Having a little secret can be exhilarating. A low-stakes one, of the “no one in this room knows I ate cake for breakfast” variety, is fun expressly because it’s inconsequential. Feel mysterious! Hurt no one! In cooking, a secret ingredient provides me with that sense of mystique. Nothing puts a Cheshire cat grin on my…
When I wake up in the morning, I shower and wash my face with CeraVe Hydrating Facial Cleanser — I’ve been using it for over ten years. It doesn’t leave a tight feeling, which is a real problem for me during the winter, when I get so dry and dehydrated. I’m not superloyal to any…
“I feel like a winter coat with pasta all over it is a little bit of joy,” she said. This winter, the pasta puffer has been especially conspicuous. Lauren Goldstein, 26, who works in social media and marketing in Manhattan and owns the coat, said this could be a result of the unseasonably warm weather…
THE FIGS ARE as big as a baby’s fist at Sahadi’s; the dates, plump, juicy and sweet. The venerable Middle Eastern grocery store on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn Heights also sells luscious blocks of halvah and honey-soaked baklava. Coffee beans are still stored in and sold from open barrels in the front of the store,…
The most useful recipes — the ones that ferret their way into your brain and inform the way you cook — have light-bulb moments, details that you need to read only once to comprehend. Some of the ideas highlighted below are broad, like spotlighting the importance of salting layer by layer, while some are hyperspecific,…
Last week, Kim Severson had an inspiring piece in The Times about the influential cookbook author and teacher Raghavan Iyer, who, Kim reported, by some estimations has taught more Americans how to cook Indian food than anyone else. He wrote his recently published book, “On the Curry Trail: Chasing the Flavor That Seduced the World…
Since its founding in 1852, the Jaipur, India, jewelry emporium the Gem Palace has been known for its dazzling diamonds, rubies and sapphires. But Siddharth Kasliwal, a partner at the Gem Palace and the creative director of Munnu the Gem Palace — the New York City atelier started by his late father, Munnu — has…
My father was an exacting eater and suspicious of certain ingredients. (Cilantro above all he despised.) But I don’t think he ever inspected the label on that Lea & Perrins bottle, which would have revealed to him the presence of fermented glutamate-rich anchovies, a food that in no other form was allowed to cross the…
In anticipation of a frigid winter that never quite panned out, I wrote about cozy dining in late December. You know those restaurants, the ones that make you feel as if you’ve been spirited away to a quieter part of New York City reserved just for you and yours. In the same dispatch, I asked…
From the street, Torrisi Bar & Restaurant looks like a set for the hottest restaurant in New York in a movie made by people who don’t live in New York. You can’t see inside the curtained windows, but you can read the restaurant’s name, painted in gold script, from across the street. Black S.U.V.s with…