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 More‘Celestial Sheet-Caking’ in Chocolate
In the course of yesterday’s extraordinary afternoon of the eclipse, readers and friends sent us their many a la minute eclipse improvisations. The most unexpected was the cake Zoe made…
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…
Read MoreSummer in a Jar: Flower and Herb Teas and Seasonings
There are some kitchen processes I do so automatically that I hardly think about them, until I become suddenly conscious that it is a principle I am using, and not a recipe. For years I’ve used a simple method to transform summer herbs and flowers into teas and seasonings for use all year round.
Read MoreImprovised Kitchen: Summer Fruit with Feta, Olive Oil and Maybe an Herb
The Blueberries, Feta and Mint recipe I love from Mindy Fox’s Salads: Beyond the Bowl is a play on a classic pairing of watermelon with feta. The possibilities for improvising on it are endless when you’re shopping summer markets. Here are some ideas.
Read MoreHow to Make the Most of The Delicious End of Asparagus Season
Asparagus season, usually a fleeting few weeks in Spring, is peaking now. I recommend REVELING in them while you can. New asparagus has an extraordinary pea-like flavor that you can unlock by simply steaming them until crisp-tender. Add butter, or a fried egg and Parmigiano.
Read MoreHoney from a Weed: Simple Rice or Risotto with Dandelion (or other Greens)
It is weed season. Dandelions make me hunger for a simple dish I first read in Honey From a Weed, a cookbook I’ve continued to enjoy for over thirty years. The elemental Macedonian dish morphs into a splendid risotto.
Read MoreSpring Breakfast: A Perfect Boiled Egg with Toast Soldiers
This Sunday, we’ll celebrate Spring and Easter with a simple, of-the-season breakfast: soft boiled eggs with toast soldiers, and good coffee, inspired by Ellen Silverman’s Girl with Egg. Here’s how to make perfection out of something so simple.
Read MoreHunger-Crazed Cooks Confess 50 Ways to Eat Eggs
When there is nothing in the pantry, there is almost always the egg. Here are 50 ways to cook them from hunger crazed food people and Leite’s Culinaria. Just to spark you imagination.
Read MoreGiant Chewy, Crispy, Eggy Popover-Pancake (Savory or Sweet)
As we were gobbling a giant sweet, lemony dessert popover with pancake overtones, we thought: Wouldn’t this also be great SAVORY instead of sweet? So we added Parmigiano Regginao to the basic egg and flour structure with to make delectable lunch, supper, hors d’oeuvre.
Read MoreEarl Gray Tea (and Other) Butter Cookies
When I want a dessert for a dinner party, I often turn to this recipe for delectable, melt-in-your-mouth cookies fragrant with butter and the caramel flavors of light brown sugar and Earl Gray tea, with its citrusy-floral scent.
Read MoreHey Vegetarians and Lazy Dogs: Check out this Faux Veal Stock
Years ago, I learned an easy-to-make vegetarian broth from chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten that tastes remarkably like veal stock. The main ingredient: ordinary button or cremini mushrooms in league with a few other ingredients you probably already have on hand.
Read MoreA Simple Formula for Sublime Macaroni-and-Cheese
My latest iteration of mac-and-cheese is a fast, ultra-simple formula that I can tailor as needed without using a recipe, with utterly delicious results. Win-win-win.
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