They wore floppy toques and were flanked by an array of ingredients: vegetable broth, chili peppers, bay leaves, potatoes, shallots, radishes, garlic powder, canned beans, carrots and more — all crowdsourced from their eager guests. As their pots emptied, they made more stew. But these weren’t chefs. And this was hardly a serious culinary exercise.…
Sometimes a kitchen needs a last-minute miracle, and mine is always frozen pesto. At a moment’s notice, I can stir a spoonful of herby, garlicky zip into any dish that needs it, lifting it to a whole new level. In a perfect pesto world, that frozen sauce is homemade — a mix of tiny-leafed Genovese…
This soy-butter corn ramen has peak summer flavor One cooking myth I’m ready to see disappear is that vegetable-based meals are harder or more time-consuming to make than meat-based ones. I’d argue that it’s just a matter of experience: The more you cook with vegetables, the more comfortable and confident you become with turning them…
In the waters of Puget Sound outside Seattle, 73 beloved and endangered orcas, known as the Southern Residents, are on the hunt, clicking. Using sound like a searchlight, they patrol the chilly depths. When they locate a target, they dive, sinking sharp white teeth into their preferred food, the fatty coral-colored flesh of king salmon.…
There’s debate about whether the bread needs to be toasted. Most Southerners, like Mary, would say no: That soft texture is central to the traditional tomato-sandwich experience. But Jason Skrobar, a food stylist and author of the coming “The Book of Sandwiches,” calls for toasted sourdough in a variation with sun-dried-tomato mayonnaise, which he calls…
New Yorkers have talked about the $29 hot dog at Mischa more than any other new dish this year. It may be better known than Mischa itself, which opened in Midtown in April with an American theme that Alex Stupak, the chef and an owner, interprets freely and with a big pinch of Eastern Europe…
Headliner Alligator Pear Though given a popular name for avocado, this New Orleans restaurant, bar and event space is not serving any for now. “I haven’t yet figured out how I want to prepare it, maybe blackened, but it is coming,” said Dominick Lee, the executive chef and a New Orleans native. But tempura alligator…
Exploring the restaurants of Greenpoint’s Little Tokyo This is me resisting the urge to use the “a [BLANK] grows in Brooklyn” cliché. I’ll say, instead, that there’s something afoot in Greenpoint, Brooklyn: a spate of Japanese restaurants and businesses that opened in the past few years in an industrial section of the neighborhood. I’m not…
There are times when you don’t want to cook, and there are times when you can’t bear to cook — that extra tablespoon of desperation keeps you from walking into the kitchen and turning on the stove. I feel that most acutely at the height of the summer, when it’s just too hot to do much…
Last summer, on an overcast July day, the coastal town of Sitka, once the capital of Russian Alaska and long a popular stop on Inside Passage cruises in Southeast Alaska, was thronged with passengers disembarking from three cruise ships. To accommodate the crowds, the city had closed the main street to cars. In their place,…