I realize as far as recipes go, suggesting one needs one for lemonade is questionable. What’s next, a set of detailed instructions for salted water, simple syrup, or buttered noodles? (Whoops!) But it turns out I have opinions on everything and there’s no time like the nth heat wave of the summer to share what…
Do you ever look around at the ingredients available to you, the energy you have to give to the cooking process — or, as I recently explained to a medium-sized child shortly before I got uninvited from future family events, the amount of fudge you have left to give from your, uh, bucket of fudge…
It is an error that needs correcting that in the near-20 years of plugging recipes into this url, only a few truly star cucumbers — and highly unrepresentative too, given that we are probably eating some format of cucumbers at half the nights of the week with dinner, and snacking on them throughout all of…
A friend asked me last week how long it takes to get a recipe right. I told him the only answer I know: As long as it takes. I’d like to be someone who could “adjust my expectations,” make peace with “close enough,” or have the slightest amount of chill when it’s clear that whatever…
If there’s anything that’s been consistent about this site in its near-20 years of beaming (babbling?) hypertext to servers and back to you, it’s that I’m very bossy when I get into something new, especially cocktails. When I fell in love with Porch Swings, I wanted you to as well. Ditto for Blood Orange Margaritas…
While I’m not from a cheesecake family — it is never unwelcome, but we are more deeply devoted to things like pastry creams, chocolate pudding, and stellar coffee cakes — I married into one, which means that even though this site’s cheesecake archives are very well-populated, not a single peep of protest could be heard…
I’m not sure if this is a sign of hitting a certain age — like a sudden interest in bird feeders (check, and please tell me about yours), or beekeeping (well, in the TikTok sense, not sorry), and animated conversations on the best pillows (I hate mine) — but I’ve found over the last year…
One of my most exasperating traits — or, perhaps one that makes me ideally suited for this space I invented, coincidentally, to suit my collection of traits — is that I have a terrific amount of random ingredient preparation ideas in the overflowing file cabinet of my brain that will spill into conversations the second…
In 2007, when this website was still in its infancy, I shared a recipe for a layered strawberry chiffon shortcake. I’d never made a chiffon cake before, but I brought it to a friend’s rooftop birthday BBQ, correctly assuming that no one would be unhappy with a towering, featherweight cake sandwiched with whipped cream and…
In something I never expected to have to clarify, this is a hot dog recipe but it is not a recipe for hot dogs. I know that I have a history of making foods from scratch that most sane people do not feel the need to — cream cheese, fig newtons, bagels, vanilla extract, and…