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 […]

There’s something about temperature contrasts that really works for me, so I love the hot soup and cold salsa here with every bite. The salsa is also pretty key for me because when it come down to it, I just don’t like smooth soups without any texture to them.
The greenmarkets are full of these […]

Well, we survived our opening night at Jack! It was tons of fun, and I hope that everyone outside the kitchen enjoyed it as much as we did. We’re gearing up for our next dinner on May 3rd, and oh, oh, did all the locals see? Apparently ramps finally hit the Union Square greenmarket as […]

This is another recipe adapted from A Drizzle of Honey: The Life and Recipes of Spain’s Secret Jews by David M. Gitlitz and Linda Kay Davidson, a cookbook full of recipes for foods cooked and eaten by Jews and conversos in the Iberian Peninsula during the time of the Inquisition. About a year and a […]

When Aki and Alex posted about making kimchi broth, I was inspired. It seemed like the perfect excuse to finally make some grits, which I’ve been meaning to do and yet not getting around to for a long time.
These grits are spicy, brilliantly flavored, creamy, meaty from the pork stock, and just an all-around […]

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. […]

Yesterday morning, I took and passed the final exam for New York’s food protection certification. Not a difficult hurdle, but it’s nice to have that under my belt at last. If you’re at all interested in ever working in food preparation in New York, I suggest you go out and get the certification now, while […]

I’ve been focusing so much on heavy, rich winter dishes lately, it’s really time to switch gears and try something different. Something clean and fresh and light to clear the palate. So instead of a braise, why not a try a nice quick pickle to go with a simple dinner? Crunchy, salty, spicy, and satisfying, […]

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 […]

This soup is of Georgian origin, where pairing red beans and walnuts appears to be some sort of national pastime. It sure beats baseball. This is a rustic soup, lusciously creamy and actually good for you, too. (Unless you overload on the olive oil, that is. Since I don’t specify quantities there, on your own […]

About two weeks ago, I received an email from Edelman Interactive, offering me a free promotional fish - a Kona Kampachi from Kona Blue. Given that I was under no obligation to blog about the fish at all, and I love fish, I accepted.
I was offered my choice of fillets or a whole fish, […]

I love Momofuku, especially now that the Noodle Bar has moved to a larger location where Dave and I can actually bring our friends and chat with them at a table over dinner instead of just hoping to find one or two spaces at the bar. The food is amazing, and being the devoted carnivore […]

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 […]

This post may seem a bit late, but it’s timely, really. Channukah came so early this year, you might as well make latkes for Christmas! Or New Year’s Eve. Or you can make latkes to celebrate my birthday from afar on January 2nd.
All those pans shown above were in a row during the East Midwood […]

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 […]

This puree was inspired by a dish we had at Alinea, during the most impressive meal I have ever been served. The dish that inspired us was lobster (butter-poached, I believe), served with lobster mousse, sunchoke puree, and sweet orange, all surrounded by the hyacinth aroma released by boiling water being poured over hyacinths in […]

For my first attempt at making this sweet, salty, spicy, satisfyingly crisp bite o’ banchan, I followed this recipe from one of my favorite Korean food blogs, Evil Jungle Prince. Unfortunately, it turned out to be way too fishy for me. (This may have something to do with my misreading the measurement for anchovy sauce […]

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 […]

This is meant as a direct response to the question - what do you do when you come across a monstrously large sweet potato that stares you in the face and demands to be bested?
You puree the sucker into soup, that’s what.

Read more […]

This is way, way too buttery to be considered healthy, but I do consider it delicious. Red lentils shining like jewels among the pasta, bursts of flavor from the spinach, and that’s all it takes to keep me happy.
It is surprisingly gingery! The ginger comes out as a floral flavor here, not particularly sharp. Just […]

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 […]

I can’t really take any credit for this recipe, aside from the eating. It was almost completely the brainchild of our friend Bonnie, who had all the ideas except adding in the crispy garlic, which Dave came up with. I’m just playing photographer and stenographer, this time.
(Incidentally, Bonnie makes and sells the cutest, awesomest sock […]

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, […]

Burdock root, also known as gobo, tastes something like a nutty artichoke potato. The long, slender, flexible roots don’t look like much, but they have a lot of flavor if you slice them thin and braise them to bring it out. Don’t bother peeling off their thin skin, which is both tasty and good for […]

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 […]

