A simple and classic roast chicken is one of the meals you should know how to make. Lest you say “roast chicken is roast chicken,” may I remind you of the many bland and uninteresting roast chickens you have probably eaten and tell you that it doesn’t have to be this way. My go-to, absolute favorite, crowd-pleasing roast chicken recipe comes from Ina Garten, aka “The Barefoot Contessa.” Garten is a self-taught home cook who has reworked classic recipes and given them new life. I have made her version of roast chicken dozens of times, for family dinners and for…
Author: emma
The Bloody Mary is the classic brunch cocktail, with the Mimosa a close second. What makes the Bloody Mary so popular may be because it is a meal in a glass. Salty, briny, and bursting with tomato flavor flecked with spice, the liquid is accompanied with garnishes that range from a simple celery stalk or pickle spear to a stacked-high skewer of cheese, salami, and peppers. But can you make the best of the Bloody Mary (minus the alcohol) and add it to steak? Of course you can! This fabulous recipe from Food52’s Ali Slagle takes the salty and spicy…
Breakfast can often be boring. We easily fall into the rotation of cereal, eggs, yogurt, cereal, eggs, yogurt, cereal…you get the idea. And when you want to spice things up, the awesome-looking recipes you see on places like Pinterest can be intricate in process, or require an obscure hard-to-find ingredient that without it the recipe falls flat. Enter this nifty little number: Hong Kong Style French Toast! Yes. French Toast, but the Hong Kongese have elevated this breakfast treat to something that can be served all day, yet keeping the toast simple to make. Gotta love the recipes and secrets…
Just the other day we found ourselves with a surplus of rice as my husband asked the Chinese restaurant for two containers of rice, not realizing that the entrees he had selected for take-out each came with rice. In researching “what to do with a bumper crop of cooked rice” I stumbled across a recipe for arancini, the crispy stuffed fried rice balls that feature in Sicilian cuisine, and found I had all of the necessary ingredients to make them that night. As I was preparing the rice balls I found I had to wet my hands to help the…
Hawaiian poke entered the scene in a big way about ten years ago. A few years after that Hawaiian restaurants started opening across the country, and soon after poke items appeared on all types of restaurant menus as appetizers and in fast-casual restaurants as bowls. What is poke, anyway? Pronounced sort of like “pokey” as in “hokey-pokey,” poke is diced raw fish that is seasoned in some way, traditionally simply with just salt and seaweed, but more commonly with Asian sauces and condiments, such as soy sauce and sesame sauce and seeds. You’re more likely to see it served as…
Are you in a cooking rut? Head to your panty and no doubt you have a stack of tuna cans somewhere in there. With the tuna and a few other key ingredients you can mix, shape and pan fry these crispy tangy patties for your next lunch or dinner. The trick with the patties is to use a binder to keep them from falling apart. This recipe uses eggs, mayo, and panko breadcrumbs to achieve that important “glue.” Panko leads to a crispier, more crackly crunch than regular breadcrumbs, so they are well worth buying and keeping in your pantry…
Forget the low carb, keto, whatever, diet. Sometimes you just want pasta. When people think of pasta, the ubiquitous spaghetti noodle comes to mind. But what about something a little different? Something that looks pretty, is fun and easy to prep, and will become your new go-to dish when you can’t think of anything else to make. Stuffed pasta shells! They are gooey and cheesy, and oh so good. And this recipe inspired by Cara Lanz of MidwesternHomeLife.com is an upgraded version of the classic stuffed shells. Using chicken shredded from a rotisserie chicken, you can cut the time to…
The first tip I learned when I got into cooking more seriously was “clean as you go.” This has been a time saver as I used to wait until the end of my cooking storm to wipe everything up and put everything back, the last thing I usually wanted to do. The Kitchn’s Christine Gallary suggests five other easy kitchen organizing tips that I have been doing myself over the years. They don’t cost much, hardly anything, really, and require you to think about the kitchen a little differently, like a culinary school student. Below are the five tips that…
Whenever rhubarb turns up in farmers’ market stalls and on supermarket shelves, I know we are firmly in the middle of spring. In Minnesota where I live the stalks appear just once a year, April to June, whereas in the Pacific Northwest they experience a second harvest in July. Because the season is short, rhubarb doesn’t tend to stay in stores for long and if you don’t sue the stalks right away, they can become stringy and woody, not something you want in your strawberry rhubarb pie, which is the absolute best fruit pie in the world (I don’t care…
I recently stayed with a friend in San Francisco, and we were deciding what to make for dinner one night. Earlier that day, I had gone to the market and purchased a half-pint container of tabbouleh, the herb, grain, and vegetable salad, thinking I would have it for lunch or a snack at some point during my stay. “I have tabbouleh,” I told her, and we placed it on the table with odds-and-ends leftovers and cobbled together a hodgepodge dinner. My friend tucked into the tabbouleh, took a few bites, and proclaimed, “Wow, that really hits the spot.” That is…
