CHEWING THE FAT

Claire Saffitz The bones of this great recipe are from a Bon Appetit writer named Claire Saffitz.  Ms Saffitz has an intriguing background.  She is a graduate of both Harvard and McGill Universities.  At both places she studied History but by the time she got…

Florence Fabricant Is the asparagus better than ever this year?  Or is it just more welcome than ever?  How did it manage to poke its heads through ground that remained frozen far later this year than last?  And, once thawed, how did those same shoots survive…

Melissa Clark, Author of 29 Cookbooks Mother’s Day is upon us.  It’s this Sunday, May 10th. It’s time for good children (and their fathers) to treat Mom to a day completely devoid of cooking.  Although you can go the restaurant route and take Mom out…

Get your party clothes on! It’s Cinco de Mayo! I’ve written at length previously about Cinco de Mayo, the May 5th salute to Mexico that’s more American than it is Mexican.  There it is celebrated in the province of Puebla and almost nowhere else.  So…

Central Market, Budapest Paprika for Tourists Early to rise and to pack in as much Budapest as time would allow.  First stop, the Central Market, just as it opened at 6:00 am.  Time changes do wonders for sightseeing.  Since I am writing a piece on…

Marcus Porcius Cato 234-149 BC If New York has a cake, it is most certainly our richly indulgent and sumptuously creamy cheesecake.  There is a lot of culinary history to support this claim.  And then there’s Junior’s, a Brooklyn Temple to Cheesecake which made history…

Last week, I went all the way back into the archives for Chewing the Fat.  I was astonished to see that an Orecchiette recipe that I posted very early on in the life of the blog has had precisely 40 visits. That is about 1/10th…

         No Joke. These people are waitingto get in to my Trader Joe’s. Trader Joe’s, the California-based food market, just cleaned the clocks of virtually all its competitors according to Consumer Reports Magazine. It scored an 87 out of 100.  While some…

          Shrimp is far and away the popular seafood in the country and has been for at least the last 10 years.  Nothing comes remotely close to per capita shrimp consumption which hit 3.6 lbs. last year.  Just for comparison, salmon catapulted…

Melissa Clark Before you turn the page on this wonderful dish, let me assure that those dried-out and dreadful anchovies that someone left atop your last Caesar Salad are not at work here.  Instead, these flavor makers are worth a great deal more than their…

Jamie Oliver’s Chicken in Milk  Richard Olney’s Chicken Gratin  Jamie Oliver I am a sucker for a good chicken recipe.  So the minute I saw that Food 52, one of my favorite food sites, had named Jamie Oliver’s Chicken in Milk a “Community Favorite”, I…

         Marcus’s sisters, Marcus and their Mother. Marcus Samuelson is the Ethiopian-born chef who was adopted by his Swedish parents, Lennart and Anne Marie, in 1972 at age 2. He was orphaned when his mother died in a tuberculosis epidemic, leaving Marcus and his sister,…

         We’re back!  And brimming with news about our latest foray to that Caribbean Island unlike any other…St. Barthelemy FWI.  You would imagine that this, our 25th trip to the island, would be fairly routine at this point.  And we do confess that one of the…

Rasa Malaysia is the website presided over by Bee Yinn Low, a highly enterprising Californian woman who has 800 Pan Asian recipes at  www.rasamalaysia.com.  She is also quite the baker so you’ll also find a surprising number of recipes for all-American baked goods like Zucchini…