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Dave and Kate’s Chocolate Brownies

One thing you may not know about me – after blogging for twenty years, you thought you knew everything about me, didn’t you? – was that the Hepburns were my neighbors growing up. They were extremely nice people, always smiling and very pleasant. While Katherine wasn’t in the ‘hood, it was her brother and his wife who lived just down the street. If you grew…

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Simplest Beef Curry

I’d read a rather head-scratching review of a book that I was very fond of from the day it landed in my apartment. Burma: Rivers of Flavor is a cookbook that has been haunting me ever since I opened it up and leafed through the pages. It was written by Naomi Duguid, a seasoned cookbook author who traveled throughout the country before the change in…

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Orange Syrup Cake with Candied Oranges

I purchased my trusty zester in 1983, back when no one had heard of rasp-type zesters, which are now a lot more popular than their old-fangled counterparts. I got mine when I started working at Chez Panisse and the cook training me on my first shift told me that I needed four essential items; a chef’s knife, a paring knife, a bread knife, and a…

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Lebanese Meze

The Lebanese are real “snackers”, a point brought home by Mazen Hajjar, the owner of 961, Lebanon’s first (and only) craft brewery that told me if I went into someone’s home in Lebanon and they offered a drink – but no bowl of nuts or seeds, “You should go…just get up and leave immediately.” Fortunately I never had to, because true to his word, each…

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Hooters Onion Rings

I continue to be amused by the debates about food, and who owns what. I think the Chinese might have something to say about noodles being Italian, a recent delivery of Montreal bagels prompted some followers to say that they were happy I have found the true bagel (I think a few Eastern Europeans might have something to say about that…) And coffee may have…

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Guacamole

Okay, show of hands – who likes guacamole more than I do? Okay… Now that that’s settled, who was more thrilled that I was to score a batch of freshly fried tortilla chips and a big bag of just-about ripe Haas avocados this week? I’m not asking any more questions, I promise. Because the answers were right here in my kitchen. Although what some people…

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Simple Polenta

I’ve been a busy boy the last few weeks, hunkering down finishing a project that’s I’m working on night-and-day. And unfortunately, it’s not even allowed me time to go to the market to do much food shopping. Quelle horreur! So I’ve been raiding my freezer (which is actually a good thing…) and rummaging through my cabinets in search of things that I can sustain myself…

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Split Pea Soup

We don’t always get snow in Paris in the winter. But when we do, it blankets the city with a brilliant layer of snow. It illuminates what can be gray and drab, and brightens things up when everyone’s spirits are beginning to sag. People tend to stay indoors or huddle in cafés, drinking hot chocolate or vin chaud, hot mulled wine.

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Homemade Mustard

A few years ago, The Art of Living According to Joe Beef – which calls itself “A Cookbook of Sorts” – landed in my kitchen. I wasn’t sure what to make of the book. It had a four-letter word in the beginning of the introduction, courtesy of a New York chef known for swearing. There was a chapter on Canadian trains. And as interesting as…

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