Category: Lamination-Worthy

  • It's only taken me two years, but on Friday night I finally, finally, got around to trying Marian Burros's plum crumble. Longtime readers of this site will remember back when I made her fabled plum torte with somewhat unspectacular results. I felt like such a Grinch that day, just as I did when I made…

  • First it was zucchini, halved and quartered, steamed until tender, then tipped into a bowl of peeled garlic and chopped parsley and olive oil, served room temperature. Then it was rounds of zucchini, sauteed with garlic until brown and puffy and then mixed with beaten eggs, a drop of milk, chopped mint and parsley and…

  • It's always so difficult, isn't it? To find yourself on the wrong end of a holiday, trying desperately to remember the sight and texture of everything that had been in front of you just hours before: the glint of sun on the acacia leaves, the tiny lizard shimmying along the terracotta patio, the sweet-smelling breeze…

  • Subpar curried chicken salads have practically become a bad dining cliche. Texturally questionable meat, possibly some raisins (truly a horror), all bound up in loathsome mayonnaise and then folded into a cold, inflexible flatbread wrap (tomato-flavored! or perhaps spinach, for health. Am I the only person on this planet who thinks those things should be…

  • I've been eating pretty well lately. More than pretty well, spectacularly even. You already know all about my delicious adventures in Los Angeles and, frankly, my kitchen's been quite good to me lately, too. It's almost too good to be true. From honey dates and kumquats to gai lan and braised fennel, I have been…

  • It's a good thing I'll be in Pasadena next week – I have half a mind to track down Craig Strong of the Ritz-Carlton, toting my little Ziploc bag filled with a few buttery crumbs and the lingering scent of ginger and lemons, to tell him that despite the utter unwillingness of that wondrous cookie…

  • Oh ho, this is thrilling, thrilling stuff. Quite possibly the best thing I've made all week, all month! Just you wait. You'll be so excited! I just know it. Remember those chocolate bouchons from Thomas Keller that I made last month? The ones that turned out too salty, inedibly salty, really? Oh, you were all…

  • Of all the winter squashes, I'd have to say that acorn squash is my least favorite. I always find it a bit watery, somewhat stringy, not as creamy and toothsome as kabocha, for example, and not so lusciously silky as butternut can be. Too often, I see acorn squashes filled with some hippy-dippy mixture of…

  • I didn't technically clip this recipe from the Los Angeles Times. Those Best American Recipe ladies did, four years ago. They didn't know where the recipe came from (whether The Sow's Ear was the restaurant the pancake came from, or whether sow's ear just referred to the pancake's appealingly floppy shape), and neither do I.…

  • I have to say that when I first saw this recipe in the paper, my eyes sort of glazed over and I just kept going. I don't really know why – after all, I like vegetables and tarts and goat cheese – but perhaps I judged too quickly that the combination of all three would…