What business did my grandmother — a Pittsburgh-born Jew who spent most of her adult life in sunny Los Angeles — have making moussaka, a Balkan/Mediterranean comfort classic that’s predicated on mixing milk and meat and is absolutely the last thing you’d want to eat before heading out for a day at the beach?
Do you know why Neil Armstrong went to the moon?
Oh, I’m sure his desire to make history played a role, as did a thirst for adventure and a deep sense of patriotism. According to my Grandpa Morry, though, there was another reason: Neil had heard there was a deli up there that served the perfect pastrami. Continue reading
I’m proud of this cake for two reasons.
First: It’s probably the prettiest cake I’ve ever made, up to and including that time I tried to craft one shaped like a football. With… mixed results. (But hey, it tasted great, I swear!)
Second: It represents what may be the greatest challenge I’ve ever faced: 40 days without cheese. Continue reading
I won’t sugar-coat this: Stuffed cabbage is just about the unsexiest thing in the history of unsexy things. It’s not colorful. It’s not texturally interesting. And it’s made of cabbage (duh), a vegetable whose very name connotes drab listlessness and smelly farts. (I’m not going to say that the word itself always makes me think of Austin Powers… but I’m also not not going to say that.)
But if you think about it, you might just realize that stuffed cabbage has all the makings of a trendy farm-to-table mainstay. It’s a classic comfort food; it’s appealingly old-school and fairly labor-intensive; it features a cruciferous vegetable, albeit one much less fashionable than brussels sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli, or the almighty kale.
Also, I think it might technically be Paleo — although I refuse to confirm that by actually looking up what things count as Paleo. Continue reading
This salad is almost certainly not Norwegian. And frankly, it’s barely a salad.
Well, maybe I’m being too harsh. “Salad” is a term so broad that it’s basically lost all meaning; this, this, this and this all technically qualify, even though they’ve got nothing in common beyond the fact that a) they don’t require a knife to eat, b) they’re served cold or at room temperature, and c) they’ve all got some kind of dressing. Continue reading
My darling readers — all 10 of you! — I have a confession to make: Nonnie’s cookbook actually contains more recipes than the ones that appear on this list. Continue reading
I’m an Ashkenazi Jew. My fiancé is Italian-American. Our ancestral food cultures — meat-and-potatoes kosher vs. Mediterranean Traif City — have just about nothing in common beyond, like, the fact that both of our people eat bread and drink wine. (His people’s is better.)
But there is one dish that turns the circles of our respective backgrounds into a Venn diagram — a dry, almond-speckled cookie that old ladies of both the Catholic and the Jewish persuasion have been pushing on reluctant kids for billions of years (rough estimation). Continue reading
I have decided that for the rest of the blog post, we are going to talk like this. Continue reading
I learned the word “aesthete” from Rent. I learned the word “crepuscular” from E.B. White’s The Trumpet of the Swan (which, by the way, is a much weirder book than I remember it being). And I learned the word “bouillabaisse” from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, at the very same time as Ron Weasley: Continue reading
It’s Valentine’s Day. It’s 9 degrees (in New York City, at least). It’s Day 2 of a three-day weekend. Do you need any more excuses to spend the afternoon inside, doing nothing in particular besides mixing, baking, frosting, and consuming a chocolate cake that you may or may not decide to share with someone else? Continue reading
And Such Small Portions! 
