Food & Nutrition

Alexander Smalls might be the only person who’s won a Grammy, a Tony, and a James Beard Award. His most recent book, Meals, Music, and Muses: Recipes from My African American Kitchen, bridges his celebrated careers as both an opera singer and a restaurateur while telling the story of Southern food through music. It’s a rich and layered read, with each chapter paying tribute to a genre of music and a genre of food that, as Smalls writes in the book’s introduction, “are rooted in a knotty lineage that connects West Africa and Western Europe.” There’s jazz (the improvisational bites that begin a meal), spirituals (rice, pasta, and grits), and serenades (comforting sweets). The book came out as a follow-up to Between Harlem and Heaven, the James Bear...

How to Make Watermelon Gazpacho at Home We were having dinner at Radnor Valley Country Club a couple of weeks ago and they were serving this incredible watermelon gazpacho recipe as a starter to a prix fix meal. It was one of those perfect summer evenings. We first went for a swim with our friends, changed and enjoyed dinner on their back patio overlooking the pool. The tables were spaced for social distancing and it was nice to be out for a meal for the first time since the pandemic. They even had live music from the Bourbon Tabernacle Band, a two person group originally from Kentucky. What is Gazpacho? Gazpacho is a cold soup that is thought to have originated in Andalusia, a region in southern Spain.  It has influences from both Greece and Rome. Originally, it was ...

How to Make a Hot and Spicy Habanero Sauce Recipe Habaneros are among the hottest peppers on earth. This habaneros sauce will produce blistering heat. So Be Careful. Employ it on virtually anything you would use hot sauce on. It is particularly good on steak and grilled meats. The heat can be adjusted by augmenting the number of habaneros or downshifting to a less intense pepper such as a jalapeno. Or, for no heat, omit the hot peppers. You’ll be left with a spicy, but not hot, red pepper sauce. Habaneros Peppers This peppers are hot. How hot? If you’ve ever had a ripe jalapeno in a salsa or Mexican dish, you know how hot they are. Habaneros are 100 times hotter. This is why I say be careful when making this sauce. In fact, I would suggest you start with 1/2 of the ha...

“Despite the heat, I think summer is the best time of year to bake,” writes Yossy Arefi in Sweeter Off the Vine. From bubbling peach galettes with demerara sugar–sparkled crusts to slab pies stuffed with juicy apricots, a quick scroll through the Brooklyn-based photographer and writer’s Instagram says it all. She makes a compelling case for a sauna-like stint in the kitchen with the oven cranked to 350ºF, especially right now, when the markets are packed with peaches, blueberries, and apricots in New York City and much of the Northeast. The height of this blazing summer harvest has us reaching for Sweeter Off the Vine, a book that was originally published in 2016. Luckily, there’s no shortage of fresh ideas about how to put your farmers’ market haul...

The man behind the fish counter found me investigating a mangled heap of pale salmon fillets. The adjacent row of whole mackerel looked more inviting. The man told me that their fish guy had gone home for the night—if I wanted the fish, I would have to clean it myself. I needed it for an attempt at a teishoku, a Japanese-style set meal, but I had no idea how to gut a fish. After delaying the decision with a lap around the aisles of my neighborhood market, I decided that I needed to learn how to clean a fish—a task I’ve managed to avoid for 27 years. Since the lockdowns began in March, I’ve been bunkered down in Portland, Oregon, trying to cook something each week that challenges me to stretch beyond my usual skill set. But more important, I wante...

“Friuli is a land of castles and giants and princes,” says cookbook author Meredith Erickson of the topic of her latest deep dive, Friuli Food and Wine, written with Bobby Stuckey and Lachlan Mackinnon-Patterson, co-owners of Frasca Food and Wine in Boulder. “Friuli is mysterious.” Erickson, along with her collaborators (who met working at The French Laundry before decamping to rural Colorado), is exploring this lore through a richly photographed travelogue and cookbook tackling the food of Italy’s extreme north. Technically called Friuli Venezia Giulia, or FVG to avoid the marble mouth, the region borders Austria, Slovenia, and the Adriatic Sea. The food and wine culture can’t be put in a single box, influenced as it is by the neighboring Austro...

Paging through Chicano Eats is a little like walking through a kaleidoscopic candy store display. Vibrant jewel tones and geometric shapes come into focus, whether you’re looking at a shelf of clay cookware or a bowl of ruby-red frijoles charros. And then there are the recipes that are literally inspired by classic Mexican candies, like the Duvalin-hued Jell-O mold, and the spicy, charred wings that take after Lucas Gusano tamarind candies. The new cookbook is by Esteban Castillo, who writes and photographs an award-winning blog of the same name. Like the blog that he founded in 2016, the book documents some of the most memorable food that Castillo grew up eating during a childhood split between Mexico and California. There are also glimpses into...

Grilled Radicchio and Corn Salad with Buttermilk Cream Sauce Last year for my birthday, my wife Meg gave me this cookbook called Piatti – Plates and Platters for Sharing Inspired by Italy. For my birthday dinner that year she made 4 different dishes from this cookbook including Grilled Radicchio and Corn Salad. Every dish was perfect. Not only delicious to eat but beautiful to look at as you can see from the photo above. This year when my daughter came home from college, we duplicated three of the recipes. I would like to try every recipe in this book. They are that good, but like many home cooks, once they find a recipe they really like, you stick with it. I’ll make a point of trying some other recipes from this book including Stewed Calamari with Tomato, capers and coll...

How do you do cold coffee? And what do you really think of cold brew? These are the questions I presented to a half dozen coffee professionals from Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago last week. It was hot and humid in my Brooklyn neighborhood, and I was personally drinking more cold coffee than I had ever purchased from my local café. But I wasn’t really loving it. Sure, the caffeine hit of a cold brew crushed in 90 seconds has its appeal. But I think of coffee as something to be savored and drunk slowly, noticing the roast profile or the coffee’s origin. The bright and lemony highs of a Kenyan, the natural sweetness of a washed Oaxacan. Cold brew destroyed that pleasure for me. Where’s the acid? Where’s the bite? I wanted my cold coffee like that....

Popcorn cornbread is precisely what you think: cornbread made with popcorn. Easy. The cornbread you know, made even more likable. There is a solid chance that you, like I did, think popcorn cornbread constitutes tufts of popped popcorn suspended in aerated animation. Nope. Or that popcorn cornbread defies physics, puffing over the skillet’s edge like a popped corn kernel’s endosperm bursting from its hull. It ain’t that either. Instead, popcorn cornbread has the precise carriage of the standard cornmeal loaf, with an invigoration of popcorn flour. Yes, I am talking about flour made from popped popcorn. You can make popcorn flour at home (see below). Like, tonight. That way, it will be ready for its starring role in popcorn cornbread, the inspir...