Sausage with Apples and Garbanzos

I am swimming in apples.

I just can’t get ahead of them. The whole kerfuffle started when a friend went apple picking and brought me home a massive bag. Since then, my CSA has provided a steady supply, and well. My recipe-brain has been stretched this fall, trying to think of more and more creative uses for all my apples.

Most often, I eat them simply: to lend a sweet snap to a ham sandwich. Or alone, with cheese and charcuterie (goat cheese and triple-crème are special favorites). They are nice with soups, as the weather turns, like tomato, carrot, or squash.

You can bake them in a crisp until the apple melts into itself, stirred together with nutmeg and golden sugar. Or bake them as they are until caramelized, with butter and apple cider. Top with ice cream or Greek yogurt. Read more »

October Shepherd’s Pie

This is less a recipe than a concerned effort to use up all the fall CSA vegetables idling in the crisper. And the thyme withering in its sleeve. And the last tiddly-bits of goat cheese camping out in the cheese drawer. (Yes, that’s right. We have a drawer in the fridge entirely devoted to cheese. I would like to blame it entirely on the Frenchman, but that would be a downright lie.)

Feel free to use my base as inspiration for your own seasonal shepherd’s pie. The goal is to find balance: each layer should play off the flavors and textures of the last one. Creamy should give way to crisp. Sweet, spicy, bitter, and salty can all have their moment in the sun. It goes without saying that when you use vegetables at the peak of their season, you’re eating vegetables that taste like their best selves.

This recipe is also an opportunity to use up leftovers. Last night’s vegetables are fair game. Any kind of puree–I’m thinking mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, squash, or any other mashed-up root vegetable–can be spread over the top. This is a good time to use up those last nubbins of cheese. Read more »

Spirals with Arugula Pesto and a Poached Egg

After the laboriousness of those veggie burgers, I thought this next recipe should be decidedly easier breezier, lest you start to think I am some sort of kitchen masochist.

What separates this pesto from any other is a variation on composition: I”ve traded traditional basil for arugula, while toasted hazelnuts stand in for pine nuts. I think it”s a happy redesign. The arugula has a lemony bite, which the hazelnuts mellow and balance. A little roasted garlic, Pecorino cheese, and lemon juice, and you”re in business.

Because it makes a meal, I”ve added a poached egg to the dish. Mix the sunny middle into the pasta in your bowl and you have a sauce that”s more than the sum of its parts. A generous pinch of red pepper flakes takes it over the top. Read more »

The Best Veggie Burger Ever

PLEASE SEE THE UPDATED VERSION OF THIS RECIPE HERE.

Yes, yes, the title of this post is bound to invite raised eyebrows. Could this really be the best veggie burger, of all time, ever? Well, I can tell you this with full confidence: this here veggie burger is the best I’ve tasted by some margin.

Because here is the thing–given the choice between a beef or lamb hamburger and a vegetable facsimile, I would never normally choose the later. Ever.

It’s not that I have something against vegetables. In fact, I quite like vegetables, in their natural state, or coaxed with a bit of heat, olive oil and sea salt. But veggie burgers are not vegetables. Veggie burgers have always seemed to me a strange and unhappy amalgamation of rabbit food mash, a strict and humorless attempt to appease those who forgo meat. Read more »

Duck Breasts with Concord Sauce

Like many Americans, I grew up eating seedless, thin-skinned grapes. It wasn’t until I visited the Frenchman’s family that I tasted my first sour grape, small and green as a jade bead, thoroughly packed with bitter seeds. Neither variety left me particularly inspired.

And then, and then. I received a punnet of Concord grapes in my CSA basket this week. Holy milkshakes. Are these ever game-changing grapes.

First of all, they are very nice to look at: inky in shades of dusty, Prussian blue, their skins lightly variegated like crushed velvet. But what really gets me is how they smell. There is no other way to say it–they smell like candy. They smell like grape Jolly Ranchers in perfume form.

My apartment is small. When I lay them on the kitchen table, I can smell them from almost every corner. I feel like some kind of crazed addict, pulling long, conspicuous sniffs as I go about my writing. Read more »

Pulled Pork with Stone Fruit Salsa

Cooking intrigues me for multifarious reasons, but chief among them is this: the learning process is endless. The opportunity for new challenges is endless. There will always a new ingredient to try, or a new technique to study. And even if you taste all the ingredients there are to taste, and try all the techniques there are to try (if such a thing is even possible), you would still be left with the enormous task of mixing and matching so many ingredients with so many techniques.

Learning to cook well takes time–this aspect of cooking at least is magic-less. The 700th clove of garlic you peel will naturally discard its coat more swiftly than the ones that came before it. You’ll sense vanilla custard is done now–right now, not thirty seconds from now, but now–without a thermometer only through exhaustive practice.

Writing a recipe requires imagination, yes, but imagination without context will lead you nowhere tasty in a hurry. The best recipes call upon knowledge assembled steadily over time. Like an unhurried braise, intuition in the kitchen is a gradually lacquered thing. Read more »

Salt-Crust Chicken with Buttermilk Dressing

I’ve known for some time that baking whole fish in a salt crust is a super-duper prize idea: It’s easy, it’s dramatic, and best of all, it results in foolproofishly (get it?) soft, tender fish. It wasn’t until I offered to write a recipe for these lovely people that I began to realize the sheer possibilities of salt crusts.

It’s really down to J. Kenji López-Alt, who knows what the fish fingers he’s talking about. His recipe series, The Food Lab, delves deeply into the chemistry of what makes a dish tick. He experiments with food from all possible angles, providing pictures along the way. In doing so, he illuminates the reasons why something works, and just as importantly, why something doesn’t work. I’ve learned a lot from this man.

In perusing an article he wrote on salt crusts, I came across his recipe for salt-crust chicken. It just makes sense. The salt traps moisture, and gently flavors the chicken in cooking. While you don’t achieve the crispy skin of a roasted chicken, you do come away with meat that’s impossibly soft and juicy, even the breast meat. You can basically use any herb/aromatic combination you like, so this preparation becomes endlessly adaptable as well. Read more »

Lobster Salad Sandwiches

Dear reader, I had every intention of dispatching a lobster yesterday.

I wasn’t looking forward to it, for several reasons. For starters, the last time I whacked a crustacean was in culinary school. It was 110° with the stoves turned off. We were each given a silver bowl full of wriggling, mud-brown crabs, and then on went the ranges. I poured a wheel of oil into my large pot, and waited until it was nearly smoking. After a silent “excusez-moi” to my ill-fated crabs, I tipped them in.

The truth is, the smell of ten bowls-worth of little crabs in a very hot kitchen is not the finest scent in the world. I would not recommend bottling it for sale. Read more »

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