My partner, Dave, wanted to make brownies last night. “Fine,” I said. “Make them with urfa-biber!” Urfa-biber is our latest thrilling spice discovery. It’s a Turkish pepper, spicy and just extraordinarily flavorful. The literature all says that it tastes a bit like raisins, and I tend to agree. It has that depth of fruitiness to […]

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 […]

This recipe was invented by my partner, Dave. He was so delighted by the reduced maple syrup we had to create when making the maple crema that he wanted to use it as a cookie base as well. He threw in the rest of the ingredients by feel, figuring that the proportions should be something […]

I am constitutionally incapable of looking at a cookie recipe without feeling the urge to add, oh, cardamom and black pepper. Or something along those lines. It’s just one of those things. Some people can look at a chocolate almond swirl of a cookie recipe and think, God bless this green earth and the cookies […]

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 […]