Stews and Braises

Chard bundles with chicken and pomegranate molasses hereby join the enormous culinary family known as stuffed vegetables. Anyone inclined to create a family tree of stuffed veg would be well advised to park chard bundles on the cabbage side, near the second cousins. You think I sound nuts? Have you…

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Beef Stew for a Rainy Day

January 9, 2023

The soaring cost of living has not escaped me, here or in real life. So it’s with some hesitancy that I offer beef stew, as even tougher cuts of beef meant for the stewpot have become costly. I do have a reason for making this, though: I bought the roast…

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Braised Artichokes

September 29, 2022

In this Julia Child recipe, braised artichokes are slowly cooked in chicken broth seasoned with white wine and butter. Child uses a classic mirepoix of diced carrot, onion, and celery. I had no celery and am married to an onion hater. I therefore used carrot, leek, and a little garlic….

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Last week, between bouts of doomscrolling, I remembered Laurie Colwin’s essay about boiled beef. The best boiled beef I ever ate was at the Ukrainian Restaurant at the Ukrainian National Home on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I would gladly go out in a violent storm and walk over…

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Roast Pork with Carrots and Fennel Seed represents a womanful effort to make something besides Judy Rodgers’ peerless recipe for Mock Porchetta, which appears in The Zuni Cafe Cookbook. This recipe asks the cook to create small pockets in the roast along the natural muscle divisions. You then stuff these…

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Lamb with Spring Vegetables might more aptly be titled: how to save dinner when you buy the wrong ingredients. Which is what yours truly did. Not the original ingredients. I stared at the recipe I’d meant to cook for a while, then at what I actually bought. Dinner needed cooking….

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  Just as some people marvel at flour, water, and yeast becoming bread, I never cease to be amazed at the transformation that occurs when cabbage, some sort of pork product, and fat encounter a pot, low heat, and time. This decidedly dour vegetable softens into tenderness, its fumes turn…

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Pot Au Feu revisited

January 5, 2021

Pot-au-feu is one of the big classics. As such, it never goes out of style. I’ve yet to hear of attempts to veganize it, keto it, or substitute cauliflower for the meats and call it “clean” (this is not a suggestion. Food is not dirty unless you drop it on…

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We’re very fond of oxtail at the IK. Evidently lots of other people are, too, because when I made it a few weeks ago, and did the instagram thing, the post got lots of likes. Which is extremely important these days, right? Well, not really, what with Australia in flames…

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