Figs are marvelous. Dave and I have been eating them with duck confit (as in this spectacularly tasty recipe, all rich luscious duck and bright fresh figs with mustard seeds and curry leaves to perk everything up), pickling them, and just generally reveling in their availability lately. Instead of apologizing for not updating this blog […]

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 […]

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, […]

On a cold winter night, with icy slush waiting just outside the door, the greatest comfort I can imagine involves warm chestnuts, chocolate, and dried strawberries, far more flavorful than the imported ones you can buy this time of year. And last night, as we hid indoors from the “wintry mix” outside (it sounds like […]

Before I explain this dish, I just want to announce that the 2007 Food Blog Awards are now open for nominations. You can nominate your favorite food blogs in various different categories here. Hurry up, because nominations end in just a few days, on Wednesday, December 5th! Because I am proud of my work, I […]

Quinces are in season, and this year I mean to take advantage of it. Quinces are like apples’ upscale cousins – tarter, rosier, more gussied up and elegant. While the apple is available right here, right now, the quince must be cooked for a long time until its pale flesh turns a ruddy hue and […]

This recipe was inspired by The Orphan’s Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice by Catherynne M. Valente. It is the second book of the now-complete series (the first was The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden), and it was just published a few weeks ago. It is brilliant and beautiful, rich and deep, […]

This dessert is entirely Dave’s creation. He calls it CBGB (cherries, biscuits, ginger, and butterscotch), but I just can’t bring myself to call it that, personally. I prefer recipe names that really warn you about what you’re getting yourself into. It’s a due process issue, as far as I’m concerned – when I skim through […]

I’d been craving chocolate chip cookies for weeks before I made these. But I was always too busy, or occasionally, trying to take a day now and then without eating any desserts. (This is difficult for me. I don’t tend to eat huge quantities of dessert, but I like a little bit of sweetness at […]

Not everything has to be complicated. These napoleons are dead simple and utterly delicious. The chocolate layers are made of an easy-schmeasy faux chocolate mousse, made by melting chocolate into heavy cream, chilling it, and whipping it like whipped cream. Phyllo is purchased, layered, and baked with minimal effort. And raspberries, oh, luscious, seasonal raspberries! […]

When I want to find ripe mangoes – lush, juicy, almost overripe mangoes, in fact – the Mrs. Robinsons of mangoes – all the shelves seem to carry are hard, tart, green mangoes. But when I’m looking for tart, sharp green mangoes – more a vegetable than a fruit, clear and refreshing like citrus – […]

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 […]

Life has been busy. I’ve been to Portland, Boston, and home again. I won an acquittal in a murder trial, had lunch at the incomparable Love + Butter, foraged for tasty plants with Wild Man Steve Brill, attended the Fancy Food Show, and discovered that I love not only glassblowing, but lampworking glass beads as […]

I dipped a spoon into the churning ice cream maker and gave it to my brother to taste. “This is actually very good,” he said. “What else are you going to put in it?” “Nothing,” I assured him. “Good!” This took place last Sunday, when we all gathered at my parents’ house to pick sour […]

This is a combination of two recipes from Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, one of the smartest and friendliest cookbook authors and food bloggers I know. It remained moist and delicious almost a week later, and got rave reviews from my mother and Dave’s coworkers. (We bake a lot, so we […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

It has been a week since I last posted, which is longer than I like. I am sorry about that. Still, as I mentioned before, things have been busy around here lately. I’ll have some exciting news for you in a few weeks. While it’s very hard for me to keep my mouth shut about […]

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.

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 […]

The worst thing about my latest cookbook acquisition, Essence of Chocolate: Recipes for Baking and Cooking with Fine Chocolate by John Scharffenberger and Robert Steinberg, is the terrible difficulty I had in trying to decide what to make first. In the end, though, I had to go with these cookies. This turned out to be […]

When Rose and I got together a few days after our apple picking excursion, we decided to experiment with some of the apples. The rosemary currant shortbread is her adaptation of a shortbread recipe she found on Epicurious. Back when we were dating, she and I made rosemary chocolate truffles together; a love for rosemary […]

I hosted the most incredible NYC Food Blogger Potluck on Saturday night. I am waiting to post about it, though, because I want to give everyone who attended a chance to put up their recipes for the food they brought so that my post about the event can be a sort of round-up as well. […]

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 […]

