One of the better pivots I witnessed in the past 15-plus months is new podcasts that popped up as a result. I mean, who didn't relish every minute of Home Cooking that Samin Nosrat and Hrishi Hirway dreamed up? Another favorite was Travel Tales that AFAR magazine put together. Rather [...]
Information. Yes. Definitely have some, lots of it in fact. Good information about the ingredients and preparation method is key to getting your point across in a well-written recipe. But how much? What kind? And how exactly to express it? “Know your audience” is a recurring theme with recipe writing, [...]
Every recipe starts with at least one ingredient and a description of something to do with it (or them). “Cooking” per se isn't requisite, of course, but some degree of transformation or composition—beyond simply assembling food to eat—generally is. I’d argue, for instance, that a “recipe” for sliced apple with [...]
** Note: This is the first of weekly Recipe Wednesday posts about the art and craft of writing recipes. Subjects will vary from nuts-and-bolts considerations of recipe style to philosophical thoughts on what recipes accomplish to reflecting on the value recipes have for food brands, and beyond. They will draw [...]
I originally meant to post this last summer, when it seemed that--almost literally--everyone was on the sourdough bread baking kick. I surprised myself being among that horde, having spent most of my life unapologetically not a bread-baker. As if by prescience, though just dumb luck, I'd spend a weekend [...]
Excuse a brief departure from my usual topics. But it’s not often I see a New York Times news item that includes an obituary for someone I had the good fortune to spend a bit of time with, albeit many years ago. It was such a pleasure to read [paywall, [...]
Heading into month twenty bajillion of cooking at home, I’m sure many of us are forging into new areas of creativity, whether by desire or simply forced into it by the realities of our pantry circumstances. If not a bit of both. I’d say the latter’s true for me. I’m [...]
It was a simple tossed salad that put me over the edge. Not the salad itself, mind you. But where the salad showed up in the recipe I was skimming in a cookbook whose name I don't even recall. The lettuces and vinaigrette were tossed together in a bowl, as [...]
I hesitate to call the books that surround me on my home office a collection, exactly. I have no organized plan or focus around acquiring books, which I tend to associate with the idea of collecting things--stamps, wine, antiques. As a random assemblage of books, however, it ideally suits me [...]
If there's one thing--at least among my sphere of friends IRL and online--that's unifying many of us during these weeks of shelter-in-place, it's baking. Tons and tons and tons of baking. In the past decade, pre-quarantine, I may have baked brownies a handful of times, if that often. I've [...]