The beauty of lentils is that they are quick to cook. Unlike other dried beans, they do not demand the overnight soak or eight-hour waiting time to tenderize as do red kidney, cannelloni or black beans. After a short simmer, the rewards are immediate.
I enjoy messing with bartenders. When they ask, “What would you like?” I pretend to muse for a moment and say, “Can you do Scotch and turkey gravy?” Or, “Give me a tequila and buttermilk, on the rocks.”
Next week, potato recipes will be dusted off once again for St. Patrick’s Day. Unlike the day’s traditional cabbage and corned beef, potatoes remain crucial to our cookery. Worldwide, we eat about 73 pounds per capita per year, more than any other side dish.
Leeks are one of the oldest Irish vegetables, and they combine well with other foods of the Emerald Isle, including cheese, potatoes and fish.
Order rice pilaf and you’ll probably get the rice but not the pilaf. There’s a lot of confusion about this. Pilaf is not simply cooked rice, although we often think it is. It’s a cooking method that adds centuries of flavor to our common rice. Any cooked grain can be a pilaf.
One of the easiest ways to add flavor is with marinades. With a marinade, a simple piece of meat, poultry or fish goes from plain to tantalizing. Suddenly, you are having dinner in Europe, or Asia, or the Caribbean, depending on the individual components.
Breakfast scrapple in German communities can be as common as pancakes and waffles. It’s hearty under maple syrup, but that’s hardly its main reason for being.
Vicki Tomashot Bauer of North Canton, Ohio, first tasted Dorito casserole when she was in her teens. Now a mom, Vicki tweaks the recipe for her family.
You may feel guilty about serving your family steak, but it’s impossible to satisfy beef appetites on a budget. This has happened before, in depressions, in meat rationing during wars, and on and on. One of the things we must cut is the food budget, and beef goes first.
The little girl with the umbrella has competition. Pink rocks mined in the Himalayan mountains, black flakes from the Hawaiian shores and gray Celtic sea salt are cropping up in restaurants and on supermarket shelves that were once dominated by Morton’s iconic youngster.
Home cooks are discovering the flavors of meatless cooking.
One of the stars during the Winter Olympics was barbecued bacon buffalo burgers on bannock buns. Scottish pioneers brought bannock, a brown quick bread, to Canada. Indians wrapped the dough around sticks and roasted it. Its hearty nutrition and ease of baking kept many a fisherman or cowboy satisfied.
Slow-cooking, revived in recent years in Europe, spread quickly to the United States. As a formally organized “movement,” its members revive and restore culinary customs, sharing recipes, techniques and philosophies. (They don’t shy away from innovative ingredients.) Underlining it is the understanding that family life is enhanced while a room fills with the savory smells of the meal being prepared.
Chicken stew with whipping cream? Leave it to our friends to the north to create hearty stews. With the harsh weather they enjoy (or suffer), Canadian stew is a weekly comfort necessity.
Ferran Adria of El Bulli in Roses, Spain, is considered by food professionals to be the world’s greatest chef. He’s generally credited with developing something called “molecular gastronomy.” So the new trend is to “re-formulate” rather than build.
I’ve always loved how Mediterraneans keep potted fruit trees on their sunny terraces. So last spring, I bought a beautiful lemon tree standard. I placed it on my patio and enjoyed its shiny green foliage and sweet-smelling blossoms all through the summer.
Once upon a time, soups came from cooking pots, not envelopes or cans. The trend is back to crafting them from scratch. They prepare easily, taste fresher and are worth the effort. A classic home-cooked is chicken or turkey with pasta.
It is possible to create a pie with no preformed crust. Then it bakes and, oh my, there’s the crust on the top, sides and bottom. This is the “impossible pie,” also known as the “amazing pie” and the “mystery pie.”
Soups, also known as potages, come in different colors, flavors and textures. They range from hot to cold, mostly broth to hearty, sweet to savory and vegetarian to meaty. For each palate there is a soup to match, and every nation has one or more signature soups to boast about.
Now that Mardi Gras is over, it seems fitting to think about the sugar used to make the holiday’s traditional King Cake. In particular, Louisiana cane sugar.
