As a child growing up in the Netherlands, Hanna ten Brink spent many days lingering by a pond in her family’s garden, fascinated by metamorphosis. Tadpoles hatched from eggs in the pond and swam about, sucking tiny particles of food into their mouths. After a few weeks, the tadpoles lost their tails, sprouted legs and…
Hello and welcome to Five Weeknight Dishes. By now have we all read this amazing article on “snowplow parenting”? It’s about parents who go to sometimes-extreme lengths to remove obstacles from their kids’ lives. The part I can’t get over is about a girl who didn’t like sauce: “Her whole life, her parents had helped…
LONDON — Every dish has a story to tell, but that story often isn’t what you expect or, indeed, want it to be. Take paella as an example, arguably the most famous of Spanish dishes around the world and the inspiration behind my recipe here. I thought, naïvely, that I would start my preamble with some…
The Canadian city of Nanaimo, in British Columbia, has been a scrappy outpost of the Hudson’s Bay Company, a coal mining center and a timber town. But its place in history may be forever entwined with its culinary namesake, one of the world’s sweetest treats. The Nanaimo bar (pronounced nuh-NYE-mo) is a three-layer no-bake square…
Is “ragoût” just a five-dollar word for stew, or is there a difference? To me, the French word sounds more elegant and painstaking. (To be clear, we’re not talking about ragù, an Italian pasta sauce.) And though a ragoût can take many forms, one made entirely of vegetables is something quite special. A good vegetable…
Most of the time, polenta is a side dish, a buttery space on which to pile a hunk of braised meat or golden roast chicken. It’s a supporting player, not the star. But like its Italian compatriots risotto and pasta, fragrant, creamy polenta deserves its own spotlight. All the cook needs to do is add…
When Indra Nooyi stepped down as chief executive of PepsiCo last year, she was replaced by a man — and the ranks of female C.E.O.s further dwindled. Today, fewer than 5 percent of companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 are led by women. Ms. Nooyi’s absence will be particularly notable. During her 12 years…
Sandwiches, with all their permutations, are an invitation to overzealous tinkering. They can be stacked up toward heaven in multiple layers or stuffed with an entire Thanksgiving dinner. They can overflow with soupy meats and be eaten with a fork and knife. And then there was that time KFC used fried chicken instead of bread…
MELBOURNE, Australia — This cosmopolitan city on the southern coast of Victoria teems with great restaurants of all sorts, and the diners there are often thirsty for wine. Whether the restaurant is Chinese or Japanese, modern Australian or a wine bar that would not be out of place in Bushwick, Brooklyn, its tables are bound…
SAVAGE FEASTThree Generations, Two Continents and a Dinner Table (A Memoir With Recipes)By Boris Fishman We should all be so lucky as to cook for Boris Fishman’s grandfather, a macher with a liquor cabinet full of excellent cognac and a jovial disregard for the dietary restrictions recommended by the agency that assigned him Oksana, his…