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Microwave the Vegetables
The most common—and frankly, best—ways of heating food are all undeniably primitive: An oven is nothing more than a metal box with a fire underneath it; a range is just a slightly controlled open...
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(Quick) Pickle the Vegetable
Pickling is utterly twee, from start to finish. This is a technique that, in some forms, actually requires a mason jar. It conjures images of grandmothers preserving the year’s harvest for the hard...
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Eat the Garlic
Almost everything I cook begins the same way: Take out a head of garlic, separate the cloves, and begin peeling, trimming, and chopping. From there, ninety-five percent of the time, its job is to help...
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Spaghetti the Squash
Of all the winter squashes, my favorite is the spaghetti squash, because it is a weird mutant that makes no sense. What possible reason could it have to produce a fruit that transforms from rock hard...
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How to Date
Dates, the fruit of the date palm, are most often associated with, and grown in, the arid deserts of the Middle East. But they also grow in the arid deserts of California, where the growing season...
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Eat the Sunchoke
We had nearly given up hope. This winter, like the winter before, and the winter before that, has moved us all one tiny step closer to packing up and moving to Los Angeles. (Unfortunately, the distance...
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Eat the Tomato Soup
Tomato soup is the chicken noodle soup of non-meat-based soups: an overlooked and underappreciated as a cornerstone of American comfort food. Though its frequent partner, the grilled cheese sandwich,...
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Eat the Mango (No, Not That One)
The end of March is still a dead zone for produce here in the Northeast, but in Mexico and further south to Peru, one of the world’s most diverse and most popular fruits, the mango, is beginning to...
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Stalk the Broccoli
There are many people who love spring, and if they like to cook or eat, they might suggest famous springtime delicacies as evidence that spring isn’t just a forty-five-degree puddle of dirty...
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Cook the Raisin
Ashkenazic Jewish cuisine has a real thing for foods so sweet you can feel your teeth crying, and raisins, by which I mean those little red boxes of Sun-Maid raisins, are exactly the right level of...
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Burn the Vegetables
A few months back, I went on a vacation to Oaxaca. While I was there, I took a cooking class, hoping to learn about some new ingredients, maybe have someone experienced walk me through a mole, the...
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Eat the Chayote
Imagine a vegetable that is handheld, and very tough, which makes it easy to ship. It is versatile, used in cuisines from Mexican to Indonesian to south Indian to Australian to Louisiana. The entire...
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Grill the Scallion
For years, I grilled onions alongside burgers, hot dogs, sausages, asparagus, zucchini, and the other stalwarts of the American grill. Thick slices of onion, a dozen rings nestled within each other...
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Eat the Greek Yogurt (Correctly)
The Greeks have a few different words for what we call “yogurt,” which makes sense, because yogurt is a major part of their diet and over the millenia they’ve been eating it, they’ve recognized that...
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Use the Wok
The king of spring vegetables, towering over the mostly young fresh grasses and ferns and alliums and greens, is the asparagus. I will happily eat an entire bunch as a meal, raw, dipping stalk after...
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Syrup the Fruit
There are a wide variety of sauces made from the delightful combination of fruit and sugar. They differ in the details of their construction, in whether they are blended or strained, in whether pectin...
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Eat the Tomatillo
It might be the beginning of June, but that doesn’t mean the soil here in the Northeast is quite ready to give us the fruits and vegetables we’re pretty sure we remember it was able to last year....
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Eat the Sugar Snap Pea, But Don't Cook It (Much)
I have written in the past about lab-created varieties of fruits and vegetables that I think are garbage (the Red Delicious apple), lackluster (the Tommy Atkins mango), or good but perhaps overrated...
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Grow the Herbs
At the moment, on an illegal fire-escape garden and an even more illegal rooftop garden, I’m growing chile peppers, strawberries, Swiss chard, figs, a few kinds of tomatoes, summer squash, cucumbers,...
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Ice the Tea, Not the Coffee
Iced coffee, a category long occupied by the humble acrid just-throw-some-ice-cubes-in-regular-hot-coffee coffee water or the venerable ultra-sweet melted-coffee-ice-cream, is now impossible to order...
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