Simply Recipes Food and Cooking Blog

People either love turnips or they hate them. And if they love them, it was probably an acquired taste. I can still remember making a face when thinking I was biting into a yummy potato in one of my mother’s stews I had speared a turnip instead. Yet this dish is another proof point that almost all things taste better with butter and cream.

It’s one of those couldn’t-be-easier, how-to-impress-without-doing-much recipes. Takes 10 minute to prep, and 10 minutes to cook.

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.

If you are looking for a special pound cake to prepare for a holiday gathering, consider this one! It is both dense and light, as all pound cakes should be; it’s rich with the aroma of almonds from the almond paste in the batter, and speckled with orange zest throughout. We’ve included a simple orange glaze though the cake stands perfectly well enough on its own without it.

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

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.

Once years ago, when I was six years old, visiting my aunt and uncle in Washington D.C., I ate an entire box of Ritz crackers. We never had anything like those crackers at home, so buttery, so delicious. And once I started, I couldn’t stop eating them.

Are you familiar with Cook’s Illustrated? It’s a magazine and a website from the same people who create the PBS show America’s Test Kitchen. It’s the only cooking show we watch with any regularity, and we read each issue of the magazine from cover to cover. What I love about the magazine is that they go into great deal of detail about the how’s and why’s of various cooking methods; I always learn something new. (What I don’t love about the magazine is that they tend to overcomplicate things, just for that n-th degree of perfection.)

Frittatas, as simple as they seem, can be a challenge to pull off well. The secret to a perfect frittata, or almost any egg dish for that matter, is slow cooking. A frittata should be firm enough to have structure, while at the same time, tender to the bite. If you cook the egg mixture too fast, the result will be dry, crumbly, and off-tasting.

The first time I encountered bluefish was in the Massachusetts kitchen of my friend Jill. Her famously unflappable son John was practically beside himself with anticipation of diving into one of the fillets his mom had prepared.