This week’s Recipes for Health had us using seasonal ingredients to whip up some celebratory tacos. Come over and take a look at some of these tasty handfuls…the roasted vegetable one with the ranchera salsa was my favorite. Leave it to Martha to bring some of that Southern California flair to our East Coast chill. Now go decorate the palm trees with some lights and glitter and have a taco, California style.
Category Archives: With Recipes
Celebrate the Holidays…With Tacos
Filed under Photography, With Recipes
Simple Gifts…
This week’s Martha Rose Shulman’s Recipes for Health column is about edible gifts for the holidays. Simple, fun and tasty. Give it a look.
Filed under Photography, With Recipes
Cook This Now…
This is the title of Melissa Clark’s new book. Melissa and I have long discussed a project like this one where the flavor and tone of our long collaboration at The New York Times could shine in a longer form venue. I am so happy and proud to have photographed this book and to say that this book looks and feels just like we envisioned. Cook This Now is available on Amazon and if you purchase be sure to chime in on the comments…it actually means an awful lot.
Filed under cookbooks, Photography, With Recipes
Gilt-y Weekend Fare…
Gilt Taste has a 3 story arc that includes some terrific recipes from Melissa Clark and Dave Wondrich that will surely give you some extra inspiration to eat and drink (as if you needed any more) fantastically this Memorial Day weekend. Go check them out before you do that shopping…you won’t want to miss out.
Filed under Food Writing, Photography, Travel, Wine and Spirits, With Recipes
Gilt Taste Arrives Today…
With Ruth Reichl, the former editor at Gourmet Magazine as their editorial advisor, the Gilt Groupe launched their new food site, Gilt Taste , today. In addition to offering hard-to-find, artisanal foods, the site will also include editorial content. I am also happy to say that I will be contributing to Gilt Taste as a photographer. Check out my first contribution…three stories by Melissa Clark…now up on the site.
http://www.gilttaste.com/stories/324-spice-porcini-mushroom-salt
http://www.gilttaste.com/stories/322-cured-and-butter-poached-asparagus
Filed under Photography, With Recipes
Mango, mango, mango…
Mangoes are here and Melissa Clark’s Good Appetite has em. Plenty of em. This Tres Leches cake takes a while to make but is oh so worth the wait.
Filed under Photography, With Recipes
Breakfast with a Blogger…
The Kitchn is back at it again with a terrific series about what food blogger love to eat for breakfast. Leela Cyd Ross called me a few months ago and I shared with her my favorite post-gym morning nosh. Go ahead over to the Kitchen for a visit. Thanks, Leela, I was happy to share.
Filed under Food Writing, Restaurants, With Recipes
DIY Bahn Mi…
In her latest A Good Appetite column, Melissa Clark laments that Brooklyn has not yet been invaded by the scores of Bahn Mi shops that certain Manhattan neighborhoods have become rife with. For example, in my neighborhood, the E. Village, we have no fewer than 5 sandwich shops selling Bahn Mi East of 2nd Ave. including Bahn Mi Zon, Nicky’s and Coyi Cafe.
Melissa has come up with a simple, fast home version of the classic Vietnamese sandwich and I can say from experience that this Bahn Mi makes me think that she should capitalize on the Brooklyn void and start selling them out of her kitchen.
Filed under Photography, With Recipes
Nurungji…Snacking Korean Style
One of the great pleasures of being in a multi-cultural family has been learning about the food. I have become rather adept at eating, cooking and speaking Korean food. I have learned more about kimchi than any Italian-American boy from Staten Island could ever have reasonably expected to. I try to absorb as much of the old traditional Korean cooking as I can while my tutor is still young and healthy enough to cook every day.
One of the family rituals that I am taking great pains to learn how to do well is making is Soo’s favorite snack, nurungji. It is a simple as it gets but like all great traditional recipes it is all about technique. Nurungji translates to “scorched rice” and is made by taking cooked rice and by using a wide, flat spoon you press a thin layer of the still hot rice into the bottom of a small saucepan. You smash the rice down into almost a paste until it covers the bottom and up the sides of the pot about 1/8 inch. Remove any excess. You then place the pot over the lowest flame your stove can manage and let it sit for about 20 minutes or until the rice paste at the edge is brown and the middle is browning. Remove it from the heat and if you did it right the rice paste that was climbing the sides of the pot will start to pull away as it cools. In about 15 minutes you should be able to take a knife and run it around the edge of the pot, loosening the now crisp disc at the bottom. If you are a nurungji rock star, the disc comes out of the pot in one piece.
The nurungji that we eat is unseasoned but some Koreans prefer it sugared. With or without the sugar it is a crispy, crunchy snack that you break into pieces and munch on like chips or popcorn. Making and eating nurungji is nightly ritual when we visit the family along with watching the world news on KBS in Korean. After we finish the nurungji we leave halmeoni’s house so she can watch her soap operas. And so it goes.
A word of caution though, nurungji can be very hard. If you have lots of fillings or have difficulty with harder foods be careful when eating it. Otherwise, its a great, light, healthy treat and the crunch is so satisfying. Eat cheoncheonhi…(slowly).
Filed under Food Writing, With Recipes
Hometown Treasures…
People give me and send me a lot of information about food. Websites, links to blogs, recipes, magazine articles and especially cookbooks. Everybody has a cookbook…well everyone except me…but just about everybody else has a cookbook.
I recently I received a cookbook as a gift from Micki Connolly, mother of a good friend. She was part of a group who organized a cookbook for her Florida retirement community comprised of family recipes from resident snowbirds from around the world. It’s a fascinating treasure trove of regional specialties from folks like our parents and grandparents. I leafed through and found things like Super Bowl Chili from Edna Scipione of Wickliffe, Ohio and Scallops a la Crabtree from Dan Crabtree hailing from Lancaster, England. It goes on and on.
The chapter I am most anxious to dive into is the dessert section. Desserts that harken back to before the age of the Hostess Cupcake are the glue that have kept family gatherings fun and memorable for generations. I feel honored to have copies of Heinz and Hella Wartski’s French Sable Cookie recipe, Celeste deCapua’s Mexican Wedding Cookies and Peggy Tuffo’s Penuche Nut Fudge.
The book is from the Winterpark Community in Naples, Florida and is titled Hometown Classics. The real charm of it is that the proceeds they raise from the cookbook go toward things like fixing up the community pool, the shuffleboard courts and the clubhouse. Hometown Classics represents a small group’s big effort to preserve their prized recipes and make their community a better place. They did a wonderful job. The great test of a cookbook is if it can arouse our curiosity enough to make the recipes…and I can’t wait to try some.
Filed under Books, cookbooks, Food Writing, With Recipes