Plantains, o platanos, which I fell in love with in the form of sweet fried maduros years ago. Plantains, which look like large bananas, but hide a secretly unsweetened center until they blacken and transform into something marvelous. From the black, squishy, grotesque exterior of a fully ripe plantain emerges an ingredient you cannot find […]

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. […]

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 […]

I just love the way that apricot in the center is peaking up his little head over the expanse of crust like a prairie dog going up on his hind legs to see the world outside his den. This recipe was inspired by a photo of rustic apricot marzipan tartlets I came across in a […]

These photos were taken back home, before I left for Hungary. I picked up these cherry husk tomatoes, which look quite a lot like tomatillos to me, at the farmer’s market in Brooklyn Heights. They smell like a mango and taste like a firm persimmon, almost. Delicious! I threw a few into a sort of […]

These photos were all taken at the NYC Greenmarket in Brooklyn Heights, right in front of the Brooklyn Supreme Court and Borough Hall. The tomatoes (and young lady) were from Wilklow Orchards. Their produce was stunning, and I appreciated the lady’s kindness in letting me obsessively photograph her as she cut tomatoes. I am leaving […]

In their original form, basteeya are Moroccan dove pies, savory pastries of spiced dove with almonds and cinnamon and sugar. We usually make them with chicken instead, with cumin and saffron and dill and other such things. There are often several dozen of them in our freezer, in case of emergency meat hunger. These sweet […]

When I was flipping through Gale Gand’s Just a Bite, what really caught my eye was her suggestion that when making shortbread, you can simply grate the frozen dough into your baking pan instead of bothering to thaw it and roll it out. How simply wonderful! That means that you can keep a hunk of […]

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, […]

Tiny single mouthful desserts with which to finish off the meal with just a single moment of bliss, is what these are. Vanilla malt cream, adapted from a recipe in Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern. A single spoon filled with cream and topped with a slice of banana and burnt […]

Peaches and sweet corn grow together, so therefore they must go together, right? That was my reasoning when I picked them up at the market, figuring that I would combine them somehow once I got home. I asked Dave to make his fabulous cornbread for the trifle, and he did, with a bit of extra […]

Whenever I see blueberries, I think of my mother. She loves blueberries so much that even when she was pregnant with one of my brothers, Josh, and eating them made her feel nauseous, she just couldn’t stop. Pregnant and sick and miserable, she ate blueberries until she vomited purple. She has told me repeatedly that […]

Imagine, if you will: A rich, buttery, almond-based tart crust. A thick, granular layer of creamy grapefruit almond curd. Slices of fresh pink grapefruit, sweeter, pulp bursting with juice. The crunch of a thin layer of caramelized sugar. The warmth of the crust, fresh from the oven. Curd and grapefruit, cool from the fridge. The […]

No story here. Just another photo taken in my parents’ kitchen, and the perfect way to finish off the last sour cherries of the year. The first thing to hit your tongue here is the sour!, and then mostly smooth almond, until a lingering aftertaste of pure, tart cherry sweeps in.

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 […]

As soon as I saw the flowering sage at the farmer’s market, I just knew I had to use it in my entry for The Spice is Right #3: The Perfumed Garden, which called for us to use edible flowers in our cooking. And as I was saying, I have this extreme overabundance of sour […]

My father planted a sour cherry tree by the side of the house a few years back, and every year he insists that I make him a sour cherry pie. The deal has always been that my brother picks the cherries and I pit and bake the cherries. The tree has grown enormously in the […]

My partner, Dave, and I joined the Park Slope Food Co-op as soon as we moved to the neighborhood. Last Sunday, we finally did our first work shift there. I desperately wanted to do something physical, since I spend so much of my time at the court sitting at a desk and writing. More office […]

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 […]

The original recipe for this tart in The Union Square Cafe Cookbook calls for more butter, more sugar, and a higher temperature for the initial baking than what I have laid out below. After fussing with it a bit, though, this is what I came up with. It’s a wonderful confluence of textures: the tart […]

“I’m not stupid, you know.” “Quit bragging.” “Stop being rude.” “When was the last time you read a book? The truth now. And picture books don’t count – I mean something with print in it.” Buttercup walked away from him. “There’re other things to read than print,” she said, “and the Princess of Hammersmith is […]

Weekend Cookbook Challenge #3: Foods in Shades of Orange is my first food blog event (as a participant rather than as an onlooker, that is). In honor of the occasion, I turned immediately to my newest cookbook, Jacques Torres’s Dessert Circus at Home.