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 Chocolate & Zucchini
Clotilde Dusoulier
  
Elbow Macaroni with Comté Cheese
and Baby Spinach
A lot can be learned about your cooking self by considering what you eat when you're on your own. I have friends who are simply not hungry when they're alone, who forget to eat (who what?), who don't consider it a real meal if there's no dining companion, or - and I am not making this up - who just eat a Kinder Surprise, build the little toy and call it dinner.
Washington Post
Food & Dining
Tap Into the Secrets of Picking the Best Melons
The only way to get a good one? Do the same thing you should do for peaches, nectarines and apricots: Put it up to your nose and breathe in (smell the soft indentation where the stem once was). If the thing doesn't smell irresistible, it probably isn't. Yes, there's that incessant tapping to find a hollow sound, a sign of ripeness; a dull thud means the melon is not quite ready. But missing that (brown last corkscrewy) tendril (at the stem of the watermelon) at the market, consumers should look at the saturation of color on the rind - not all over, but on the light spot where the melon was resting on the ground. If that spot is yellow, the watermelon is sweet, ready to eat. If it's white, the watermelon was picked too soon. If it's brown or soft, the thing may have begun to ferment inside.
Passionate Cook
Johanna Wagner
Caramelised Fennel & Red Onion
Salad with Raisins & Pistachios
Anything caramelised tastes just miles better than plainly cooked and with the sweet-and-sour tinge this dish has to it, there's a flavour component for everyone. And if that won't win them over, then the sherry-soaked raisins will surely produce smiles all round... if you have very picky guests, just double the amount!
Vinography
Alder Yarrow
Labor Day for Wine Lovers
Just as wine is celebrated for the immediacy of its link to, and taste of, a place and time, so too must wine be celebrated for being so blatant a product of human toil. For anyone who has even observed a harvest, let alone tried their hand at working one, that winemaking requires an incredible amount of human effort is undeniable. First and foremost to make wine you need a shitload of grapes. The irony of Labor Day falling during the harvest means that hundreds of the people who might ordinarily most deserve to take the proscribed day off to celebrate their own labors are instead hard at work making wine for you and me.
Simply Recipes
Elise Bauer
Tomatoes!
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Splendid Table
American Public Media
The House of Mondavi
This week it's a tragic story from the Napa Valley. Robert Mondavi built a family empire on innovation, evangelical salesmanship and, at times, stunning quality. Now it's gone, a victim of family betrayal and corporate takeovers. Wall Street Journal reporter Julia Flynn Siler tells the story in her book The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty. Then Lynne shares her recipe for the steak she made to go with her first bottle of Robert Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon. The year was 1974. The wine was a 1969.
Cooks Illustrated
Current Issue
In This Issue
La Tartine Gourmande
Béatrice Peltre
Eggplant in a Millefeuille
Eggplants are botanically a fruit although they are also commonly considered a vegetable. Italian Eggplants are smaller than its close cousin the Globe variety. I prefer them small because they are then more flavorful and less bitter. The best eggplants will be firm and shiny, not bitter if they have less seeds — like the male eggplants. Did I mention that eggplants had a sex? I, too, was surprised! Normally, male eggplants have less seeds and are therefore less bitter than female eggplants. When the indentation found at the bottom of the vegetable is a round scar, then it is a male, if it is oval, it is a female. Sprinkling them with coarse sea salt and letting them rest for a minimum of thirty minutes also helps to remove some of the bitterness.
David Lebovitz
David Lebovitz
Pistachio Gelato
The QCSS Syndrome occurs when a recipe call for some bizarre, outrageously-expensive or extraordinarily unusual ingredient. And to make it even more maddening, it's something used in such a miniscule quantity that it doesn't really make a difference. But like the things that people do online that they wouldn't dream of doing or saying in real life (and boy...do I have some emails to prove that) I figured I could do it here—so voilà!
Traveler's Lunchbox
Melissa Kronenthal
Tarator, Bulgarian for Summer
Although I appreciate the delights of fall as much as the next person, and realize that it promises much to look forward to in the food department, try as I might I just can't shake the nagging thought that I should have made more of summer while it was here, since at these latitudes, it's only a matter of weeks until we'll be lugging out the stewpots and casserole dishes and firing up the oven in preparation for another long, dark winter. Luckily, over the past few days we've been given a reprieve. And telling you about this soup, in fact, is really the excuse I needed to say a few words about Bulgaria.
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Cooking with Amy
Amy Sherman
Pear Pecorino Potato Soup: Recipe
I know what you're thinking. What kind of still life is that? In addition to being a study in ingredients that start with the letter "P"; pear, potatoes, pecorino and pepper are also the main ingredients in a most delicious soup. It's a rich and complex soup, the creamy potato backdrop accented with a little sweetness from the pears, a little sharpness from the cheese and just a tiny bite of pepper. It also pairs well with many different sandwiches, though probably not peanut butter and jelly!
Orangette
Molly Wizenberg
The Old Switcheroo
Alright, people. That's it. Enough of this wedding hoo-hah. Enough gushy, gloppy, lovey-dovey stuff. I don't know if you've noticed, but it's September. Like, end-of-summer September. Back-to-school September. Early-season-apples September. The calendar said it was coming, but still. It's something we should talk about. OH NOOOO. But then, you know, that old September feeling comes again, and from my safe perch inside the house, with the door closed, I can almost love the puddles and the leaves and the cars splish-splashing past, each one whooshing September! September! SepTEMberrr!
New York Times
Dining and Wine
Special Section: Restaurant Preview
Tea & Cookies
Tea Austin
My Ironic Garden, Part I
Then, about a week or two later, once we had all begun to get friendly with each other, I noticed the sage, rosemary, and oregano plants all had white spots on them—was it a fungus? Had I been watering them too much? No, those white spots were the work of pigeons that perch on the roofline above the planters and (ahem) let things fall where they may. I knew then that I would never be plucking herbs to add to my cooking. Perhaps my gardening urges were incompatible with my urban lifestyle.
101 Cookbooks
Heidi Swanson
Coconut Chocolate Pudding Recipe
It took me almost thirty dollars in premium chocolate and four lackluster attempts to eventually come up with a chocolate pudding recipe special enough to share with you. I made not only bland, flat, and gelatinous puddings, but also runny and boring chocolate puddings before I finally turned out this keeper of a batch. It is deeply dark and impossibly chocolatety, rich, glossy, fragrant, and un-lumpy. I used a coconut milk base in place of dairy, and infused it with a whisper of warming spices to give it an unexpected, ambiguously exotic je ne sais quoi.
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