365 Days of Food

This was my dream. We were hosting a dinner party, except we lived in a campsite in the woods, in a tent. The hour of the event arrived and I realized we didn’t have any ingredients, such as yeast to cook the pizza dough. Waking up disoriented and perhaps concerned for the welfare of our…

I will tell you a story. After work I took the skyway passage from the metro station and walked through a parking garage to the mall. Then after I’d walked the length of the mall I realized I’d forgotten a coupon from home, so I went to another parking garage where we’d left our car,…

Vietnamese spaghetti bolognese. You need six garlic, and even though peeling garlic is annoying (to me) it’s worth it for the flavor you get. Cook ground pork with a tablespoon each of sugar and Vietnamese fish sauce (nước mắm). Set the pork aside and cook the garlic with half an onion, followed by a can…

Brussels sprouts in garlic-flavored oil. In restaurants brussels sprouts are usually cooked with bacon or at least a lot of butter, and I didn’t know how I could possibly match the excitement. I didn’t have bacon and I used olive oil, and they ended up tasting more like cabbage, their cousin, rather than a substitute…

Portuguese beef stew, from the latest issue of Cook’s Illustrated. It calls for using a white wine for the braise instead of the usual red wine or beef broth. Putting onions at the bottom of the stew at the beginning is supposed to release a meat-tasting chemical that lends a mature taste, and you cook…

For the New Year, chicken thighs boiled in a bath of chicken broth. Canned tomatoes mashed together with a little salt and boiled in a separate pot to create the sauce. Boiling is, if not the easiest, at least the first kind of cooking most of us learn how to do. “The natural progression from…