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I’m about to leave on vacation – a two-week road trip across the US to the West coast – so naturally I had to clean out my fridge a little bit before my departure. Buried in the back, I found some quail eggs that had been kicking around for too long. Rather than just throwing […]

Everyone knows you can make a foam out of egg whites; that’s what meringue is. But did you know that egg yolks can foam too? It’s a little trickier, though. Yolks won’t foam without a little help in the form of some added water. And unlike egg white proteins, which can be destabilized by mechanical […]

Every culture has its New Year’s Eve dishes that are traditional for bringing luck in the coming year: in my family it was mincemeat, in Italian culture it’s cotechino and lentils, and in Japanese culture it’s toshikoshi (“year-crossing”) soba noodles. Although they have a special name, there is no specific recipe for toshikoshi soba; you […]

If the noodles are the body of a bowl of ramen, the broth is its soul. There are lots of different styles of broths, from basic dashi to chicken stock to intense, pork-based tonkotsu, or any blend of the above. These are then seasoned with a tare or kaeshi sauce concentrate, which roughly determines the […]

I’ve long been a fan of the idea of using eggshells as serving pieces, especially since I saw Michael Laiskonis’ recipe for The Egg at Le Bernardin. The challenge, of course, is to remove the top of the shell cleanly. Apparently, it can be done simply with a serrated knife and a lot of practice, […]

Although winter has held on for too long this year, spring finally seems to have set up shop, and my drinking habits are making their seasonal shift from brown spirits to white. And since it’s Easter weekend, what could be more appropriate than a drink with eggs? I’ve written about certain egg-based cocktails before, but […]

As a predominantly savoury-kitchen cook, I don’t follow pastry trends closely – I pretty much completely missed the cupcake trend, for example – but more and more, I’ve been seeing rows of lovely, pastel-coloured French macarons in local bakeries lately. I know they’ve been trendy for several years in other cities, but trends are often […]

When the Christmas season rolls around, there are two cocktails that make their way into increasing rotation in my bibulous life. One of them is the Coffee Cocktail, mostly because we always have a bottle of port in the house at Christmas; it goes in our fruitcake. If you’re not a regular denizen of the […]