Food & Nutrition

Braised Beans and Spinach Comfort Food at Its Best There’s something to be said about comfort food and these braised beans and spinach is about as comfortable as you can get. I wasn’t sure where this recipe was going but I wanted to use ingredients I happened to have in the house. It’s a meal you can prepare in 30 minutes and I can’t wait to eat leftovers for lunch today when I know it will be even better. So let’s look at the ingredients and talk about substitutions. Guanciale Guanciale pronounced gwaan·chaa·lei comes from the jowl (cheek) of a pig. It is the key ingredient to classic Italian dishes like bucatini all’amatriciana and spaghetti alla carbonara. I happen to have some in my refrigerator because I recently made bucatini all’amatriciana after watching the R...

You could pick a different jar of chile crisp to eat for every day of the month. Each jar of crunchy chile flakes submerged in glistening, ruby red, infused oil has a slightly different flavor profile, depending on the brand—there’s tingly, mouth-numbing mala spice from Sichuan peppercorns; savory garlicky crunch; umami bombs of MSG alongside crunchy pepper flakes; and sometimes all of the above. No matter which jars have become your chile crisps of choice, the condiment’s foundation of flavorful oil can be worked into your morning eggs and toast, salad dressings, slippery noodles, and more. But in these recipes by Jenn de la Vega, chile crisp becomes more than a condiment to reach for after you’re done cooking. Instead, it’s incorporated into a ...

“Knowing whispers. Rapt excitement. Swift proselytizing.” This is how writer Cathy Erway describes the fervor that has bloomed around chile crisp in recent years. The invigorating condiment has it all: a fiery red vibrancy, the heat of chiles, the crunch of fried garlic, and, most important, a rich oil scented with the aroma of Sichuan peppercorns, cardamom, star anise, ginger, sesame seeds, fennel seeds, and anything else you happen to decide to add to your personal batch. While many home cooks grew up with jars of Lao Gan Ma in their refrigerators (a brand that was founded in China’s Guizhou province in 1997), there are endless permutations of the basic formula. Making your own jar can be as simple as heating some vegetable oil and then steepin...

Despite what skeptics, carnivores, and ’90s cafés might have you believe, there’s a lot more to vegan cooking than whole grain sandwiches full of sprouts and tofu. It can be creamy, cheesy, savory, spicy, and wildly complex. And, most important, as YouTuber and former MTV VJ Lauren Toyota has set out to prove, food doesn’t need animal products in it to be really comforting. Her first book, Vegan Comfort Classics, preached this gospel with buttermilk biscuits, Buffalo chicken dip, and Southern fried cauliflower. Her latest book, hot for food all day, brings this style of indulgence into everyday cooking, equipping readers with the pantry ingredients and know-how needed for riffing on recipes and improvising along the way. There are easygoing bre...

A Simple Side Dish of Roasted Carrots and Asparagus in Pesto Sauce My wife is out in Utah visiting my youngest daughter so I haven’t been cooking as much as when she is home. I needed a quick meal so I came up with this tofu dish and served it with roasted carrots and asparagus in pesto sauce. Healthier Eating Like many Americans, my cholesterol is a little high and my primary care doctor is constantly telling me to try and lower it. So I’m trying to eat less red meat and more fish and chicken and now and again, a little tofu. Tofu is a great conduit for sauces. Tofu itself doesn’t have a ton of flavor but if prepared properly (I’ll be researching and writing about this soon) and served with a great sauce, it is very delicious and nutritious. I’m hoping to incorporate m...

Frozen food is essential for millions of American home cooks, from the peas dropped into an off-season February risotto to the seafood in a perfectly spiced gumbo—it’s convenient, cost-effective, and can help reduce food waste—but, perhaps unsurprisingly, it can be shunned by the snobbier corners of the culinary world. But now, as COVID-19 has led to the need for more meal prepping and shelf-stable options, some home cooks are rethinking their relationship to frozen foods—ushering in a new legacy for frozen food, where “preparedness” means something entirely its own. And shrewd brands have lined up with offerings adjusted to match the changing tastes: new companies like Ipsa Provisions and Mosaic Foods promise meals with a sense of place, designed by top chefs. Ipsa sells premade dinners...

Down where I live, in New Orleans, there is little worse than encountering underseasoned food. Black people here mock white people for their proclivity toward the blandest of bland foods: boiled chicken, flavorless potato salad. A crawfish boil that does not leave you sodium-swollen like a pufferfish on a bender is no boil worth attending. Righteous seasoning has a range of meanings. It can signify a steady baseline of sautéed onions, green bell peppers, and celery. It can suggest a fillip of black pepper. It can denote chile heat, whether fresh jalapeño, ground cayenne, or liquid hot sauce. Often, all three are united, such as in, say, a good gumbo, a dank crawfish stew, or a lush shrimp étouffée—shrimp “smothered,” as its name denotes, until th...

Arugula Salad with Roasted Beets Pistachio and Goat CheeseHow to Make an Arugula Salad with Goat Cheese   By Meg Jones - wife, mother,professional, contributor We haven’t done much entertaining lately (!) but couldn’t resist a socially distanced dinner with our good friend Jon in celebration of his 75th birthday AND vaccination.  Since he was the birthday boy, he got to choose the menu.  He said, “fish.”  OK.  We could make that work.  Since we had a wide berth, we decided to try a new recipe for Slow-Cooked Halibut with Garlic Cream and Fennel.  It was over-the-top delicious but wanted a side that was light and colorful.  Of course that didn’t occur to me until Jon’s ETA was about 15 minutes, so I had to spring into action and make do with what we had on hand.  ...

Few people can speak as enthusiastically about toasting Swiss meringue, piping icing onto perfectly rectangular loaf cakes, or exploring Minnesota’s rich baking culture as Zoë François. Over the course of the past year, while working on her new book, Zoë Bakes Cakes, and a new television series, Zoë Bakes, François has spent a whole lot of time doing all these things. “It’s been a big year,” she tells me. “It’s funny because, on one hand, nothing happened because I’ve been quarantined. I haven’t been out in the world much. But so much has happened in this house.” The book tells the story of how she went from being an art student in Vermont to being a pastry chef at a variety of restaurants in Minneapolis, and it translates this career into a ba...

“I hate when you go to a restaurant—especially an expensive restaurant—and they have a clam pizza, and you get it, and it comes with six clams in the shell,” Peter Reinhart tells me. “Where are the clams? I wanted clam pizza, not a pizza with six clams. I wanted a clam festival.” As the author of Perfect Pan Pizza and numerous other books about bread-baking and pizza, Reinhart has eaten fresh clam pies from Connecticut to Oregon to Italy. But, for his part, when it comes to cooking at home, he says, “I don’t love shucking uncooked clams.” Like thousands of other home cooks out there, he turns to an economical, widely available, and fairly delicious alternative: canned clams. While the last fifteen years of spaghetti alle vongole recipes, Portug...