Can we talk about my favorite holiday — a foodie celebration that comes but once a year, a national occasion that makes my heart swell with unmistakably American pride?
Obviously, I don’t mean Thanksgiving. I’m talking about National Half-Price Avocado Day, a.k.a. the Monday after the Super Bowl. It’s not recognized on a nation-wide scale yet — the name, I admit, could use work — but there’s real potential there. Continue reading
So as I’ve written before, the first thing I ever really cooked for myself — beyond scrambled eggs — was Nonnie’s ratatouille.
But the first fancy thing I ever cooked — something that required preparing separate ingredients in different ways, making a sauce, carefully assembling a final dish that was not only tasty but also pretty — was Gourmet magazine’s intricate inside-out eggplant parmigiana, an artistically deconstructed take on the fat kid classic. (You know, the kind of thing a Top Chef contestant would call “my play on eggplant parmesan.”) Continue reading
It finally happened: I crossed the gelatin rubicon.
You know how Julie Powell (of Julie and Julia fame) flipped out when faced with cooking Julia Child’s aspic, a.k.a. meat jello (shudder)? That’s sort of how I felt when I first saw that there’s a whole section of gelatin-based dishes in Nonnie’s cookbook.
Almost all of them are desserts — save a truly horrific-sounding shrimp mold, which I intend to avoid for as long as possible — but that still didn’t quite ease my worries. I know that gelatin is a perfectly cromulent ingredient; I know that modern gastronomic types even champion it as the secret to everything from juicier meatballs to soft-serve.
And yet… gelatin is gross, guys. Continue reading
Let’s talk about fridge fish. Continue reading
Allow me to read your mind: What the hell is limpa bread? Continue reading
I spent the last week of 2015 in Mexico City, blissfully gorging myself on meat, cheese, and gloriously simple carbohydrates. I ate red mole and black mole and guacamole, corn fungus (surprisingly delicious) and goat-milk caramel (ditto) and grasshoppers (not… great), barbacoa and chilaquiles and weird Mexican convenience store snacks, sandwich cookies and pastries and a pink drink called a Lulu that I absolutely would have been embarrassed to order at home, but whatever, we were on vacation, and if you can’t have pink drinks on vacation, when can you have them?
Naturally, I returned to New York with a heavy sigh and a mild case of scurvy. I was more than ready for January, when we atone for the excesses of the holidays with whole grains and hot water with lemon and diets disguised as “cleanses.”
Unfortunately for January, there’s a real deficit of “healthy” recipes in Nonnie’s cookbook. Continue reading
As a kid, the cartoons that consumed a good, oh, two-thirds of my waking hours warped me into believing a lot of erroneous stuff. Vintage Looney Toons made me wary of dogcatchers, limburger cheese, anvils, and banana peels, all dangers I somehow have yet to encounter in real life. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles taught me to shun anchovies, leading to a tragic Caesar salad deficiency in my early years.
And then we have liver and onions, a combination that several cartoons used as shorthand for “something disgusting your parents will force you to eat.” I’m thinking specifically about an episode of Doug that revolves around the title character’s fear that he’ll be forced to eat the dreaded dish when he’s invited to dinner at Patti Mayonnaise’s house. You know, the stuff of your worst 11-year-old nightmares, although I’m pretty sure I didn’t know what liver was until my animated pal taught me to hate it. Having brought a pile of raw liver into my kitchen recently, I can’t imagine why he wasn’t a fan.
The first time I leafed through Nonnie’s cookbook, I was surprised to find that there are barely any cookie recipes in there — just three, in fact, and one of them is secretly a cake.
Hidden in another section, though, there was something called “Cream Cheese Pastry” — a simple, cream cheese-enhanced dough that’s rolled out, cut, and filled with jam.
“Oh!” I thought. “So they’re rugelach!”
Not really. Continue reading
It’s still Hanukkah, which means it’s still acceptable – encouraged, even – to painstakingly grate a mess of potatoes into long, ropy strands, plunge them into ice-cold water, squeeze the living daylights out of them, bind them together just barely with eggs and flour, fry them in copious amounts of oil, slather them with sour cream and applesauce, and call it dinner.
Acceptable and encouraged, maybe — but nobody would blame you if you’re exhausted just from reading the previous paragraph. Continue reading
Nonnie’s brisket may be the original fusion food: an implicitly kosher, theoretically cheap, classically old-school Jewish piece of meat that’s bathed in a deeply maroon, ethnically agnostic slurry of quintessential American convenience foods.
Of course, she was far from the only grandmother to mix ketchup with powdered soup and call it a marinade. Her recipe is a variation on the very same method you’ll find in all corners of the American Semitic universe, literally from sea (the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles’ online Hanukkah guide) to shining sea (this Massachusetts synagogue’s brisket bake-off). Continue reading
And Such Small Portions! 