Après Dinner No. 1
What’s after dinner? Well, dessert, duh. I first found my way into the kitchen through baking. Back when I still needed a step stool to reach the counter, I became […]
Category Archives: Mains
5 Cuts of Beef That You Need In Your Life Right Now
1. Short ribs Also known as wife of Adam chops. 2. Oxtail Slow-cooked oxtail: like a cow tail, but with masculine-gendered meat. 3. Brisket Brisket is so tender and melt-in-your-mouth […]
How to Fuck Up Spaghetti
I once wrote about how I became obsessed with aglio e olio (garlic and olive oil pasta) after watching an episode of Korean tele-drama Pasta. Since then, I’ve forgotten most […]
Color coded
Yes, this was one of the most wonderful things ever. No, I did not follow my own advice about not being too “matchy”. I used the leftover red cabbage from […]
Accessorize It
There’s some vague, unofficial rule in fashion about never matching too much. If this plate were an outfit, it would surely be in violation: chickpea hummus, chickpea falafel, even pita bread […]
Red hot
These tostadas, adapted from Simply Recipes, were the perfect answer to my hankering for some lighter summer fare as well as the visions of tortillas occupying my head after coming […]
Delectable histories
In what is easily a personal best, I made four curries today – and all at the same time. It may have been for an assignment, but nevertheless, I’m still […]
Red, white, and stew
Although cumin lamb is associated with Sichuan province, there is an unmistakable Muslim influence in it, a testament to the diverse cultures that have left their imprint on China’s foodways. […]
Work with what you’ve got
Although I’ve tried to become something of a connoisseur of ethnic groceries, first in DC, now in Boston, I admit that stepping into them still feels like a gamble. I […]
Sacrilicious
Leftover broth from the braised chicken was used to create a soup for this ramen, which includes homemade noodles and roast pork loin. The distinctive red hue comes from the addition […]
A NOSE KNOWS
I’ve never been to Mission Chinese Food, but it must smell like heaven. This chicken stew, adapted from head chef Danny Bowien’s recipe, should be made into an aromatherapy candle. […]
Not Crap
Since kung pao chicken usually appears as some sort of deep fried catastrophe in red gloop at most American Chinese restaurants, I was surprised to find out that it actually […]
¿Como se dice?
I’ve never taken Spanish lessons, but having worked in the service industry, I’ve managed to pick up some of the food lingo. I tried to think of what you would […]
SMELLS LIKE…
Last week I made some rather forgettable jerk chicken that was saved by the addition of this rice and beans recipe from Simply Recipes. I loved the creamy, fragrant rice so […]
OH THE DRAMA!
The problem with watching films and TV shows about food (the gastronome’s second favorite pastime) is that they’re impossible to get through without craving what’s on the screen. I’ve been […]
GLAZED OVER
Braised goat in drunken glaze with jasmine rice and green beans Last weekend, I went to Phu Cuong, a recently opened Vietnamese supermarket in Dorchester to get some of the […]
REWINDING
Drunken noodles with beef Revisiting my recipe for drunken noodles. Still holds up the second time.
A STROLL DOWN THE AVENUE
Roast pork, broccoli rabe, and sharp provolone sandwich An ode to the Pattinson Avenue, my favorite sandwich from DC’s Taylor Gourmet. I’m creating a mock food website for a class, where […]
A WALK IN THE WOODS
Udon with mushrooms J. Kenji López-Alt has been posting some wonderful vegan recipes over at Serious Eats, the sort written for those of us with tastebuds. I don’t mean that as a dig at my vegan and vegetarian friends. But really, every time I see…
SO OVER IT
Spiced lentils with lamb (yakhni’l-adas) and swiss chard in yogurt (siliq bil laban) These recipes come from Nawal Nasrallah’s Delights from the Garden of Eden, a historically-minded Iraqi cookbook. According to Nasrallah, yakhni not only describe…
DESPERATE TIMES
Macaroni and lots of cheese OK this snow needs to go away before I pose any further risks to my health.
