First Cooking Memories When we visited my grandma in Brooklyn, she used to keep my parents up too late talking. But we kids woke up early. My grandma always let the other adults sleep, and took me and my younger brother downstairs to make cheese blintzes for everyone. Making blintzes for nine people took all …
Monthly Archives: August 2019
Chawanmushi
Japanese breakfast for dinner? We ate this at Smallwares on Fremont Street in Portland, and it was so delicious I wanted to figure out how to make it at home. It was surprisingly simple and cheap, and delicious too. Also, open to endless variations. How to make Chawanmushi: Put on a pot of beef broth: …
Celery-mushroom soup
Celery Season Celery’s one of the first spring vegetables to come into season, because it’s basically a stem, like rhubarb or chives. It’s so exciting to have a new food after all those root vegetables and apples in the winter! But you can’t just be eating celery sticks all the time, so you need some …
Cauliflower curry
How to make cauliflower curry: First put on a pot of rice. In a small saucepan, put 1 1/2 cups of rice and 3 cups of water. Cover and heat over high heat until the water boils; then turn the rice down to medium-low heat and keep cooking, covered, until the rice has absorbed all …
Cassoulet
A quicker, easier cassoulet Recipes for cassoulet are full of instructions like “simmer for four hours” or “stir for an hour” or even “let sit overnight”. I like recipes you can make in an hour, and this is an amended cassoulet recipe that takes – okay, not an hour, but maybe two hours, and most …
Caramelized cabbage
This is a stove-top version of a Times recipe that involved long slow baking I never have time for, but we liked it this way. First make some noodles to serve on the side: In a medium-sized mixing bowl, mix 3 cups of flour with 6 eggs and 1/3 cup oil. Knead and divide in …
Calamari and fries
Pulpa! In Rome, I once took a bunch of American students out for dinner. We all ordered different appetizers, but when the waiter brought the food, he had brought pulpa – sliced cold octopus – for everybody, instead of whatever they had ordered. He explained (in Italian) that the pulpa was really exceptionally good that …
Broccoli Soup
Special vegan ingredients? No thanks. I’m a historian, and part of my interest in cooking is to see what people might have eaten a long time ago. I like to cook using only ingredients that I really understand where they came from. That means I don’t like to use soy milk, vegan butter, and things …
Braised endives
Eew, endives? Isn’t that some weird foreign food? Well, it’s not the most ordinary American food, but in France people think of endives as perfectly normal, regular food. Children eat them. Think of them as small cabbages, or thick asparagus. My kids loved these braised endives – generally kids like soft cabbage, and of course …
Black-eyed peas and rice
Don’t you need bacon for black-eyed peas and rice? You can put 1/4 pound of chopped bacon in to saute with the onions if you want. We’ve found that spices can make a good black-eyed peas and rice even without the bacon, and we’ve been trying to stay away from bacon and other processed meats …