It may be spring, but summer — and all its abundance — is on the horizon, ready to encourage breezy communal dining under the glow of the sun and the grill. No gathering of the season is complete without bounteous produce, which can be quickly and easily turned into crowd-pleasing sides. These summer dishes, all…
They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and when I think of necessity, mothers and invention, I think of my colleague Priya Krishna and her mother, Ritu. Years ago, after falling in love with spanakopita on a family trip to Greece, Ritu expertly swapped in feta while making saag paneer when she could…
Summer can be a punishing time of year — the heat! — but it can also be the most rewarding, full of juicy stone fruit consumed precariously over the kitchen sink, plump tomatoes fresh from the market (or the garden, if you’re lucky) and impromptu beach days that call for recipes both simple and satisfying.…
The best advice for making shrimp cocktail I ever learned came from the great chef and cookbook author James Beard. He was adamantly against it. Not the shrimp, of course, which he adored, but rather the “overpowering red menace known as cocktail sauce,” as he wrote in his classic cookbook, “The New James Beard.” “If…
One of my favorite dinner shortcuts is to nestle a hot roast chicken on a heap of sturdy greens like kale, baby mustard or watercress. The chicken fat coats and gently wilts the greens, infusing them with the chicken’s flavor. It’s a perfect side dish for the roasted bird that requires no extra work. Now…
“Double Scotch, single-malt.” I tried my best to get the words out confidently, hoping to channel Patrick Dempsey’s character, Dr. McDreamy, on “Grey’s Anatomy.” If a three-ounce pour of single-malt Scotch whisky was good enough for a suave television neurosurgeon, then it was good enough for me, a squeaky 19-year-old with his big brother’s ID…
New York City is full of restaurants that deliver the unexpected. A nearly 80-year-old Jewish deli run by a Yemeni family, scallion pancake burritos lowered from someone’s fire escape by bucket, bagels to rival New York’s delivered from Connecticut. After all, isn’t that why we live here? The ever-present possibility that something exciting could be…
Sometimes it takes an entire meal before I know whether I want to write about a new restaurant. At Tobalá, an eight-month-old Mexican place in Riverdale in the Bronx, I was pretty sure after one drink. The drink was a carajillo, a cocktail made with two ingredients, espresso and the Spanish liqueur Licor 43, shaken…
When Brigette Ramirez and her family drove to Houston for a Taylor Swift concert, she made a very important pit stop. Three, actually: T.J. Maxx, T.J. Maxx and T.J. Maxx. Mx. Ramirez, 33, an 11th-grade U.S. history teacher, was on the hunt for the sugar-free syrups that her fellow flavored-water enthusiasts had cleaned out from…
Foragers around the world hunt for wild mushrooms to bring their earthy, nutty, meaty flavors to the table. But every so often, people mistake a potentially lethal variety for the edible ones. A mushroom called the death cap — Amanita phalloides — and dozens of related species containing the same toxin, alpha amanitin, account for…