For much of the year in Haiti, rain seeps into the crevices of rotting wood, sparking the growth of an island delicacy: an earthy, black mushroom named djon-djon that is the main ingredient for a rice dish made on special occasions. The mushrooms are handpicked throughout the rainy season and left to shrivel in the…
Making yeasted bread is one of the few acts of cooking where ingredients actually come to life. Dough expands in size and flavor when yeast feast on sugar to then release carbon dioxide gas. Seeing and smelling dough rise can be as restorative as eating the warm loaf, but only if the process feels foolproof…
The lighting designer Lindsey Adelman knows how to throw a classic dinner party — the kind with cocktails and good conversation — but as a host, she says, she gravitates toward formats that offer her guests “bliss in an unconventional way.” Accordingly, she’s organized figure-drawing sessions, sound baths and, most recently, a two-hour cacao ceremony.…
Good morning. Bari, Italy, the capital of Puglia, is on the Adriatic coast. My friend and colleague Steven Raichlen was there not long ago to look into one of the city’s most notable pasta dishes: spaghetti all’assassina (above). That translates as the spaghetti of an assassin, killer spaghetti: spicy, singed strands of deeply burnished pasta…
Paul writes: I’m the cook in our house. As summer turns to fall, I like to make hearty soups. But my wife contends that soup is not a dinner food — unless she is sick. I say this is absurd. Your wife can always make her own prime rib or pheasant under glass or whatever.…
Hi, I’m Pete Wells, restaurant critic for the Times and unarmed duck hunter. Each October, I get hungry for duck. There’s no good explanation for my timing. In some parts of the country, fall is when you pull on waders, whistle for the retrievers and crouch in a marsh waiting for mallards and teals to…
In meal-train cooking — be it for an ailing friend, a weary new-parent neighbor or a grief-stricken co-worker — the cheesy casserole often prevails. Few things can comfort like, say, a tray of easy-to-freeze lasagna at the onset of difficult times. But the reality of hard times is that they can outlast even the biggest…
Now that we have dessert (or our 3 p.m. snack) sorted, let’s talk dinner. If you have shrimp in the freezer and gnocchi in your pantry, you’ve already got 25 percent of what you need for Melissa’s one-pan shrimp scampi with crispy gnocchi. This dish is equal parts reviving and comforting, with the assertive jolts…
Anton Coleman, an avid fan of American whiskey with several hundred bottles in his collection, lives on the outskirts of Nashville, less than an hour’s drive from Lynchburg, the home of one of the distilling world’s most famous names, Jack Daniel’s. Yet until recently, not one of his bottles bore the distinctively filigreed Jack Daniel’s…
Michael Chiarello, a hard-working, TV-ready chef from California’s Central Valley whose culinary prowess and intuitive knack for marketing helped define a chapter of Italian-influenced Northern California cuisine and the rural escapism of the Napa Valley lifestyle, died on Friday in Napa. He was 61. His death, in a hospital, was the result of an acute…