Tag Archives: American recipes
Recipe: Buttermilk Biscuits
This recipe is a combination the late, great Southern chef Edna Lewis‘ recipe and an unwritten one by my mother-in-law, who is Georgia born and bred. I wanted to make biscuits as light and fluffy as hers but could not seem to replicate them up north. Biscuits were always better in Georgia. One day I watched as she put ingredients in a bowl without measuring them and patted out the perfect biscuit dough on a sheet of waxed paper. How did she do it?
(more…)
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Recipe: New Old-School Meatballs
Recently I’ve been fascinated by the Meatball Shop. I’ve never actually eaten there, because there’s always a line out the door, and every time the owners open a new branch, an additional line forms out of an additional door, with no impact on still crowded original Meatball Shop. And they don’t take reservations, which to me is not a comforting quality for a comfort food place. Still. The place is insanely popular. (more…)
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The Copycat Chef: Asparagus with Deep-Fried Egg
This spring, ABC Kitchen served up a delectable appetizer of wood-grilled asparagus topped with a crispy, runny, just-slightly-spicy deep fried egg. It’s the sort of miracle work with eggs that you’d expect from a James Beard award-winning restaurant, but when we started craving it afterwards, we wondered if there a way to recreate this dish at home. (more…)
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Recipe: Banana Buckwheat Bread
Like a lot of culinary inventions, this recipe for banana bread came about by accident. I had enough white flour to make half a recipe originally given to me by my college friend California Girl, but not enough to make the whole thing. Rather than make a sad, small loaf of banana bread, I decided to substitute 1/2 cup of buckwheat flour for the missing white flour.
The results were surprisingly good, since buckwheat flour adds a slight edge of bitterness to balance out the sweet bananas and sugar – I often find banana bread to be too sweet. This banana bread is like the ideal banana pancakes, in loaf form. (more…)
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Tagged American recipes, breakfast recipes, snack recipes, the copycat chef
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Recipe: Toasted Corn and Tomato Salad
Corn is wonderfully good right now. If, like me, you find yourself buying more than you can eat, this toasted corn salad is a great use for extra corn and tomatoes. Farmer’s market produce like this should never go to waste when it’s sweet as candy in late August. (more…)
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Tagged American recipes, salad recipes, sides recipes, the copycat chef, vegetable recipes
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Recipe: Special Sauce
One of the best things about going to Burger King as a kid – other than those gold paper crowns – was the “special sauce” on the burgers. It probably wasn’t anything more special than a mixture of mayonnaise, ketchup and mustard, but it was still more exotic than what Mom made.
At a recent barbecue, we decided to make Pat La Frieda burgers more special with our own grown-up version of special sauce, a chipotle mayonnaise recipe cobbled together from several similar ones. But this version includes all the key secret ingredients – chipotle, adobo, lime and garlic – in particularly spicy, smoky proportions. It’s ridiculously easy to make and adds an extra layer of deliciousness to burgers, veggie burgers, hot dogs or grilled fish. Added bonus: the resulting sauce has the same peculiar orange color as your childhood favorite “special sauce.” (more…)
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Chilled Pea and Mint Soup
This recipe is based on one that appeared in Bon Appetit this spring for an Easter menu. That soup was served hot, but fresh peas and mint seemed to call out for the cold soup treatment. This summery combination also benefits from the addition of cumin, a riff on a side of sugar snap peas with cumin and mint that once graced the table at the beloved bygone Grange Hall on Commerce Street.
Now that peas are in season in the Northeast and available at the Union Square Greenmarket, there’s no reason to fall back on the frozen kind. Pick up a pint of fresh shelled peas and you can easily make this simple but elegant first course. (more…)
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The Copycat Chef: Raw Tomato Soup With Garlic Croutons
This recipe is based on Nigella Lawson’s Spaghetti al Sugo Crudo from her excellent summer house cookbook, Forever Summer. Spaghetti made with fresh uncooked tomatoes and garlic is delicious when tomatoes are in season—though the sauce gets watery if you let the tomatoes sit too long. This never stopped me from slurping up the leftovers with a spoon, however, so I thought: why not make the whole thing a soup?
The result is pretty insane, like intense Sicilian sunshine in a bowl. The ingredients may be rustic, but the finished product looks and tastes quite sophisticated. (Serve it in smaller portions as an amuse bouche.) The soup can be frozen for the winter months, when you’re really craving that dose of sunshine. (more…)
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The Copycat Chef: Rosemary Beef Kebabs With Greenmarket Vegetables
The death of The Silver Palate‘s Shelly Lukins marks the end of an era: she and her partner Julee Rosso taught so many of us how to cook. They developed simple but sophisticated recipes for entertaining and introduced American cooks to bright Mediterranean flavors. Before the Silver Palate, garlic was considered exotic, and you couldn’t find fresh herbs at fancy supermarkets; now both are readily available nearly everywhere.
It was with their recipe for rosemary beef skewers in mind that I started working on this recipe several weeks ago. The marinade has been toned down – no more Asian influences of soy sauce and sesame oil – and the focus is on the herbs and greenmarket vegetables. If it hadn’t been for The Silver Palate, who knows if food would have evolved the way it has. (more…)
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Recipe: Peaches and Bacon Sundae
This being a thrifty summer, there are a lot of recipes going around for pickling and canning. But what if you read one of those recipes and think, grasshopper-like, I want to eat that right now, not in January? This is what happened with Amanda Hesser’s recipe for brandied peaches.
