You know when you go to someone’s house for dinner and they seem to have it all together? One of the hosts is mixing you a drink and asking your children about camp while the other is sipping a glass of Prosecco, tossing some sort of delicious summery salad, listening intently to what you are saying, and showing no outward… Read more »
Search Results for: tomato
Finger Food For Grown-Ups
Let me put your minds at ease, right here at the top: No, our kids do not love clams. They’re kids, first of all, and clams are kind of freaky. The most I can say, while maintaining journalistic integrity, is that our kids and clams are in the process of learning to coexist. They’re getting to know one another. They’ll… Read more »
Lunch at the Beach: BLT Sliders
Why is it that if you put anything into slider form, it tastes better. I put a tray of these BLT sliders on the table for lunch at my sister’s beach house and they disappeared fast. Too fast. The person I actually invited for lunch at the beach only got one. BLT Sliders (Like you really need a recipe?) Assemble… Read more »
Summer Reading Series on DALS
Here at DALS we believe the only thing that screams “summer” louder than a tomato sandwich is an afternoon on a hammock curled up with a good paperback. (Or a nice icy cold iPad.) That’s why this July, in addition to getting recipes for grilled steaks and fresh summer salads, you’ll be getting what we think are some pretty cool… Read more »
Grilled Pizza
When it comes to summer cooking, we have a pretty strict family policy: Do everything you can to avoid turning on an oven. Which is all well and good except that it clashes with our other family policy: Eat pizza once a week. By pizza, we don’t mean the takeout pie from Tony’s on Main Street or the personal pans… Read more »
Two-Minute Dinner
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 »
Here’s the Plan
Two things happen to me when the weather starts getting nice: First, I don’t have the primal urge to cook up a bolognese for the freezer in the middle of a sunny day. Second, I want my dinner cold. This shrimp and avocado salad is a riff on a ceviche I had at Los Gemelos (website is somewhat bizarre, but… Read more »
The Quinoa Solution
We usually do our food shopping once a week, on Sunday afternoons, bolting to Trader Joe’s as soon as the final whistle on the final soccer event of the weekend finally blows. It’s our secular pilgrimage. We genuflect at the altar of dried fruits and granola bars, we load up the cart, we drive home, the kids go upstairs to… Read more »
The Someday File
Here are a few of the dishes you might find in my Someday File: An authentic lasagna from the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy (Someday I’ll have time to make pasta from scratch); That Post-it tagged lobster pot pie recipe from one of the Barefoot Contessa books (Someday I’ll be able to justify spending $25/pound on shellfish that gets lost in… Read more »
Happy Birthday DALS!
When the girls were little, my idea of celebrating a birthday was an 8:00 dinner reservation and a babysitter booked by Andy. It didn’t matter what restaurant we were headed to, so long as I didn’t spend half the meal kneeling under the table looking for a Polly Pockets shoe. But in the past few years, as the girls have… Read more »
The Family Cheese Plate
Before kids we were mushroom-stuffers and tomato-scoopers. Before kids we weren’t afraid of the adjective “hot” before the word “appetizer.” I think when we lived in Brooklyn — when the girls were as distant on the horizon as the suburbs were — we might have even served a chilled avocado and cucumber soup as an amuse bouche for our friends Jeni… Read more »
10-Minute Tortellini
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 »
The No-Fight Zone
Last Thursday, I started hating myself a full hour before my morning coffee. If you must know, I started hating myself at precisely 8:04, which was the first time I yelled at my kids who were in danger of missing the 8:09 bus. Yelling Where are your shoes and yelling Where are your gloves and Did you brush your teeth and… Read more »
The First Annual Dolly Awards
In case you haven’t noticed — it’s awards season! I’d like to thank the Academy for reminding me how remiss I’ve been at following my #1 Get-Fired Resolution. (“See more matinees.”) And to the folks who handed out Michelin stars in France earlier this week — thank you! I can now afford to dream about all the cafes in the… Read more »
A Winning Weeknight Dinner
Full disclosure here: I think I knew the winner of my Go-to Weeknight Dinner Contest almost as soon as I spied the Sausage, Kale, and Bean Stew entry submitted by “anna” on Day 1 of the contest. Every recipe that came in after this one, as far as I was concerned, had to pass the anna test — as in, is… Read more »
Chicken Chili: Always the Right Answer
On any given winter day in my house, if I ask the innocent question cooks across the earth are asking — i.e. What should we have for dinner tonight? — I can pretty much always count on Andy suggesting some kind of healthy, simple seafood; I would bet the house on Abby requesting — please, Mom, puh-leeeeeeze, I’ll kiss you 99 trillion… Read more »
Not Just a Sandwich
Have you seen Black Swan? I haven’t. True Grit? Nope. And, god, wasn’t Colin Firth mind-blowingly good in The King’s Speech? Actually, I wouldn’t know, because I haven’t seen a second of it. Not even a preview. The sad truth is, we haven’t seen a single one of the movies nominated for an Oscar this year. It pains me to… Read more »
Special Today: Coconut Shrimp
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 »