recipe Archives - Page 2 of 30

recipe

Pharm Table restaurant makes healthy eating fun

Posted on January 6, 2023December 30, 2022 by Pat

Say “Texas” and most people think “beef.” So the quality of the beef that I enjoyed in San Antonio was in line with my expectations, even at the iconic fast-food joint Whataburger (see previous post). But Pharm Table restaurant (611 S Presa St., Suite 106; (210) 802-1860; pharmtable.com) was a delightful revelation. Chef Elizabeth Johnson is on a mission to surprise diners in this beef-centric state with plant-forward dishes that are delicious, satisfying, and fun to eat. That's not to say that Johnson doesn't take healthy eating seriously. Her plant-forward cuisine is informed by research from the Harvard School of Public Health, among other institutions, and by the principles of Ayurvedic eating. “I realized that it was my calling to bring vegetables and plants back...Read More

Wisconsin triumphed in American Cheese Society awards

Posted on August 15, 2022August 15, 2022 by Pat and David

As one of America's big dairy states, Wisconsin takes special pride in its cheeses. Even the fans of the Green Bay Packers NFL football team call themselves ‶cheeseheads.″ They wear ridiculous hats that look a bit like a Swiss cheese, complete with plenty of holes in their heads. The cheese industry's promotional arm brags that the state makes ‶more flavors, varieties, and styles of cheese than anywhere else in the world.″ We do wish that Wisconsin cheese companies wouldn't appropriate cheese names that obviously belong to other places in the world. Wisconsin parmesan, for example, is a fine grating and flaking cheese in its own right. If it were called something else, it wouldn't invite comparison to Parmigiano-Reggiano, to which it displays only a distant...Read More

‘Serafina’ capitalizes on tender summer harvests

Posted on July 16, 2022July 8, 2022 by Pat and David

How this cookbook would have made the late Tony May smile! The champion of Italian food in America always insisted that Italian cuisine had been emphasizing fresh ingredients centuries before the farm-to-table fad. The Italian penchant for combining a few terrific fresh ingredients to make a dish underlies Serafina: Modern Italian Cuisine for Everyday Home Cooking by Vittorio Assaf and Fabio Granato, text by Lavinia Branca Snyder (Rizzoli, New York, 2022, $39.95). Of course, a good origin story never hurts. Assaf and Granato were lost at sea in a small sailboat. They comforted each other by vowing that if they survived, they'd open a restaurant serving the best pizza and pasta in the world. And so they did, launching Serafina in New York in 1995....Read More

Cake celebrates a signature taste of Valencia

Posted on July 2, 2022June 25, 2022 by Pat and David

The whole idea of a Valencian orange is confusing. The area around Valencia boasts a staggering number of orange orchards. Most of the trees bear sweet oranges, but not what is called a Valencia orange in the U.S. That would be a creation of William Wolfskill, an agronomist who hybridized the juice orange in the mid-19th century. He called it Valencia because the oranges of that part of Spain were famously sweet. Of course, they were sweet. They were what we now call mandarin oranges. And most of the citrus varieties grown in Valencia today are mandarins or one of the many mandarin-pomelo crosses. Orange remains one of the signature flavors of Valencian cuisine. Fresh oranges appear throughout the meal from an orange-onion salad to...Read More

Noodling around with fideuà in Gandía

Posted on June 18, 2022June 16, 2022 by Pat and David

While we were living in Valencia, we took advantage of the cercanías (essentially the regional commuter rail) to explore beyond the metropolis. One Costa Blanca city on our bucket list (and on the train line) was Gandía. The big attraction is the ducal palace of the Borja family, who rose to fame (or infamy) when they changed the spelling to Borgia and took over the papacy. The Palau Ducal (Carrer del Duc Alfons el Vell, 1, Gandía; +34 962 871 465; palauducal.com) is a sprawling Gothic fortified palace complex where Sant Francesc de Borja was born in 1510. He later became one of the most important figures in the history of the Society of Jesus. Thanks to the stewardship of the Jesuits, the building is...Read More