Greenmarket peaches are so good right now that at first I never even made it to the recipe stage. Raw sliced peaches topped with crisp bacon make a great breakfast dish. The last bit of fat from the bacon oozes into the peaches, creating a wonderful smoky-salty-sweet taste. They were even better with syrup drizzled on top—not the fancy New England maple kind, but the kind of syrup you find in the South, Aunt Jemima. You’re going for Georgia flavor here. (more…)
How to Throw a Crawfish Boil
Barbecues may be fun, but there’s nothing quite like sitting around a pile of spicy seafood with friends and a cold beer on a summer day. The next time you have an outdoor party, consider throwing a crawfish boil.
This Louisiana staple is not as hard to pull off as it sounds. Getting the crawfish? Just start working the phones. We got ours from Mr. Fish in Baltimore. In New York, try the Lobster Place in Chelsea Market, where it was most recently $4.75 per pound – call several days ahead of time to special order. (more…)
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More Burger Tips
The Resto Burger
As we head into the holiday weekend, the Times Dining section has a handy article on how to grill burgers. Some of the pointers, from 30 chefs with major burger cred, echo the ones in this earlier Gastro Chic article on what not to do when grilling burgers. Some are good new tips.
The final burger recipe is pretty unrealistic for a home chef, however, since it involves searing the burgers on a grill then finishing them in the oven. Most people’s outdoor grill is nowhere near their indoor oven. Also, I’ve noticed that guests tend to freak out if you abscond with a whole tray full of burgers. (more…)
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Grilling Burgers: What Not to Do
The Minetta Tavern Burger - Do Not Attempt!
This hilarious bad review of RF O’Sullivan’s in Boston by A Hamburger Today reminded me: there are so many people that don’t know how to cook a burger. Why? Because it’s not as easy as it seems. Once you clear away several widely-held misconceptions, however, it gets a lot easier.
- Do not use any kind of “lean” ground beef. “Lean” ground chuck is to meat what Snackwells are to cookies: blasphemy. There’s no need to be afraid of the fat in regular ground chuck. When you are cooking the meat, the fat heats up and liquifies, running out of the burger and leaving a much airier texture behind. Lean meat, on the other hand, results in dense, less flavorful burgers. Remember: fat is the conduit of flavor.*
- Don’t buy gourmet buns. Gourmet rolls, as mentioned in this review, tend to be too crusty and hard for a sandwich. The bun should meld to the burger. You’re better off with regular old sesame seed buns. (more…)
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Tagged American recipes, beef, burgers, entree recipes, grilling recipes, the copycat chef
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The Doodle’s Bacon-Egg-and-Cheese-on-an-English
Everyone should know how to cook an egg. I mean, really: what else are you going to offer your date the next morning? Cereal?
Yet so many cooks, from those in your local diner to high-end brunch places, are capable of messing it up. The key is giving the egg lots of love and attention, something that the Yankee Doodle in New Haven has done since 1950.
This recipe is very quick, but you must operate at lightning speed to execute it well. Pretend you’re a line cook. “Bacon-egg-and-cheese-on-an-English” is an order shouted from counter to cook, and it’s done here in the style of Lew Beckwith, Jr., the Doodle’s great master chef in the 90’s.
Bacon Egg and Cheese on an English
1 Thomas’ English muffin
2 strips Oscar Mayer bacon
2 tablespoons salted butter, softened
1 large egg at room temperature
1 slice pale yellow American cheese
Preparation:
Get out all the equipment you’ll need: a large, 2 burner griddle, or an omelette pan and a skillet. A spatula, a breadknife, a regular table knife for the butter, a long fork for the bacon, and a small domed saucepan lid. You’ll also need a toaster, which should be placed right next to the stove.
Lay out all the ingredients in order of appearance. Slice the English muffin in half with the bread knife and put the slices in the toaster (do not toast them yet). Put the bacon slices on waxed paper. Soften a stick of unsalted butter by nuking it on defrost for 20 seconds, if necessary. Bring the egg to room temperature by running it under warm water, if necessary. Unwrap the cheese from any cellophane covering. Place all these ingredients next to each other, as shown.
1. Heat a skillet (or cooler half of the griddle) to medium-high. It’s ready when a few droplets of water splashed on the pan skittle and evaporate.
2. Lay the bacon slices on the pan. They should be sizzling loudly but not alarmingly so.
3. Watch the raw pork fat off your hands.
4. Start toasting the English muffin.
5. Turn the heat on the omelette pan to high.
6. At about the 2 minute mark, the bacon should be beginning to brown. Carefully flip it.
7. Put a tablespoon of butter in the omelette pan and swirl it around as it foams. Break the egg against the flat surface of the counter and open it onto the omelette pan, leaving the yolk whole. The English muffin will pop up about now – just leave it in the toaster to stay warm.
8. When the egg white is set about halfway through and the bottom isn’t brown yet, about a minute into cooking, carefully flip the egg without breaking the yolk. (Or, if you prefer a hard-cooked yolk, break it with the edge of the spatula before flipping it.) Don’t let the egg fold over onto itself.
9. Working very quickly, put the cheese on top of the egg, take the bacon out of the skillet and put it on top of the cheese, and cover the whole thing with the small domed lid.
10. Remove the English muffin from the toaster and smear both halves with the remaining tablespoon of butter. In the time it takes to do this, your egg will be cooked.
11. Remove the lid and scoop the bacon, egg and cheese with a spatula, slide it onto the English muffin, and voilà: you have a Doodle special.
The yolk will burst when you bite into the sandwich. Never fear, that’s what it’s supposed to do. It’s deliciously messy.
Total cooking time: 4 minutes, 40 seconds.
Serves 1.
To make 2, lay out twice as many ingredients in the beginning, then repeat the entire process. (The first egg sandwich should stay warm. Cover it with foil if you want.) Or, after you have a lot of experience, you can try making more than one bacon egg and cheese at a time. But I’ve only seen the Doodle cooks master that.
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