No matter how you spell it – crozetti, corzetti, curzetti – this northern Italian pasta is delightful. I was walking through Georgetown one day and saw that a new shop called Via Umbria had opened up. I thought it was an Italian kitchenware shop, but it turned out to be so much more. There was beautiful Italian food to eat there or take away, a wine room with a generous tasting going on, and lots of great Italian pastas – […]
There’s a wonderful Greek restaurant in Malibu called Taverna Tony’s, where they serve an addictive dip with warm pita bread that’s so good we barely have room left to eat all the Greek deliciousness that follows. I always say to the waiters, “What’s in this stuff?” – like there’s some secret ingredient that explains why we – and everyone at the tables around us – are scraping the bowl and licking our fingers. The friendly waiters patiently reel off the […]
Here’s an easy and delicious breakfast or brunch sandwich that is bursting with flavor, yet it must be the lowest-calorie bagel sandwich in history. I used a scooped bagel (a bagel split in half and hollowed out to be filled with yummy things – hence the fewer calories,) leftover grilled and marinated tuna from the night before, wasabi mayonnaise, and black sesame seeds and chives for color. In the time it took to assemble (less than five minutes) I had […]
In my view, there aren’t many foods that can’t be improved upon by the addition of fresh ginger, and fried rice is no exception. The crisp, fresh ginger flavor is heightened by flash frying first, then setting it aside to add to the top of the fried rice just before serving. Fried rice can be heavy on the calories and carbs, but if you flip your proportions a bit – use more vegetables than rice – it makes a leaner, […]
I first ate nasi goreng in the late seventies, when I worked as a research assistant at a Washington think tank. I had been befriended by one of the secretaries, a wonderful Dutch lady who had lived an exotic and harrowing life: raised in Indonesia before World War II, she spent her teenage years in a Japanese internment camp in unimaginably horrible circumstances. Later, as an adult, she lived in Saudi Arabia with her husband and children, where one afternoon […]
