“Shrimp again?” quipped my husband when he unpacked our supermarket order of EZ-peel shrimp on Friday? I could understand the remark; since we’ve been sheltering in place since March, our seafood orders have been limited to shrimp on sale from our local supermarket, frozen, though rather expensive, salmon fillets from celebrity chef Curtis Stone, and Italian tuna in olive oil from Amazon.
One of the best moments in blogging is finding a great recipe on a friend’s website that you just have to make because it sounds and looks so good. Of course, trusting that colleague’s taste is also a determining factor for choosing it.
When I moved back to New York from Cambridge in 1982, I found an apartment on Columbus Avenue down the block from the Dakota and across the street from a take-home gourmet shop called the Silver Palate. Their window was always filled with delicious fare, most of which I couldn’t afford but nonetheless aspired to recreate.
When one hears “comfort food,” I’d bet most people wouldn’t think immediately of fish. But when I read Ina Garten’s recipe for pan-seared salmon in her latest cookbook, Modern Comfort Food, the photograph illustrating this “pretty-in-pink” dish prompted me to make it.
Given that we’re sheltering in place during this pandemic and relying on friends and Whole Foods home delivery for our groceries, Thanksgiving proved problematical this year. We had hoped to order the makings for our feast from the Whole Foods “Holiday Desk,” only to discover that they would not deliver. Amazon was supposed to offer a limited-time offer for the holiday, but that fizzled out as well. Read more
Back in graduate school, when my friends and I began to set up our new apartments and started to entertain and have one another over to dinner, one friend in particular stood out from the rest. She had a certain sense of style. I used to describe her as being “VSFA,” or as the store’s advertising campaign would add “Very Saks Fifth Avenue.”
Before the internet, as some of you may recall, food companies often added recipes to their packaging that would suggest ways to use their products. Of course, the limited space on the package restricted these recipes to relatively simple dishes, but I still remember my mother cutting them out and adding them to her hand-painted tin recipe box, yet another culinary icon of a bygone era.
“Meanwhile.” The word makes me cringe whenever I read it in a recipe. As you probably know, it typically implies multi-tasking—not one of my strengths. So when I read today’s recipe, one suggested by my better half, and “meanwhile” appeared twice, you can imagine how I felt.
As a graduate student in the mid-seventies, I was living in a fifth-floor walk-up studio on New York City’s, not-yet-gentrified, Upper West Side. The apartment was on the top floor of a converted brownstone and consequently had a tiny kitchen, my very first, maybe 6-feet long by 3-feet wide. Yet it was here that I began to take a serious interest in cooking.
Occasionally, the New York Times “Cooking” newsletter has an attention-grabbing, hyperbolic headline that makes me stop reading my emails and go directly to their website. Such was the case earlier this week when the subject line read: “The Most Incredible Cauliflower.”
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Cooking from Books 