Posts Tagged ‘intermediate’

Is there any better Super Bowl comfort food than chicken wings? Crispy skin. Spicy, tangy sauce that drips down your chin and tempts you to lick your fingers. Chased by refreshing gulps of frosty, crisp beer.

Chicken wings, of course, are perfectly suited for an endless variety of sauces. Buffalo sauce, barbeque sauce, sticky-sweet teriyaki sauce. All good, and all in our rotating chicken wing repertoire. But we came across a recipe that blows away all other chicken wings. The star of the show is Thai hot sauce, also known as sriracha, and the supporting flavors include the warm — almost exotic — nuances of cinnamon, coriander and cumin. Fresh cilantro cools the sauce, while lime juice…

Category: Recipes

I’m a sucker for glamorous hors d’oeuvres. Pour me a lovely glass of wine or champagne, pass a silver tray with scrumptious bites, and I’m at my favorite kind of party. (Good company and good music go without saying!) And this shrimp in spiced phyllo with tomato chutney is right at the top of the list of luxurious hors d’oeuvres.

Basically, if you treat phyllo lovingly and bathe every layer in butter like you’re supposed to, you could wrap up shoelaces in it and I would swoon. There’s something about the delicate, shattering crunchiness of phyllo that seems grown-up and decadent. It’s not an ingredient you use in everyday cooking, so it’s elevated, sophisticated even. And…

Category: Recipes

Every once in a while, I’m lucky enough to stumble upon a new recipe and know instantly that it’ll become part of our weekday dinner repertoire. This light, flavorful baked pasta — shells stuffed with ricotta, fontina, fennel and radicchio — is one of those recipes.

It had been staring at me temptingly, all cheesy and crusty, from the cover of Food & Wine, and by last week I could no longer resist. I sautéed fennel, radicchio and onions in a large pan while boiling up the jumbo shells, and then I stuffed them individually with a mixture of the sautéed veggies, fresh ricotta, shredded fontina cheese, eggs and parsley. While I prefer to make my…

Category: Recipes

We have something of an obsession with fried chicken in my household.

You see, Dave’s dad owned Topsy’s Fried Chicken Restaurant on Route 6 in Swansea, Massachusetts “back in the day,” and I’m told he made the best fried chicken (and onion rings) known to mankind. The restaurant closed in 1973 when I was but a wee lass, and sadly, I never made it there from all the way on the other side of the bay. And the legend of Topsy’s has been passed along not only by Dave, but by legions of fried chicken fans who used to detour for a basket of hot, crunchy, juicy poultry.

Trouble is, Dave’s dad, God rest his soul, took the secret…

Category: Recipes

Ah, the power of suggestion. Last week, a piece in the New York Times reminded me of one of the best family dinners we had in 2011: a fabulous Friday evening savoring the Bo Ssam meal at Momofuku Ssam Bar. David Chang’s restaurant takes reservations for tables of 6-10 diners, who are served a life-changing whole slow-roasted pork shoulder to pick apart with tongs and assemble in delicate lettuce cups, topped with divine kimchi and other scrumptious fixings, all capped off with fresh slurpy oysters. Pork shoulder and oysters- well, isn’t that just the quintessential Shabbat dinner for every nice Jewish girl?!

The Times’ photo made my mouth water, and as I read the article, I…

Category: Recipes

Big football weekend = big pot of delicious chili!

A few cold Sundays ago, knowing it would be an afternoon spent watching football in front of the fire, I had a hankering for chili. It had been in the back of my head since we had seen the chili cookoff episode of Top Chef earlier in the month, and knowing that chili is a process rather than a “yikes, it’s 5:30 on a Thursday…what should I whip up?” kind of dinner, I decided the time had come. I searched for a meat-and-beans version that I could cook all afternoon, and the recipe I chose was from Bobby Flay: Beef & Black Bean Chili with Toasted Cumin…

Category: Recipes

Sure, I’ve written about French Onion Soup before, but now that there’s a slight chill in the air and people are feeling sort of “autumny,” I couldn’t resist revisiting one of my favorite recipes. If I could have video’d the cheers and excited hugs last weekend when I announced I would be making my soup for dinner, you would’ve thought I’d told the boys that it had all been a huge mistake, and the Red Sox really were going to the World Series! But let’s not go there.

As I wrote previously, the inspiration for my soup is Thomas Keller’s recipe in the Bouchon cookbook. I cheat a little by using store-bought beef stock, but I…

Category: Recipes

We are completely smitten with grilled seafood tacos this summer, and these are so yummy that they even inspired my sister, who didn’t think she liked fish tacos, to declare that she needed the recipe to make them herself.

First of all, it’s fun for everyone assemble their own tacos. What’s better than a semi-customizable dinner? Second, the components are pretty easy to make, and again, you can customize to your heart’s content. I happen to love radish matchsticks on mine, but there’s nothing to stop you from adding whatever else you like.  And finally, I mean, they’re grilled fish tacos…YUM!

With lots of company over the weekend, I figured it would be an ideal time to try the…

Category: Recipes

If you’re a clam fanatic, you absolutely must experience this dish—and the dramatic adventure that goes along with making it—at least once in your life. When you grow up on the Rhode Island shore, clams are a quintessential food staple, and when you grow up as David Cohen’s daughter, dad’s legendary clamboils and clam roasts are a sought-after annual tradition. My boys are now the next generation of roasted clam lovers, and they count down the days of summer until they get to have what they have come to affectionately name “Papa’s Clams.”

My dad officially refers to them as “Clams Like the Indians Used to Make”—and by Indians he unmistakably means Native Americans. So if you’re ready,…

Category: Recipes

In honor of our interview with Ina Garten (the Barefoot Contessa) last weekend, and because it’s the last day of Passover, I wanted to share our review of what finally became the first recipe that actually turned out amazing matzo balls. Mmmmm…balls. I mean, no one can resist a Schweddy Ball-nothing beats those Balls-but these came mighty close!

I like my balls tender, light-but not so light that they dissolve — and they have to be tasty, too. I grew up eating my Nana’s k’neidlach, which she made from a box, but I’m just not a box kind of chick, so I really wanted to learn to make them from scratch. There are three…

Category: Recipes