A Classic Recipe for Any Season The holidays are fast approaching, which means I’m going into baking overdrive. Over the last month or so I’ve been stocking up on baking supplies as they go on sale and clearing my freezer to make room for stacks of snickerdoodles and pumpkin whoopie pies. My seasonal baking frenzy is…

You’ll Love It When You Taste It Curry is kind of like porn. To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter in his famous majority opinion, I don’t know how to define it, but I know it when I see it. Curries are building blocks of many cuisines, including Indian, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Jamaican, and Japanese. They can be…

A Classic Any Way You Cook It My friend, Paula, is a great cook. So good, in fact, that she opened a restaurant some years back. Although she is from the South, her restaurant served Italian food, and it was in a New Jersey town just across the river from New York City. I first went there…

A Blast from the Past The first — and only — casseroles I ate when I was a kid were mac and cheese and chicken pot pie. I didn’t think of them as casseroles, though, because they came frozen in little single serve tins courtesy of Swanson or Banquet. …

Chicken Soup = Comfort If comfort food is defined as food from our childhood, my version would consist of noodles or pancakes with butter (or SpagettiOs); jelly sandwiches on Wonder Bread, Twinkies, and Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup. My childhood diet was the food equivalent of sweatpants. What I eat has evolved over the years…

A Savory Mix The chance that I will have a salad for my main meal, especially when I am dining out, is I would say, nil. Lunch, maybe. But for dinner? Nope. Despite my ongoing tilt toward a more plant-based diet, when I want something substantial, cold or room temperature food feels inadequate…

A Fresh, Bright Interplay of Flavors and Textures I grew up in New Jersey. Here are a few things I can tell you about it: 1) Everybody from the state is one degree removed from Bruce Springsteen (for example, a friend of mine was his personal chef some years back) 2) When New Jerseyans visit the ocean, they…

Summer in a Skillet You know how they say that at parties everyone ends up in the kitchen? Not at my place. While I have a pretty large kitchen by New York City standards, it’s mighty narrow when you’re trying to squeeze past somebody to get to the stove. I can cook there well…

Sweet, Savory, and Simple Some of my fondest memories come from simple moments: strolling along the Brooklyn waterfront as an unexpected fireworks show burst overhead; lingering over drinks in the window seat of a local café on a snowy afternoon; lolling in my beach chair in a shallow stretch along the shore as the…