December seems like a strange time of year to get excited about new weeknight recipes. There’s just so much to do as the holidays approach. Lean on standbys! Order takeout! You’re busy. And yet — this is surely a procrastination technique — I’m in full cooking mode, trying recipes I’ve never made a few nights a…
All year, I write and cook recipes that, beyond tasting delicious, have a reason and a season. The recipes are pegged to fixed moments in time, ideas rooted in the vegetables coming out of the ground. By the time December comes around, truth be told, I look at my cooking a little differently. Maybe it’s…
Cooking duck at home is a classic example of when my quest for perfection undermines the “tasty enough.” For years, I strove to create the idealized vision of roast duck that I held in my head. It had to have crackling, burnished skin as crisp as a potato chip, and ruby-hued breast meat as rare…
Sometimes you want a baking project to last all day, while other times you just need to satisfy a craving — and quick. Or maybe you just found out about tomorrow’s school bake sale, um, tonight. These sweets require only one bowl for assembly, one vessel for baking and a reasonable number of ingredients. But…
Domaine des Ardoisières Vin des Allobroges Argile Blanc 2019 I’ve been enjoying the wines of the Savoie region of France for a long time, though primarily the reds and sparklers. This was the year I fell in love with Savoie whites. Savoie is in the Alpine foothills of eastern France, where the border intersects with…
Workers at one Buffalo-area Starbucks store have voted to form a union, according to results announced by the National Labor Relations Board on Thursday. Workers at a second store in the area voted against unionizing, according to the board, though a union lawyer contended that some ballots had been delivered to the agency and not…
Some personal news: I got a microwave this week! I haven’t had a microwave since my sophomore year of college, when I shared a tiny kitchen with a roommate, and we used it exclusively for popcorn and warming up cold coffee about 10 times a day. I didn’t see the point in owning one after…
On a Friday afternoon in the spring of 2020, Hope Bagozzi, the chief marketing officer at the Canadian coffee chain Tim Hortons, was on a Zoom call with representatives for Justin Bieber. The agenda for the meeting? Exploring a possible partnership between the two Canadian greats. The call was business-as-usual but took a surreal turn…
Using a little soda in your ham glaze is an old art, but boiling your ham in two liters of soda may be a more recent practice. The first two-liter bottle wasn’t invented until the early 1970s, when Pepsi came out with one. This must have paved the way for boiling your ham in soda,…
Headliner Bonnie’s The chef Calvin Eng’s career began with culinary school, followed by several years of increasingly significant restaurant jobs and a role as chef de cuisine at Win Son. Now, at 27, he has opened Bonnie’s, a restaurant of his own, realizing the dream of many young chefs. Mr. Eng, a Bay Ridge, Brooklyn,…