Tag Archives: the copycat chef

It seems like an easy dish: just potatoes and cheese, right? But this cold-weather staple can be boring if you just take the traditional French route. Luckily, my family was treated on Christmas Day to some of the best potatoes au gratin I’ve tasted. My future sister-in-law Jeanne Arnondin combined her mother’s recipe with a Food Network recipe for a dish that’s decadent and infinitely craveable. The key differences are fennel and Pecorino Romano, which brings a sharper umami flavor that a straight French preparation doesn’t have.

Make it with a simple beef tenderloin roast for an elegant but easy winter dinner party. (more…)

Like the wartime song “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” some holiday classics remind us of a time when the basics were harder to come by. So it was with my grandmother’s Christmas cookies, the recipe for which dates back to about 1900. By the time the Depression was over and people could actually afford to buy the butter and sugar to make cookies, she said, along came the war, and butter and sugar were rationed.

Which may be one reason these cookies are best left to shine as is, with just sprinkles or nothing at all on top. Before it became the fashion to ice Christmas cookies elaborately à la Martha, they were less cakey and ultra thin, so as to showcase the crisp, delicious cookie itself – and how fortunate it is to have access to plain old butter and sugar. (more…)

Ribollita, which translates literally as “reboiled,” is a traditional Tuscan white bean soup that’s on nearly every menu in Florence during the colder months. Ask for it during late spring or summer, however, and they’ll laugh: Fall, when leafy green vegetables are at their peak, is the best time to make this hearty vegetable soup. The most important ingredient in this vegan dish is the slightly bitter cavolo nero or Swiss chard, which gives ribollita its distinctive taste. It takes three days to make ribollita properly, but it’s worth it!

The recipe, after the jump. (more…)

This recipe is based on Nigella Lawson’s Spaghetti al Sugo Crudo from her excellent summer house cookbook, Forever Summer. Spaghetti made with fresh uncooked tomatoes and garlic is delicious when tomatoes are in season—though the sauce gets watery if you let the tomatoes sit too long. This never stopped me from slurping up the leftovers with a spoon, however, so I thought: why not make the whole thing a soup?

The result is pretty insane, like intense Sicilian sunshine in a bowl. The ingredients may be rustic, but the finished product looks and tastes quite sophisticated. (Serve it in smaller portions as an amuse bouche.) The soup can be frozen for the winter months, when you’re really craving that dose of sunshine. (more…)

The death of The Silver Palate‘s Shelly Lukins marks the end of an era: she and her partner Julee Rosso taught so many of us how to cook. They developed simple but sophisticated recipes for entertaining and introduced American cooks to bright Mediterranean flavors. Before the Silver Palate, garlic was considered exotic, and you couldn’t find fresh herbs at fancy supermarkets; now both are readily available nearly everywhere.

It was with their recipe for rosemary beef skewers in mind that I started working on this recipe several weeks ago. The marinade has been toned down – no more Asian influences of soy sauce and sesame oil – and the focus is on the herbs and greenmarket vegetables. If it hadn’t been for The Silver Palate, who knows if food would have evolved the way it has. (more…)

This being a thrifty summer, there are a lot of recipes going around for pickling and canning. But what if you read one of those recipes and think, grasshopper-like, I want to eat that right now, not in January? This is what happened with Amanda Hesser’s recipe for brandied peaches.

Greenmarket peaches are so good right now that at first I never even made it to the recipe stage. Raw sliced peaches topped with crisp bacon make a great breakfast dish. The last bit of fat from the bacon oozes into the peaches, creating a wonderful smoky-salty-sweet taste. They were even better with syrup drizzled on top—not the fancy New England maple kind, but the kind of syrup you find in the South, Aunt Jemima. You’re going for Georgia flavor here. (more…)