NO GUTS NO GLORY
Laab with mushrooms and pork So I suppose the news story of the moment is that Boston is going to get 2+ feet of snow this weekend. Right now, it’s barely a few hours into the storm and the window in my room is so clogged that I can’t see anything…
IT’S ALL GREEK
Chicken giouvetsi I made shrimp giouvetsi once a few years back and have returned to the dish, and variations on it, rather often. Rather than boiling the orzo that goes into it, everything is baked casserole style, infusing the pasta with the fla…
MELTING POT
Chettinad curry, green beans with coconut and mustard seed, broken rice This recipe was designed for someone like myself: a home cook with a seriously overstuffed spice cabinet that never seems to declutter no matter how many times I make curry. T…
EASY DOES IT
Red curry with chicken, squash, string beans, and eggplant There are as many red curry paste recipes as there are Thai cookbooks and Thai cooking blogs. I don’t have any particular favorite and usually only end up consulting them to remind myself …
BITS AND PIECES
Berbere rubbed chicken wing A vegetarian acquaintance of mine who once worked as a waiter told me that he generally didn’t mind handling meat or watching guests eat it but for one exception: chicken wings. Something about gnawing and picking at th…
ON A SOUR NOTE
Laksa asam – Penang hot and sour noodles After a truly hectic end to my first semester in grad school, I finally have some time to get back to cooking and other important things in life, like marathoning episodes of Breaking Bad and reading all of…
MEAT FOR THE MASSES
Beer braised corned beef brisket with veg What better way to celebrate the end of the semester than with a big sloppy pile of pleb food? Pierre Bourdieu eat your heart out.
IT TAKES TWO
Navel oranges and oil-cured olives with tarragon and sea salt Orange and olive is one of my favorite flavor pairings. After seeing it on a menu with yellowtail crudo a few years back, I encountered it again via old school, pre-soapbox Bittman. It’…
A-MAIZE-ING
Corn and miso ramen with vegetables and ground pork Yes, even I will stoop to terrible puns sometimes. I still have some corn flour left over from making the corn cookies, which I’ve already tried using in pancakes. For some reason, corn and miso …
ALL PURPOSE
Kale saag with tofu on an onion seed flatbread Cheap, healthy, and tasty. This is one for all seasons.
WE ARE NOT WORTHY
Yellow rice with sausage, edamame, okra, and pickled onions It’s been a few weeks since any dinner has appeared on this site. Not that I haven’t been cooking – life just hasn’t been able to accomodate the massive “project” meals I usually post. So…
THE GOOD AND THE BAD AND UGLY
Momofuku Milk Bar Corn Cookies The biggest perk of being in a gastronomy program is, duh, getting to eat food in class. Sometimes the food is related to the course material (like earlier this week when I got to try some dishes based on medieval Is…
ACROSS THE OCEAN
Tamarind soup with shrimp, rice, and peas This week I finally had an opportunity to attend a lecture in Harvard’s Science and Cooking series, which normally I wouldn’t be able to do due to classes (thank you Christopher Columbus for the day off?)….
IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE
Squid and baby bok choy over egg noodles This stir fry is a favorite of mine for when I want something fairly quick and easy. I used leftover homemade noodles from last week’s Khao Soi to soak up the briny juices that the marinade for it gives off…
IDENTITY CRISIS
Khao soi – curry noodles with chicken, pickled mustard, shallots, crispy noodles, cilantro, and lime Recently I’ve been reading a lot about matters of authenticity and what it means in the food experience. Since about ninety nine percent of the fo…
ANOTHER TIME AND PLACE
Doro wott and ye’abesha gomen (Ethiopian chicken stew and collards) with farro More than a week after I moved, I finally got around to cooking a proper meal. That first week was painfully ridden with canned tuna and greasy quesadillas, but hey, at…
THE LAST SUPPER
Linguine with meatballs In the last few months my cooking has leant towards spice and flavor heavy dishes – a lot of Thai and Chinese. Of course I love these sorts of foods, but I also had a practical motive in making them: to get rid of as much o…
MYSTERY MEAL
Niu Rou Mian – egg noodles with beef and Chinese broccoli Last week, after four years in DC, I finally made it out to Eden Center, a mega strip mall for Vietnamese businesses just over the river in Virginia. All the talk I’d head about it being a …
REPEAT PERFORMANCE
Som tam and pad thai I’ve already explained my love/hate relationship with pad thai. Right now, I’m trying to focus on the love, which is that it’s great for cleaning out my pantry. I’m guessing that in Thailand it’s not typically served with som …
FOR ALL SEASONS
Minnesota wild rice soup with mushrooms It’s quite obvious looking through my photos that rice is a big staple of my cooking. I usually opt for jasmine, but I ran out of my last bag of it a few weeks ago. I’ll be relocating to Boston at the end of…
COMPLEMENTARY COLORS
Corn and potato soup with sorrel pistou, berbere roasted eggplant with merguez sausage / baby eggplants at sunset I’m not sure what I was thinking when I bought yellow corn and purple potatoes for making soup. Any third grader could tell you that …
CABIN FEVER
Lemongrass chicken with coconut rice and sauteed kale with mushrooms I can’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve come across an interesting recipe, only to find that the instructions are designed for the charcoal grill. It’s as if all the…
TOTALLY MOD
Drunken noodles, revised / Stir-fried broccoli tips This past weekend I had set out to make Yotam Ottolenghi’s Malaysian duck curry. However, upon getting to the grocery and experiencing a bit of sticker shock at the price of duck ($15 for one bre…
CROSS CULTURAL
Pad Horapa – Thai basil chicken with crispy skins This dish is closely related to the Teochew style chicken I made a few weeks back. The Thai version seems to have been heavily influenced by the Chinese, due to the fact that many Teochew migrated …
KO’d
Rice with shrimp and chorizo, baked plantains, chayote pickles I’ve got my method for cooking rice on a stovetop mastered. It always comes out perfectly cooked — never burnt, never hard, never soggy. I should have realized earlier that adding a w…
BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
Salted salmon, grated beets with dill, Russian kale, and brown Basmati rice Although the main components of this dish suggest something vaguely Nordic, each item was seasoned with quintessentially Japanese ingredients: rice vinegar and sesame oil …
FROM THE SOURCE
Cha ca la vong – Rice noodles with hake, herbs, peanuts and fried shallots Another recipe that is a copy of a copy of a copy. Even if far removed from the source, the abundance of herbs picked straight from my own and from neighbors’ yards made th…
DO IT LIKE NO ONE ELSE
Dan dan noodles I love being able to roll out of bed on Sunday mornings, literally walk about 30 paces to the west, and then in a half-asleep haze stumble my way through the Bloomingdale Farmer’s Market. For a fairly small market, it packs an incr…
A FIRST TIME FOR EVERYTHING
Homemade linguine with basil pesto, trumpet mushrooms, pecorino romano, and pine nuts I had never heard of pesto until I got to college. During my freshman year I had a crummy work-study job ladling food at the cafeteria. On my first day I was ass…
DESTROY EVERYTHING YOU TOUCH
Teochew style chicken with basil and Sichuan peppercorn Another recipe from Eileen Yin Fei Lo’s Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking. The greens are deep fried basil leaves. I love how luminously translucent they become after cooking. Of course, t…
COOKING WITH KIDS
Goat curry with coconut milk Goat is the most widely consumed meat in the world, yet it’s difficult to come by in the U.S.. Luckily for me, there’s a sweet lady who offers it at my neighborhood farmer’s market every Sunday. Goat is ideal for brais…
BEING BORING
Pad Thai I never order Pad Thai when I’m eating at a Thai restaurant. It’s like ordering a hamburger at a high end steak house — incredibly pointless and lacking in all the real action. Why order noodles that have likely been adulterated with sic…
MASTERPIECE-A PIZZA
Aloo Gobhi Naan Pizza One time when I was shopping at Lotte Plaza, I came across a giant freezer full of naan pizzas on sale for $1.50 each. Although I generally try to stay away from frozen meals, I nevertheless proceeded to load my cart with a h…
CUCINA POVERA
Tagliatelle with asparagus and clams A riff on the ubiquitous linguine with clams using leftover bacon and konbu dashi from shrimp and grits combined with sherry, soy sauce, and a seafood broth made using the shrimp shells.
