Since my Trinidadian sister-in-law was amongst the family visiting sweltering New York City this week for my nephew Kaden’s baptism, I decided to make her favorite beverage, Sorrel. It’s an iced tea made from hibiscus flowers. I added mint and lime to give a bit of a mojito treatment and am now calling it Hibiscus Mint Limeade.
Is it lazier to use dried split chickpeas to make hummus so you don’t have to slip the skins off each whole chickpea? Or is having to soak and boil the split chickpeas considered more work? What if you have a pressure cooker?
Whatever method you use to get skinned chickpeas, do it. Your hummus becomes downright sexy when you do.
“Stuff ‘em” is my usual stance when I invite guests over to a meal at my house. You will never leave hungry. You will be fed to the point of bursting. You may need to nap between the meal and the dessert. Lately, I’ve been easing up when it comes to dessert. When our guests woke up from their between-meal naps after the brunch Marlena Spieler and I whipped up this past Saturday, I served them this ethereal and light Pudim Molotov with Crème Anglaise, a Matcha (Green Tea) Cream and Caramelized Black Sesame Almonds. Oh, it’s gluten-free, to boot.
Do Indians host BBQ’s like Americans do? If they do, is there an Indian spiced coleslaw on the menu? I don’t know the answer, but I know that my Indian Spiced Slaw was a hit at both the picnic and the BBQ I took it to recently.
Going to the Summer Fancy Food show is like taking your taste buds on Mr Toad’s Wild Ride—Tasting The Globe Edition. The Javits Center is packed with 2500 vendors from all over the world all vying for you to try and buy their specialty food wares. You can go from the finest Venezuelan chocolate to oddly delicious blue cheese infused salami to dried African baobab fruit to black garlic vinegar to camel milk. Yes, this year I had camel milk! You cannot taste everything or you’ll be disgusted, bloated and miserable in no time.
My system is to go all three days for a few hours and eat only savory things for first part of the day and then switch to only sweets. I don’t waste my limited stomach real estate on too many carbs either. This year, I ate my weight in fine pork and even finer cheese products. It was GLORIOUS! Often it’s the same old stuff from year to year, but there are always a few items that stand out:
My rules for summer cooking is either not cooked or quick-cooked with low heat dishes. Since we find ourselves eating outdoors, I will add to my rules dishes that stand up to sitting out at warm temperatures like this Potato, Cauliflower & Green Bean Salad in Dijon-basil vinaigrette.
I picked pickled beets. Finding the right savory picnic foods in summer is a challenge. It needs to be not-too-much-work-to-make because it’s usually too hot to cook. It needs to be good “siege” food as in easy to serve and eat while sitting on the ground and being attacked by ants and wasps. It needs the resilience to hold up well in the heat.
Whenever I’m in Chinatown, I have grab a bunch of garlic chives now and ask questions later approach. The question is usually what am I going to do with all of these garlic chives? You can get a quite a decent sized bunch for just a buck. I snap them up because I can’t buy them in my neighborhood. My last bunch made it into at least two dishes recently, Garlic Chive & Chinese Mushroom Potatoes and a dish I’m calling Garlic Chive Garlic Chard.
WILL WALK FOR FOOD. A guide on how to organize a food crawl, an event where food enthusiasts gather to walk around and try different places and dishes around a theme. There’s my recipe for miang kana, a dish that we had on our recent Thai food crawl in Elmhurst Queens.
Dinner for two at the River Cafe will run you over $300 without drinks. For the same money or less, you could feed up to 19 friends by hosting a barbecue in Brooklyn Bridge Park with the same multi-million dollar view. How To Host A BBQ in Brooklyn Bridge Park has tips and a checklist for you to plan, execute and enjoy a successful and stress-free barbecue in the park.