So Many Recipes, So Little Time
With leftover Dominican sazon and sofrito, here’s a little experiment — eggplant lasagna. Light but filling and quite tasty. SAZÓN: — 13 garlic cloves — 1 medium yellow onion — 2 cubanelle peppers — 12 Caribbean sweet peppers, ajíes dulces — 6 leaves culantro — 1 tsp dried Mexican oregano — 2 tsp salt —…
Each time a Latin American country comes on the radar, Gran Cocina Latina by Maricel Pricilla comes off the shelf. This 900-page tome written by a scholar and explorer who can cook, write, and has experienced ways people live and do things first hand. It is a detailed guide to this huge part of the…
It finally dawned on me that this year November 1 falls on a Thursday which means Thanksgiving is as early as it can be. A person of lists and schedules, for a moment I panicked — it was already the second week of November. — What are you worried about? Just get a turkey and…
My usual assignment for a family Easter gathering is vegetables. There’s one dish I make every year — an element of comfort — and one new — a surprise. The idea for the traditional one comes from 2001 Food & Wine magazine. For a couple of years, I followed the recipe to a T, then,…
It was supposed to be a classic chicken soup — I am still nursing a cold. But recent frost that prompted a hasty garden clean up provided a good deal of tomatillos, a few poblanos and serranos. In the pantry, there were two cans of hominy from some previously failed project, pepitas, cilantro, and lime….
Cape Malay — savory, rich, and spicy curry from South Africa with rice, roti, and pickled tomato-onion relish. The list of ingredients is long but, an Ottolenghi-prepared mise-en-place-enthusiast, I breezed through it with pleasure. This is my favorite way to cook acquired years ago reading books by Fu Pei Mei, a distinguished Chinese culinary artist:…
Playing Sicily on a Jersey porch. I grew up on what is called eggplant caviar, a rare delicacy available to a lucky few only a couple of months in a year after a lengthy wait in a grocery store line and a laborious process. The value and significance of the said caviar — way above…
Although Fuchsia Dunlop called a hotpotization of Chinese cuisine a step down from the wok mastery, for gatherings at home, hot pot is a huge step up. Here are some of the advantages of hot pot meals:— no skill is required, just planning and chopping; — most of the meal can be prepared way in…
An absolute fish collar convert here. The amount of flesh in a collar is comparable to that of a filet but the texture of it is that of a cheek. Yes, there are bones to work around. Sometime ago, I read about Asian proclivity to and mastery with bones. A FaceTime chat with my daughter…
Of all the conch fritters — from Florida, to Bahamas, to Jamaica, and around Caribbean — Antiguan looked the most appealing with all the vegetables and herbs added to the mix. Not a complicated recipe, as long as there’s an H Mart nearby to deliver the conch meat and Scotch bonnets. For the dip, there…