BBQ gets people riled up. It’s all about the sauce, and declaring which one is the best induces heated conversations and invitations to try rival concoctions with friends old and new. Whether it’s the mayonnaise-based Alabama white sauce, the vinegary North Carolina style, or the tangy Memphis style, people have their favorite they swear by. But the most replicated BBQ sauce style is Kansas City, the thick smoky-sweet brown sauce with a touch of heat. It’s popular; millions of bottles are sold annually and featured on tables at every BBQ restaurant and home cookouts. According to Visit KC, a man…
Are you one of those people who likes dessert but doesn’t like sweets? Sounds contradictory, yes, but I know you are out there. Well, I will let you in on a little secret: an ingredient that you may have never heard of but lends a savory fudgy-ness to the blondie, the chocolate-less version of the brownie. It’s Doenjang, the Korean fermented soybean paste (what?) which bears similarities to Japanese miso. It is an essential ingredient in the Korean pantry and boasts many uses, from flavoring soup to playing the role as a dipping condiment. Blondies get their distinct flavor from…
Sometime in the near future, you may have unexpected guests drop by, but you don’t have anything to serve. If you plan ahead and get some phyllo pastry dough and keep it in the freezer and a wheel of Laughing Cow cheese wedges and keep it in the fridge, you’ve got yourself an easy cheesy breezy appetizer that comes together in minutes. The nice thing about this recipe is that the result looks fancy, like something you’d see served at a cocktail party. You can, of course, expand the visit of your expected guest to include cocktails or double the…
At a tea party, one expects to see white tableclothed tables teeming with goodies such as cucumber sandwiches on white bread with the crusts cut off, pots of steaming Earl Grey tea, jam, and clotted cream, and inevitably scones, the flaky doughy little bread cake. It’s a sweet treat, but not always, as the scone can be made savory just like its cousin, the biscuit, and you don’t need a tea party to enjoy it. But why would you want to do that, you ask? Because soup, stews, and salads need a little companion, don’t they? And sometimes, you want…
When you see zucchini overflowing at grocery stores and farmers’ markets, you know that summer is not too far away. But, while it is available in stores year-round, the humble zucchini is at its best during the warmer months, and what better way to prepare it than on the grill. Zucchini, or courgette, doesn’t have an abundance of flavor, so it needs a little help to make it shine. The grill’s high heat brings out complex flavors of the vegetable as its natural sugars caramelize. Also, because it has high water content, it is less dense than, say, a potato,…
Memorial Day weekend is upon us, ushering in BBQ season, and what better way to add to the food line-up than to make these delicious, tangy, and delectable mini muffuletta sandwiches! The Pioneer Woman Ree Drummond shrinks the traditional large muffuletta into the smaller bread roll and multiplies it into an easy-to-prepare appetizer. But where does the muffuletta come from? Muffuletta is associated with New Orleans and came to that city via Italian immigrants who brought the round sesame loaf – a “muffuletta” or “muffaletta” – from Sicily to the Big Easy. The sandwich was born in a grocery store…
Just five ingredients separate you from this delectable easy-to-put-together cake. Because it’s an icebox cake it doesn’t require any baking and is perfect for those who think they can’t cook. You simply layer cream and cookies one after another in a springform pan and throw it in the refrigerator to set. Top it off with crushed cookies and shaved dark chocolate and you’ve got yourself a showstopping dessert that will look impressive at your next BBQ. But where did the icebox cake come from? It is the descendant of similarly prepared desserts such as the charlotte and the trifle, but…
One of the yummiest things on earth is a simple, three-ingredient pasta dish I first tasted at a craft beer bar in Rome (yes, they make beer in Italy) several years ago. Melty tangy cheese and bitey cracked black pepper clinging onto strands of slick hot spaghetti served to me in a little ceramic bowl. Cacio e Pepe, or cheese and pepper in the local dialect, is a comfort food and easy to make yourself provided you perform one crucial technique; otherwise, you will be left with a lumpy grainy mess. Make a paste. That’s right! The secret is to…
Recently a friend of mine gifted me a kitchen-sized garbage bag of ramps she had pulled from her backyard. I was thankful (really I was and I told her so) and smelled the garlicky, oniony aromas of this spring allium seep from the bag and into my nostrils while I wondered what do with them. So what are ramps exactly? No, I am not talking about the inclined angled surface that allows you to go from low to high or high to low without the need for steps. These ramps are edible, a species of wild onion that pop out…
Banana bread is an easy way to use up bananas that have started to turn brown and stay ignored in the fruit bowl. You can throw the bananas and the other ingredients you probably already have in the pantry together in no time and you don’t need an electric mixer. Other ingredients such as lime zest, nuts and chocolate pieces can be thrown into the batter. Most importantly the house smells heavenly as the bread bakes in the oven. Bananas were first brought to the Americas by Spanish explorers in the 1500 but didn’t take hold as a breakfast and…