When my friend suggested we meet at the Annapurna near UNM at 8 a.m., I was surprised. I didn’t even know the place was open before lunch. Turns out it opens at 7:00 for desperate early-morning chai fixes. Our menu choices were very limited – apparently more options come online at 9:00 – but included…
Taco Bell’s Breakfast Menu: Make a Run from the Border
Dear reader, I have desecrated my tongue. Our morning was kind of strange on Saturday. We had planned to go out to breakfast with my mom, but her truck wasn’t starting, so it wasn’t clear when we’d be eating breakfast. Since we’d been planning on going out, I didn’t really have any good breakfast options…
Singapore Crab Cakes with Sweet and Tangy Red Chile Sauce
I am a sucker for the words “street food.” They call to mind the most exciting and delectable experiences: sizzling fish tacos handed down from the window of a brightly painted truck; smoky grilled meat sticky with spicy lemongrass-chile sauce; colorful drinks in plastic bags, skewered with straws for sipping; steaming bowls of soup slurped…
The Best, Easiest French Fries at Home!
These French fries are so exciting. We came across the instructions in a video (embedded below) for the online food science class we’re taking. Basically, Dan Souza from America’s Test Kitchen proposes a simpler method than going through the trouble of double-frying French fries – the classic method to make fries that are creamily cooked…
The Science of Cooking: Harvard EdX, Weeks 4 & 5 (Ceviche Lab)
Week 4 of our food science course focused on elasticity in food, mostly in candy-making and cooking meat. The candy-making part focused on Bill Yosses, the White House pastry chef. There were six videos of Yosses making various things, including strudel, a blown sugar “glass” apple, and an over-the-top dessert that I assume is the…
Luxurious Four-Ingredient Browned Cauliflower Soup
I am inordinately proud of this soup. It is perfect Unfussy Epicure fare – extremely simple to make and stunningly delicious. It’s just a variation on roasted cauliflower soup, a cold-weather staple that I’ve made with curry, with potatoes, with garlic. But this variation is so easy, so elegant, and makes such an incredible difference…
Eating NYC: New Year with the Family
Over the New Year’s holiday, Arne, my mom, and I went to New York to visit my brother Jeff, his wife Ashley, and their new baby girl, Rory. We took the JetBlue redeye flight – a direct flight that leaves Albuquerque just before midnight and arrives at Kennedy airport at 6:00 in the morning. I’d…
The Science of Cooking: Harvard EdX, Week 3 (Ice Cream Lab)
You may have noticed that it’s been more than a week since I posted about Week 2 of the food science course. Well, there was a grading glitch, so they pushed everything back two weeks, and with Christmas and all, it was very easy to take them up on their offer to be lazy. But…
The Science of Cooking: Harvard EdX, Week 2 (Sous Vide Eggs Lab)
Turkey and stuffing croquettes with a 62-degree egg Arne and I were pretty excited for the second week of our food science class, on temperature and heat. For our lab, we were going to play with sous vide cooking, a major darling of today’s chef’s, that I addressed briefly before when I made sous vide…
The Science of Cooking: Harvard EdX, Week 1 (Oven Calibration Lab)
How could I resist a free online cooking class with guest lectures from the likes of Momofuku’s David Chang, Flour’s Joanne Chang, and pioneering molecular gastronomist Ferran Adria? And featuring the work of famous food scientist Harold McGee? You know I couldn’t. So I didn’t. I signed up (and you can too, though the first…