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 Chocolate & Zucchini
Clotilde Dusoulier
  
Squeeze Cookies (A Roasted Flour Experiment)
Raw flour is bland, browned flour isn't. This is why we bother to make roux, and why the crust of bread is tastier than the crumb. With this simple fact in mind, why not bake with roasted flour? The finished product would no doubt benefit from the heightened flavor. Of course, exposing flour to direct heat cooks it. This changes the structure of its starch and gluten molecules, and thus it behaves differently from raw flour; one notable change is that it loses some of its elasticity.
Washington Post
Food & Dining
Onions That Don't Bite Back
Onions are one of the most important building blocks of cooking. They are an essential part of salads and sauces, stews and savory pies. They give us depth of flavor, a hint of sweetness, a blast of pungency. But to most of us they are also a mystery. They are just there, quietly fulfilling the task we want them to. We don't notice or appreciate them until something goes wrong. Then we realize that we don't really know them at all. And that's just a crying shame.
Passionate Cook
Johanna Wagner
Home-cured Gravadlax
Come Saturday, though, it's time to pull out all the stops: cooked eggs in all shapes and sizes (e.g. my speciality of eggs florendict, oeufs cocotte, huevos a a mexicana, etc), freshly baked bread, pastrami or BLT bagels and/or some salmon. And again, we don't settle for second best: the most glorious salmon ever is smoked at my local fishmongers and he is a super hero for shaving off the thinnest slices... no chewy bits that stick between your teeth, just the tenderest, melt-in-the-mouth fish you could ever imagine. Recently, he's taken to also making gravadlax - but I thought, hang on, I might not be able to build a smoker in my house, but I can surely cure my own salmon? And so I did.
Vinography
Alder Yarrow
Does Expensive Wine Taste Better
Than Cheap Wine?
According to a recent paper from the delightful folks at the Journal for Wine Economics, I couldn't be more wrong. Not only can a random sample of people presented with several glasses of wine (and no information about the wines) not tell the difference between a $2 bottle of wine and a $150 bottle of wine, they tend to think that the cheaper wines taste better (without knowing anything about the prices). Gulp. Which means, of course, that for most people, the right amount to spend on a bottle of wine is as little as possible.
Simply Recipes
Elise Bauer
Chorizo and Eggs
What is chorizo? A spicy pork sausage. While the Spanish version is usually spiced with paprika and garlic, Mexican chorizo is spiced with chile peppers. I've seen chorizo served in Mexican restaurants most often as a side sausage, like bacon. We cook ours up with the eggs and add some raisins as well, the sweetness of which provides some balance to the spicy chile in the chorizo.
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Splendid Table
American Public Media
Hawaii
This week we're bringing you a special one-hour program recorded in Hawaii. It's a look at the food and culture of Honolulu and its island of Oahu that few tourists see. You won't want to miss this show.
Cooks Illustrated
Current Issue
In This Issue
New York Times
Dining and Wine
Too Much Heat in the TV Kitchen?
But even Mr. Chang at his most vivid comes across as an instructor at vacation Bible school compared with Gordon Ramsay. On his shows "Hell's Kitchen" and "Kitchen Nightmares," Mr. Ramsay leaps outside the bounds of broadcasting rules so often that the Web site Television Without Pity begins its summaries of each episode with something it calls (give or take a word here or there) Gordon Ramsay's Bleep-O-Meter. There is, admittedly, a dog-bites-man quality to the news that chefs curse.
New York Times Magazine
Style Section
The Green Issue: Eat
Traveler's Lunchbox
Melissa Kronenthal
Zen and the Art of Mandarin Jam
The problem, you see, is that I have this tendency to latch on to a particular fruit in season, and not let go until I'm dragged, kicking and screaming, to the next one. Last summer it happened with nectarines and greengage plums, the withdrawal from which - when my supplies finally dried up - I wasn't entirely sure I was going to survive. The summer before it was flats of enormous local raspberries. The fall before that, it was soft-as-marshmallow figs from Turkey. And currently it's mandarins, which I began eating tentatively last December when the first cheerful orbs from Spain and Cyprus hit the shelves, and which now I'm consuming so voraciously that they're competing with things like cheese and olive oil to occupy the biggest slice of my daily caloric pie-chart.
David Lebovitz
David Lebovitz
Robe-ism
One of the great things here is the first thing when you step in the door is they do is hand you a big, fluffy robe and sandals and tell you that you don't need to wear anything else—for the entire time! Now if that isn't my idea of bliss, I don't know what is. Some people are more comfortable being naked and go to nudism resorts to 'let it all hang out.' I'm a bit more bashful and prefer a comfy robe. I guess that makes me a robe-ist.
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Smitten Kitchen
Deb Smitten
17 Flourless Dessert Ideas
Every year, I see Passover-friendly recipes that frighten me: Brick-like honey cakes; "sponge" cakes that still haunt my mother; dinner rolls that my father likens to "hockey pucks" and macaroons that nobody (besides me) likes. And every year, I wonder: what ever happened to impossible-to-hate flourless chocolate cakes and truffles? Desserts lifted with egg whites? Ground nuts instead of flour? Do people even realize that one of the most popular peanut butter cookies on earth has exactly no flour in it?
Orangette
Molly Wizenberg
A Long Slog
The book was originally scheduled to be released this fall, but for a number of reasons - including the presidential election and the serious havoc that comes with it - we have decided to move it to March. At first, that felt like a long way away, and I was a little sad. But then I decided that this book feels like a spring baby; it didn't want to be born in the winter. So it's alright. But I want to thank you for your patience. I'm learning that a book is a long slog of a project, no matter how you look at it, and I'm so happy that we can pass the time together. Whew.
New York Times
Dining and Wine
Sticker Shock in the Organic Aisles
Demand for organic wheat, soybeans and corn is so great that farmers are receiving unheard-of prices. But people who have to buy organic grain, from bakers and pasta makers to chicken and dairy farmers, say they are struggling to maintain profit margins, even though shoppers are paying more. The price of organic animal feed is so high that some dairy farmers have abandoned organic farming methods and others are pushing retailers to raise prices more aggressively.
French Laundry at Home
Carol Blymire
Veal Stock
I like to make veal stock in large quantities, which requires large stock pots... which means the weather has to be nice because I have to take those pots outside and wash them using a garden hose because they don't fit in the sink. And, because I enjoy a clean and relatively sanitary space in which to clean these pots, it means I have to clean up the area where my garden hose is, oh and by the way, it has to be above 32 degrees Fahrenheit because the hose can't be hooked up when it's too cold, and I hate being outside in the cold anyway to wash those pots, so there you have it. Also? I had a freezer full of veal stock from the last time I made it, so I needed to use that before I made more. And so I did. And here we are.
101 Cookbooks
Heidi Swanson
Strawberry Panzanella Recipe
Choose wisely or all your efforts will be for naught. I encourage you to seek out bread that is the opposite of, say, Wonder Bread. Seek out a loaf that is dense, crusty, hearty, dark, and country-style. If the gods are smiling on you, you'll find a loaf that is all of these things, and is nut-studded as well. The bread needs to be dried out - let it sit out for a day, maybe two. This way it that will retain its structure (and not go to mush) in the midst of all that sweet berry juice - a key to a good panzanella whether you are talking strawberry or a more typical summer version.
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