Week 47: Hi-Rise’s Corn Bread

Thanksgiving’s food rituals are strong. In many families, woe betide the cook who introduces alien vegetables or exotic desserts into the time-honored menu. My holiday dining companions aren’t that rigid, but we all delight in the traditional dishes. I don’t host Thanksgiving; Tom and I go to the home of friends, who in turn come [...]

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Week 46: Smelts with Caper Sauce

It’s an unfortunate name, smelt.  “Didn’t you care for your fish?” “No, it smelt.” These are indeed fishy-smelling little critters when raw. They’re oily too, which can be unpleasantly intensified by some ways of cooking. Counterintuitively, I’ve found the best way to reduce that oiliness is to fry them. You can’t plan ahead for smelts. [...]

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Week 45: Ragout de Porc, Chasseur

So you’re browsing through a cookbook, looking for a dish for this week’s recipe, and you find one that calls for boneless shoulder of pork, some of which you have in the freezer. The recipe takes almost three pages of text, and you say, “Well, this is just a braise; what’s all the fuss about?” [...]

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Week 44: Prosciutto-Roasted Fennel

Every cook who gives dinner parties needs to have a few genius-of-simplicity recipes available for providing relief in an otherwise-extravagant menu. If you’ll be serving hors d’oeuvre, appetizer, first course, main course, cheese platter, and dessert, you can’t, in charity to your guests, make them all blockbusters. This week I added to my repertoire a [...]

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