When I think of cucumber salad, I think of all the love and sheer stubborn energy that only your grandmother can bring to the table.
My grandmother, my Ima, makes very classic Hungarian cucumber salad, with vinegar and (again, you guessed it) paprika. Alanna of A Veggie Venture learned to make cucumber salad with sour cream […]

I first tasted fava beans a few days ago. I’m not sure how I managed to miss them until now, but I did. But now that I know how creamy they are, how fresh green and buttery in texture, I will be sure not to miss them again!
Preparing fava beans to be cooked is a […]

Rosa of Rosa’s Yummy Yums made this wonderful banana ketchup last spring, and I’ve seriously been waiting all year to try it out. See, Rosa? I didn’t forget!
Of course, I had to make a few modifications along the way. But that’s what food blogging is all about.
I brought this to a friend’s barbecue yesterday, but […]

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 […]

If you have studied symbolic logic, you are familiar with the logical operator x-or. ‘A x-or B’ means ‘either A or B, but not both’. A friend of mine once suggested that there must also exist the illogical operator x-and, where ‘A x-and B’ means ‘A and B, but not both’.
He put forth the word […]

Until this past year, I thought that I hated all salads. I spent my life passing on my salad course at restaurants to my mother to eat for me. I knew that I liked spinach, sure, but that certainly didn’t count as salad in my mind.
Last summer, my friend Coby introduced me to a salad […]

This started out as a mint chutney, until we chanced upon some gorgeous persimmons at the store. And I have been craving cucumbers lately. (To be fair, I am almost always craving cucumbers.) As we combined our key ingredients, we realized that it would be a shame to cook or overspice them. And so a […]

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 just noticed that my photo of Sweet and Sour Lotus Root won in the Originality category for Does My Blog Look Good in This? - March, 2007. I am delighted and extremely flattered. Thank you!
On to the tale of the cauliflower. We hosted a fairly non-traditional seder this year. We served pomegranate ginger saffron […]

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 […]

As I’ve mentioned before, I love chowder. What you may not know is that I also love oysters. (In fact, I love all seafood, except perhaps jellyfish and sea cucumbers.) This leek and oyster chowder is scrumptious as only a simple dish can be. The broth is creamy and flavorful, and the oysters themselves are […]

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 […]

Actually, it’s a rhizome. But never mind that.
I ordered sweet and sour lotus root at a restaurant not too long ago, and it was my favorite dish of the evening. Naturally, I tried to replicate it at home the very next day.
I looked at the wildly different recipes in Fuschia Dunlop’s two cookbooks, one […]

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 […]

Okay, this is probably the last post I’ll be making to clear out my old photos taken with my Canon PowerShot S400. (I want to post only better photos taken with my new 30D from now on.)
When we were visiting Dave’s mother, Barbara, she suggested that we make some butternut squash risotto, having been inspired […]

My partner Dave and I spent a fun evening a few weeks ago making green curry paste over at a friend’s new apartment, a portion of which was ours to take home and freeze. It’s always fun trying to follow recipes with our fussy friends - does the recipe call for ginger? Pfeh, we have […]

When I first served this to two couples we had over for dinner, the women declared it too spicy, while the men dug in enthusiastically. I won’t try to interpret that data, but there it is. I’m not sure why any of them found it to be so spicy, though. I am sensitive to spicy […]

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 […]

The latest edition of Fine Cooking had instructions for making these potatoes. You get some baby red potatoes and boil them until they are soft. You then place them on a baking sheet and squish them flat, about 1/2″ thick. Sprinkle on some salt and pepper, and pour olive oil over them fairly liberally. Bake […]

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 […]

I know it’s past the deadline for Hey Hey It’s Donna Hay Day #8: Tempo di Risotto, run by Cenzina at il cavoletto di bruxelles, but nonetheless, this risotto was so tasty and such fun to make.
Truffle salt is my latest discovery.
Truffle salt is just a blend of ground dried truffles and sea salt, but […]

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 […]

I keep seeing these tiny, adorable clams in the Chinatown fishmarkets whenever I’m out shopping around there. They live in vast bins, not far from the live frogs and periwinkles that I keep meaning to learn how to prepare.
I have this thing about eating cute things. I like doing it. If I see something adorable […]

This is my entry for The Spice is Right VIII: Frankenstein’s Monster, where we are creating culinary mash-ups using spices from one cuisine in recipes or with techniques from another. Here, I have used Sichuan peppercorns to add a tingle to a bowl of classically American shrimp chowder.
The deadline to post your entries is […]

