Lately I’ve found myself in Bushwick … a lot. The last time I was in the neighborhood this much I was a 22-year-old sharing a railroad apartment on Bushwick Avenue — I may or may not have gotten the idea from “Girls” — and hosting bar trivia at Pine Box Rock Shop once a month.…
The Abruzzo region of eastern central Italy, on the Adriatic coast, is home to Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, a popular red wine that paradoxically has been historically little known and rarely very good. Its popularity owed to one main factor: It was a cheap wine that was usually good enough. The last decade in the region, though,…
During a trip to the grocery store this week, I was stopped in my tracks by my one true harbinger of warmer days to come: the arrival of ranunculus, a darling of spring and my favorite blooms, in the floral section. It is also, coincidentally, “false spring” here in New York, with temperatures tipping into…
One of the best perks of being the newsletter editor for New York Times Cooking is the digging I do through our vast recipe archive. I find fan favorites that are new to me (nice to meet you, Pierre Franey’s turkey chili), see familiar friends (always a pleasure, kale sauce pasta) and address my own…
The Hawaii-born artist Toshiko Takaezu was known for her ceramic works that redefined the genre with their “closed forms,” as she called them — sealed vessels whose hidden interior spaces were meant to activate the imagination. Next month, Takaezu’s life and work will be the focus of a major retrospective at the Noguchi Museum in…
The first time I heard a friend praising “wilted salad,” the memories came flooding back. They were not entirely good. I could picture that half-full bowl of droopy, oil-slicked greens sitting in the fridge, leftover from the night before. When I was growing up, my mother hated the idea of wasting food so much that…
Having friends over for dinner tomorrow? Do yourself a favor and make everything today. More and more, I cook today for tomorrow, for any number of reasons. After a night in the fridge, many dishes improve, deepening and intensifying in flavor. Soups and stews of all sorts are usually better if made in advance. And…
The secret to the silkiest pasta sauces is not oil, cheese or even copious amounts of butter and cream. It’s the starchy water the pasta cooks in, which, when added back to the pan after draining, binds and melds the ingredients during their final simmer. Mark Bittman shows us how to harness that starchiness in…
Grapes are half snack, half compulsion. Bunched as if just snipped from the vine, skins taut and shining, they are always a crowd, a party unto themselves. There is power in numbers, because if you eat just one, the pleasure is too brief: A burst on the tongue, a spike of sugar in the blood…
Just below rows of energy and kombucha drinks at Westside Market, a deli in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, sit a few glass bottles of Vybes. The drink, which comes in flavors like strawberry lavender and blood orange lime, is made with cannabidiol, more commonly known as CBD. But a lack of federal rules and…