I thought I could add balsamic vinegar to these fabulously easy cookies to make them even more interesting. I love balsamic vinegar with sweets as well as with savories, so how could it not work? In the end, I couldn’t taste the vinegar at all, but the cookies seemed more chocolatey than they ever had […]

Barbara, my partner Dave’s mother, gave me a copy of The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen: Recipes for the Passionate Cook by Paula Wolfert for my birthday. I tried out one of the easiest recipes in the book first, by throwing a few eggs into the oven at 225º after soaking them in warm water while the […]

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 […]

My father is an attorney. He has a general civil practice here in Brooklyn, NY. He also has a history of clients who believe in trying to barter instead of paying legal fees. We’ve had the bagel man, the sports tickets man, the nut man, the painter, and more. I’m an attorney, too, but I […]

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 […]

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 […]

This is Dave’s ancestral recipe for banana chocolate chunk muffins, slightly updated for the modern age. The key difference is that the modern age involves Chinatown produce stands with small, cute bananas, and cheap bars of Scharffenberger bittersweet chocolate at the Co-op.

I was blown away to discover that I was nominated and then chosen as one of the top 5 in the Best Food Blog – Post category of the 2006 Food Blog Awards. There are some wonderful posts out there, and I’m flattered that the tale of my granite countertops even made it to the […]

I want to thank and congratulate all of you. When I set the Sugar High Friday #26: Sugar Art challenge for this month’s Sugar High Friday, I was afraid I would scare people off, intimidate them out of just going ahead and having fun. Instead, you went ahead and made an extraordinary array of gorgeous […]