Tag Archives: Honey

Eggplant and rainbow chard stir fry

15 Jul

Of all my material possessions, the eggplant costume hanging in my closet gives me the most joy. My mom hand-sewed it for me for Halloween in 5th grade, and I have worn it for almost every costume-required occasion since then.

The typical exchange goes something like:

Other person, as he or she looks up and down from my leaf and stem head piece to the giant, shiny, maroon-y purple bulbous blob hanging over my shoulders and down to my knees all around me: “Wow, what a great costume!” Continue reading →

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Honey balsamic brussels sprouts with plums

31 Mar

Insects were my earliest predators. As a preschooler, the majority of my outside time was spent in backyards and neighborhood playgrounds. My little friends and I invented ‘make-believe’ universes and spent afternoons cooking invisible pancakes in our invisible kitchens, bossing around invisible students in invisible classrooms, and performing carefully choreographed dances for invisible audiences in invisible theaters.

Juicy plums waiting to be sliced

My favorite character to play regardless of the scene was a puppy (though one time I took it upon myself to be a blind cat, and it didn’t end well. I’ll save that for another post.) How, you might wonder, does a puppy wind up in a kitchen? In a classroom? In a theater? I don’t know, and it never seemed to matter. For some reason, I liked the idea of not only pretending to be a human in another context, but embodying a cute animal that got to have just as much fun. Continue reading →

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Homemade pizza that’s taken over our lives

16 Feb

My attitude toward pizza was relatively neutral for the first quarter century of my life. My childhood memories of pizza strike me either as deliciously excellent or just plain gross.Delicious Franzone's pizza and not so delicious Ellio's While I always looked forward to Franzone’s pizza, with its sweet sauce swirled over salty cheese and to Ocean Pizza after a day spent playing on the raft at the beach house, I also remember suspiciously eyeing frozen and perfectly rectangular Ellio’s Pizza and cringing as Mansoor put mustard on his pizza during lunch in second grade.

It's alive!Then came Pizza a Casa. In year 26, I stumbled into pizza enlightenment, and now I am practically a prosthelytizer. Pizza a Casa is a fabulous pizza-focused cooking class on
NYC’s Lower East Side. Mark and Jenny, a terrific (and newly married – congrats!) couple have perfected the art of teaching a group of enthusiastic but unskilled tourists and natives the art of making homemade pizza. Mark and Jenny are pizza connoisseurs for sure, but their focus during the four hour class is imparting recipes, techniques, and tool recommendations that suit the average home cook in the average kitchen. No fancy brick oven in your microscopic New York kitchen? No problemo.

Continue reading →

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