I come from a family of condiment hoarders. We love pickles, spreads, and sauces, but we can’t ever seem to finish them. This used to result in a Jenga-like situation in my fridge, with jars poised to topple out and break a toe every time I reached for the milk. Then, in my early 20s,…
Good morning. We celebrate Martin Luther King’s Birthday today, a national day of service, a day to practice love, as the minister said, not as an expression of impractical idealism, but of practical realism, a way to ensure the life of our civilization. Some will make pecan pie (above) in his honor, because some say…
Whether you are having an intense midnight snack craving or are expecting guests, it comes in handy to have enough cooking ingredients in your house. This way, you can easily whip up something delectable as quickly as possible. Wonder what food items you should always have in your kitchen if you want yummy and filling…
Hello, Five Weeknight Dishes readers! I’m honored that Emily asked me to show up for her in this space. (She’s on leave for the next few months.) I take the responsibility of choosing weeknight-friendly recipes seriously. Years of food writing, and cooking for my own family after work, have taught me a lot of brilliant…
LONDON — In the process of making sure that bread, one of the most popular but also most perishable staples, doesn’t end up in the trash heap, cuisines the world over have used every tool at their disposal to find delicious recycling options. The famous British love of desserts, to mention an example close to…
There are those who think that less is more. But I like to think that more is more, at least when it comes to the milky syrup of a tres leches cake. I sampled my first pastel de tres leches at a Cuban restaurant in Miami. The spongy yellow square began oozing at the slightest…
Some wines confirm assumptions. Others shock the system. Good syrah, especially when made using traditional methods like fermenting the grapes with their stems, can be one of those jarring wines. Depending on one’s experience and expectations, it can delight or appall. I adore syrah, and the more extreme, the better. Yet when I recently opened…
If ever a wine seemed out of step with the times, it would be Rioja Gran Reserva. The rest of the wine world has adopted the Burgundian way of thinking, in which a wine is defined by the place in which the grapes were grown. The more distinctive the vineyard, and the more narrowly circumscribed,…
Merriam-Webster added “Chinese restaurant syndrome” to its dictionaries in 1968. The definition described symptoms affecting “susceptible persons eating food and especially Chinese food heavily seasoned with monosodium glutamate.” The entry came shortly after a physician, Robert Ho Man Kwok, wrote The New England Journal of Medicine to describe an unusual malady. Whenever he ate at…
Ekala is a prickly climber akin to North American greenbrier, often dismissed as a troublemaking weed. In the Imereti region of Georgia, its crisp young shoots are gathered in spring, before their thorns sharpen, when they’re as skinny and fragile as first asparagus, and pickled to last. It rarely makes its way to New York,…