Month

06/28/11 • SAUCY PORK BARBECUE From the June/July, 2011 Saveur (click here to view the recipe) When I was a teenager there was an amazing barbecue joint called The Rib Crib not far from where my father and stepmother lived in the Philadelphia neighborhood of West Mt. Airy. Despite its proximity to the historically high WASP zip code of Chestnut Hill, the take-out operation — little more than a chipped formica counter

06/24/11 • CACIO E PEPPER From The Best of America’s Test Kitchen, 2011 (click here to view the recipe) Thumbing through the 2011 edition of The Best of America’s Test Kitchen I came across a recipe for a dish that’s been popping up in a lot of the cooking magazines lately — spaghetti with pecorino and pepper, or as it’s known in Italy, Cacio e Pepe. I don’t know why this one called out to me exactly: maybe it’s how

06/21/11 • TOMATO COBBLER From the July, 2011 Martha Stewart Living (click here to view the recipe) One of the benefits of obsessively flipping through the various cooking magazines each month is that from time to time you land on a dish you know will end up in regular rotation on your dinner table. Such is the case with the cherry tomato cobbler pictured here, from the July issue of Martha Stewart Living. This is a

06/17/11 • DUTCH BABY PANCAKE From the Dec., 2010 GQ Here’s something I’ve noticed about recipes in men’s magazines: they’re generally easy to prepare while offering a big payoff in the flavor department. I guess it’s not that surprising given their audience—If you want to interest most guys in cooking, there better be minimal effort with maximum reward. While I don’t necessarily fall within that category, I apprecia

06/14/11 • ROAST CHICKEN DINNER From the Oct., 2005 Gourmet (click here to view the recipe) When it was announced a few years back that Gourmet was ceasing publication, I, along with many other food lovers, treated the news like there’d been a death in the family. That may seem like an over-reaction to the closing of a business I had no obvious connection to, but though I’d never worked for the magazine nor been clos

06/03/11 • RHUBARB & RASPBERRY CROSTATA From the May, 2011 Bon Appetit (click here to view the recipe) I’ve now spent about three weeks with the May issue of Bon Appetit and I’m happy to report that the new team there has breathed some much needed life into a publication that had grown a little stale. This is only their first complete issue so time will tell if it’s truly a sign of things to come, but after init

05/24/11 •  PASTA PRIMAVERA, 2.0 From the May, 15th 2011 New York Times Magazine (click here to view the recipe) One of the pleasures of the recently revamped New York Times Magazine has been the Eat column by food writer Mark Bittman. In part that’s due to his writing, which is always crisp and often quite funny, but also because many of the recipes he’s presented in his first few months on the job have been both en

05/17/11 • BEST BROWNIE EVER! From The Best of America’s Test Kitchen (click here to view the recipe) Brownies, like my old stuffed bunny, are one of those things from childhood that I’d pretty much said goodbye to. And no, it’s not because of the calories, or the carbs, or even the way chocolate still manages to show up on my face a few days after eating it. Rather, it’s because the only brownies I’ve ever really li