When I was a kid, it was called schwarma because it came mostly from Middle Eastern restaurants. And then when I spent a college semester in Australia it was called doner kebab, the Turkish name. And now in San Francisco they’re mostly called gyros, even if the place where you get it isn’t Greek. For…
The Superbowl is one of the best food holidays. In the same way that on Halloween girls can wear basically nothing and call it a “costume”, on Superbowl Sunday you can make something obscenely unhealthy and call it a “snack.” And then you can spend the rest of the afternoon eating a dinner-sized portion of…
I don’t go in much for adventure cooking. The dishes with too many steps or too many fancy ingredients rarely happen here. My mom had a rule when it came to cooking – if the recipe went onto the second page, she wasn’t going to make it. It’s a rule I’ve mostly adopted in my…
Several months ago I whipped up an amazingly rich and decadent bacon, onion, and gruyere tart from one of my favorite fancy-cooking cookbooks. Sheets of puff pastry topped with a cheese-laced bechamel sauce, crispy lardons of bacon, onions that had turned sweet and melting in the heat. It was gooey and buttery and flakey .The…
Everyone had a dinner chore in my parent’s house. My mom cooked, my dad cleaned, my brother emptied the dishwasher, and I made salad. I’m not sure how and why salad got sliced off the dinner cooking, or how I escaped more boring chores like setting the table, but every night I made salad. Sometimes…
Let’s get something straight about winter eating: I am not a fan of braising. Many people wax lyrical about how delicious braised food is and they can’t wait for winter so they can braise some more. I am not one of those people. So you may find yourself asking why I’m trying to sell you…
I’ll let you in on one of my quick-and-easy meal secrets. When it comes to making dinner on a typical night I rarely worry about having a meat-starch-vegetable kind of ‘balanced meal.’ We still eat those things come dinner time but instead of making it as three separate dishes, I’m generally looking for ways to…
Turnips get a pretty bad rap. They aren’t alone in the category of “maligned vegetables;” we can’t forget Brussels sprouts*, spinach, and beets (and probably others). But over the years I have learned to love pretty much every vegetable – except turnips. That’s not to say I’ve ever really disliked turnips. It’s just that between…
Most of the tastes and foods I associate strongly with growing up are those of Jewish and/or British and South African dishes which reflect my background pretty accurately. There are also a smattering of regional New England dishes that snuck into my parents’ repertoire through neighborhood parties or dinners with friends. And then there are…
It’s not uncommon that I am inspired by something I eat at a restaurant or café and try to recreate it at home. Sometimes these attempts are spot on and I make a fair to incredibly close approximation of the original. But other times the end result is almost unrecognizable from the initial inspiration and…