EASY A
Fried yellow rice with chickpeas, baked spinach, onions, and feta One thing I’d like to get better at is creating my own dishes without recipes. This is probably when studying old episodes of Iron Chef would come in handy, applying their lessons t…
WHATEVER I WANT, WHENEVER I WANT IT
Shrimp and grits with bacon, spinach, scallion This one’s adapted from the Momofuku cookbook. Naturally, it’s got a bit of a Japanese twist, with a konbu and soy sauce base for the grits’ cooking liquid. I was inspired to make this after I got the…
IN DEFENSE OF PROCESSED CRAP
A sea of sunny yellow / Mac ‘n cheese making fun of side dish raw, macerated kale Here is how I normally prepare mac ‘n cheese: Take one box of Velveeta with shells (the kind that comes with a silver pouch of liquid cheese). Boil approximately thr…
SLOW AND STEADY WINS THE RACE
Oxtail in berbere sauce with collard greens and rice This is an adaptation of Marcus Samuelsson’s recipe for doro wott from his pan-African cookbook The Soul of a New Cuisine. I don’t think I’ve ever seen oxtail in Ethiopian dishes before, but it’…
COCO LOCO
Spaghetti nero with dandelion greens, shrimp, squid, tomato jelly, and tom kha broth / Telephone brand agar agar / Tomato jelly fingers I guess I’m going coco loco this week. I returned recently from a trip to Germany and Switzerland, where I ate …
PLAYING FAVORITES
Goan-style curry with tofu over a brown basmati and red rice blend Coconut milk curry was one of the first things I ever tried to make on my own and throughout the years has remained one of my chief culinary obsessions. I will probably be forever …
NO SUGAR NECESSARY
Sopa Tarasca (black bean soup, Michoacan style) Mexican cream (crema Mexicana), which is what that squiggle is, is one of my favorite condiments. Creme fraiche ain’t got nothing on it.
NO JERK, NO CRY
Jerk chicken with fried cabbage Ever see this meme? I think the same thing happens every time I try to make Jamaican, or Ethiopian, or Thai, or any other food that I dearly love that is from a place I will likely never visit. I got the recipe for …
REMIX
Homemade tagliatelle with lentils, pecorino romano, dill, and tomato Leftovers meal inspired by a recipe at the excellent Greek cooking blog Kalofagas.
THE ROOF IS ON FIRE
Larb nuaa gae (Minced lamb salad) Last week I went to Little Serow, a basement restaurant run by the same people who own the esteemed Komi. Little Serow serves up Isan cuisine, from the northern countryside provinces of Thailand. I’d had Isan befo…
YESTERDAY’S CREPES
Crepe with Brussels sprouts, andouille sausage, pecan, and pecorino romano A dinner (or breakfast) made entriely out of leftovers: sausage and nuts remaining from this week’s farro dish, buttermilk left from making the funfetti cake, Brussels spro…
NEW YORK TO LOUISIANA
Farro with andouille sausage and pecans Remember back in the early noughties when a then 20 year old Britney Spears opened the doomed to fail restaurant NYLA in midtown Manhattan? It featured Britney’s favorite Louisiana home cooking crossed with …
A FRENCH DISH, ETHIOPIAN FLAVORS
Arctic char and lentils cooked in berbere I don’t mind making my own berbere powder in a pinch, but the best of that paprika heavy spice mixture can be bought at Zenebech Injera. Tyler Cowen was not exaggerating when he declared Zenebech the best …
DINNER IS SERVED…
Pan-fried noodles with tofu and peppers I’ve been posting photos of my creations in the kitchen to Facebook for almost a year. When I started, I had no intention other than to document the activity that brings me the most consistent joy and sense …