Coconut, minus the hype

Palm and coconut oils have made a huge comeback in the last few years. But should you really be buying coco butter to cook with? It’s loaded with saturated fat. On the other hand, actual coconut, used sparingly for flavor, can be a sophisticated and not necessarily diet-busting addition to many dishes, particularly the aviyal “dry curries”. Here I try out coconut as part of an aviyal tailored to the unexpectedly smoky and bitter edge of cowpeas.

Lightening up homemade scones

Scones don’t have to be a commercial, or even a homemade, salt-fat-and-carb bomb to be delicious. Try these for a lazy brunch.

Fruitcake and the Jews

I love French food logic. It makes me want to argue even when I actually agree. The “Le Monde” newspaper’s explanation that its Alsatian fruitcake isn’t really a pear cake but rather a Jewish Passover cake would make so much more sense if there weren’t in fact a whole pound of dried pears in the recipe. Come to think of it, the fact that Jews like fruitcake more than Christians do is just as confusing.

Stuffed onions in a hurry

Why, you have to ask, should I make such a big deal about stuffed onions–they’re a party trick, after all, not standard cooking. But we discovered we really liked them, and they’re a pretty good kind of party trick. But they take over an hour the traditional braise-and-roast way. My way’s so quick I can make them for supper after work, and they’re so good they may actually be better than the long-roasted ones.

Medieval in LA: Sweet Spinach Tart

The fact that sugar is added to this one is reminiscent of Elizabeth I’s infamous sweet tooth, but it also makes the normally savory spinach a dish more in keeping with the earlier recipe collections so favored by Renaissance Faire participants. So we adapted this sweet spinach tart with the spices from an earlier era.

Microwave Tricks: Getting more chocolate power from cocoa

I take my hot chocolate as seriously as a pre-revolution French aristocrat, but I want to make it with cocoa powder, not chocolate bars. And clearly, Monseigneur’s servants also had the classic problem of the chocolate sinking to the bottom, or why the whisk?

When life hands you sour cherries, pit them!

When my grandparents moved back out of New York City after retiring, my dad discovered an old Mott’s prune juice jug in a box in the garage. It was filled with a mysterious dark liquid with red lumpy stuff at the bottom. It turned out that forgetting the sour cherry vishniak he’d put up with vodka back in the 1950s was the best thing Grandpa could have done to it.

Stuffed Eggplants with Quince, A Vegetarian Odyssey

When I got “Aromas of Aleppo” for my birthday this week, the stuffed eggplant with quince was the first thing I had to try. It took two hours in the oven–not counting the time it took to make the tamarind concentrate earlier this week–but it worked beautifully the first time around, even with my vegetarian version, and it made a great addition to the Rosh Hashanah table. Next time, I’m going to use the microwave to cut the roasting time to a few minutes just for finishing, so my house doesn’t heat up in 90-degree weather.

The Birthday Project: New Year, New Food

Despite the unfamiliarity of some of the flavors in “Aromas of Aleppo”–allspice in meat dishes, tamarind-based sauces–this is the best kind of traditional Jewish home cooking, the kind that has your favorite great-aunts outdoing each other for Pesach, Rosh Hashanah, and other big celebrations. And like all Jewish great-aunt dishes for the holidays, this dish of stuffed eggplants and quinces comes with two required homework items: the beef and rice stuffing, and tamarind concentrate. The stuffing is easy enough, even in my vegetarian lentil version. The tamarind concentrate? I decided to mechanize a little to see if I could speed it up.

Food that’s fit to print–but is it fit to eat?

The now common your-photo-in-icing cake decorations made using an inkjet printer and soy-based and other edible inks have given way to 3D printable food–or at least that’s what the researchers at Cornell are calling it.Food, any shape you want, and they contend it can be any flavor too. But it has to be made of goo.