Tag Archives: the copycat chef
Old-Fashioned Christmas Cookies
Like the wartime song “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” some holiday classics remind us of a time when the basics were harder to come by. So it was with my grandmother’s Christmas cookies, the recipe for which dates back to about 1900. By the time the Depression was over and people could actually afford to buy the butter and sugar to make cookies, she said, along came the war, and butter and sugar were rationed.
Which may be one reason these cookies are best left to shine as is, with just sprinkles or nothing at all on top. Before it became the fashion to ice Christmas cookies elaborately à la Martha, they were less cakey and ultra thin, so as to showcase the crisp, delicious cookie itself – and how fortunate it is to have access to plain old butter and sugar. (more…)
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Ribollita
Ribollita, which translates literally as “reboiled,” is a traditional Tuscan white bean soup that’s on nearly every menu in Florence during the colder months. Ask for it during late spring or summer, however, and they’ll laugh: Fall, when leafy green vegetables are at their peak, is the best time to make this hearty vegetable soup. The most important ingredient in this vegan dish is the slightly bitter cavolo nero or Swiss chard, which gives ribollita its distinctive taste. It takes three days to make ribollita properly, but it’s worth it!
The recipe, after the jump. (more…)
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Tagged appetizer recipes, Italian recipes, soup recipes, the copycat chef
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Accidental Plum Pizza
A fig tart with Stilton and caramelized onions looked so good on the cover of last Wednesday’s NYT Dining section that I offered to make it for a friend on Saturday night. A snack of pastry sprinkled with figs, blue cheese and pine nuts seemed like the perfect fuel for a night on the town. The only problem?
Everyone else in New York had the same freakin’ idea.
You know the feeling: you get to Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods only to find a gaping hole on the shelf where a main ingredient should be. There had been a run on frozen puff pastry at Whole Foods, and the cheese department was sold out of Stilton.
Since I had already bought all the other ingredients and had no more ideas at 7pm on a Saturday, I swapped out frozen pizza dough ($1.69) for puff pastry and, at the cheese counter guy’s suggestion, Jasper Hill Bayley Hazen Blue for Stilton. Problem solved! Or so I thought. (more…)
Pasta with Wild Mushroom Sauce
There are so many different varieties of mushrooms arriving at the market right now, like these at Dean & Deluca, below, that it’s hard to choose just one. How can you settle for just cremini when chanterelles, oyster mushrooms, and hen o woods are right nearby? Usually the answer comes down to price: the fanciest mushrooms can cost $45 a pound, so many cooks stick to the basics. But keep in mind that just an ounce of mushrooms can go a long way flavor-wise, so cooking with exotic mushrooms can be done with little pain to your wallet. Just use a higher proportion of less-expensive mushrooms (cremini) and a smaller proportion of the pricier ones (chanterelles).
One of the best recipes that uses wild mushrooms is one by Melissa Clark for the Times in the spring of 2007, for creamed morels on toast. But what about fall, when morels aren’t in season? All the mushrooms I found at Dean & Deluca would be excellent with cream and white wine on toast, but I wanted to feature them in a main dish. The creamed mushrooms became an unorthodox French pasta sauce served on linguine – though for a really stellar effect, serve the mushroom sauce over fresh, homemade fettuccine. (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…)
The Copycat Chef: Last-Minute Sangria
Some warm summer nights call out for sangria, but with the weather as fickle as it’s been, you rarely know it 12 hours in advance. Fortunately there are shortcuts to traditional sangria that will make it taste as if it’s been steeping all afternoon, even if you put it together at the 11th hour. This recipe was developed by D. on a recent evening, when all the pieces—and a secret ingredient—fell into place in record time.
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Summer Entertaining: Grilled Pepper Steak With Salad
Everybody needs a few go-to recipes for summer entertaining. We adapted this one for Pepper Steak with Salad from Bon Appetit to make it super simple for a casual dinner with friends.
Perfect for summer house guests wanting to repay their hosts, it’s low impact on the kitchen, requires little equipment other than a grill, and calls for ingredients available nearly everywhere. Most importantly, the recipe has been tweaked so that all the prep work can be done well in advance – allowing plenty of time for cocktail hour.
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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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Tagged American recipes, entree recipes, seafood, seafood recipes, the copycat chef
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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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The Copycat Chef: Fried Polenta (Scagluzzoli)
It’s thrilling to find that the addictive Italian street snack scagluzzoli, or fried polenta, is finally hitting restaurants in New York. The Standard Grill, Tonda, and several other places now have fried polenta on the menu, but unfortunately, New York versions are often too fancified to be considered a snack of the people. Unlike the plain fried polenta in Florence, here it’s often cut into fancy wedges or gussied up with extraneous ingredients like basil and artisanal cheese. This is bad enough, but to fry polenta so that it’s limp, not crispy? Utter blasphemy. (more…)
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The Copycat Chef: Asian Bloody Mary
This Asian spin on a Bloody Mary was inspired by Sake Bar Hagi, though it isn’t served there. As at Monkeytown in Williamsburg, an Asian Bloody Mary is the cuisine of a country that doesn’t actually exist.
On a recent night at Hagi with Joey Deckle, he asked for some shichimi pepper. This blend of chili pepper, orange peel, sesame seed and seaweed tasted like it had been made to go in a good spicy Bloody Mary. Marie Fromage suggested it should be dusted on the rim of the glass.
“I always thought they should put fish sauce in a Bloody Mary,” said Joey Deckle, which didn’t seem too far off, given the popularity of clamato juice in Bloody Marys.
So here’s a new recipe for the Asian Bloody Mary, the dangerous brain child of three food people drinking sake.
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Tagged Bloody Marys, cocktail recipes, Sake Bar Hagi, the copycat chef
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The Copycat Chef: Tia Pol’s Deviled Eggs with Smoked Paprika
As mentioned, one of the best things at crazy-popular tapas spot Tia Pol is their deviled eggs sprinkled with smoked paprika, or pimenton. This secret ingredient of many Spanish dishes is made of peppers from the La Vera, Extremadura region of Spain. The peppers are slowly smoked over an oak fire, sometimes for weeks, then stone ground to a fine powder. Smoked paprika gives that signature rusty red color to chorizo and spicy paellas. It’s not a knock-you-in-the-face kind of hot pepper, though: it morphs from sweet to slow burn.
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Tagged appetizer recipes, snack recipes, Spanish recipes, tapas, the copycat chef
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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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