Does the world need another fried rice recipe? I didn’t think so until I made Kenji López-Alt’s Basic Vegetable Fried Rice from his new, somewhat astonishing book The Wok. The dish, which I consider to be an absolute cornerstone of a Weekday Vegetarian’s repertoire, has always been something I’ve kind of made up on the fly. Ginger here, soy sauce there, eggs… Read more »
I told Andy that yesterday in the kitchen felt like the fabled story of painting the Golden Gate Bridge. Every time I cooked something and cleaned it up, someone was right behind me dirtying up another one hundred dishes. It was mostly my fault, though. I had a bunch of things to test and retest for my book — a… Read more »
Hello and welcome to Wednesday. Yesterday Andy cut Abby’s hair (he’s the “detail guy” in the house); I tested some cabbage recipes and made a style guide for my book; and I think I saw my 18-year-old for a total of five minutes. (She was holed up in her room or outside riding her bike.) For bedtime reading, I took… 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 »
Hearty, elegant, and slightly old-school, it’s been a family fall-back for decades. Wild Rice Salad with CranberriesServes 6 1 1/2 cups wild ricekosher salt3/4 cup dried cranberries1/2 cup pecans, toasted in a skillet on medium-high heat until roasty3 tablespoons scallions, finely choppedWhite balsamic vinaigrette (1/4 cup white balsamic vinegar whisked with 1/3 cup olive oil, salt and pepper)2 tablespoons chives, finely… Read more »
Before this blog, before my diary. Before the phrase “cut and paste” conjured up anything more than scissors and glue, there was my spiral black kitchen book. The book is filled with recipes clipped from magazines and newspapers that I felt were manageable for someone like me — a twenty-something recent college grad whose spice rack contained three things: salt, pepper,… Read more »
It’s almost irresponsible of me to tell you about the way I served this meal to my kids — because it’s exactly the way that, if practiced often enough, will drive you to swear off family dinner forever. I love fried rice. Before Andy and I had kids we’d make it with shrimp and pork and chicken all the time…. Read more »
Have you guys found the recipe for sushi rice on page 165 of the cookbook yet? And have you found the recipe for the salmon teriyaki in the “restaurant replication” section (p. 112)? I have! And that’s what was for dinner last night — a combo of the two: Rice bowl with Salmon, and crumbled on top: those Trader Joe’s… Read more »
Since discovering the oven-roasted shawarma recipe (<gift link) from the Times in December, I’ve made it a half dozen times — sometimes for company, sometimes for an easy Sunday dinner, sometimes with homemade yogurt flatbread (page 222 The Weekday Vegetarians), sometimes over rice with yogurt sauce and mint. The recipe, with nearly 20,000 reviews, is wildly popular for a reason: It always delivers. Unless, of course,… Read more »
I’ve been a Weekday Vegetarian for over five years and though now it feels easy, a lot of that is because I’m not cooking for my college-age children on a daily basis anymore. When I was just getting started, with younger kids who weren’t always, shall we say, receptive to the plan, I remember how much I appreciated coming across a recipe… Read more »
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 »
September, as always, was a busy month, compounded — in a good, happy, lucky way — by our move to Manhattan. Which is probably why this past Sunday, our first completely free day in what felt like weeks, Andy turned to me and said “Why do I feel like I still don’t know my own kitchen?” I knew what he meant,… Read more »
I confess this was actually last week in grilled chicken, and also that it will most likely be next week in grilled chicken and possibly the week after that, too, because the dinner is that good — so fresh and flavorful and just plain beautiful — and I should probably try to control myself before I overdo it. (Longtime readers may recognize the dinner as a new… Read more »
Subscribe now As you likely know by now, my most favorite kind of summer cooking is a simply grilled something surrounded by a bounty of farm-fresh, creative salads. (It always reminds me of my old magazine boss, Carrie, whose fashion philosophy was “Gap clothes, Prada accessories.”) This is probably why I love Susan Spungen’s new book Veg Forward so much. You might… Read more »
“In the late summer of 2019, I hit a wall. I felt cruddy after years of eating everything I wanted, all in the name of professional research.” So beings Andrea Nguyen’s wonderful new cookbook Ever-Green Vietnamese, where she reimagines her traditional Vietnamese repertoire, seeking out savory depth while wearing more plant-forward goggles. Perhaps it’s not a surprise that the whole project… Read more »
How do I eat vegetarian without leaning on carbs? Since I wrote The Weekday Vegetarians, I have gotten this question at every turn. The first thing I need to say about this is that in general, we eat a normal amount of carbs in our house. We’re not eating pasta every night, but nor are we serving riced cauliflower with our… Read more »
I cleaned out our refrigerator over the weekend and found a tub of Gochujang (Korean fermented chile paste) hiding in the back, far away from where most of my condiments live. Which might explain why I forgot about it for some time. And I’m not sure how because it’s one of those ingredients that really earns its keep — it… Read more »
Unlike products I cook with — Trader Joe’s 100% Greek Kalamata Olive Oil, my Diamond Crystal Kosher salt, Grey Poupon Dijon, etc. — I somehow, after all these years, don’t have the same kind of brand loyalty to the products I bake with. So I thought this year, in anticipation of all the holiday cookie-ing, I’d ask two baking pros,… Read more »
Welcome! I’m Jenny, author of Dinner: A Love Story and The Weekday Vegetarians More
