Food & Nutrition

What’s a Turkey Dinner going to Cost You in 2020? It’s that special time of year when we get to break out the good china, polish up the silverware and put on a big spread for family. The question I try to answer each year with the help of the American Farm Bureau Federation’s 2020 annual survey, is how much is our Thanksgiving meal going to cost. Unfortunately, for many families this year, the number of people at the table will be smaller because of Covid concerns.  It’s true in our house this year too. We are only having dinner for our family plus 3 of our closest friends who all will be tested before coming over. That means we won’t be cooking as much as usual on Thanksgiving but it won’t change the average cost per person as detailed by the AFBF. So just how much will it ...

After autumn’s glorious red-gold foliage has turned brown and fallen to the ground, and after Halloween bags have been filled and emptied, we approach another American microseason, now that it’s November. It is time for the annual Pie Panic. For all its down-home charm and soft patriotism, pie induces a swelling of fearful anxiety, particularly during the mad-dash rush of Thanksgiving. Cake, a pastry-loving friend once pronounced to me in one of those low-stakes quibbles about the supremacy of cake versus pie, is always good even when it’s bad, whereas pie, particularly with its finicky double crust, is more difficult to pull off. Recipe developers know this well. “During the week of Thanksgiving, my brother calls my Instagram DMs a 24-hour pie h...

How Long Can I Freeze These Foods & Leftovers? Have you ever looked in your freezer and found some meats or shrimp or leftovers that have been in there for a while and ask yourself, “I wonder how long I can freeze some of this stuff?” I know I do and then I wished I dated it and wrote was was in the vacuum sealed freezer bag. I have stuff in my garage freezer chest that I have no idea if it’s chicken livers or sauteed mushrooms. Even when I do write on the bag what it is, after a while the ink fades and I can’t read what I wrote. I guess that’s when it’s time to toss it. What NOT to Freeze Before we look at ingredients and food’s recommended storage times, let’s look at foods you should not freeze for various reasons. Here they are: Apples Mayonnaise Artichokes...

During tough moments in our nation’s history, pizza has always been there. American soldiers stationed in Italy during World War II ate pizza in droves, introduced to the GIs through local street vendors. When President Barack Obama and his Cabinet were hunkered down in the Situation Room during the 2011 Osama bin Laden raid, they ordered pizza to get through the night. Amid the 2008 economic crisis, pizza parlors posted booming sales. “It is the thing that people go to in times of need,” says Scott Wiener, the director of Slice Out Hunger, a nonprofit dedicated to providing hunger relief in the form of pizza.  Now, during a once-in-a-generation pandemic, pizza is once again answering the call. Slice, a quickly growing app that runs takeout and d...

“For an Indonesian, no meal is complete without sambal,” writes Lara Lee in the introduction of her new book, Coconut & Sambal. The sweeping book contains ten different variations on the spicy and dynamic condiment, of which there are hundreds of iterations and family recipes across the island nation of nearly 270 million people. There’s the fiery green sambal hijau padang, which combines green chiles, anchovies, and lime juice. There’s the copper-colored sambal kacang, which is creamy with blended peanuts and made fruity with tamarind paste. And there’s the sambal matah, which brings together matchsticks of fresh ginger with rounds of banana shallot and lemongrass. These sambals were the cornerstones of the food Lee grew up eating with her f...

How to Make a Classic Tuna Casserole My wife is experimenting with meals from her childhood. Two nights ago she prepared a childhood favorite, Chicken Baked in Cornbread. It was a hit.  Last night she topped that meal with a Tuna Casserole with Dill. I have to say I was a little skeptical when she said she was making a casserole that included potato chips. It took me back to the days when my mom would make them and they weren’t very good. Typically overcooked, dry and tough to get down. Not true with this recipe we adapted from Bonappetit.com. It was flavorful, moist, hard to stop eating and the potato chips were a perfect accompaniment that not only added texture but a blast from the past.  We made a few changes to the original recipe because my daughter’s college frie...

Prolific at any slice shop or late-night diner, mozzarella sticks always manage to feel like a minor celebration. But there are lots of deterrents to re-creating the crispy, stretchy snacks at home. For one thing, most cooks aren’t ready to deep-fry on a whim—with ripping-hot oil and considerable mess to navigate. And even when you go to the trouble of breading and freezing cheese batons before cooking them, as many recipes suggest, you still run the risk of a messy meltdown, undermining all the work you put in. So, when the craving for fried cheese hits at home, the solution lies beyond the stick. Mozzarella in carrozza (or simply “carrozza”) consists of the same elements as its tubular brethren, just rearranged into a more navigable format. The...

To be fair, brick chicken has been here all along. The al mattone method of cooking birds dates back to the Roman era, when a sizable tile (called a mattone) was placed over the bird inside a terra cotta Dutch oven (of sorts) that was heated over an open flame. You can still buy a similar set throughout Tuscany, where pollo al mattone remains a regional standby. In Russia and the Caucasus, a similar dish, called chicken tapaka, is likewise a stalwart. But, like many New Yorkers, I met brick chicken in the early aughts at Williamsburg’s Marlow & Sons, an effortlessly hip American tavern that, along with its sister restaurant, Diner, helped define the modern Brooklyn restaurant. It was a half bird, partially deboned and cooked under a cylindric...

Ask about moqueca de peixe, the lush Brazilian seafood stew slippery with coconut milk and dende oil, and Jessica B. Harris, culinary historian, author, and legend of food scholarship in the United States, might reference Shakespeare.  “‘Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripped,’” she quoted from Macbeth, when I called her at her home on Martha’s Vineyard. She had been telling me about her time more than three decades prior in Bahia, the northeastern Brazilian state famed for its version of the dish made with tropical fruit and rust-colored palm oil. “If you look at Bahia’s topography, if you look at the dirt, the palm trees, the water, Bahia feels like it was from Africa’s womb untimely ripped,” Harris said. “Bahia is wher...

For Jason Wang, the story of Xi’an Famous Foods began well before 2005, the moment his father, David Shi, began pulling sour liang pi (cold-skin noodles) and stewing meat for rou jia mou (Chinese “hamburgers”) to sell out of a 200-square-foot basement food stall in Flushing, Queens. The path to the New York restaurant empire’s now legendary spicy cumin lamb and hand-pulled noodles can be traced back to their family’s hometown of Xi’an in northwestern China, and to the subsequent suburbs and Chinatowns the family settled in after immigrating to America. Wang’s new cookbook, Xi’an Famous Foods, written with journalist Jessica Chou, includes recipes for those menu mainstays, and pays equal respect to homestyle dishes like egg and tomato or “red brai...