Month: July 2006
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I have to be honest – my heart wasn't really in my last post. Could you tell? I felt like choosing that recipe was a bit like grasping at straws – I didn't really want to be making it, and once I made it I didn't really want to eat it. Luckily, I was able…
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Though I consider myself more of a spartan breakfaster (no more than a bowl of unsweetened cereal with berries and skim milk, or jam-spread toast with yogurt on most days), when Jonathan Reynolds wrote about spider cake in the New York Times Magazine a few years ago, I found myself intrigued by the thought of…
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As the entire United States suffered a blanket of heat earlier this week it would have been considered cruel and unusual punishment to turn the stove on (well, besides to boil water for the iced tea supply). This didn't keep me away from the kitchen for too long – in fact, I used the heat…
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A lot of people, like my stepmother, are so obsessed with crab cakes they'll order them whenever they appear on a menu. I've had a few restaurant crab cakes in my time, but they've never been much to write home about. Too aggressively spiced, too pasty, too fried. And since mayonnaise, such an integral part…
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When the cupcake craze swept Western civilization a few years ago, I felt a bit left out. To me, the cupcakes being peddled by faux-fifties decorated bakeries uptown, downtown and midtown alternated between too sweet, too dry, too pasty, too waxy and too fussy to justify the absolute mania they spawned. I understood the homemade…
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While it totally irks me that what is in essence a tapenade in this preparation is being called a pesto when there is nary a leaf of basil or a clove of garlic to even begin to lend itself to the attempted yet inappropriate use of the word, the utter genius of these little sandwiches…
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I imagine that there is nothing more stressful than the first time you cook for your beloved's mother. After all, you are proving yourself in that most elemental of areas – the nourishment of the very child that she fed for so long. That phrasing veers a little too close for comfort to the idea…
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The last two weeks are a blur of restaurant meals, both highbrow and low. So lunch on Sunday at my father's in Boston – consisting of nothing more than fresh bread and tomatoes sliced up and dressed with olive oil and vinegar – came as a total relief. Later that night, I cooked our first…
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I'm back! I promise! Thanks for your patience, dear readers, while I replenished my fatigued system, spent a delicious evening with a certain Eggbeater from San Francisco, danced all night at a gorgeous wedding in Vermont (catered, by the way, by these folks, so if you're in Vermont and dying for a seafood martini that…
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Despite the best intentions, the closest I came to cooking in Maine was pouring myself a bowl of cereal. So I’ve got little to report, food-wise, besides some tales of delicious cinnamon-scented blueberry pie, lobster rolls gobbled up while overlooking the ocean, and a home-cooked amalgam of two Bourdain steak recipes yesterday in Providence that…
The Wednesday Chef 