i have never really understood the point of arraying things on a plate in separate areas, only to turn around and stuff it all into your mouth at the same time anyway. why not save your guests the trouble of cutting everything up? of course, […]
my feet are killing me because i just ran to school (ok, walked really fast; i don’t run) to get my computer – i’m having dinner at josh’s and i’m shamelessly using it as an excuse to have him help me extract my hard drive […]
r is leaving for australia for three months, so we had brunch on labor day. assuming that most places would be closed, i made popovers. i can’t recall ever having made them successfully before, so this time i wanted to get them right.
of course, it turns out that it’s really not that hard to get them right; i suppose i was on crack or something when i made them last. these popovers were so attractive that i don’t quite know what went wrong the first few times. all you do is mix the ingredients together, pour the batter in the pan, and let the eggs do their thing in a rather hot oven. i think the trick is to leave them in the oven long enough to get crispy and brown on the outside, as you can see is what happened here.
popovers are good on their own – i mean, you can’t really go wrong with eggs, butter, flour, and milk – but i made scrambled eggs to go with them for the savory, and whipped cream and cherry preserves for the sweet. the scrambled eggs were good, but i think i prefer the cherry preserves; at any rate, i think that the wetness of the jam and whipped cream is a better complement for the crustiness of the popover than the scrambled eggs. i think shredded rotisserie chicken would be good as a savory filling, but that might just be me and my current obsession with rotisserie chickens. (more…)
i haven’t done a lab report since high school chemistry (10 years ago!), so here you go. purpose/problem: i used to use the chocolate chip cookie recipe from nick malgieri’s cookies unlimited; however, as i stopped making chocolate chip cookies as frequently, i forgot the […]
can you believe that i haven’t been watching law & order obsessively? yeah, neither can i. so this isn’t a murder case involving food, but it does involve me surreptitiously copying a recipe out of the best recipe at barnes & noble. this is my […]
when i was growing up there were tons of things that my sister and i weren’t allowed to have: twinkies, hostess cupcakes, tv dinners, all manner of synthetic food. this was all for my own good, of course, but when i was ten years old i was much too young to realize that. while i didn’t have an all-consuming desire for these packaged cake products, i would watch the commercials or see images of them and wonder what they tasted like. they always looked soft and dense, but not too dense; filled with some kind of delicious whipped cream.
now that i’ve taken charge of my own nutrition, i know that these fake cake products are actually pretty gross. the cake is too soft and doesn’t taste like it should (ie, chocolate or butter), the filling is some sort of synthetic, gritty sugar parade, and the icing is more like plastic than anything else. but the idea is still a good one – it’s the execution that’s lacking. (more…)
just a brief rundown of recent dinners: posole (pork and hominy stew) buttery cornbread with caramelized corn and scallions made this with c – she made the posole and i made the cornbread. one really shouldn’t take as long making cornbread as i took, but […]
oh, top chef. who works on this show, anyway? i just watched the season premiere and the judges blasted a guy who had no idea what piccata was. true, he should have looked it up (and not made the thing that he made based on […]
what you see is roasted tomatoes, nicely caramelized in a 450-degree oven, sitting on top of saffron and smoked paprika scented rice. what you see is gorgeousness. let us all worship at the altar of tomatoes and rice.
this is a slightly revised version of mark bittman’s tomato paella from the new york times food section. i’ve made this three times now: once when i was sick and could barely taste anything, once for my parents while i was home, and once for a couple of my roommates.
in the article that accompanies the original recipe, mark bittman says that you have to try it at least once with just tomatoes, and i would have to say that with respect to this paella, i’ve become a tomato purist. for the purposes of this post i’ll be ignoring any issues regarding the authenticity of this particular paella, because when something tastes this good, you ignore pretentions like authenticity. this rice is pretty fantastic: the smoked paprika and saffron give the rice an earthy, unplaceable flavor and aroma that’s balanced by the tomatoes. if you make this in the summer, with homegrown or locally grown tomatoes, i guarantee you that the tomatoes will taste like tomato-infused sunshine. (more…)
one day, a pound of bacon walked into the kitchen. it accidentally walked into a skillet, but jumped out after getting a little toasty. some onions took its place with a little thyme, and the whole group took a dive into pasta, finding eggs and […]