Foraging & Feasting: A Field Guide and Wild Food Cookbook by Dina Falconi, illustrated by Wendy Hollender, will enable you to actually cook with the many abundant, common wild foods hiding in plain sight, or available at your farmer’s market.
Read MoreCecil and Merl Bitters’ Vibrant Flavors INSPIRE, Drinks to Desserts
Of all the artisanal bitters we’ve sampled over the years, Brooklyn-based Cecil and Merl’s totally blew us away. They managed to distill clear vibrant flavors of fruits, vegetables and herbs with a subtle bitter afterfinish that goes well in all manner of cocktail, culinary and wellness applications. Given their sublime flavors and endless uses, they are a perfect house gift.
Read MoreOur Twelve Best 4th of July Recipes (Just in Time)
The city is quiet already, as many people have blown down in preparation for their 4th of July celebrations. In case you need a few ideas while you do your shopping, here’s some of our favorite summer recipes. Most are easy to make; all are delish and perfect for a summer evening, from Mamma Lucia’s Insalata…
Read Moremamma lucia’s essential tomato sauce
I did not REALLY know how to make a great marinara sauce until Lucia LoPresti taught me how. The key: Lucia’s trick of sauteing the onions in a liberal amount of olive oil, which makes for an mellow, curiously velvety tomato sauce. It is a perfect sauce for pasta and a fine base for many…
Read Morerecipe riff: chard + other vegetables stuffed with rice, raisins, pine nuts
For many years, I wrote about improvising in the kitchen. My basic approach was to show people how to ‘see’ the basic structure of a recipe. Once you understood its essential workings, you could play with all sorts possibilities, depending on what you had on hand or were inspired to do. It’s pure liberation. So…
Read More4th of july pt 1: grill rigs + open-fire paella improvs
Every 4th of July, my friend Timothy Chegwidden cooks two huge paellas, Spain’s famous rice dish, for a gathering of friends and their children. Tim makes his paella as they REALLY do in Spain, outdoors over a wood fire — the slight hint of smoke is essential to its flavor — a Spanish-style barbeque that makes…
Read Moresplendid table’s ‘key 3’ recipes from great cooks
Over the past few month’s public radio’s The Splendid Table hosted by Lynne Rossetto Kasper has featured an illuminating series called Key 3: a series of discussions with great cooks (not just professional chefs) about the three recipes or techniques they think everyone should know. In a break from traditional radio, Kasper and her team…
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