It’s been almost ten years since we made this recipe and it’s still as good as it gets. One of the great challenges I face is to constantly look for new recipes, new combinations and new takes on the classics.  When you think about it,…

I’ve been working on Chewing The Fat’s first book. It’s a compendium of Andrew’s masterful baking.  The very last recipe was for homemade Granola.  The mere thought of it brought back memories of just how good it was.  It was so far superior to any…

If you live in the East, you’re experiencing an arctic blast of obscenely low temperatures. We’re so bundled up against the cold, not even the runners are out these mornings.  There is a cure for the cold. And that of course, is a bowl of…

On Chewing The Fat, the recipes really do come from everywhere.  However in this case, it came from closer to home–our own kitchen. I had an intense desire for a Pork Chop and not one of those boneless half inch deals swathed in plastic wrap. …

This recipe landed in my inbox in a collection of the 10 Most-Popular recipes in The New York Times. Turns out the Times runs posts of its Most Popular recipes so frequently, that I cannot tell you what time frame they’re referring to.  However, the…

Melissa Clark has to be one of the most prolific food writers and cooks in all of history. There’s her constant presence in the Food Section of The New York Times, where week after she creates some of our most memorable meals.  Just type Melissa…

As promised, I am going to try to make everything posted in December easy ways to get dinner on the table with maximum flavor impact.  Today’s dinner incorporated a Premio sausage combination I’d not seen before.  Premio packages both Sweet and Hot Sausages in one. …

Not too long ago, Andrew had a birthday.  The minute I’d seen it advertised, I’d ordered Dorie Greenspan’s latest book “Everyday Dorie”(A Rux Martin Book Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2018) as a gift. It turned out the book took 244 pages before landing at “Desserts”. So…

No American producer of Goat Cheese is more responsible for its ever- increasing popularity than California’s Laura Chenel’s.  Starting in the 1970s, Chenel’s became America’s first commercial producer of this extraordinarily healthful cheese. Everything from its calorie count – 30 to 40{7764cd352edcf19b608e75b52a560f8f0623df8defec59f0ed185161f2ba1413} lower than cow’s milk…

I’ve been writing about Budapest ever since I came back from there in August.  I was completely captivated by the place.  Of course, staying in the #1 Hotel in the World (Trip Advisor 2017) was a great deal of the reason why.  And it was…

Meatless Mondays have been missing from our house. It was not intentional but I had trouble finding recipes that appealed to the palate and to the eyes.  But on one of the daily e-mailings from Healthy-ish, Bon Appetit’s latest venture, I spied this recipe. It…

One of the first things I tasted aboard Viking Ocean’s Homeland cruise was an artfully arranged serving of Gravlax.  It was beautifully served in The Restaurant aboard Viking Star as we sailed for Denmark.  I liked it so much, it was the first of many…

If you follow me on Instagram (@montemathews) you know that I have been in Scandinavia all last week.  I boarded Viking Star in Germany and sailed to Denmark and Norway. As soon as I can cook them, I’ll be sharing some wonderful discoveries on my…

After I published this post, I shared it on Jonell Galloway’s Facebook page “Culinary Travel by Jonell Galloway, The Rambling Epicure”.  One of  Jonell’s readers got involved when I mentioned the multiple spellings of “biryani” and Jonell asked whether it was the English spelling of…