Although I love roast chicken, I don’t always plan the defrosting part far enough in advance. Could I roast a chicken frozen? I wondered. So I tried it.
Read MoreAnnals of Personal Hungers: Nori ‘Bread’ and Butter
No doubt it was my hunger for buttered toast that caused me to spread really good butter on a sheet of nori seaweed. That surprising combination has become another thing I hunger for
Read MoreHomemade Lemon-Scented Olive Oil For Bright, Summery Flavor Anytime
Casting about for foods that could sparkle things up and remind me of warm places and summer, I remembered my simple Lemon Olive Oil recipe. YES, that’s what I need, to use and give as gifts.
Read MoreEase and Many Pleasures in a Cookbook Pot-Luck
Our clever friend Fran Black’s brilliant innovation of the traditional pot-luck dinner party model where guests are asked to bring a dish to forge an entire meal, yielded a to-die-for party that felt like Sicily.
Read MoreSalt-Roasted Root Vegetables: Potatoes, Shallots, Sunchokes and Others
One of my favorite ways to cook small, whole firm root vegetables is to bury them in Kosher salt and roast them. It yields an extraordinarily pure flavor.
Read MoreEmergency Ginger Scallion Sauce for Everything
When I am stressed or blue or just plain tired, I turn to the smallish jar I keep in my fridge of ginger scallion …sauce…condiment…elixir…potion…
Read MoreSimple Best: Brown Sugar Lightning Cake
About the simplest and best cake recipe I learned in my long cooking career is “lightning cake”: eggy, tender and fragrant with a fine texture that belies its ease. Recently a reader shouted out: “Hey Sally, why don’t you post the Brown Sugar Lightening Cake on Improvised Life?”, so here it is.
Read MoreCharred, Hot-Roasted Peppers with Pimenton de la Vera
As I get older, my cooking gets simpler. I find myself creating short cuts and innovations on recipes I created years ago, as a way to feed myself and friends more easily. Hankering for the flavors of smoky piquillo peppers I used to love in Spain, I hot roast sliced peppers dusted with smoky paprika…
Read MoreImprovised Life’s Not Shopping Holiday Gift Guide
Years ago, having burned out from years of overdrive in holiday giving, I devised a strategy for pleasurable, stress-free giving that avoids combing through “holiday gift guides” for cool things nobody needs.
Read MoreClassic Chicken Liver Pate + An Artfully Lightened Version after Michel Guerard
My Classic Liver Pate, deeply enriched with butter, cream and cognac, makes a divine and satisfying appetizer or hors d’oeuvre. For those that don’t want such richness, I came up with a lightened version achieve with the same luxurious effect.
Read MoreHow To Have Your Cake and Serve It Too (Fran Black’s Revelation)
Fran Black, known in Australia as Dr. Fran, for her wise counsel on health matters, is an unusually outside-the-box thinker on everyday matters. Recently, she shared her revelation about the dessert she’d made for guests who were coming to dinner, and her breaking of a social taboo.
Read MoreGuest Post: Harriet Bell’s Mom’s Vegetable Soup
Our friend Harriet Bell told us how to make the homemade vegetable soup she’s made for fifty years, improvising on her mother’s beloved recipe.
Read MoreImprovised Life’s Thanksgiving Toolkit
If you’re still wrapping your head around pulling Thanksgiving dinner together, here is our toolkit of Improvised Life’s best ideas from Thanksgivings past.
Read MoreEssential Recipe: Simple Roasted Pears Morph Into Dazzling Desserts
As is, roasted pears are wonderful with whipped cream, creme fraiche, or a custard sauce/creme anglaise*. But they can be the inspiration for all manner of desserts.
Read MorePumpkin Seed Sauce for Shrimp, Fish, Pork, Chips, Eggs…
While traveling in Mexico, I learned a handful of sauces whose flavors I yearn for but seem unable to find in restaurants here. Pumpkin Seed Sauce is one. It has a delicate yet earthy flavor that is delicious on just about anything.
Read MoreRustic Bean Ragout with Many Embellishments
Recently, I was challenged with cooking for a mix of Paleos, vegetarians, and a person who could not eat beans or wheat. Sigh. I fell back on a wildly successful strategy I devised years ago to feed a crowd…
Read MoreRe-envisioning Lettuces and Other Tender Greens
Reading Mads Refslund’s inspired cookbook, Scraps, Wilt & Weeds: Turning Wasted Food into Plenty, I realize that I’ve been employing a simple strategy for using unexpected greens and stems for years: simply envision salad leaves as a green like spinach, perfect for quick cooking.
Read MoreScraps, Wilt & Leaves: Sublime Trash Cooking with a Michelin Chef
I am inspired and smitten with Scraps, Wilt & Weeds: Turning Wasted Food into Plenty. Michelin star chef Mads Refslund weaves a powerful philosophy of ecology into his cooking that has led him to create gorgeous, do-able dishes out of the foods we routinely throw in the trash.
Read MoreSecret Flavor Amplifiers of Clever Cooks + Parmesan Bone Broth Recipe
In Parm Bones: How to Raise Flavor From Foods You Might Throw Away, Zingerman’s Mo Frechette outlines tricks traditional, i.e. frugal, ie savvy cooks use to amplify flavor from the last bits of ingredients. They’re essential, as is this Parm Bone Broth recipe.
Read MoreEssence of Summer Tomato Candy
When we have a surplus of smallish tomatoes like plum or cherry, we often make them into addictive “tomato candy” — a chewy, intensely tomato dried fruit —by drying them the same way we dry herbs for tea or kale chips: drying them on racks in the heat of our pilot lit oven…
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