All Things Food
I mentioned to my stepson, Ben, the other day that I had made scallion pancakes. Please post that, he requested! So here it is.
The recipe is adapted from Flour, Too, by Joanne Chang. She had the brilliant idea to use focaccia dough for her scallion pancakes. As a result, if you don’t want to or, for whatever reason, can’t make the dough yourself, you can use store-bought pizza dough from the refrigerated or frozen section of the supermarket.
Read MoreAlthough we are months past the Festival of Lights, let us remember that Hanukkah is one of myriad observances at or around the winter solstice, the darkest time of the year in the northern hemisphere, and that these holidays look hopefully toward a return to light and life and a new growing season. And now, although the days are getting longer, we are metaphorically in a dark time, and we hope and pray for a return to light, to better days.
Read MoreToday is the first of a new category of blog posts called “Found in the Freezer.” Yes, we finally did a full inventory of the freezer – complete with an Excel spreadsheet! I found several ½-cup containers of egg whites, probably from a total of 12-14.
How did I end up with so many egg whites?!
Read MoreSometimes you just need the comfort of a fresh-baked challah and a roast chicken in the oven, and what better day to smell, taste, and feel that comfort but Shabbat.
Read MoreSome months back, while searching the internet for something else, I stumbled upon the Cook the Books club (link here), which bills itself as “A Bimonthly Foodie Book Club Marrying the Pleasures of Reading and Cooking.” The founding members select books – either fiction or non-fiction – that have food and cooking as a focus. Participants have two months to read and cook and write a blog post about the book. Some books have recipes, some do not, but all inspire kitchen creativity!
Read MoreI always forget how much I adore this recipe! Hank never believes canned tuna on pasta is going to be good, then remarks with great surprise how tasty it is! This is something my parents used to make often, as it could come together easily with pantry ingredients. With their busy lives and tiny NYC apartment kitchen, this recipe allowed them to have a great home-cooked meal without much planning.
Because it uses humble pantry ingredients, I rarely think about making it. Until this week. A can of tuna, a can of white (cannellini) beans, some lemon, and pasta is all you need.
Read MoreMy friend and fellow Latin teacher, Jamie, responded to my request and asked for some vegan recipes! Although I am not vegan, nor even vegetarian, I do have friends that are, and I have been able to adapt recipes when they come for dinner.
In addition, when I worked as a recipe-tester for The Berkshire Farm Table Cookbook, there were numerous recipes for which I tested a regular version, a vegetarian version, and a vegan version! When this cookbook comes out (in May, click here to preorder) you will find a wide variety of options for different dietary needs.
Read MoreMy friend and colleague, Lisa, and I have been talking about this recipe on and off since last year. She had asked for new ideas for the spices in her cabinet, and we even talked about doing a curry cooking class with friends, and I had thought of a few recipes I could include. Maybe once things get back to some semblance of normal we will finally plan that get-together.
For now, however, I hope you enjoy this family favorite! It’s surely not authentic (see my rumination on what “authentic” means anyway in my blog post about General Tso’s Chicken), but it’s easy and delicious and keeps well! We usually make a large batch so we can enjoy it for dinners and lunches over a few days – although when we still had kids at home it never lasted that long! (You can halve the recipe if you prefer.) It can also be frozen, and for “emergency” lunches for work (i.e. when we have no leftovers), I pack some Indian chicken and rice together in a plastic container, which I then pop out into a glass container to heat up in the microwave at school.
Read MoreMy dear friend, Debby, called me yesterday because she has some sour cream in her fridge and wants to us it in a coffee cake. The good thing about making baked goods with any dairy products before they go bad is that you can then freeze a portion of the baked goods for another day – if you have the willpower not to eat it all right away!
My favorite coffee cake recipe includes pear and pecans. My father used to send us a box of Harry & David pears every year, and since he passed away I have continued the tradition to honor his memory, sending them to my mother and my sister, and also making recipes with pears myself.
Read MoreWe had some bread that was getting stale. Usually we try to slice bread and put it in the freezer before it gets to this point, but right now the freezer has not an inch of space. I’m also feeling like I need to use everything that I have and not waste anything, so I decided to make some stuffing!
OK – I should be precise. I made dressing. Stuffing is cooked in the bird, dressing is cooked in a pan. (On Thanksgiving, I usually make both because just in the turkey is not enough for my family!)
