Category Archives: Recipes (Savory)

Blow Off Some Steam With Extra-Anchovy Pasta With Kale

Posted on by Leave a comment
A pasta dish that crushes it.
A pasta dish that crushes it.

This past year has been nothing short of cataclysmic. So, you’d be forgiven if there have been moments when all you wanted to do was cry, curse, curl up in a ball or crush something into smithereens.

At a time when we could all welcome some relief comes the new cookbook, “Steamed: A Catharsis Cookbook for Getting Dinner and Your Feelings On the Table’ (Running Press), of which I received a review copy. It encourages you to pound, pulverize, and rip apart your pent-up pandemic aggression — in a tongue-and-cheek way, of course — while cooking up some tasty dishes along the way.

This wonderfully irreverent cookbook was written by Rachel Levin, a freelance food writer who was Eater’s first restaurant critic; and Tara Duggan, a veteran food writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, who now covers climate and environmental issues.

This recipe lets you blow off some steam by smashing croutons to smithereens.
This recipe lets you blow off some steam by smashing croutons to smithereens.

With humorous illustrations by Los Angeles designer Stephanie DeAngelis, the book includes 50 recipes sure to brighten any mood. Get your frustration out with “Whacked Lemongrass Chicken Coconut Curry,” “Pummeled Pork Tonkatsu,” “Cry-It-Out Alsatian Tart,” and “DIY Cannabutter” (which is exactly what you think it is).

Read more

Effortless Grilled Pork Kebabs With Hoisin and Five-Spice

Posted on by 2 comments
The most time-consuming part of this simple dish is just threading the pork onto the skewers -- and that takes hardly any time at all.
The most time-consuming part of this simple dish is just threading the pork onto the skewers — and that takes hardly any time at all.

When you’re married to a man whose nickname is Meat Boy, and a “Meat Illustrated: A Foolproof Guide to Understanding and Cooking with Cuts of All Kinds” cookbook lands on your porch, you know you’ll have to practically pry it out of his hands to ever get a look at it, yourself.

Such was the case when a review copy of that meat-centric tome (Cook’s Illustrated) by America’s Test Kitchen arrived.

With more than 350 recipes for beef, pork, lamb, and veal, it’s a true meat lover’s manual. It includes illustrations showing where each cut is found on a particular animal. It also will teach you how to make meat juicier through pre-salting or brining; what kind of fat to trim off and how much; and how to cure your own bacon.

The recipes make use of a range of cooking techniques and run the gamut from “Sous Vide Pepper-Crusted Beef Roast” and “Slow-Roasted Pork Shoulder with Peach Sauce” to “Slow-Cooker Sweet-and-Sour Barbecue Spareribs” and “Egyptian Eggah with Ground Beef and Spinach.”

You can’t go wrong with “Grilled Pork Kebabs with Hoisin and Five-Spice” that’s easy and quick enough to make on a busy weeknight.

Read more

Chef Sheldon Simeon’s Hack For Homemade Chow Fun Noodles With A Microwave

Posted on by 7 comments
A soul-satisfying plate of chow fun — with fresh, chewy noodles made in the microwave.

Maui’s Chef Sheldon Simeon is many things:

The owner of the lovable, guava-sized Tin Roof Hawaiian eatery. A devoted husband and dad. A “Top Chef” finalist and two-time “Fan Favorite.” And what I like to call, the MacGyver of chefs.

There was the time when I dined at one of his previous restaurants, when he talked about how he and a line cook came up with a way to cook perfect pork belly — in Hot Pockets sleeves, of all things.

Then, there was the time when a table of chefs fell silent and began madly typing notes into their phone, when Simeon let slip that he makes his own chow fun noodles and generously began sharing the recipe just like that.

So when I spied that chow fun recipe in his debut cookbook, “Cook Real Hawai’i” (Clarkson Potter), I knew I had to make it. The book was written with Garret Snyder, a former Los Angeles Times food writer.

Through 100 recipes, Simeon gives you a taste of today’s Hawaii, mixing tradition with fun spins that amplify the unique cross-cultural blend of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Filipino and native Hawaiian flavors that makes this cuisine so mouthwatering. Along the way, you get to know him, too, from how his grandpa left the Philippines at age 18 to work on a sugar plantation in Hawaii to how Simeon slyly fed the tired and hungry camera crew of “Top Chef” with his Spam musubi.

Read more

A New Favorite: Chicken with Caramelized Onions and Croutons

Posted on by 5 comments
A "no-recipe'' recipe of crispy-skin chicken on a bed of caramelized onions and shallots, with arugula and home-made croutons.
A “no-recipe” recipe of crispy-skin chicken on a bed of caramelized onions and shallots, with arugula and home-made croutons.

If you were to spy a recipe that offered merely a list of ingredients — without any precise measurements for the most part — along with no specified number of servings, and only one paragraph of instructions, would you:

A. Be petrified.

B. Rejoice in its invitation to let loose and improvise.

C. Consider it a gimmick.

Now, imagine an entire cookbook like that, and you have “The New York Times Cooking No-Recipe Recipes” (Ten Speed Press). It’s by Sam Sifton, the founding editor of New York Times Cooking.

As a cookbook writer, myself, who’s always had it drilled into her to be as specific as possible when writing or editing recipes, this cookbook initially gave me pause. With its tack that less is actually more when it comes to recipe verbiage, I wondered: Would novice cooks would find this style off-putting and too intimidating? And would experienced cooks give the book a pass, assuming the recipes must be far too easy or mundane to accommodate such a truncated style?

It pays to approach this book with an open mind. Whether you’re just learning to cook or already a decent home-cook, you’re sure to find new, inspired ways — as streamlined as they might be — to get dinner on the table. What this book does is encourage you to trust your instincts more, to be less rigid in the way you cook, and to be more imaginative in scouring your pantry for substitute ingredients when need be. And in a pandemic year, which has seen grocery shelves decimated at times, that’s an invaluable skill to possess.

Read more

Middle Eastern Lentil Soup To Warm the Soul

Posted on by 6 comments
A delightfully earthy and fragrant lentil soup garnished with feta and cilantro.
A delightfully earthy and fragrant lentil soup garnished with feta and cilantro.

How satisfying is this vegetarian “Middle Eastern Lentil Soup”?

So much that I didn’t even catch my husband, aka Meat Boy, sneaking slices of salami afterward, as he is wont to do.

That tells you just how delicious this hearty bean and spinach soup — imbued with cumin, coriander, fennel and cayenne — really is.

The recipe is adapted by the Wall St. Journal from “The White Dog Cafe Cookbook” (Running Press, 1998). The cookbook was written by the owners of this Philadelphia restaurant, Judy Wicks and chef Kevin von Klause.

Read more
« Older Entries Recent Entries »