Crêpes with pickled ramp crème fraîche and scallions.

In Tom Colicchio’s cookbook Think Like a Chef, in his recipe for pickled ramps he suggests that you can make a really good sauce for fish by spooning a few teaspoons of the ramp pickling liquid into creme fraiche. I thought about this recently after I made my most recent batch of pickled ramps, and…

RampFest 2022: revisiting all of the hits made with my favorite spring vegetable.

It’s funny how much happiness $20 can buy, at least when it comes to acquiring five bunches of ramps at the Union Square Greenmarket during our trip to New York in April. To say I doted over those ramps in the hotel room–which, for the record, was kept at a very cold temperature to basically…

José Andrés’s spring leeks with mushrooms from Tapas: A Taste of Spain in America.

Sometimes I’m at a loss for inspiration on what to make for dinner, and that’s when I usually turn to my tapas books to spark my imagination. It may seem counterintuitive to pick several dishes to make instead of just one or two, but I’ve found that once I select one, I can more easily…

Fettuccine with sun-dried tomato and miso pesto.

As much as I love a nice, herby pesto, sometimes I’m craving something a little bit different, and this umami-laden, no-cook sauce fits the bill perfectly. I’ve been on a bit of a kick recently where I combine tomatoes and white miso into various pasta sauces, but this one might be my favorite to-date. For…

Hugh Acheson’s sous vide cheeseburger from Sous Vide.

Nearly a year after we moved to Baltimore, a new restaurant opened up on Cross Street: Bookmakers Cocktail Club. On a street littered with variations on the traditional pub and/or biergarten, Bookmakers was decidedly different: a quasi-speakeasy with gothic decor, an extensive cocktail list, and upscale takes on Southern fare. It was one of the…

Citrus-cured salmon with latkes, Meyer lemon-fennel cream cheese, sumac-pickled onions, and capers.

After my near-religious experience with the house-cured king salmon at Lowell’s Seafood in Pike Place Market, it was only a matter of when, not if, I would be curing some salmon for brunch when we came home. If you look up “cured salmon” or “gravlax” on this blog, you’re going to find all of the…

Tagliolini with Meyer lemon, basil, pistachios, and Pecorino Romano.

After not making fresh pasta for a month because we were traveling, to say I was eager to get back at it is an understatement. Whether we were actually out of town on a Sunday or we were about to hit the road on a Monday morning, it seemed silly to make a full batch…

Images (not) from New York, Fort Lauderdale and Hollywood edition.

Back in 2019, flying to the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood airport in South Florida was an intermediate stop en route to our actual destination of Miami. Since Southwest didn’t fly directly to MIA at the time, we’d fly to FLL, either rent a car or get a rideshare, and drive the 40-ish minutes to the Magic City….

Gail Simmons’s jerk shrimp from Bringing it Home, but make it lettuce cups.

The mark of a good cookbook to me is how much I use it, and I use Gail’s Bringing it Home a lot. I love how much it covers, from breakfast and brunch to fun party snacks and noodle dishes, and I also love how conversational the headnotes that precede each recipe. It’s easy to…

Drunken red wine cavatelli with pancetta and basil

While I really don’t have any reason to add any more pasta tools to my collection, I did add one more this past Christmas and I have to say that I really like it: my cavatelli maker. While I’m still getting the hang of it, I wanted to share one of my more successful recipes…