Cooking chicken satay at a July 4th cookout is, I admit, a little odd. It's especially so if you consider that my wife and I subjected our parents and grandparents to the ordeal. While everyone else around the country casually flipped hamburgers and hot dogs, I rounded up everyone available to help me skewer tiny pieces of highly marinated chicken onto wooden skewers. That marinade also...
Before beginning even the most basic of recipes, I usually consult a few dozen cookbooks and online sources to make sure I’m not missing some essential technique I’d skipped the previous dozen or so times I made the meal. It's a compulsory action, one that drives other people nuts, and very often myself. But I just want to make absolutely positively sure that I'm doing something that r...
My only real dumpling experience has been at the Rickshaw Dumpling Bar , a tasty, if tad expensive little shop in Flatiron. There you could get fried or steamed dumplings with whatever filling you wanted for around $6. A box full of those, a warm, sun-drenched day in Madison Square Park, and all is right with the world. I know Chinatown has some great deals, some where 5 or more can...
I’ve bought two cookbooks in the last week that teach you how to do funny things with pigs. The first, which I haven’t had nearly enough time to explore, is Michael Ruhlman ’s Charcuterie , co-written with Brian Polcyn, a book about the wonders of salting, smoking, and curing meat, a tradition of which pork is the oinking mascot. Much has been written of this book’s breakt...
Every once in a while I get really excited about something I've never made before, and before I really have a firm understanding about what I'm getting myself into, I'm in the middle of making it. "Hey, I've never made a whole ham . Let's do it tonight even though we have no guests." This is the thinking that lead me to pull out an apparatus that has never, ever been used in my kitchen...