A FOREST IN THE BAY AREA, CALIF. — Moments after walking into a verdant forest in San Francisco’s East Bay, the chef Hanif Sadr nibbled on the vegetation he found there — canary yellow mustard flowers, then spicy wild radish flowers, streaked with white and purple. He tasted potently cool chocolate mint, and sniffed leaves from…
The volunteer committee that oversees the James Beard Foundation awards for restaurants and chefs has criticized the organization for its handling of this year’s awards, saying that its “faith in the Foundation has been shaken.” In a statement sent Wednesday to the foundation’s chairman, Frederic M. Seegal, the committee charged that employees of the organization…
There’s a classic early 20th-century comic strip by Winsor McCay in which, after eating a Welsh rarebit close to bedtime, characters fall into wild, vivid dreams — often horrible, always bizarre — then wake up regretting their choice of dinner. Called “Dream of the Rarebit Fiend,” I think about it every time I make myself…
Melissa Clark has a terrific new recipe in The Times this week, for a sheet-pan dinner of roast chicken, plums and red onions (above). She came up with it as a dish appropriate to Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, which begins on Sept. 18, but it’s outstanding whatever your faith or lack thereof: a…
Whatever my grandfather did, he devoted himself completely to it. He took his time. He did it well. It didn’t matter how the small the job — cutting a melon for dessert; ironing shirts and trousers and, to my embarrassment, even underpants; wrapping gifts with paper by folding perfect lines; parallel parking on the curb…
When the coronavirus hit, even the most enthusiastic cooks had to adjust to a new, more complicated relationship with their kitchens. For the first time in a generation, Americans began spending more money at the supermarket than at places where someone else made the food. Grocers saw eight years of projected sales growth packed into…
Headliner Bronx Community Foundation Last week, a group of volunteers helped assemble an outdoor dining area on Alexander Avenue in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the South Bronx. The setup accommodates Ceetay and Hudson Smokehouse, two restaurants on the block, and is one of the Rockwell Group’s DineOut NYC systems, installed across the city. This…
Late last year, when my husband was very ill, my friend Debbie Goldberg dropped off a tsimmes, a holiday dish that I had not eaten in years. After heating it up and dipping my fork into the meat and sweet potatoes, memories of my own family — the sweet potato-and-pineapple casserole topped with marshmallows at…
Gabrielle Hamilton wrote a terrific column for The Times recently about how hard it is to cook the food she serves at Prune, her restaurant in the East Village of Manhattan, as if there weren’t line cooks in the kitchen but instead “a gentle older woman back there in heavy stockings and a cardigan.” There’s…
Paella to go in a proper pan, big enough to serve three or four, is the latest offering at José Andrés’s Spanish market in Hudson Yards. This is not your usual kitchen-sink paella, but a precise one that features only imported Mediterranean red shrimp and cuttlefish. It’s the first of what will be a changing…