The lyric for the song “Cry Me A River” should be, “Cry Me A Liver”? “I cried a ‘liver’ over you.” I have shed a tear over a big bowl of raw chicken livers because, let’s face it, chicken livers are pretty gross to touch and deal with. Yet, they are delicious. So delicious that I must delve into the bloody, gooey bits and prepare them.
Faced with a hankering and a need to make chopped liver for my nephew, Kaden’s baptism party, I decided to devise a recipe where I handled the chicken livers the least.
Is it lazier to use dried split chickpeas to make hummus so you don’t have to slip the skins off each whole chickpea? Or is having to soak and boil the split chickpeas considered more work? What if you have a pressure cooker?
Whatever method you use to get skinned chickpeas, do it. Your hummus becomes downright sexy when you do.
I picked pickled beets. Finding the right savory picnic foods in summer is a challenge. It needs to be not-too-much-work-to-make because it’s usually too hot to cook. It needs to be good “siege” food as in easy to serve and eat while sitting on the ground and being attacked by ants and wasps. It needs the resilience to hold up well in the heat.
WILL WALK FOR FOOD. A guide on how to organize a food crawl, an event where food enthusiasts gather to walk around and try different places and dishes around a theme. There’s my recipe for miang kana, a dish that we had on our recent Thai food crawl in Elmhurst Queens.
Monday, I was back at Santina, a restaurant in the meat packing district that I’d been to this past February. I’ve been obsessed with one of their dishes, the cecina, since my first visit. It’s rare that I visit the same restaurant twice in a short time since I have restaurant ADHD. I want to eat at pretty, shiny new restaurants all the time. But my cecina obsession trumps my ADHD and I had a good blogger friend in from DC who wanted to try it. It hits many marks. It’s unusual. It’s easy to make. It’s gluten free. It’s vegan. It’s cheap to make. It’s fun to eat. It can be eaten alone or with a myriad of toppings or even a salad on top.
Who remembers the 1969 Alka Seltzer commercial? Mama Mia! That’s A Spicy Meatball.
On Saturday, the plan was to remake the spicy calamari salad, I’d made the previous Sunday because the original would not have given the guy in the heartburn. It lacked kick. I’d also served it cold and I thought it would be better warmer on the temperature side and the Scoville scale side.
An eyeglass store is not the first place you’d think you’d find cooking inspiration. At the Warby Parker stores, you can buy books from small presses, in addition to eyeglasses, but I didn’t notice any cookbooks. This recipe for Sriracha Honey Lime Glaze for my Cooked The Sh*t Wings was inspired by an event at the store on Washington Street. It was for a book that 826NYC and Edible Schoolyard helped produce, filled with stories by New York school kids called “Chicken Makes the Ice Cream Taste Better”.
Do you ever want to just smash something? When I was a little girl I was rather partial to a temper tantrum. I’d get so angry, I’d simply want to throw things and hear them smash. There is something so satisfying about the sound and it’s a nice way to get one’s aggression out. Are you angry about the never-ending winter or the coming of spring? You can take your aggressions out on the cucumbers in this salad… they don’t seem to mind.
There was a time when you had to have egg rolls on the menu in New York Chinese restaurant like it was the law of the land. These days, I have to hunt them or make them.
