It’s a cold winter here in New York City, and nothing’s better than a big, hearty meal to warm up with in the evening. So I got a little excited when La Cucina Italiana magazine arrived in the mail recently, with a bunch of fantastic winter recipes: roasts, braises, soups and other mostly one-pot dishes. [...]
I’m about 10 days into my new job at a New American restaurant in Midtown Manhattan. I’ve been working 12-14 hours a day, doing prep, lunch service, and dinner service every day. This past week was crazy because we were prepping for a big Christmas Eve dinner, and a Christmas day prix fixe menu. We [...]
Salt cod is a fun ingredient to work with. It can appear in multiple forms; flaked, in a salad, or pureed, as in the French brandade de morue. In Naples, Italy, salt cod is enjoyed in the form of a fritter, mixed with cream and dipped in a fizzy beer batter before being fried. To [...]
I love the earthy combination of mushrooms and spinach, brought together with a little cream, and lightened with a drizzle of lemon juice. This combination is the base for a pasta dish I recently made, from the book A Cook’s Tour of Italy. Farfalle, the bowtie-shaped pasta, is a perfect match for this sauce, as [...]
I’m about to start a new job, at a more upscale restaurant, cooking more refined food. The place is New American, and the chef is French, and the menu features great American grown ingredients and techniques from French and other cuisines. The thing I really love about my country’s growing culinary movement is the amount [...]
Here is a tasty stew that I made with leftover rabbit parts from another recipe. This is simple, rustic Italian cooking, showing respect to the rabbit and giving it a lot of flavor. There’s acidity from white wine and red wine vinegar, a briny note from black olives, and herbal flavor from sage.
Corn and beef are two things American cuisine is known for, and this soup brings the two together harmoniously. The foundation of the soup is a deeply flavorful corn stock made by simmering the roasted corn cobs in chicken stock to infuse their flavor. As the stock simmers, the beef is seared, and the corn [...]
The cooking of the Emilia-Romagna region of Northern Italy is rich, satisfying, and flavorful. This is the land of the ragu, long simmered meat sauces that adorn two of the region’s culinary mainstays – silky fresh pasta and creamy polenta. Although the Bolognese meat ragu, from the region’s capital, is certainly the most famous, there [...]
One thing that most professional cooks have in common is that they hate brunch, or at least working brunch. I’ve definitely not been the exception to this. We have to get up early on the weekend to go to work, which means we can’t stay out all night (well sometimes we do anyway), and for [...]
Normandy is dairy land, and cream finds its way into many of the northern French region’s dishes. In this recipe, cream coats sauteed beet slices with its luxurious richness, and its ivory color contrasts beautifully with the ruby red root vegetable. A sprinkle of chives is all that’s needed to finish this rustic French dish.
