Sassy Radish

This here makes a perfectly respectable lunch despite what you might think. You can try and reason as to why you shouldn’t have potatoes bathed in duck fat, but all of your thinking will fall short of one germane truth against which you will have no argument: they are delicious. These are humble ingredients, potatoes, mushrooms. The whole thing will run you about six dollars, excluding the duck fat. How’s that for economy eating?

You can purchase duck fat a nicer stores or your butcher, or if you cook duck, and you should, you should absolutely save the fat that renders out. Not doing so results in a great culinary tragedy. I actually like cooking duck precisely for the duck fat, because, to me, it’s the best part of the duck.

Continue reading duck fat potatoes with mushrooms.

I was forced to relinquish the map; I had no idea where we were and was getting visibly stressed out. This was our first real trip and I was trying to impress not only with my ability to pick out good restaurants but also that I had fine navigational skills, which by the way, normally are quite strong. And yet those skills were failing me at that very moment – big time.

We were somewhere near Notting Hill, desperate to find one of the Ottolenghi restaurants we’ve heard so much about. I thought I had a pretty good handle on the map, but managed to take a wrong turn and there we were, in a cozy residential part of London that was, distinctly, not where we wanted to be.

I started to stress-sweat through my shirt: I expected Andrew to get angry and sullen, and blame me for not doing enough research, but instead, he calmly took the map, looked at it for a minute, and started to walk in the opposite direction.

Continue reading roasted butternut squash and red onion with tahini and za’atar.

And on the fourth night of Hannukah, there was a loud groan, “We’re all potato-latke’d-out! Let there be another fritter to delight our palates!”

And so it happened. A different latke was made – and everyone was pleased.

While I might be the last person to turn down potato latkes, especially of the hand-grated variety, especially those where extra care has been applied to preserve the starch and decrease the amount of moisture; even I get to a point when a potato latke, while wonderful in its concept, needs a sexier, worldlier cousin. The kind of cousin that will teach a potato latke (generally thought of as a homebody) to wear red lipstick, listen to 80s Prince, and sneak out to go dancing all night.

Continue reading curried sweet potato, carrot, and parsnip latkes with harissa yogurt.

Hi. Happy almost Fourth of July. It’s appropriately hot out there and I hope each one of you is either hosting or attending a cook out of sorts.

Today, I come to you with zucchini and green garlic latkes. It doesn’t sound particularly patriotic, I’m sorry. But I have a book due in less than a month so you can understand when the best laid plans go by the wayside.

I was hoping to have a berry fool for you that featured red, white, and blue colors and was one of those desserts you could whip up for company all the while avoiding the stove. Who wants to add heat to the crazy heat wave that we already have?

But the weekend came and went and I spent all of it, or just about all of it, proofing another galley for The Kimchi Cookbook, and dutifully typing those edits up. There was also a cake of unspeakable greatness, but that’s a story for another day.

Continue reading zucchini green garlic latkes [and a cookbook announcement!].

This is what happens when you get an edited manuscript, while working on another book and planning a wedding all the while your wrist is in a brace for five weeks. You fall behind on work because typing with one hand takes more time. Crazy concept, right?

Writing, in and of itself, is an amazing, thrilling, scary, exhilirating process. Just not with one hand. Typing with one hand is just frustrating. You think of something great to say while you’re finishing sentence, and by the time you get to the end of that sentence, you can’t remember what you were thinking of. It’s a lot of spurts and stops, like going somewhere in a taxi in New York; suddenly the cabbie slams on the breaks and you’re hurled towards the windshield. And before you’ve had time to collect your breath (and your poor discombobulated internal organs), the cabbie is hits the gas pedal and you’re thrown in the way back. Writing with one hand is a bit like that – spastic and not particularly efficient.

Continue reading za’atar roasted cauliflower.

Hello, friends! It’s been while.

Sorry for the long silence. I’ve been meaning to write for quite some time. I had plans to post a week ago, in fact, while I was in LA for the IFBC Santa Monica conference. But that was the day I felt like the death was coming over me and I wound up sleeping all day in the hotel.

Continue reading quinoa with brussels sprouts and pumpkin.

We were going to go to Boston this afternoon to look at wedding venues this weekend, but we cancelled our trip. Andrew has the dreaded summer flu, which in my mind, is way worse than the winter flu because in the winter you’re at least expected to get sick once or twice. Summer flu is the pits – it’s warm outside but you’re running a fever and are therefore cold.

Outside of rescheduling appointments, it’s not a big deal. We’ll get married one way or another some time next year. It’ll happen. You know why? Well, for one, I bought the dress – so um, I have got to wear that thing one way or another. And moreover, I believe I’m owed some wedding pie, so that’s that.

Continue reading broiled tofu with snow peas, broccoli, and shitake.

Who was the first brave soul to tackle an artichoke? I ponder this every time nowadays, when I find myself trimming, pulling, and scraping the prickly vegetable. And while I might never find out the daring gourmand who is responsible for this bounty, I am certainly grateful – artichokes are delicious and are totally worth the trouble they give.

I’m a fairly new to making artichokes at home. Like many of you out there, I suspect, I’ve always been intimidated by them. I’d be at the grocery store, holding them in my hand, and then I’d place them back – they didn’t seem all that friendly and looked like a lot of work. Sometimes, when I wasn’t careful, I’d accidentally hook the tip of my finger on one of the sharp leaves. Once or twice, my fingers bled. How many vegetables can you say are actively out to get you? Artichokes were clearly sending a message – do not eat me.

Continue reading carciofi alla romana.

Of all the dishes of my childhood, none was more loathed than tsimmes. Right around Rosh Hashanah and Passover, this graced our table practically at every meal. But whereas come September, I had many more options food wise, being that it was harvest time and all, come March or April, Russian stores had little to offer and by little I mean sad-looking root vegetables. This is a lot like what the farmers’ market currently has as well, minus the sad-looking part.

For some reason, my hatred of tsimmes inspired my mother, against all odds, to make me love the mushy honeyed carrots. She’d stand over me as I shoved spoonfuls in my mouth, gagging in the process. It was not a pretty sight, but in the spirit of full disclosure I should also add that I was a very picky eater as a kid, so it could’ve just been that tsimmes was the straw that broke the camel’s, or in this case my mothers, back. Or maybe because she was so enamoured of the dish herself, she was hoping that we’d be share our enthusiasm over it. Sadly, that never happened, and I avoided eating and making tsimmes until I hit thirty. Tsimmes was my food arch-nemesis.

Continue reading tsimmes.

Parsnips will never win a beauty prize. They’ll never even place runner-up. And sadly, all too often they get passed up for a prettier-looking vegetable. Root vegetables have it rough, I tell ya.

Even Andrew wrinkled his nose in disappointment after finding out that I was planning on roasting parsnips for supper. “Wasn’t there anything else at the farmers’ market,” he grumbled.

Well, actually, no there wasn’t much more at my local market a few weeks ago, nor has the situation improved much last week. Which is why I kicked off my bimonthly “The Farm Stand” column over at Prospect Heights Patch, with something as homely and humble as a parsnip.

Continue reading roasted parsnips.