Home Cooking

Well, OK, really: Last night Tamara and I shot a segment for a new TV series the Estimable J.O. is currently working on, a tour around the US. Jamie attended one of our Sunday Night Dinners in Astoria…which, for once, was actually on a Sunday. Just like old times.

{ 5 comments }

In an op-ed called No Chefs in My Kitchen, Marcella Hazan is in fine form: concise, pointed and just a tad crabby.

{ 2 comments }

This could very well be Kitchen Rule #1:
If you smell something burning, go down to the kitchen. Don’t sit there at your desk, doing a mental inventory, trying to convince yourself nothing could possibly be burning.

{ 0 comments }

It’s freakin’ cold. At this point, most people start waxing lyrically about hearty winter soups.
But I don’t really like soup. Or most soups.
The trouble with most soups is that every bite is the same–this is the huge flaw in the one-dish meal. It’s totally boring. Somehow, even if it’s jam-packed with a bunch [...]

{ 2 comments }

Have I mentioned? Book publishing is impossibly slow. It makes my life as a guidebook writer infuriating, knowing that the book I worked so hard on is deteriorating as it sits at the printing press, and then bobs its way back here, on the slow boat from China. And yes, publishers are now actively [...]

{ 0 comments }

That’s what Tamara called her old galley kitchen. I had one too for a while. It turns out Mark Bittman also has an awful tiny kitchen. Living proof that you don’t need fabulous stuff in order to cook well.

{ 0 comments }

A little while ago, someone tipped me off to Robert Rodriguez’s cooking videos–they’re extras on a couple of his DVDs. I like the guy’s style anyway–and it’s great when he applies it to food.
One video is for breakfast tacos, and the other is for puerco pibil–aka cochinita pibil, a real Yucatecan standard of pork [...]

{ 5 comments }

I finally busted into the guanciale I cured myself after my class at the Brooklyn Kitchen.
Gorgeous:
It’s pretty salty….because I spaced and left it in the salt for more than a week, rather than the recommended 4-5 days. I can’t say I really got much of a sense of the garlic, thyme, allspice, fennel and whatever [...]

{ 0 comments }

In the same way that I only got a grill a couple of weeks ago, I just managed to perfect my zucchini bread recipe with the last two fresh zukes in the tristate area.
And in the same way that I always thought I was normal growing up, and then it turned out I totally wasn’t, [...]

{ 2 comments }

Yesterday’s New York Times had a good long story about the in-house butchering at a group of Brooklyn restaurants.
I got to see the group’s butcher, Tom Mylan, hack up half a pig at The Brooklyn Kitchen a couple of weeks ago. It was illuminating, and I came home with many pounds of meat.
I knew [...]

{ 0 comments }

Last night at one of my freelance jobs, a woman I work with was musing on the current financial mess: “I figure, my family lived through the Depression. It wasn’t pretty–but they survived.”
Survival is key. But I worry that people today don’t have the same survival skills they did back in the 1930s. I [...]

{ 0 comments }

A while ago, we had a Code Red in the house: We ran out of butter.
Holy crap, I’m shivering with fear again right now.
No–it’s over. It was all just a bad dream. We solved that butter problem.

{ 4 comments }

Our friend Katie had a significant birthday, which called for dinner. I haven’t been cooking much recently, at least not in a big way. It was very soothing to go through my cookbooks, make my lists, do all the mental tinkering, get the shopping done and get down to business.
First, though, the decks had to [...]

{ 0 comments }