For Tuesday night’s dinner I unearthed a recipe I haven’t used in years. And I think I’ve only cooked it once, for our friend Aaron (and maybe my mom?) when Matt and I were living on Shepard street, just outside Harvard Square. It’s the only recipe I have that calls for juniper berries, which means that I am still using the same jar of junipers that I bought many years ago for the last time this dish was made. Clearly, I am not one of those people who diligently disposes of herbs and spices on a regular basis and replaces them with fresh ones. I’ve heard the shelf-life for most spices is about a year if you want them to be pungent and bright. I’m mildly ashamed to tell you that my jar of cardamom pods has outlived three apartments. I just can’t bring myself to throw edible (if not quite fresh or good) food away. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: February 2015
My Gift to You
If you follow the blog by email, you probably got an email yesterday with a broken link. Don’t worry. It’s not you, it’s me. I published a post, then thought better of it. It was a little mopey, a little mean, you really didn’t need to read it. I promise. Still, I feel I owe you a little something to make up for the blunder. And so, I give you the best, easiest, fastest cookie bar recipe ever. Seriously, start to finish in under an hour. And unless you don’t like peanut butter (like my boss’s boss, what?) or chocolate (I’m not even going to comment on this), you will LOVE these. Continue reading
Valentine’s Day Steak
Let’s talk about Valentine’s Day. Does anyone out there actually celebrate? That question is totally facetious and mostly rhetorical, since I listened to an NPR story on Friday about how a Manhattan florist has 25,000 roses shipped directly from a farm in Ecuador to his shop door just in time to sell them to V-day shoppers at twice their usual price. All of the roses need to magically bloom six days before February 14. The flowers wear little hair nets to protect them from the wind and farm workers open and close the canvas curtains surrounding the plants to shield them from the elements. It’s all spectacularly dramatic, far more enthralling than the holiday itself. Continue reading
Finding the Dek
Last week at work, I sat in on a short talk by Christian Caryl. He spoke to a room full of graduate students, all eager to learn the secret to writing well. Have a point, he told us. And get to it quickly. Support it with just the most relevant facts and say it all with passion. All of which, he confessed, is much easier said than done. But then he suggested the following: Start with the dek. The dek is the very brief description immediately following the headline. The dek is your entire story summed up in a line or two. Once you have the dek, the story’s arc is set and you can travel the curve from start to finish, filling in the details along the way. Continue reading
Kitchen Tools and Challah French Toast
I was so eager to tell you about last weekend’s amazing pot pie that I neglected to tell you about the new kitchen tool I bought myself. You’re probably thinking that this is no big deal, that an avid home cook like me must buy kitchen tools the way normal people buy lattes or chapstick (or whatever it is normal people buy on a regular basis). But I don’t. In fact, I basically never buy kitchen stuff unless it’s absolutely necessary (see the French press incident and the must-have melon baller). Desperate times call for new kitchen supplies, but most of the time I’m pretty happy with the tried and trues. Continue reading
Sunday Lunch Love
I know I’ve already told you how much I love Sunday lunch. The Sundays I spent eating dim sum with my dad at Bernard’s in the Chestnut Hill Mall. Or the Sundays we went to Viet Hong and split a bowl of pho. Or the Sundays we sat at the bar at Legal Sea Foods and talked to our favorite bartender over light clam chowder (the cream-less version where you can actually taste the clams). Or the Sundays in Rangeley when dad made eggs florentine and the smell tantalized us for a full hour before it was ready to eat. Sunday lunch is perfect in so many ways. It’s far enough into the weekend that the week feels like a distant memory, but there’s still a long lazy afternoon ahead. And there’s so much time to eat, slowly, lazily, happily. Continue reading
Cooking For Sig 