Gastrolust

After Ivar’s sent some samples of tartar sauce and cocktail sauce, my partner and I decided to speed over to the seafood section to prepare food for sauce tasting.
First up was fish, sans chips. Fresh, wild-caught cod deep-fried with a panko coating would be the perfect way to test the tartar sauce. My partner dove [...]

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The utilitarian Haas avocado is frequently on sale in these parts, and while I often simply cut slices into a salad or mash one to make guacamole, Mark Bittman’s recipe for “Fast Avocado Soup” recently caught my eye.
This is simple soup. Take a few avocados, combine with an almost an equal number of cups of [...]

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Okay, time to close out this inadvertent “noodle trilogy” with a confession of sorts: I did not prepare the yakisoba or the hiyashi udon discussed the past two weeks. And I certainly wouldn’t want to claim preparation of the “girl noodles” in this week’s “Something I Ate.” The better half is from Japan. She’s the mistress of [...]

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If pre-Labor Day is serious summer and the season for cold noodles, then post-Labor Day is faux fall—and a perfect time for hot noodles.
Few noodle dishes are better than yakisoba, which literally means “fried noodles.” It’s a Japanese dish derived from China and made not from buckwheat (”soba”), but from ramen-like noodles made with wheat [...]

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Just as ma po dou fu is a favorite emergency dinner option in my home (even if there’s no ground pork in the fridge, there tends to be tofu in there, and there’s always frozen pork in the freezer), udon is ubiquitous for lunch when we’re otherwise uninspired. We do a number of noodle dishes [...]

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We’ve come a long way since the boil-in-a-bag lunches of chicken à la king I enjoyed as a kid back in the Seventies.
But for this collector of kitchen gadgets, I feel like I’ve come full circle with a Sous Vide Supreme (and vacuum sealer for the bags) sitting on my kitchen counter.
Note the location. While [...]

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Peaches. ‘Tis the season
Earlier this week, I was thrilled to see that Metropolitan Market had brix (basically, a way to sneak inside the fruit to measure its sugar content and predict its sweetness) ratings for its Frog Hollow Farms and Pence Orchards peaches
The Frog Hollow peaches, brought in from California, are beloved and generally fantastic, [...]

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A food writer/restaurant reviewer can’t, and shouldn’t, eat out all the time. A simple salad or bowl of broth is a great break from far too much fat that’s inevitable with many meals out.
My go-to meal when the refrigerator and pantry are bare, and I’m otherwise uninspired: ma po dou fu.
I love it, and make [...]

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