I’m a tomato soup junkie. It’s been a comfort food of mine since I was young. The finest tomato soup I ever had was at Le Marais in New York. It was a Tomato Fennel Soup. I tried for years to recreate it, until I realized they had lied. So I make a Tomato Star Anise Soup that is on my list of restaurant recipes.

I was paging through Mollie Katzen’s Still Life with Menu when I came across her recipe for tomato soup with coconut. A quick search in the pantry revealed that I had all of the ingredients, so I made the recipe.

I want to like cumin. I really do. It has an earthy bass that balances brighter flavors. but so help me, I can’t get over the fact that it tastes like armpit. (more…)

There are a surfeit of cookbooks on the shelves, everything from pretty books that rattle off lists of ingredients whose duplication in the styled photos is next to impossible, to classic tomes that assume a complete apprenticeship to a master chef and years of professional experience.

I own both kinds.

Having cookbooks is a way to explore worldwide cuisine without leaving your reading chair. It mixes the exotic with the familiar and ignites the imagination. Cookbooks, for me, are a way to kick-start my creativity. I process kosher substitution in my head to see whether milk can be reasonably substituted or whether just plain water will do, or if veal or turkey can stand in for pork. It’s well past the point where I flip past a recipe simply because it’s not intrinsically kosher; anything can be kosherized. (more…)

Over the years I’ve had several different kitchen scales. The first one I remember was a cheap spring-driven one that almost never got used. It sat on the shelf with the glasses, and sometimes we used it to weigh letters (like emails on paper; you remember those).

My current kitchen scale is a fairly inexpensive electronic scale. But it does an amazing job of making sure that I’m giving you recipes that are easily replicated and scalable. It’s usually only the small stuff (1/4 tsp. black pepper, etc.) that I resort to volumetric measurements. (If you have trouble with amounts when you have to multiply by 20, let me know.) (more…)

I have discussed ingredient substitutions in classes, and I will probably go on mentioning them here in my blog. They’re not cheating, they don’t fundamentally detract from the recipe and they’re not wrong. Purists who click their tongues are nothing but elitist food snobs who can’t think in the kitchen the way a chef thinks. And anyone who disagrees with me so far should remember that many of the original, classic recipes bear no resemblance to their modern day counterparts.

Substitutions should redefine a dish, not sabotage it. Here’s a classic example. A la Florentine is a well-known preparation of with spinach and typically Mornay sauce. Whether your protein is chicken, mullet, pork or eggs, the preparation remains the same.

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There is one cookbook on my shelf that I’ve had for years which is quickly becoming my go-to book for never fail recipes, which surprises me because I have many other cookbooks that are either more specialized or more comprehensive. This recipe is adapted from that book – which I will write about at a future date – and proofed using my foolproof proof box.

Oh. My. Gawd.

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