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I’m currently on the road, in Ottawa (where I enjoyed the “grilled cheese sloppy joe” pictured above at Art Is In bakery). I’ll be here for the entire month of March, staging at a number of restaurants. Rather than putting my blog on hold for that time, though, my goal is to try and post [...]

After the success of the other Bouchon Bakery recipes I tried, and in light of my efforts to bake bread more regularly in order to better understand the process, I thought it would be interesting to try the Bouchon Bakery “Master Recipe” for bread. Nearly all the breads in the book call for a pre-ferment, either [...]

I don’t make cocktails with sparkling wine very often, because good sparkling wine can be expensive, cocktails alone rarely use the whole bottle, and it tends to lose its fizz too fast if stored. But sometimes you just need the effervescence that only sparkling wine can provide. We first tried the Airmail cocktail at Beretta [...]

My husband gave me a copy of Bouchon Bakery as a gift in December, bringing my total collection of Thomas Keller Restaurant Group cookbooks up to four. After opening it, I wasted no time in diving in. The book approaches baked goods, both pâtisserie and boulangerie (with a little confectionery thrown in for good measure) in [...]

Until now, I have always made oatmeal exclusively with rolled oats; although I know connoisseurs swear by the steel-cut variety, it always seemed like too much of a time investment for a breakfast food. (And yes, I know I’m saying this as someone who has cooked his own English muffins for eggs Benedict.) But if [...]

Another recent nabe that I made, this one called the “Akita Hunter Hot Pot.” The defining characteristic of this hot pot is a rice preparation called kiritanpo. It’s made by cooking rice, mashing it up, forming it into a cylinder (around a chopstick or similar) and grilling or broiling it before adding it to the [...]

I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to the value of repetition in the kitchen, of doing the same task over and over and over again. Repeating it until you’re completely sick of doing it, then repeating it some more until you can do it in your sleep. And, ideally, becoming a little bit [...]

It may sound like the title of a bad spy novel, but the “Esquire formula” is really just shorthand for an interesting “universal” cocktail ratio proposed by Esquire magazine. The idea is that, armed with this ratio and one secret ingredient, you can make a tasty cocktail from pretty much any other ingredients you have [...]

I spent a good chunk of December in Southeast Asia, specifically Bangkok, Chiang Mai and Hanoi. Needless to say, we had a variety of delicious foods, but one of the dishes that stood out for me the most was the Chiang Mai specialty of khao soi. Khao soi is part of the continuum of Asian [...]

In keeping with my annual tradition of starting off the year on a Japanese-cuisine kick, I made my first nabe of the year last week – a fitting dinner given how cold and snowy it’s been. I turned to Japanese Hot Pots, which is the indispensable reference on the subject, and used the recipe for [...]