Food & Nutrition

Talk About Comfort Food – How to Make Chicken Baked in Cornbread   By Meg Jones - wife, mother,professional, contributor It’s a dreary rainy day at the end of October.  The virus is surging, the election is pending, and “I WANT MY MOMMY!”  Days like this make me reminiscent, and today I keep thinking about my mom’s comfort food.  I was a child of the ‘60’s, so most of what we ate came from a box or a can, and I loved it all.  Our standard pasta was spaghetti with Spatini spaghetti sauce (I can still hear the jingo in my head); though no longer in production, I can still taste it.  Beef stroganoff made with cream of mushroom soup served over egg noodles – a favorite.  Meatloaf was another standard, as was “Shrimp Louisiana,” a dish so laced with sherry I could bar...

If you visit New Orleans, there’s a very good chance you’ll find yourself gazing into the glowing pastry case at Willa Jean, the James Beard Award–winning South Market District neighborhood restaurant run by Kelly Fields. Between the golden biscuits, flaky fruit Danishes, and salty chocolate chip cookies, it’s nearly impossible to order just a coffee. Named after Fields’s grandmother, Willa Jean has been drawing crowds and national acclaim since opening its doors in 2015. While the lines are shorter these days—the restaurant is operating at 50 percent capacity, in accordance with city guidelines—and getting to New Orleans as a tourist may prove difficult, you can now re-create some of the restaurant’s beloved baked goods at home, thanks to The Good...

What Are Capers, Where Do They Come From and What Do They Taste Like? Let me start out by saying I love capers but not as much as my oldest daughter Nell. She is a caper fanatic. There are very few meals she doesn’t bring out the giant jar of capers from the refrigerator to the table to spoon out some of those mini salty morsels on to her food. On the other hand, my wife and youngest daughter Maddie are not fans. They’ll tolerate them if they have to in a dish like chicken picata, but otherwise, no thanks. What Are Capers? Those tiny green peppercorn looking morsels are actually the immature flower buds from the perennial caper bush (capparis spinos) also called Finders Rose.  They are dated back as far as 2,000 B.C.  Wow! Not to be confused with a caper berry that grows...

Plenty of cookbooks attempt to boil down an entire cuisine into a single author’s perspective. It’s a familiar scenario: A famous chef is anointed the “expert” on the food of a particular country (or continent) and condenses this expertise into a single, static, authoritative volume of essential recipes. Books like these can offer a great starting point for learning about a culture, but they also pose the question: If these 50–150 recipes have been deemed essential, then what are the unessential recipes that have been left out? In Bibi’s Kitchen, a new cookbook, oral history, and travelogue by entrepreneur Hawa Hassan and writer Julia Turshen, takes a different tack. It tackles the food of eight African countries that touch on the Indian Ocean, u...

How to Make Sheet Pan Chicken Great My wife Meg loves to cut out recipes from the New York Times weekend edition and the Wall Street Journal.  But not only does she cut them out, she and I prepare them including this one for sheet pan chicken. Typically, we have most of the ingredients for these recipes on hand and those we don’t, we substitute or run out to the store and pick them up. Some nights we make them exactly as written but other times we substitute ingredients or add some to change them up a bit. Just depends on how adventurous we’re feeling. Marinating Makes the Difference My wife asked me to prepare this meal on Wednesday night and laid out all the ingredients. At 5 o’clock when I looked at the recipe, I noticed it said to marinate the chicken for 2 to 24 ho...

Have you ever eaten something that smashed all your previous conceptions to smithereens? Mansour Arem’s harissa can do that to you. My first bite, raw from a jar that my buddy Garrett Oliver—Arem’s former boss at Brooklyn Brewery—hand-delivered to my door (so great was his zeal for this harissa), hit me like Proust’s madeleine. It was a taste that unlocked a memory. As I rolled the plush paste around with my tongue, the flavors of bitter olive oil and ruddy coriander revealed themselves. Then a jolt of fruit—yes, chiles are technically fruits, but are there blueberries in here?—then a slow, smoldering heat that tickled my gums and beckoned another spoonful. I’m an experienced cook and supposedly well-cultured food writer. I’ve eaten lots of har...

Claire Saffitz is a breakout video star of the home cooking internet, but deep down, she might not love video all that much. Perhaps this—a total lack of thirst and a humble indifference for the format—is the secret to her incredible rise from Bon Appétit Test Kitchen worker bee to the magazine’s senior food editor to the host of “Gourmet Makes,” the insanely popular series on said magazine’s YouTube channel that re-creates well-known grocery store items like Cadbury Creme Eggs, Cheetos, and Twizzlers in a home kitchen. The episodes, running 15-45 minutes, are mostly upbeat, straight-faced cooking demos, but with a wink at the (mostly male) food-science wonkery—and tired food TV in general. This endearing combination of cooking wit and mild snark, ...

How to Make a Simple Sweet and Sour Chicken My daughter wanted to prepare sweet and sour chicken for dinner last night but we started late because she was on a virtual class for school. Her school is on the west coast so it was later than usual. I didn’t want to eat at 9 pm so we made a quick version sweet and sour chicken. Coating Just about every sweet and sour chicken recipe you’ll find on the Internet or in cookbooks will include some sort of coating. Some recipes use tempura batter, others flour and some cornstarch. If I were going to make a traditional version of this recipe, I would prefer cornstarch to achieve the crispiness while keeping it light. If you use a coating, you need to shallow fry the chicken which just means you are using more oil than pan fry but ...

This past summer, Tunde Wey, the Nigerian-born chef, writer, and activist, launched a direct-to-consumer salt brand. “Say hello to Lot, a premium sea salt for white people! No, seriously this isn’t a joke,” the brand’s how-it-works page reads. One box of Australian salt costs $100; the monthly subscription option is called “White Tears.” It’s easy to get the reference for what Wey calls “pantry items as reparations”: start-up food brands are flooding Instagram, claiming disruption and redemption alongside eye-catching packaging. Naturally, there’s a lot to parody. With the flattening effect that marketing lingo can propel, it’s often challenging to distinguish walk from talk. Still, in the kitchen, where capitalism and culture uncomfortably overl...

A few weeks ago, Bread and Salt Bakery in Jersey City posted an Instagram photo of a single gnarly red onion, solid and raw in its papery skin. The image arrived alongside an announcement that, in order to keep the lights on while adhering to indoor-dining guidelines, the restaurant would begin offering a $380 tasting menu for 4.5 guests per night. The theme of the first dinner? Onions. The post was, of course, a very bleak joke about the economic realities of restaurants being forced to operate at 25 percent capacity. Reconciling this economic blow with the costs of operating a kitchen and paying staff would require a magic trick, like spinning gold from an ingredient that costs $1 per pound. But if any piece of produce could pull it off, wouldn...