen’s Spice Blends. It’s a fairly mild curry, but intensely […]

What do you do with leftover string beans sitting in your fridge? Start craving a stir-fry, perhaps. That could be the answer. Start poring through your favorite Chinese cookbooks, such as The Breath of a Wok: Unlocking the Spirit of Chinese Wok Cooking Through Recipes and Lore by Grace Young.
Find a recipe for a […]

Winter means constant braising, and stew, and curry. Curry means flipping through half my cookbooks before finally settling on this recipe from Madhur Jaffrey’s Far Eastern Cookery. With a few changes, the most important being some fresh galangal and ground cardamom thrown in to add much-needed high notes to perk things up and bring them […]

I’m sorry, we ate the stewed spare ribs up so fast, all I have left to show you are the bones.
Okay, okay, fine.
I saved a bowl for you.

The ribs were lusciously tender, the meat quite literally falling off the bones in the pot. That’s what hours of slow braising in a sand pot will do […]

Now that I have my new camera, I figure I should post older recipes that have been sitting in my drafts folder with photos taken with the old camera, just to get them out of the way. This is one of the first meals I made after returning from Hungary this past summer.
Pancakes were the […]

Tami of Running With Tweezers set a Super Souper Challenge this month, asking everyone to share their favorite soup recipes.
This is the first time I’ve made this soup, but it may become one of my favorites from now on. It’s adapted from a recipe I’ve had bookmarked for a while now in A Taste of […]

The preparation for this dish must begin a month in advance, unless you already have a jar of preserved lemons lying around. The lemons are preserved in water and salt with a layer of oil on top, and for the first week you must shake the jar daily to redistribute the salt. After that, the […]

Ivonne from Cream Puffs in Venice and Orchidea from Viaggi & Sapori are hosting a one-time event called Dishes of Comfort. They ask us to write about something we consider comfort food, one of the special dishes that meant a lot to us when we were young.
My grandmother has a fairly limited culinary repertoire. She […]

October is over, Halloween has passed, and pumpkins are quickly going out of style. It’s hard to find tasty baby pumpkins, anyway, so these function more as cute bowls than anything else. But the meatballs were absolutely delicious, and the mildly intriguing taste of the squid ink pasta balanced well with them. Kids in particular […]

Perhaps the best Afghani restaurant I have ever been to is Helmand in Cambridge, MA. Bamiyan in NYC has a special place in my heart, because we discovered it when Dave was trying to keep me fed while I was taking the bar exam, but Helmand won me over with their Kaddo Bourani.
The way […]

Well, I finally purchased a tagine, so my tagines will actually deserve the name from now on. I seasoned it by soaking it in water for about an hour and a half, then rubbing the inside with olive oil and baking it for a nice long while afterwards.
I have been rereading all the Paula Wolfert […]

I just purchased a copy of Land of Plenty: A Treasury of Authentic Sichuan Cooking by Fuschia Dunlop. It came very highly recommended, and rumor has it that this is the best text on Sichuan cooking available in English today. I’m very excited and looking forward to trying out a whole lot of Dunlop’s recipes.
For […]

I took no part in cooking this meal. Me, I’m just the scribe and photographer this time.
The ribs were experimental meats purchased in Brooklyn’s Chinatown. The sour cherries come from my parents’ sour cherry tree, and I did help with the picking and pitting. We made most of them into jam and pie and sauce […]

I have the most amazing new cookbook - A Drizzle of Honey: The Life and Recipes of Spain’s Secret Jews, by David M. Gitlitz and Linda Kay Davidson. It is full of recipes for foods cooked and eaten by Jews and conversos in the Iberian Peninsula during the time of Inquisition. To my great delight, […]

To be honest, what I’ve actually been searching for is a good recipe for Sali Boti, a Parsi lamb and apricot dish that I have every time I go to this wonderful Indian restaurant in Cambridge. I haven’t really seen any trustworthy recipes for it, though. If anyone reading this knows of any, I’d be […]