When I picture time passing, I think of a calendar — specifically, a full-year calendar printed on one page, the sort that a bank or a restaurant might hand out as a freebie, emblazoned with its logo. The year is laid out as a grid: three rows, four months to a row. I picture each […]
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The chile con queso you know best may be a jar of tomato- and chile-flecked processed cheese. But it can also be a thing of unparalleled beauty, a deliciously messy, fiery, thin salsa capped with molten cheese meant to be pinched with fresh tortillas. You may not learn about this version until you visit southern […]
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For the unofficial start of summer, these dishes with fresh, bold flavors give you plenty of time to spend with friends and family on Memorial Day, which falls on May 29 — and won’t leave you stuck in the kitchen while everyone else is having fun. Many of the recipes are meant to be prepared […]
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Last winter was a terrible time to be a strawberry in California — and maybe an even worse time to be a strawberry farmer. At Harry’s Berries in Oxnard, Calif., the rain came down so hard it flattened acres of strawberry beds “like pancakes,” said the operations manager, Kristopher Gean, whose grandfather Harry Iwamoto started […]
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In India, milk is simmered for hours until only the dense, nutty solids remain. They’re mixed with sugar and spices, like cardamom and saffron, to make burfi, a category of sweets whose adornments might include pistachios and twists of silver leaf. Unlike dulce de leche, in which milk is cooked down with sugar until it […]
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Good morning. J. Kenji López-Alt went full Kenji recently and dove deep into the process of dry-brining salmon to achieve firmer, juicier, less albumin-stained cooked fillets. I admire the tenacity of Kenji’s reporting, and I’m absolutely thrilled to report that while he calls for an overnight cure on the fish, I’ve achieved excellent results in […]
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It may be spring, but summer — and all its abundance — is on the horizon, ready to encourage breezy communal dining under the glow of the sun and the grill. No gathering of the season is complete without bounteous produce, which can be quickly and easily turned into crowd-pleasing sides. These summer dishes, all […]
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The best advice for making shrimp cocktail I ever learned came from the great chef and cookbook author James Beard. He was adamantly against it. Not the shrimp, of course, which he adored, but rather the “overpowering red menace known as cocktail sauce,” as he wrote in his classic cookbook, “The New James Beard.” “If […]
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The fruity chile odor filled my nostrils as I took a sip of the mezcal that Juana Amaya Hernandez had poured for me. I was drinking it out of a chile de agua, a large lime-colored chile local to Oaxaca, its rim dipped in homemade sal de gusano, a spice made with ground agave worms, […]
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Good morning. Happy Mother’s Day to all who celebrate. My mom sure didn’t. She called it a Hallmark holiday and resisted all efforts to take her to brunch, a meal she loathed with passion and eloquence. Once I tried serving her a mimosa. She gave me a withering side-eye and didn’t touch it. For my […]
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The technique is wonderful, even in Western preparations, and solves many problems home cooks have with salmon, namely the spatter when searing, the potential for sticking to the pan, and the struggle to keep the fish moist and juicy inside while developing plenty of browned flavor or crisp skin. To get an idea, I bought […]
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For those equally frustrated by supermarket markups and interested in supporting local farmers, a C.S.A., or community-supported agriculture program, has a lot to offer. Chief among the benefits is that a mystery box of fruits and vegetables makes every week (or every other week or every month, depending on your program’s model) feel like your […]
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“Transforming Spaces” is a series about women driving change in sometimes unexpected places. When Ana Ros became the head chef at Hisa Franko, a restaurant in the Slovenian countryside, she had no experience cooking professionally or running a restaurant. She had never gone to culinary school, nor had she dreamed of being a chef as […]
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Asparagus season sneaks up on me every year. I anticipate it so hungrily, so ardently, that I have to put it out of my head as May approaches. Stay calm, I tell myself on the way to the farmers’ market, asparagus will be here soon enough. Then, suddenly, there it is, in bunches and bunches […]
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Cocaine. Foreign currencies. Firearms. All contraband that customs agents are trained to catch. But hundreds of pounds of Fruit Roll-Ups? Welcome to the age of TikTok-influenced smuggling. Because of a recipe that spread widely on the social media platform, Fruit Roll-Ups — the American-made fruit leather snack that has been passed out to children at […]
Read MoreThere’s something about asparagus that makes it a bit intimidating. There’s an aura to it, a mystique, a set of rituals related to its seasonality and how fresh it ought to be, rules on how it should be cooked (steamed in an asparagus pot, if you can) and eaten, without overwhelming it (with just some […]
