There has always been an air of southern hospitality about the White House, situated as it is below the Mason-Dixon line. It’s reflected in the sumptuous afternoon reception buffets offered to guests, and one of the classic foods for those events is a good old-fashioned ham biscuit. There are many ways to make a great biscuit, but for this particular recipe I prefer those that are made without baking powder, so that the biscuits don’t raise too much. You wouldn’t […]
These two open-faced sandwiches are the kind of food that take the hipster phrase “on toast” and give it real meaning. The first one, a ricotta, nectarine, and prosciutto sandwich, came from my daughter, who spent six weeks in Italy a number of years ago, taking full advantage of the language (read: culinary) education she received there. She gained a pound a week, eating six meals a day, including one of these sandwiches in tramezzini form, and said it was […]
I think of this as a Sunday dinner meal, mostly because the idea of making gnocchi from scratch conjures the image of a smiling Italian lady kneading and chopping dough in her sunny kitchen before heading off to church, pulling basil from the pots on her windowsill and enjoying a creative and peaceful moment before the day really begins. If leisurely cooking seems more fantasy than reality, maybe we need to start thinking about “appointment cooking,” rather than “appointment TV.” […]
I went grocery shopping at an Asian market the other day, just to see what the produce was like, and had an eye-opening experience. Just 20 minutes from home, the Good Fortune Market in Arlington, VA, was enormous, immaculate, and full of exotic and enticing raw material for cutting-edge food. My goal was to find some Chinese flowering leeks for this chicken and leeks recipe, but I started taking photos, buying fruit, ogling the live seafood in their aquaria, and […]
I’m always looking for the best version of certain food classics – the meals that are as much about the memory of a satisfying meal as they are its actual flavor. For me, onion soup is one of those foods. When I first moved to Washington after college, with a take-home pay of $267 every two weeks, I used to buy a can of onion soup, a small baguette and some inexpensive (waxy) cheese, and make myself onion soup for […]
