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. [...]

Read Full Post »

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

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, [...]

Read Full Post »

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

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, [...]

Read Full Post »

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

Chanterelles with Confetti Vegetables

One day a week, at my local Greenmarket, the wild-mushroom man appears. His tiny stand starts in spring with the first morels and proceeds through the summer and fall with chanterelles, black trumpets, ovoli, porcini, sweet clubs, maitake, chicken of the woods, blewits, lobster mushrooms, oyster mushrooms, and any others his woodland prospecting turns up. [...]

Read Full Post »

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. [...]

Read Full Post »

Swimpses and Rice Fats Waller

OK, I know your questions. What in the world are swimpses? And what does Fats Waller have to do with it? Don’t blame me: Blame M.F.K. Fisher. This recipe is from her 1968 book With Bold Knife and Fork. In a chapter on the pleasures of rice, she speaks of Fats Waller singing “a slyly libidinous [...]

Read Full Post »

A Twice-tried Tale of Woe: Spinach Gratin

Recipes are like life. If at first you don’t succeed, it may well be your fault. If, with much more care a second time, you still don’t succeed, you might reasonably begin to think it isn’t you. A new recipe failed on me twice this week, and I’m suspicious. Some days, as Chief Dan George remarked [...]

Read Full Post »