Summer’s ‘la vie en rose’ begins by Public Garden

Posted on June 7, 2022June 7, 2022 by Pat and David

The summer solstice may be a few weeks away, but balmy temperatures, bright sun, and unusually vigorous rose blooms have us thinking summer already. Our penchant for white wines fits the summer well, but we also tend to keep a bottle or two of rosé in the vegetable drawer. Pink wine is the perfect foil for summer food. Sommelier Andrew Thompson of Bistro du Midi (272 Boylston Street, Boston; 617-279-8000; bistrodumidi.com) agrees. In fact, the French bistro overlooking the Public Garden is going all out with rosés this summer in a reprise of the popular Tour de Rosé promotion. Two wines are featured each month along with some signature menu items from executive chef/partner Robert Sisca. For June, it's the Grenache/Cinsault Château Sainte-Marguerite from the...Read More

Learning about all the Valencian rice dishes

Posted on April 14, 2022April 12, 2022 by Pat and David

Just walking around the Tastarròs festival provides an education in the astonishing variety of Valencian rice dishes. By far, the bulk of them are cooked in the wide, flat pans that we tend to associate with paella. In fact, the pan is called una paellera. The photo sequence above shows the first steps in making a paella. The paellas range in color from a ruddy yellow to deep red. Here is celebrity chef Santi Garrido of La Pepa Bluespace (lapepabluespace.com/) serving his arroz rojo de carabineros, which had eager diners lined up in a queue that stretched halfway around the plaza. Part of the appeal was his fame (he's a Valencian culinary rock star) and partly that he was using the huge red prawns (carabineros)...Read More

Tortilla soup: Mexico’s world class comfort bowl

Posted on March 26, 2022March 23, 2022 by Pat and David

Because our trips to Mexico have mostly focused on the central highlands, we've been acquainted with tortilla soup as long as we've been going to Mexico. You might find it in some coastal resorts, but it's primarily a staple of the inland Mexican cities. We can't count how many different versions we've eaten over the years. Sometimes the soup is gussied up with fresh chopped herbs, cubes of avocado, or diced hard-boiled egg. Often it is simply thin chicken broth thickened with fried tortilla strips. But we've never eaten a bad version of tortilla soup. Sitting in a small back room or under the arcade (as in Morelia, above), tortilla soup makes a dependably tasty and economical lunch. Over the years, we've perfected a version...Read More

Clever recipes born of pantry cooking in pandemic

Posted on March 19, 2022March 18, 2022 by Pat and David

We sympathize with lifestyle journalist Ronda Carman. Known best for her work writing about entertaining, decorating, and traveling, she found herself suddenly grounded by the pandemic. The avid cook suddenly felt the need to minimize trips to the supermarket. We know. We know. Many of us experienced the same restlessness compounded by agoraphobia. We converted a large portion of a supply closet into the overflow for extra food. Why should one giant cardboard canister of old-fashioned oats suffice when we could stockpile three? Carman took a more practical approach and began to catalog her pantry and adapt her aspirational cooking to suit. (We suspect she enlarged her pantry, too.) The upshot was this lovely cookbook out next week, The Art Of Pantry Cooking: Meals for...Read More

Pepper and mint conjure memories of Turkiye

Posted on March 12, 2022March 9, 2022 by Pat and David

We first tasted Turkish red lentil soup around 2010. We were researching Food Lovers' Guide to Boston when we encountered it at a now-vanished Financial District lunch buffet restaurant. The chef was Turkish and, after some nudging, he gave us a recipe for the soup to publish in the book. When we visited Istanbul the year after that book appeared, we realized that the recipe we had printed was good, but was only the most basic version of the soup. Well-suited to a buffet line, it was too one-dimensional to enter our home soup rotation on a regular basis. Thus began our quest to perfect red lentil soup. Eating in Istanbul was probably the most important part of the research. We had our tastiest bowl...Read More