Apple Marzipan Cake
Apple marzipan cake came about because as everyone else began cooing over farmers market fraises de boise and posting nauseating recipes for rhubarb bowls (go ahead, tell me you haven’t seen some gross stuff out there), I faced a fridge brimming with apples. In the hunt for something interesting to…
Gong Bao Chicken
According to Fuchsia Dunlop, the precise origins of Gong Bao Chicken are unknown. We do know the dish is named after Ding Baozhen, who governed China’s Sichuan province during the Qing Dynasty. As Ding Baozhen was very fond of eating this dish, the chicken was cut into very small pieces to…
Rice Noodles at home
I’ve read that people who have a “hand” for bread baking will find noodle making a breeze. Those pretty little pleats keeping Asian dumplings closed? Just a matter of practice. My noodles–Asian or otherwise–range from barely edible to disastrous. To call my attempts at pleating childlike is an insult to…
Mexican-Style Ground Beef
Mexican-style ground beef–a terrible title for an excellent dish–came about by accident. So many recipes do around here. After a recipe fail, a plumbing mishap, and the last-minute cancellation of oral surgery, dinnertime had the temerity to roll around. Your hostess was on prep duty. Of course. The IK currently…
Bademiya’s Justly Famous Chicken
Anyone who cooks maintains a mental recipe box. Organization methods vary, but it’s safe to say everyone’s box shares the following categories: -will cook this someday -delicious but too expensive/work intensive to prepare on a regular basis -holiday set pieces that cannot be changed -Wednesday night specials: dull but easily…
The Wacky Cake: Not My Grandmother’s Bundt
Bill LeBlond, editorial director of Chronicle Books, once told a crowd at a cookbook proposal seminar that if he had to read one more book proposal from people who learned about cooking at their grandmothers’ knee, he would throw up. Dianne Jacob, Will Write For Food I spent a lot…
(Fake) Thai Drunken Noodles
Why Fake Thai Drunken Noodles? Well, I’ve never been to Thailand. (And how I long to go.) And it must be sadly admitted that, much as I passionately love Asian food, I am a Eastern European Jew, through and through. (In the past two weeks, we’ve had some rain…which led…
Miniature Chocolate Cakes
Years ago, while writing an article on holiday cookies, I consulted The Martha Stewart Living Christmas Cookbook. Stewart assume a readership whose kitchens are stocked like a Sur Le Table outlet: cake pans in every possible size and shape, pizza stones, candy thermometers, pastry bags, sugar combs, a willing staff ready to…
Dungeness Crab
Forbidden fish and seafood include… all shellfish and crustacea.. The Askenazim have been much stricter in their practice of kashrut, whereas the Sephardim, even when deeply religious, are known to have been more tolerant and easygoing. Claudia Roden, The Book Of Jewish Food Lobsters are essentially big fucking bugs; they’re…
White Chocolate Raspberry Truffles
After years of loathing white chocolate, I realized the trouble lay not with the ingredient itself, but with the disconnect between expectation and reality. Once I stopped expected white chocolate to taste like the stuff that with geographical pedigrees and percentage points, I stopped loathing it. A parable for hard-won…
