Poulet à la Forestière is a classic French preparation of browned chicken served with mushrooms, salt pork or bacon. The name forestière—“of the forest”—refers to the mushrooms that define the dish.
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I get this question fairly often: when you spend much of the day working on recipes and talking about food, don’t you eventually get tired of thinking about what to cook?
The answer is yes.
There are evenings when the last thing I want to do is research a recipe, measure twelve ingredients, or spend an hour standing over the stove. That’s when I fall back on a handful of things I can make almost without thinking.
This is one of them.
Continue reading “The Pasta I Make When I Don’t Feel Like Cooking”
Murgh Kari, literally “chicken curry” in Hindi and Urdu, is a classic style of North Indian home cooking. Unlike the richer cream- and butter-based curries that often dominate Indian restaurant menus in the West, Murgh Kari is everyday cooking—chicken simmered in a deeply flavored gravy built from browned onions, ginger, garlic, tomatoes and warm spices.
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Old-Fashioned Cuppa Cuppa Cake is a beloved Southern dessert made with equal parts flour, sugar, and milk layered with fruit and baked until golden brown. Popularized by the movie Steel Magnolias, this easy cobbler-like dessert can be made with peaches, berries, or even canned fruit cocktail for a simple old-fashioned treat.
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This Norfolk Seafood is such a good recipe and so simple to make. The story behind this recipe is interesting.
When I was a young boy, we used to go to a seafood restaurant in Washington DC called O’Donnell’s. The historic O’Donnell’s Sea Grill opened in 1922 on E Street NW in Washington, D.C. It was a legendary destination for seafood, nautical decor, and its signature rum buns. They had wonderful food, and most importantly, they had Buck.
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Roasting eggplant until completely tender transforms it into an unexpectedly rich pasta sauce. Tossed with garlic, good olive oil, basil, Parmesan and toasted walnuts, this is one of those simple Italian pastas where a handful of ingredients become much more than the sum of their parts.
Continue reading “Rigatoni with Roasted Eggplant and Walnuts”
Guizhou Spicy Chicken-贵州辣子鸡, is very different from the dry, crisp laziji associated with Chongqing and Sichuan. The defining ingredient is cíbā làjiāo—a coarse paste of softened dried chilies, ginger and garlic fried in oil—which is cooked with the chicken until the meat becomes deeply infused with chile and coated in a rich, glossy red mixture.
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Ciba Chili Paste gets its name from its sticky, cohesive texture, which resembles freshly pounded glutinous rice cake (cíbā). Unlike dry chili flakes or smooth purées, it is a coarse, moist paste made by rehydrating whole dried chilies and pounding or grinding them together with fresh ginger and garlic, then slowly frying the mixture in oil until fragrant and glossy.
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The more I cook Hunan food, the more I realize that some of its most distinctive flavors don’t come from complicated recipes. They come from the ingredients that Hunan cooks keep on hand. Duo Jiao (剁椒), chopped salted chilies allowed to ferment until they become tangy, savory and deeply aromatic, is one of those ingredients.
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This vibrant Hunan seafood dish pairs shrimp with Duo Jiao—a pickled relish made from crisp green chilies, garlic, and ginger. Flash-fried over high heat, the chilies create an aromatic, savory-sour glaze that clings to the shrimp without the need for heavy cornstarch sauces.
Continue reading “Hunan Stir-Fried Shrimp with Chopped Green Chilies (青剁椒虾)”