When I originally came up with the Year of Pie, making a chicken pot pie was an obvious choice. Except for one serious issue: I’ve already written about a few chicken pies. It’s not that uncommon that I have a general idea without a recipe attached. I took a look at some cookbooks, did a search…
The first thing I made when I got back from the weddings was this chicken. I planned it out on the flight home from Boston, right down to the shopping list. It was the first food I’d made in weeks that wasn’t a sandwich or a plate of leftovers. It was the first plated meal…
Every once in a while the Internet collectively goes crazy for a recipe. Have you noticed this too? The same recipe pops up all over the place and everyone’s talking about it or trying it excitedly. Almost invariably it’s something simple with big results. A few years ago it was the New York Times chocolate…
My dad recently unearthed a recipe from his childhood – for chutney. It’s an industrial recipe for a brand called Mrs. Balls, one that both my parents remember having when they were growing up. There are a lot of things that get left behind when you move and this brand was one of them. My…
My house is littered with tissues. It’s the post-holiday cold season and it seems like everyone is sniffling, getting over a cold or on the verge of getting sick. Forget New Year’s resolutions – we’re all spending the first days of the new year just trying to get healthy and that’s what we’re doing. We’ve…
I have two slow cookers. One is a small 70s-esque number with two settings and a low enough “low” setting to cook fruit butter with the lid off. The other is technically my roomate’s, sleek and new, almost twice the size, and has a fancy “warm” function to keep food warm when an eight hour…
Some recipes just don’t work out. This is especially true when the recipe is one you are making up on the spot, cobbling together from multiple sources. Sometimes it’s a total flop, the kind that can only be dumped in the garbage before ordering takeout. Too much salt, ingredients-gone-bad, poorly calibrated baking experiments. But most…
Growing up we ate a lot of teriyaki chicken. I’d say I was partly to blame for this phenomenon. I loved teriyaki chicken. Nevermind that we’d already had it earlier in the week, when it showed up for dinner again, it was an exciting occasion. On Saturday mornings while grocery shopping with my dad I’d…
My mom makes the best matzah ball soup. So good that it was the standard of comparison for all matzah ball soups, not just in my family, but in other’s too. “These aren’t as good as Bev’s,” was a comment made on more than one occasion by a friend or neighbor when the Passover hostess…
There is a weird food holiday pretty much every day of the year if you pay attention to those sorts of things. Which, to be honest, I do only about half of the time. There’s a margarita day, a watermelon day, even a day in honor of creamsicles. But, as I believe we established here…