Category: Chicken and Other Birds

  • I don't know if you noticed, but there hasn't been much balance in terms of cooking from both coasts here lately. Although it wasn't done on purpose, it's been all NY Times all the time, and my LA Times recipes have begun to nurse a distinct grudge against me in their little corner. No more!…

  • I'm not going to be beat around the bush here. Gentle readers, I have to tell you, this NaBloPoMo thing? Is exhausting me. It's been such a great week, what with those elections and the first female Speaker of the House and healing my great heartbreak from 2004 (and, frankly, 2000, but let's not even…

  • Work is threatening to eat me alive. I don't seem able to do much more than stew some canned beans for dinner, or pour myself a bowl of cereal. And so, in order to feed myself something a bit more interesting, I resorted to a source I've usually turned my nose up at. Desperate times…

  • I don't know what's come over me, but I can't seem to stop cooking exotic meals lately. I wonder if it's the chill in the air, and the sadness over summer ending that has me craving spicy food. Strong spices and forceful flavors promise a different kind of warmth these days. Soon, I'm sure, this…

  • It is exceedingly difficult to photograph flatbreads appealingly. It is, however, exceedingly easy to consume said unphotogenic flatbreads at an alarming rate. Especially when smeared with a spoonful of yogurt or dipped into a greenish mound of smoked aubergine crush (I can't stop repeating this recipe title over and over in my head). Fragrant with…

  • I'm back from a week in the mountains – communing with nature, sleeping under the stars – and have concluded that the Rockies are indeed breathtaking (literally, in some cases). Some of the Wild West lived up to my expectations, some of it still surprised me (the lack of black people, for one). We had…

  • Chicken salad always seems to be the most impossibly chic and yet dated thing to eat on a warm day. I imagine monochromatically-dressed ladies sitting daintily at their Upper East Side luncheons, nibbling discreetly from heavy china plates and sipping iced tea from tall, thin glasses. I don't know where I got the impression that…

  • I might have teased a few readers and friends some posts ago, promising to write the next day about the most amazing chicken recipe I'd made – but then the Tweety Scramble got in the way, and before I knew it it was Friday and people were accusing me of not delivering on the goods.…

  •   "How come my chicken never comes out looking like this?" was Ben's cry as he spotted this burnished bird resting on the windowsill last night before dinner. For a moment, I considered smiling pompously beatifically and telling him to just leave the cooking to me, but then I relented and explained: rubbing a raw…