If you were functioning on the subway this morning, you probably saw a steady stream of backpacked kids parading around with wide mouths and unsure stares. That daze was the stern face of school, the great unknown and the official end to summer. Standing amongst those kids, I tried remember my own back-to-school feeling, the churning stomach, the moment when I knew it was all ov...
Every time I go to a grocery store and, while making my merry way down the produce aisle, I see leeks, a little jolt of suspicion and hesitation runs through me. My shoulders tense up a little, my eyes get shifty, and I keep walking. What are those giant, oversized green onions? What steroids have they been fed? Are they from a Jonathan Swift novel? And why do these arm-length veget...
"Just use whatever leftovers are in the fridge."
That little statement is repeated endlessly throughout the course of one day on the Food Network and I'm not sure who they are trying to fool. It's as if those celebrity chefs aren't paid enough to send an assistant to the store to pick up some tomatoes--not that they need to. Their fantastically clean fridges come stocked with leftover t...
Lately I’ve been going to restaurants and leaving with ideas for what to cook at home. A previous post , a salad of roasted squash and dandelion greens, was inspired by the restaurant 360 , an unpretentious little spot where you can eat for $25 and the wine list, which emphasises organic, is very reasonable. My version of the squash salad wasn’t nearly as good--I didn’t have the...
As you probably know by now, the New York City 2007 Zagat Guide has been published. Josh over at The Food Section has comprehensive information and a comparison running all the way back to 1996, showing which restaurants have shuffled in the top ten, in both food rankings and popularity. I find it especially interesting that New York City's average meal cost on a global scale, ranking 4t...
Someone is really concerned about us. We eat a lot of meat and not enough vegetables. Nick spent a week devouring ham and now his face is the color of plain file folders . (I'm in the office--this is the only simile available to me.) We're facing vitamin deficiencies, colon problems. We're afraid to go outside. Because if we just ate a bunch of raw vegetables, we'd have nothing...
After four days of intense bonding with my 10 pound ham , the meat stopped magically improving in the fridge, and started instead to develop what could best be described as a funk. Not necessarily revolting, and I'm sure perfectly edible, the smell was offending enough. And with something less than a pound left, I didn't feel too bad chucking the slimy, sour-smelling flesh into the...
I'll have to admit the real reason I bought a 10 pound ham , beyond "I'd never done it before" cop-out, was to have enough meat to make as many ham sandwiches as I could possibly stomach in a week. Sure, that Boar's Head Black Forest ham can stuff a hero, but thick slabs of real, brown sugar encrusted ham exist on an entirely different plane of pleasure. And for three days I had enormo...
By the second day the roughly 8 pound ham I had foil-wrapped in my refrigerator had started to express its full potential. What had tasted perfectly fine the day before became a sensuous, hands on event the next, as it had somehow increased in flavor as it waited in the fridge. I wanted nothing more than to slouch over the kitchen table, picking hunks right off. How could anything...
I had no reason to buy a ham. No guests were coming over, there was no potluck to attend. It was just a Monday and I had never baked one before and wanted to try. So I hopped on my bike and set out to Fairway to secure the biggest ham I could find. Sure, I could have trained myself on some perfectly reasonable ham steaks that would have happily fed my girlfriend and me for one, maybe t...
Blake and Nick live in Chicago and have written for The Paupered Chef and other publications since 2006.
