After several weeks of hospitalization (unrelated to Covid-19), my mother is back home, snug and settled in the same Brooklyn house where I grew up. To celebrate that, and Mother’s Day, I baked her a challah. It’s the same challah recipe I always use, rich with orange and olive oil, and very adaptable as long…
Hello and welcome to Five Weeknight Dishes. I’m back from maternity leave, though “back” in the current moment means I’m quarantined at home with a laptop and an entire carafe of coffee. Thank you to Julia Moskin for filling in. If we haven’t yet met, I’m one of the Food editors at The Times. I…
Cheap, nourishing, eminently available and fuss-free, the humble potato is just the thing for these days and weeks of stay-at-home, nearly nonstop cooking. Potatoes have always had mass appeal. And I find them beyond appealing, really. How deep is my love for potatoes? The mere mention of them makes my pulse race, starts me salivating,…
As a few faint rain drops began to fall in the courtyard of Riad Mena, a seven-room guesthouse in the Marrakesh medina, the hotelier Philomena Schurer Merckoll looked skyward, assessing the likelihood of a downpour. This was in February, when a seasonal shower was the biggest threat to a social gathering, and at risk beneath…
Comfort is often sought in the familiar: sitcom reruns, well-worn books, family recipes, even an old relationship. Just as something from our past can act as a balm when the future feels uncertain, so, too, can a classic cocktail. Reaching into the drink archives doesn’t have to be solely rooted in nostalgia, it can also…
One Wednesday in early March, Abra Morawiec realized something seismic was happening at her farm stand. The month had been pretty quiet at the Feisty Acres table in the Union Square Greenmarket in Manhattan. But that day, at the very start of social distancing, she had sold out of everything by 2 p.m. “I had…
It took only 50 years, but nutritional yeast has finally gone mainstream. “Nooch over everything” reads one sticker available for purchase online, the text appearing on a yellow canister not unlike the ones used by Bragg nutritional yeast. On another site, a “Nooch God” T-shirt shows the same bottle between two prayer hands, yellow flakes…
The artist at Smith Kebabs in Collingwood, Melbourne, has a style similar to Jackson Pollock’s. For a canvas, he uses French fries (chips!), topped with cheese and thinly sliced halal lamb and chicken. His medium is sauce: barbecue, creamy garlic and tart chile. The resulting creation, kaleidoscopic in its thickly splattered patina and creamy-crisp, meaty…
Ione Christensen has been baking breads and making pancakes for most of her 86 years, using sourdough starter, a bubbling brew of wild yeast she has kept alive since her mother gave her a batch. That was six decades ago, which makes Mrs. Christensen, a Canadian former senator from Whitehorse, Yukon, one of the most…
From a distance, what divides white wines from reds seems pretty clear. Yes, the color is obvious, but it’s also the methods of production. To make red wine, the producer begins by macerating the juice of the grapes with the pigment-bearing skins. This adds not only color to the juice but also tannins, which contribute…