Thirteen years ago, here on The Blog, Andy wrote about “fish presents” after discovering that the recipe was a sneaky way to market the meal to young seafood skeptics. This is how he described the dinner back in 2010, when our daughters were 6 and 8: Our latest venture in rebranding involved the kind of intimidating-sounding fish en papillote, which is… Read more »
Please answer a question for me: Is honeynut squash as common as butternut squash these days? I ask because I only ever used to score the smaller, sweeter squash at the farmer’s market during a very specific window of weeks, but now I see them spilling forth out of boxes and crates everywhere I turn — from Trader Joes to Fairway to… Read more »
I think hands-down the best tofu is crispy tofu, i.e. when it’s been dredged in cornstarch, then pan-fried in a generous amount of oil and tossed with some form of glaze or sauce. (Exhibit A: Hsiao-Ching Chou’s Crispy Weeknight Tofu with vegetables.) But honestly, dredging and frying can be a pain sometimes, and when my friend Robin (by way of our friend Kate,… Read more »
Good morning! I just listened to Samin & Hrishikesh’s Thanksgiving podcast on my walk to get coffee, and realized that I’m officially excited about the holiday — the cooking part at least. With one kid returning from college in the Midwest, the actual sit-down feast is not going to happen — at least not how we are used to seeing… Read more »
Good morning, I hope everyone had a nice weekend. I went to my first virtual bat mitzvah on Saturday and was surprised to find it as moving as an in-person service. (Big Mazels, Maylie!) I also did my first training session with Vote Save America for Wisconsin and I learned a lot, including what Culver’s is — Midwesterners don’t laugh!… Read more »
For reasons that will become clear in the near future but that I will currently explain simply as “an occupational hazard,” I had to bake eight batches of box-mix brownies yesterday. Technically, I didn’t eat any of the brownies I baked, unless you count the batter from each scraped bowl, and the crumbs under the cooling racks, and of course… Read more »
My usual rule of thumb is that there should be one thing on the dinner plate that is fresh, as in a vegetable that is raw, crispy, uncooked, bright. It’s why we eat so much slaw in our house. Nothing cuts the richness of a pork chop quite the way a vinegary pile of cabbage can. But occasionally, we shake… Read more »
Sl0w-cooker evangelists, maybe skip the next few sentences please, because I know how you feel completely betrayed whenever I say something with even the whiff of negativity about your beloved crock pots. And I get it: What’s there not to love about a meal that involves minimal prep and cooks itself all day long freeing you from your dinner shackles… Read more »
It’s a Christmas Miracle: My daughter has come out of retirement just in time for the holidays. Some of you might remember me mentioning Nerd Alert, a blog Phoebe started a few years ago as a way to explore books, comics, graphic novels, and “other essentials,” to quote her tagline. She hasn’t posted in while — which might have something to… Read more »
I had such buyer’s remorse the other day. But sometimes, that’s a good thing. I’ll start at the beginning. Instead of writing from home last week, I decided to set up shop at the Starbucks that was down the block from my daughter’s camp. That way, I wasn’t wasting any time in the car, I was maximizing my time working,… Read more »
Tuesday night: 5:30 Wrap up work in my home office — even though I meant to wrap up work before kids got home from school two hours earlier. Oh well. 5:40 Realize that Andy is out tonight and it’s Tuesday, which means everyone has their various extracurricular pursuits until almost 9:00. Make radical decision: Let’s eat dinner before practice tonight… Read more »
I don’t know about you, but this is the time when I suddenly look at the calendar, and then at the list of things I’ve bought for family and friends so far, and then at the list of things I still have to buy, and think, “Rut-roh.” How’s it all gonna get done? And how did I let this happen?… Read more »
My mother, an attorney, was the first person to teach me about res ipsa loquitur, a legal term that translates to “The Thing Speaks for Itself.” I will leave it to the lawyers out there to explain the finer points of how it’s used to prove negligence in the courtroom, but as long as I can remember, my mom and… Read more »
O, haricot verts, how it pains me to say this, given all that you have given us (nay, done for us), but I have grown tired of you. For eight years, you — the basic steamed and salted version of you — were there for us, a rock in our rotation, a reliable side dish we could count on. You… Read more »
I had the world’s greatest assignment for the June issue of Bon Appetit. I can’t tell you all the details because it hasn’t hit newsstands yet, but it involves summer and it involves rules and it involves cooking. I was putting the story together in the middle of February — during one of those stretches of bean-soup-making snow days —… Read more »
I know. Bummer. An entire post devoted to salad. Not a BLT salad or a wedge of iceberg with thousand island dripping in and around the crevices. But a yawn-inducing, omega-3-rich, good-for-you, raw bowl of nutrients that falls into the “leafy green” category. Thanks, Jenny! Thanks for the big bowl of homework! Go ahead, leave the page. Go lose yourself… Read more »
Since I think I’ve received a personal (practically perfumed) note from just about every DALS reader telling me how much you love Andy’s pork ragu, I assume you might be interested in some suggestions for how to stretch it out into two meals. Yes, this means that you’ll have to restrain yourself from eating the entire batch on Night One, but… Read more »
When I was little, shrimp did not qualify as seafood. Seafood was the stuff my mom picked up at the dreaded fish market (my twin brother and I used to hold our noses in protest whenever she made us go in with her) and was what she might have made for people coming over for dinner once her bratty brood… Read more »
Welcome! I’m Jenny, author of Dinner: A Love Story and The Weekday Vegetarians More
