Simply Recipes Food and Cooking Blog

One of the first things I learned from my mother about cooking meat is that fat=flavor. If you have lean cuts of meat, you often need to do something to introduce fat back into the meat just to make it taste better and to help keep it from drying out. Along those lines, here’s a trick you can use with a pork loin roast, a relatively lean cut, to bump up the flavor and keep it juicy. Just brown the roast first on the stovetop, then wrap it in strips of bacon to roast. As the roast cooks, the bacon will bathe it in flavor.

Prime rib claims center stage during holiday season for a very good reason. It is the king of beef cuts. It’s called a standing rib roast because to cook it, you position the roast majestically on its rib bones in the roasting pan. Beautifully marbled with fat, this roast is rich, juicy, and tender—a feast for the eyes and the belly.

Slice the chicken against the grain into strips. Serve at once with the peppers and onions, some warm tortillas, and sides of shredded cheese,

Have you ever seen a lingcod? They are almost primeval looking—huge, gaping mouths with sharp teeth. As with any fish, the most important factor for how good it tastes is its freshness.

All winter long it’s Dungeness crab season here in the Pacific Northwest. Dungeness crabs tend to weigh in between 1 1/2 and 2 1/2 pounds, and have perfect meat for making crab cakes. These crab cakes are a step-up riff off a recipe I found years ago in Ruth Reichl’s Comfort Me with Apples. The difficult thing with crab cakes is that they don’t hold together that well when forming them, and they can easily fall apart when frying them. The trick is to handle them delicately to begin with, and then chill them on a breadcrumb-lined pan for at least an hour before cooking them. Just that time in the fridge will go a long way in helping them stay together as they cook. There isn’t a lot of binder in this recipe, so it needs the chilling time.

Have you ever seen a lingcod? They are almost primeval looking—huge, gaping mouths with sharp teeth. As with any fish, the most important factor for how good it tastes is its freshness.

Walk in to practically any taqueria in California and you’ll likely find super-sized containers of agua frescas, right next to the soda dispenser. The usual flavors are horchata (a sweet rice drink), tamarindo (from tamarind, and agua de jamaica (pronounced hah-MY-kah), an infusion of dried red hibiscus flowers.

My father, being of the solid German stock that he is, is naturally a connoisseur of all things potato.

The first is the stock. Your soup will only be as good as the stock you are using. This soup traditionally is made with beef stock, though sometimes a good beef stock can be hard to come by and expensive to make. If you use boxed stock, taste it first! If you don’t like the taste, don’t use it. (If you cook a lot of beef or beef roasts, save the scraps and freeze them to make a stock with later.)

Did your father ever tell you that when “he was a kid, he walked 10 miles to school everyday, barefoot, in the snow”? My dad did, and I believed him for years. He was from Minnesota; they had snow there. We lived in LA—palm trees, no snow. How was I to know? We grew up with hearty soups, even though in Los Angeles there was maybe one month a year when it really made sense to eat them.