CHEWING THE FAT

Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs Founders of Food52 Have you ever visited Food52.com?  It’s the brainchild of former New York Times Food writer, Amanda Hesser and her partner, Merrill Stubbs, a Brown University and Cordon Bleu grad who worked with Amanda on “The Essential New…

Jill Clark, Redhead and Cook  My friend Jill Clark introduced me to Melissa Clark’s recipe for “Counterfeit Porchetta” at the dinner party she and her husband Steve threw right before Christmas.  Like Jill, I’d seen the recipe in the New York Times the week before…

         If you scroll down this page, you’ll see that we show 15 posts.  What I aim to do is never to have two similar dishes in the mix. Most of the time, that’s easy to accomplish.  I just avoid cooking the same raw ingredient…

         Who can forget Carla Hall? Twice a contestant on Top Chef, she was voted “Fan Favorite” her second time around, which is equivalent to being named “Miss Congeniality” in the old Miss America days.  She was lots of fun to watch…

Costco’s $4.99 Chicken   In our continuing series of quick weeknight dinners leading up to Christmas, I couldn’t ignore the charms of Rotisserie Chicken.  I cannot go into Costco without buying one of their birds, beautifully cooked and an amazing bargain at $4.99.   I’ve made this…

Food and Wine has just come out with another of its compendiums of recipes, this one titled “Chef’s Easy Weeknight Dinners” (Time Inc. Affluent Media Group 2014).  There are all kinds of recipes here from soups to seafood, side dishes to desserts.  What strikes me…

    Who isn’t always looking for fresh, new ways to cook that workhorse of the kitchen, the skinless chicken thigh? How about pairing them with Figs and Almonds? That’s why I was intrigued by a recipe in October’s Food and Wine Magazine that was…

         Growing up in Canada, the Sunday Roast was a tradition in our house.  An enormous piece of beef would appear on the dinner table and our extended family would dig in.  And it was almost always beef because my parents had…

         Several weeks ago, Andrew went to the Institute of Culinary Education, a great cooking school on 23rd St. in Chelsea (www.ice.edu) where he had signed up with one of the masters of the baking arts, Nick Maglieri.  The class was small – just 9 students –…

         We have had a lot of Thanksgivings that weren’t at home. I’ve always volunteered to cook and love doing it. The first-ever Thanksgiving with my son Alex and his family was one I will never forget.  It was my first West Coast Thanksgiving. I…

         I’ll let you in on a little secret.  Of all Ina Garten’s cookbooks, “Barefoot in Paris” (Clarkson Potter 2004) was the least successful in terms of sales.  That came as a complete surprise to me because I find it one of the best “French”…

The year, for the first time ever, I am heading out to California to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with three of my favorite people on earth: my son, my daughter-in-law and my 6 year old grandson.  The minute I knew the trip was on, I…

         I don’t think food should be controversial. It should be one of life’s great pleasures. To quote none other than Luciano Pavarotti “One of the nicest things about life is that we regularly have to stop whatever it is we are doing and devote…

Last summer, in the course of one week, I saw three recipes posted for an identical dish.  Authored by Martha Stewart, it involved putting the entire contents of a pasta dinner into one pot and firing the stove up to create a meal that was…