Mains

Cold Sirloin Sesame Noodles

I’ve developed an unfortunate habit. It’s quite embarrassing, really, but still I persist:

I want your bones. All of them. The bigger the better. I will probably ask for yours in public. Please don’t try to fight it.

Perhaps I should explain.

In the last few months, I’ve formed a tiny obsession with homemade stocks. The understanding that bones + water + vegetables + herbs + time = liquid splendor has been revelatory. I don’t fuss over details: I use the bones, herbs and vegetables I have on hand. This way, each batch is slightly different, but always wonderful. I freeze the results in ice cube trays, and use what I need for soups, pan sauces, risotto, rice. Good stock gives new life to vegetables, mashed potatoes and leftovers alike. Read more »

Lamb and Saffron Rice with Spring Vegetables

Rice and me, we aren’t quite simpatico.

For starters, I didn’t grow up eating it; the starch of choice in my parent’s house was pasta. Personally, I have an ongoing love affair with potatoes of all stripes. I was, at best, ambivalent about the grain, until I got to culinary school.

In French culinary school, you are taught to make rice the old-fashioned way: in a pan, covered with a perfect wheel of parchment paper. (My “wheels” looked more like drunk hexagons, but I digress.) Read more »

Spring Soup

After months and months of the same old, same old at the market—the same ruddy sweet potatoes, the same crinkled white onions—these days it’s flush with new gems all the time, and I am unapologetically thrilled about it. Last week I collected peach blossom branches (note: peach blossom branches do not fit into bicycle baskets; you will look clumsy all the way home), and this week I scooped up bundles of perfumed lilacs, to fill every available ledge of my apartment.

Broccolini arrived this week, which I plan to boil in salty water until it just yields, and then toss lovingly with olive oil and Pecorino. There are a multitude of baby lettuces to consider, not to mention the asparagus I will barely roast and toss with lemon juice or egg yolk. And what about radishes? They should be sliced thinly and strewn across buttery toast, sprinkled with sea salt…. It’s a good time to be a cook. Read more »

“Doggy Bag” Chicken Soup

If you ask the Frenchman, he’ll tell you I only ever order one dish when we go out to dinner: chicken. This isn’t true of course, but I will admit that chicken is my backup dish, my reliable mainstay amongst the flotsam and jetsam of an uninspiring menu. (It doesn’t hurt that chicken dishes typically arrive with some kind of saucy vegetable and potato arrangement, but that is neither here nor there.)

Last week we had friends visiting from France, and so I used the opportunity to knock a restaurant or two off my Must Try list. (It’s a long list, alas.) One evening, we dined in a restaurant where every hostess was certainly a model. I’d read an article about the owner; he raised chickens (well, not he, but people he employed) on a devastatingly bucolic farm somewhere upstate in order to supply the restaurant with high-quality poultry. This kind of information is like catnip to me; of course, I had to try it. Read more »

Shrimp Tacos

The impetus for these tacos was pretty simple: although it’s been dreary, dreary winter in New York for months now, the last few days have been glorious. Like, leave-your-coat-at-home-and-run-though-the-streets-with-your-arms-in-the-air glorious.

So when it came time to make dinner, I wanted to build upon the theme. I don’t have a hammock in my living room (not yet, at least), but I figured this was the next best thing. Well, this and the Coronas I served them with. Feel free to pretend you are grilling the shrimp on an actual barbeque, instead of on the little grill pan you bought from Ikea. Read more »

Sardine Pizza

This pizza is for a winter weeknight when you want something tasty and substantial, but you do not feel like venturing out for too many ingredients. I typically have most of the ingredients on hand, or if not, some version of them: various nubs of leftover cheese, wilting greens and herbs, some form of leftover potato or onion, etc.

I should say that, although it feels like cheating to me, I do not make my own pizza crust for this recipe. Because this is a “make the night of, with as little fuss as possible” kind of recipe, I use either pizza dough purchased from my local Neapolitan joint, Sottocasa, or I buy naan from the supermarket. To make things even easier, you can also make most of the elements of this pizza ahead of time.

This pizza was my first go-around with a pizza stone, and here is what I learned: If you toss flour onto a stone surface that has spent an hour in a 500 degree oven, it is going to burn. Really, really fast. Then you will be forced to run around your apartment like a headless chicken, opening windows and turning on vents. It’s not a pretty picture. My suggestion, therefore, is to simply make sure the bottom of the pizza dough is well floured before you put it in the oven. Read more »

Halibut au Pistou with Shallots, Peppers and Fingerlings

Over the summer, I attended my first wedding. (I am twenty-six years old—it was a long time coming.) I am not sorry to say it set the bar quite high for all future nuptial celebrations. For one thing, it was held in the Irish countryside in the flush of summer. We heard mass in an aged church, led by the groom’s Irish-priest uncle. And then there was the party, impossibly posh and lovely, which continued far into the evening.

My mother is fond of saying that wedding food is terrible. “Enjoy the canapés,” she says, “because everything else will be awful.” But this is a false doctrine at 100% of the weddings I’ve attended so far. Yes, hors d’oeuvres were served, along with tall flutes of Cava on the patio (that is, before it started pouring; we were in Ireland after all). But a multi-course dinner (replete with fish forks and wine pairings) followed. And then there was a dessert bar. (Here the details start to get fuzzy. Can you blame me? It would have been a crime to let all that wine go to waste.) At some point I remember giggling with my sister over my parent’s, uh, spirited dancing. Around midnight, they set out fish and chips and other miniature fried things….Let’s just say this was not a wedding for the faint-of-stomach. Read more »

Research Chili

The fact of the matter is, I have never made chili before. Not really. I didn’t grow up in a “comfort food” household, and I do not spend my days herding cattle. I have no hockey team to feed. And since you can’t exactly whip up a single portion of chili, it never occurred to me to throw together a pot full. (A silly notion, considering how beautifully chili freezes.)

As a result of my chili ignorance, I was only vaguely aware of the rules surrounding the dish—beans vs. no beans, what cut of meat to use, what variety of chili pepper….and so on. I arrived at this recipe the same way any self-respecting nerd would have: I read everything I could get my hands on. Read more »