Category Archives: General

Chocolate Chip Cookie Brownies

If you love chocolate chip cookies and adore brownies, these bar cookies are sure to satisfy.
If you love chocolate chip cookies and adore brownies, these bar cookies are sure to satisfy.

After this grueling past year and a half, you most certainly deserve a special treat.

Or two treats in one to be exact.

“Chocolate Chip Cookie Brownies” is precisely that.

Let those words roll over your tongue and sear into your mind for a hot minute: Chocolate chip cookie. Plus brownies.

Stacked one on top of each other, these cookie-brownie bars are truly the best of both worlds.

And a riot of dark chocolate.

This decadent recipe is from “Martha Stewart’s Cookie Perfection: 100+ Recipes to Take Your Sweet Treats to the Next Level” (Clarkson Potter) from the Kitchens of Martha Stewart Living.

They are essentially Brookies, which are often made as individual circular cookies. This recipe streamlines that because you bake everything in one pan. Which, of course means you get to enjoy them even sooner.

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Rodney Scott’s Smoked Prime Rib

Have you ever smoked a prime rib low and slow? This recipe will have you itching to try your hand at it.
Have you ever smoked a prime rib low and slow? This recipe will have you itching to try your hand at it.

Rodney Scott has felt the blistering heat at the heart of a raging fire.

Both in front of the barbecue pit and in life.

In his new cookbook-memoir, “Rodney Scott’s World of BBQ: Every Day Is a Good Day” (Clarkson Potter), of which I received a review copy, this legendary pitmaster lays bare both his rise to success and the subsequent yawning chasm in his relationship with his father.

It’s a book that offers lessons in cooking, of course, but also in fortitude and perseverance.

What’s more, despite the legion of barbecue and grilling books that have flooded the market over the years, it’s also astonishingly billed as the first cookbook written by a black pitmaster.

About time.

James Beard Award winning Scott, chef and co-owner of the legendary barbecue mecca, Rodney Scott’s BBQ in Charleston, S.C.; Birmingham, AL; and Atlanta, GA, wrote the book with Lolis Eric Elie, a writer and filmmaker, and one of the founders of the Southern Foodways Alliance.

Scott has led a hard-scrabble life, in which his family eked out a living growing soybeans, corn and tobacco on their farm in Hemingway, SC (population 400). It was at the family-owned store that Scott’s father got the idea to sell barbecue. He took charge of the pig while his wife made the sauce.

As his parents’ only child, Scott grew up helping on the farm and at Scott’s Bar-B-Q from a young age. In fact, he cooked his first hog at age 11, stoking the coals every 15 minutes in the wee hours by himself.

When Scott grew older and branched out on his own in Charleston, winning widespread acclaim in the process, he butted heads with his dad. Unfortunately to this day, their relationship remains strained.

You can cherish this book simply for the inspiring story of a man who worked his way up from nothing to the very top of the barbecue pinnacle. Or you can also relish in cooking from it.

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It’s the Season For Slow-Roasted Romano Beans

Romano beans turn ever so soft and juicy in the heat of the oven.
Romano beans turn ever so soft and juicy in the heat of the oven.

They look like green beans on steroids that have been run over by a Mack truck.

Now’s the time to get your fill of Romano beans.

Don’t let these sturdy flat beans fool you, though, into thinking you can cook them just like you would green beans.

These meaty beans do best when cooked for a much longer time beyond al dente.

Earlier this summer, I tried the Zuni Cafe method for “Long-Cooked Romano Beans” in which they’re gently cooked on the stovetop. It’s a super-easy and wonderfully delicious recipe. But it does require 2 hours of cooking time. And I’ll be the first to admit that there are days when time gets away from me, and I find myself with all of 1 hour to get dinner on the table.

Thankfully, I came across this alternative method for cooking them that takes only 40 minutes in the oven. “Slow-Roasted Romano Beans” is from “The A.O.C. Cookbook” (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013) by Suzanne Goin, the chef-owner of Los Angeles’ revered A.O.C. and the dearly departed Lucques restaurant.

An alum of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse, Goin has a skilled hand with most any ingredient, and especially seasonal produce.

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Sizzling Turkish Lamb and Eggplant Kebabs

Lamb meatballs interspersed with big chunks of eggplant turn delightfully smoky on the grill.
Lamb meatballs interspersed with big chunks of eggplant turn delightfully smoky on the grill.

Husband-and-wife chefs Itamar Srulovich and Sarit Packer like to play with fire.

And the after-effects are sure to make your mouth-water.

After honing their craft at Yotam Ottolenghi’s acclaimed London restaurants, the couple opened the popular Israeli-influenced cafe, Honey & Co. in London, in 2012. That was followed in short succession by Honey & Smoke, and the Honey & Spice deli.

Their first cookbook, “Honey & Co: At Home: Middle Eastern Recipes From Our Kitchen” (Pavilion) was named “Cookbook of the Year” in 2015 by The Sunday Times in the United Kingdom.

Now comes their follow-up, “Honey & Co: Chasing Smoke: Cooking Over Fire Around the Levant” (Pavilion), of which I received a review copy.

As the title implies, this book is all about grilling, smoking and imparting coveted char in dishes. Join Packer and Srulovich as they take you on a journey to discover the most delicious live-fire-cooking through Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Turkey, and Greece. Photographs of market stalls, desert landscapes, seashores, and all manner of blazing grills transport you to these evocative places. So much so, that you’ll swear you can feel the heat and smell the smoke right off the pages.

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Meet Your New Favorite Condiment: Umami Crunch

An indispensable new condiment you'll want to put on most everything.
An indispensable new condiment you’ll want to put on most everything.

Chili crisp may be all the rage now as the “It’ condiment, but a worthy competitor has stepped up to challenge: Lazy Susan Umami Crunch.

This new Chinese condiment is from Lazy Susan, the takeout- and delivery-only Chinese restaurant that opened earlier this year in San Francisco by Salt Partners, the restaurant group behind the (Dominique) Crenn Dining Group, and Humphry Slocumbe.

While chili crisp is a mix of Sichuan peppercorns and chili flakes floating in a generous pool of oil that carries a kick of spiciness, Umami Crunch is not about heat at all but an explosion of savoriness. That’s what I found when I received a sample recently to try.

Umami Crunch is made with rice bran oil, but just barely enough to hold all the minced ingredients together. As a result, when you study a jar, you will immediately see the mix of diced pieces of garlic and fermented black beans visible that gets bloomed in the oil and seasoned with shiitake mushroom powder.

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