Nourishing Joy in the Home Kitchen
During my first week of vacation between working and starting culinary school, I gave myself a challenge: croissants. I’ve never made puff-pastry and it’s always intimidated me, so I figured a full day off with nothing to do was the perfect time to take the …
I’ve written before about how much I enjoy baking homemade bread here: Sunday Baking Series: The Miracle of Bread.  After baking many different types of loaves, mostly from Ken Forkish‘s fabulous book Flour Water Salt Yeast, I was ready to branch out on my own. I thought …
It’s a magical time of year for the culinarily-minded in New England. The bridge between the hottest days of summer being edged out by the cooler nights of early fall means that just about every kind of produce is available in abundance. A visit to …
Happy Fourth of July! Is there anything better way to spend the holiday than sitting outside on a breezy summer evening, the smell of steak wafting off the grill, beer in hand? Unfortunately, Hubtastic and I do not have a grill, much less outdoor space …
Actually, “first” is a lie. I’ve made homemade macarons 4 times in my life, with progressive success (“success” being a relative term), but this time I had a teammate. That teammate happens to be a materials engineer who fixates on following instructions perfectly, so I …
I am a lucky subscriber to all of the America’s Test Kitchen Empire’s publications and I frequently rely on their recipes and articles to improve my home cooking. This past April, a recipe for Three-Cheese Ravioli with Brown Butter-Pine Nut Sauce tantalized me, despite knowing …
Learning to cook is not all about memorizing instructions on how to hold a knife or what temperature to roast a chicken. Yes, having a basic idea of those things can help with food preparation, but they are of very little use when any kind …
Bread gets a bad wrap these days. It always seems like everyone is trying to “cut down” on their bread intake, be it calories, carbs, gluten, or whatever other fad diet grabs our attention. And yet, bread has sustained humans for thousands of years. I’ve …
I am writing this post as I recover from a bout of illness-induced anosmia. As in, I couldn’t smell. For most people, not being able to smell during a cold is annoying, but for someone who lives to cook, it felt like a crisis. Which …
Bread may be one of the most intimidating things to try your own hand at, especially if you already have access to good-quality bread from a professional baker nearby. Yes, most recipes look more like chapters out of a textbook and use weird words like …