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A JELLYFISH TASTES of nothing. Maybe a little salt — a trace of the sea, or of how the creature is packed, once wrested from its natural habitat, for preservation (not of its life but of its viability as food). When its bell is prepared as a raw salad, it tastes only of the ingredients […]
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Oyakodon Is Bliss in a Bowl Good morning. Bryan Washington has a lovely column in The New York Times Magazine this week about the joys of oyakodon (above), the Japanese rice bowl with chicken and egg. The name translates to “parent-and-child bowl.” Bryan’s eaten oyakodon all over Japan, and he’s perfected it in his home […]
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Certain foods are too powerful to stay in the past. Buljol, named for the contorted patois of the French words brulé (burned) and gueule (mouth), is a dish of dried salted cod, and has followed my family through generations, well beyond my mother’s childhood in 1950s Trinidad. Every Friday night, my maternal grandmother, Elaine Cadet, […]
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I count myself among those devoted cooks who aren’t afraid to break out their waffle irons. A brave and foolhardy bunch, we make our batters from scratch or from boxes, and indulge in the ridiculous pageant of cooking waffles. Why? After all, any hot, flat surface would transform an almost identical batter into golden brown […]
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In the United States, lasagna almost universally entails tomato sauce, mozzarella and ricotta. However, a recent visit to Italy reminded me that the lasagna family is, in fact, vast and varied. There are hard-boiled egg and meatball-stuffed lasagnas from Naples; chicken liver studded ones from Le Marche; Bolognese and béchamel-swathed examples from Emilia-Romagna. But there […]
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THE CHEF MOST often credited with inventing the croquembouche, the French-born confection that towers haughtily over any table it graces, was, unsurprisingly, an architecture enthusiast. Toward the end of the French Revolution, years before he baked the cake for Napoleon Bonaparte’s (second) wedding, Marie-Antoine Carême began an apprenticeship at a patisserie near the Palais Royal. […]
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There’s a sort of holiness in donburi’s simplicity, which is endless, permeable and variable. With its smoking eel just slightly grilled and settled over rice, every bowl of unadon I’ve eaten at Kuromon Market in Osaka, tanked in the mornings after cartwheeling with the gays through the city’s Doyamo district, has been the closest I’ve […]
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Good morning. Spend enough time with New York Times Cooking and eventually you’re going to deviate from a recipe, or cook without one entirely. Some will do so out of necessity. The recipe calls for chicken, shallots, smoked paprika and cream, but what you have is pork chops, onions, flour, white wine and Lawry’s seasoned […]
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No matter how you feel about King Charles III and Queen Camilla’s recently revealed signature quiche, it seems unlikely to eclipse the most famous coronation dish of all — coronation chicken. Created for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, the posh, delicately flavored chicken has, like Britain itself, changed a bit since. What […]
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After the long, gray winter, outside is where I want to be more and more. And somehow all I want to eat is vegetables, perhaps as a kind of tonic. If your climate allows, this light, sunny menu is really more of a daylight meal, relaxed and best eaten outdoors (though, this year, it’s anyone’s […]
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You probably think all of us here at New York Times Cooking love to cook. And for the most part, we do! We cook for work, we cook for fun. But we’d be lying if we didn’t admit to sometimes wilting at the thought of planning another week of meals, or groaning when the last […]
Read More You probably think all of us here at New York Times Cooking love to cook. And for the most part, we do! We cook for work, we cook for fun. But we’d be lying if we didn’t admit to sometimes wilting at the thought of planning another week of meals, or groaning when the last […]
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The first time I tasted changua, a dairy-rich Colombian soup, my wife, Adri, a Bogotana from the heart of changua country, grimaced as I swirled the golden yolk of a poached egg through some half-melted cheese. She pulled a sour face as I sopped up the milky broth, seasoned with cilantro and green onions, with […]
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When the chef Asma Khan was growing up in Kolkata, India, she learned that there was very little mustard oil couldn’t do. Dry skin? Weak joints? A common cold? A dab of the oil could cure them all. But she loves cooking with it most: drizzling it into begun pora, a rich and smoky mashed […]
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To celebrate the 10-month anniversary of the successful spinal surgery on Jagger, her goldendoodle, Cat Torrejon-Nisbet didn’t buy him the traditional rawhide dog bone. Instead, she paid $15 for a light pink, rose-shaped dog pastry made with antelope heart from Dogue, a canine restaurant in San Francisco. “They’re not going to love you more for […]
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