Our take on a traditional dim sum favorite, eggplant stuffed with a shrimp/pork mixture, sautéed and steamed. Recipe below.
For quite a few years, one of our most beloved dim sum dishes was the eggplant stuffed with shrimp prepared at Hong Minh on Cermak in Chicago’s Chinatown. It was light and luscious and suave, and we were crazy about it. Continue reading “A favorite Chinese restaurant remembered: Dim Sum Eggplant Stuffed with Shrimp”
Leave it to the French to tame the sharp bite of vinegar with lots of butter, shallots, garlic and tarragon in this classic Lyonnaise dish. Recipe below.
CHICKEN. IN VINEGAR SAUCE. After me somehow never hearing of this ever, suddenly it was everywhere. Within the span of the past two weeks, three very different recipes popped up on my radar from three very different sources. A little digging turned up more. And despite my ignorance of it, chicken in a vinegar sauce wasn’t some new chef-driven trend. It was rooted firmly in “my grandmother used to make this” and “based on a traditional Lyonnaise dish” territory. Continue reading “Pleasantly peasanty: Chicken with Vinegar Shallot Sauce”
Five ingredients—gin, fresh sage, simple syrup, and grapefruit and lemon juices—create an herbaceous, summery cocktail. Recipe below.
We’ve lived in our new old house for a little more than a year now. The biggest transformation since we’ve moved in has been the garden. During the gut rehab of the house, the backyard was buried under demolition rubble three separate times. Even though our contractor’s team ostensibly cleaned up after the project, the first step of creating a garden involved removing a stunning amount of glass shards, broken bricks, nails, gravel and other debris—at least partly done by digging away the top several inches of the yard and throwing it out. Continue reading “Celebrating yardwork: Summer Garden Gin Sage Cocktail”
With summer in full swing, potato salads are showing up at picnics, family barbecues—anywhere people get together and eat. Here are six potato salad recipes to get you through the season, from the traditional classic to the decidedly non-traditional. Continue reading “The taste of summer: six potato salad recipes”
A make-ahead tomatillo sauce with cilantro, garlic, jalapeño peppers and lime juice livens up this weeknight-quick chicken dish. Recipe below.
We’re big fans of chicken, especially thighs. They’re flavorful, juicy and relatively inexpensive. But it’s easy to fall into comfortable cooking ruts with them. “Shall I do my chicken and wine again tonight?” “Should we just roast them?” Or now, with summer here, “How about I fire up the grill?” All good choices, to be sure, but sometimes you need a change. And that’s where this tomatillo sauce with black beans and corn comes in. Continue reading “Changing up chicken: Tomatillo-braised Thighs”
Smoky mezcal and tea brewed from dried hibiscus blossoms star in this refreshing, herbaceous cocktail, which also features cilantro, lime juice, simple syrup and club soda. Recipe below.
IN OUR ONGOING, VARIED ADVENTURES IN COCKTAIL-LAND, we sometimes play bartender challenge. In the right bar, on a slow night, we’ll specify a particular spirit, describe a flavor profile—citrusy, summery, fresh, for instance—and ask the bartender to create something. Almost always, he or she rises happily to the occasion and we end up with something wonderful, full of layers and subtleties. Continue reading “Garnet and Smoke: a mezcal hibiscus cocktail”
We love pasta. A lot. Just check the pasta section of the Blue Kitchen archives, and you’ll find pages and pages of listings. That’s what we did to compile this varied list of six pasta recipes—and a bonus seventh post at the end. Continue reading “Six pasta recipes and a bonus”
Made with ground turkey, feta and dried herbs, these pan-cooked burgers are so flavorful, they don’t need condiments. Recipe below.
I CAME UP WITH THIS RECIPE A FEW WEEKS AGO in the middle of a complicated family project that had me working very long hours with not much time to do things like eat. It was exhausting. Then one day I was in the grocery store and saw some ground turkey, of all things, and thought animal protein, and then it had somehow leaped into my cart and the must eat animal protein trance was falling over me and then I was home, rummaging around in the fridge, hunting for saute pans in a frenzy, and next thing I knew, I was putting these burgers on plates, and thinking how handsome they looked and, in the moments before they vanished, how good they smelled. The whole thing was amazing. Continue reading “Hold the ketchup, hold everything: Turkey Feta Burgers are just plain good”
A variety of Chinese and not-so-Chinese ingredients create a flavorful marinade for oven-baked pork ribs that aren’t ribs at all. Recipe below.
CALL IT CLEVER BUTCHERING, CALL IT GENIUS MARKETING, CALL IT BOTH. In the 1960s, Clifford G. Bowes took a section of pork that was hard to sell, cut it into meaty/fatty riblike slabs and dubbed it country-style ribs. Bowes, “one of the country’s top meat men and a meat consultant from Chicago,” according to a Chicago Tribune article from 1978, had hit a meat home run. Soon, butchers were using pork shoulder and the blade just behind the shoulder to keep up with the demand for country-style “ribs”—which are actually not ribs at all. Continue reading “Oven-baked, country-style Chinese Pork “Ribs””
Pimento cheese, a versatile, easy-to-make appetizer/spread/sandwich filling/burger topping/etcetera, is rightly enjoying a moment. One taste and you’ll see why. Recipe below.
People talk about pimento cheese like it’s always been around—as if it’s been a fixture of Southern life since time immemorial. Not so. The “caviar of the South” actually originated in New York state around 1910. Continue reading “Appreciating an icon: Pimento Cheese”