Read MoreI spent a long time looking for a peanut or sesame noodle recipe I really liked. One of the things that annoyed me the most with earlier attempts was that my food processor became an oily mess from making the sauce and clean up took too long. This recipe is so much easier because you just need a bowl big enough to toss the noodles after you make the sauce in the bottom of the bowl.
This is also one of our go-to Tanglewood recipes, along with the grilled salmon shown here because it’s a meal you can eat on your lap with only a fork! We hope and pray that in a few short months we will again be sharing picnics with friends on the Tanglewood lawn.
Read MoreI’ll admit, my pantry may not look like most. I’m the kind of person who sees preserved lemons at a good price and buys three jars! Fortunately, I also subscribe to the website Eat Your Books, so now I can enter “preserved lemons” to find things to do with them as I cook my way through my pantry.
To digress before today’s recipe – I would highly recommend Eat Your Books for recipe ideas, especially now. You don’t even have to be a member. One of the pages on this website is a virtual library of online recipes and you can search by ingredient, and then narrow your result by lots of other features, such as course, cuisine, or dietary needs, and you will be directed to a link that includes the full recipe.
Read MoreGreta, my son Daniel’s girlfriend, asked me today for the Guinness cake recipe I made when she and Dan visited. It’s another NYTimes cooking collection selection (original here, if you are subscriber) from Nigella Lawson. However, I do something different for the frosting. The original calls for a cream cheese frosting just on the top to mimic the foam on a pint of Guinness, but I prefer a coffee frosting with the earthy chocolate of this cake (which I’ve adapted from a different NYTimes recipe, the original of which is here).
Read MoreAnother request today, an easy mac & cheese recipe! This comes from the NYTimes cooking collection with some helpful tips to make this pantry & freezer cooking.
Although we all may be looking for recipes that take time these days, this recipe has two time-savers: You don’t cook the pasta first, and you don’t make a roux.
Read MoreMy friend, Olivia, who is 12 years old and whose school is closed, asked me for some easy recipes so she can try her hand at more cooking while she is stuck at home. She asked me for some dessert recipes to start, and, to be honest, because we do not eat dessert every day I usually am willing to try something more complicated when I decide to make a dessert.
But after discussing it for a while, she thought her parents would still be able to go to the store and get a refrigerated crust and two pints of blueberries, so here’s an easy blueberry pie recipe!
Read MoreMy guess is that many of us will be making a lot of pasta in the days ahead. So here’s something you can do with leftover pasta. Of course you can just warm leftover pasta in the microwave and have a decent lunch, but a frittata is so much better!
On the plus side this will work with pretty much any strand or shape pasta. The downside, however, is that I don’t have an exact recipe.
Read MoreWhat a difficult time we are in right now. I am sure many of us are cooking from the pantry, and perhaps you are trying to figure out what to do with that can of whatever you once bought for a recipe you never ended up making, and you can even remember what that recipe was!
It’s also a strange feeling to have two unplanned weeks off. All the schools in my area are closed until at least March 30, and there is no distance teaching for the time being. While I always like a surprise day off for a snowstorm – or maybe even two for a real honest-to-goodness blizzard – it’s weird to be faced with available time and nothing pressing to do.
So in an effort to give structure to my days and to offer some ideas for meals with things I hope people have in the house, I’m starting a series of Pantry Recipes!
Read MoreNow in the last days of my fourth trip to Italy with students (and there have been many more visits with family, as well as a semester in Rome during college), I’m struck by how many times I’ve heard students declare with surprise that a food they normally don’t like is really good here!
You can consider yourself lucky if you have friends in Italy! Italians are the most thoughtful generous people you will ever know, and I feel very lucky that I have some wonderful, dear friends in Umbria, the heart of Italy, in the small city of Gubbio. I am now on my third visit to this beautiful, charming town, and this time we are so lucky to be doing a gnocchi-making class at Pasta Fresca All’Eugubina!
Read MoreA few weeks ago, I met a former student, A.J., for a cup of coffee. I love keeping in touch with former students, hearing what they are doing now! Among other things, A.J. recently got married, and as we talked about cooking, he mentioned how he and his wife, Grace, lead very busy professional lives and often don’t have time to cook. Even when they do cook, he said, they find themselves with random leftovers and don’t know what to do with them, and he suggested I post some easy ideas for that.
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