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 […]
As more people are becoming aware of the pleasures of Mediterranean cooking, I thought it would be fun to go straight to the source. I asked my friend, Nicole Chedid, the wife of the Ambassador of Lebanon, for some classic Lebanese recipes. With typically warm Lebanese hospitality she invited me for lunch and served two of her favorites. You may know Baba Ghanouj, the classic roasted eggplant dish, fragrant with garlic, spices, and olive oil, and served as a first […]
It wasn’t intentional, but this has turned out to be classic American food week on America’s Table; first a steak sandwich, now pizza. What’s special about pizza? Its infinite variety, for starters. Thick crust, New York-style thin crust, endless toppings, dripping cheeses: can you imagine life without out it? I asked a friend with celiac disease what food they most missed eating, and the answer was…pizza. That’s exactly why I wanted to make gluten-free pizza, because if someone told me […]
Washington is full of steakhouses. You can find other kinds of restaurants, of course, but it’s hard to get around the red-meat-and-potatoes vibe here. Sometimes a good steak hits the spot better than anything I can think of, but there always seems to be more meat than I can eat, and I wind up bringing home a little foil bag of barely-charred steak that screams from the refrigerator, “Use me! I was hideously expensive.” So then what? A big he-man, […]