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 […]

Originally I was not going to bother posting this recipe, because it is such a simple thing, and not all that much to look it. Never mind that it is delicious and addictive and goes unbelievably well with our favorite skirt steak for a quick and easy autumn dinner. Never mind that it is […]

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 was so excited when I saw cabbage-stuffed peppers on a menu in Hungary. How wonderful, I thought. But when I ordered them, they turned out to be pickled. I’m sure that is delightful to some of you, but personally, I do not like pickled anything. (Oh, all right, Japanese pickled ginger. And mango slices […]

These are made in much the same manner as the last stuffed zucchini blossoms I posted about, except that they are filled with spicy duck breast instead of the sweet cheese filling I used before. I am so excited that this time we found blossoms with baby zucchini attached! I think someday I will have […]

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, […]

I was at Kalustyan’s the other day, looking through their spices, when I wandered up to the second floor to check out their tea selection. There is a small deli section up there, where they sell prepared foods, which I had never examined before. I glanced over, and the man behind the counter thrust a […]

This is my contribution for The Spice is Right IV: It’s Too Darned Hot!, though, in truth, I am probably the only resident of New York City who is not completely sick of the heat by now. I am cold-blooded and reptilian, and nothing makes me happier than soaking in the warmth. I am trying […]

My favorite Afghan restaurant is Bamiyan, on the corner of E. 26th St. and 3rd Ave., just a few blocks away from Kalustyan’s. I discovered it when I was taking the bar exam last summer. Dave’s job over those few days was to make sure that I actually ate dinner, when all I wanted to […]

A friend and I were once on a bus to Boston, discussing the origin of ketchup (a/k/a catsup). I insisted that it had to be a relatively recent invention, because the tomato is a New World fruit. She thought it was older. So I called up my brother, asking him to look it up for […]

The photo is of the unbaked cookies, because I failed to take a good photo of them after they came out of the oven and before they were taken away.
I am catering a cocktail party (well, we are - I never cook alone anymore; everything I make is a joint effort with Dave nowadays). We’ve […]

I’m still stuck on that saffron dill tart dough I was playing with when I made those garlic scape tartlets and leek tartlets. I am also temporarily entirely done with making tartlets - spending most of a party in the kitchen making extra batches of them can do that to a person. What to do? […]

The tart dough I used here was actually developed by my friend Scott Lefton, who showed me the recipe and encouraged me to go forth and play with it. First, I used it with brie and sauteed leeks for a variant of Bron’s leek and brie tartlets. The flavors combined so well, a slow rolling […]

TeaChef has this ongoing project where each month they give away free samples of a different tea. The catch (and it is hardly a catch) is that if you get a tea sample from them, they want you to cook with it and send them a recipe including it.
I can handle being honor-bound to cook […]

Ramps are here, ramps are there, stinky beautiful ramps are everywhere! If you’re not familiar with them, it’s about time for you to give them a try. They’re also called wild leeks, and they taste like very garlicky scallions to me. They won’t be in season for long, so find them and devour them while […]

I always get Tom Lehrer’s Poisoning Pigeons in the Park stuck in my head around this time of year. “Spring is here, ah-sah-pah-ring is here! Life is Skittles, and life is beer! I think the loveliest time of the year is the spring, I do. Don’t you? ‘Course you do.”
For me, though, spring is more […]

Yes, I know, I know, even my savories tend to be sweet. To be honest, I made these a few weeks ago, and am only now getting around to posting about them. We finally unpacked the kitchen at the new apartment, though, but we got so caught up in making and eating our first meal […]

If posting is sparse for a while, it’s because we just moved to a new place and this week they’re painting our new kitchen, so it will be a few more days before we can get in there to unpack the kitchen stuff and start cooking. In the meantime, I’ll simply do my best, even […]

There’s a restaurant on the Lower East Side called Stanton Social, which is designed around a menu containing nothing but small tasting dishes meant to be shared with everyone at your table. Dave and I went there not too long ago at my honorary aunt’s recommendation, and everything we tried was excellent.
I fell utterly in […]

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 […]

I’ve been sorting through my mother’s cookbooks lately, taking out the ones I want to keep. She has so many interesting Thai and Indian and Chinese cookbooks that I can see already what I’ll be eating for the next few months, at least. This recipe was the first thing that caught my eye when I […]