CHEWING THE FAT

         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…

The Original Parm at 248 Mulberry St. NYC         Italian cooking is such an ingrained part of the American diet that dishes like Pizza and Spaghetti and Meatballs are barely labelled Italian anymore.  They’re just good old American staples at this point. But as Lasagna and…

         Who doesn’t love a great pot pie?  Meat and vegetables and gravy under a blanket of pastry, these pies are American Classics.  But they go back in culinary history considerably longer. In the Roman Empire, the pastry was banquet fare.  Sometimes the crust revealed…

        Solomon and The Queen of Sheba as painted by Piero della Francesca Nobody seems to know why, but February 26th is World Pistachio Day.  The day even has its own website: www.worldpistachioday.com And, as the site points out, it’s hard to…

Do you have recipes that sit there tempting you but that look too winter-y when you discover them on the first warm day of Spring?  That’s what happened to me with Rick Bayless’ flawless recipe for Pork Tinga.  But the other day, I was going…

         King Louis XV  Who doesn’t love a bowl of French Onion Soup? Topped with melted Gruyère cheese over crusty bread, your spoon digs into the bowl to get to the rich beef and onion broth.  It’s a classic recipe that became…

         Food Trends are an annual pursuit for everyone from Bon Appetit to the BBC.  The list that intrigued me most, however, came from Pinterest, the on-line picture sharing site where anyone, anywhere can post any image at all that interests them.  “Food” makes up…

         New York loves its meatballs.  There are now no less than 6 Meatball Shops alone and on the Upper West Side, if you can’t get into the one there, Nicky Meatball’s “Polpette” (that’s meatball in Italian) is a couple of doors away.  The meatball…