Mushroom Stroganov with Morels

It’s a mean, cold, wet day as I write, but I know Spring is here because morels have begun appearing. Tom and I dreamt about morels all winter long. We’d been planning an experiment of substituting wild mushrooms for the beef in a Stroganov recipe, so when we saw plump, pale golden ones in a [...]

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Two Exotic Legume Dishes: Mujaddara and La Loubia

Toward the end of each year, as the weather declines from chilly to frigid, I start thinking of long-cooking, rib-sticking legume dishes, based on beans and lentils. I have good French, Italian, and American recipes for these pulses, but this week I was feeling global, so I looked in my cookbooks for something more exotic. [...]

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Three California Vegetable Dishes

I’m not a big fan of California cuisine. I feel that too often it throws together too many not-really-compatible ingredients, so the flavors clash rather than cooperate. But I keep looking into it and hoping for the best. An attraction for me of Christine Hanna’s book The Winemaker Cooks was the restrained exuberance of many [...]

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Confessions of a Converted Okraphobe

Even as a child, I hated okra. My mother never cooked it, but one of her friends seemed to serve it, stewed, every time we went to dinner at her house, and I always loathed the slimy stuff. In later years, when I became interested in New Orleans cooking, I would make only filé gumbo, [...]

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Escarole and Leek Pie; Pugliese Caponata

It’s hard to appreciate the cooking of Italy’s Puglia in the USA. Over the years, I’ve worked with several Pugliese cookbooks, but that region’s cuisine is so minimal, and so dependent on the freshest local vegetables, that unless you have exactly comparable ingredients, the recipes can come out flat, dense, or bland. A new cookbook [...]

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Vegetarian Indian Supper

No matter what the fusion cuisine people may say, my trouble with Asian cooking is that I’m not good at incorporating an oriental recipe into an otherwise-occidental meal. Therefore, I always end up “doing Asian” much more elaborately than I intended. To wit: The other day I was browsing Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cooking, [...]

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Ratatouille and Sausage “Pot Pie” with Cornmeal Biscuits

This week’s recipe made a dish that we thoroughly enjoyed eating – but I got really irked by the process of making it. I have to say it’s one of the most carelessly written recipes I’ve ever encountered from an American cooking professional. It was printed in the New York Times nearly two years ago, and [...]

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Baked Stuffed Heirloom Zucchini

For me, zucchini, corn, and tomatoes are the Holy Trinity of summer vegetables. I never tire of them in season, cooked plain or cooked fancy. This year several stands at my Greenmarket are carrying an heirloom zucchini variety, costata romanesco. Ridged, palely striped, and sometimes unevenly bulbous, it has a tender, nutty sweetness well beyond [...]

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A Sicilian Meal for Montalbano

One of my favorite detective novelists is Andrea Camilleri. His incorruptible police inspector, Salvo Montalbano, is a fully realized and totally satisfying hero, not the least of whose charms is a devotion to food. In every story we find him passionately consuming classic dishes of his Sicilian homeland. Reading the books makes your mouth water. [...]

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Russian Ham Dumplings with Fried Onions and Mushrooms

Happily, this week’s new recipe redeemed my disappointment from last week’s. I discovered an excellent dish, of a kind I’d never made or even eaten before. Great Meals in Minutes is a Time-Life cookbook series, like others I’ve written about here. In the early ‘80s, Tom and I contributed recipes for three meals to each [...]

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