Every good party deserves a good dip.
When we hosted the Halloween Party – complete with Tarantula Treats and Bloody Lady Fingers – Caitlin and I also served this dip. Unlike more traditional dips, we allowed this one to set, though it was still soft enough to accommodate our assortment of chips.
If you prefer a truly soft and creamy dip,…
During my senior year of high school, I got my first laptop. By today’s standards, it was slow and it was heavy. It hardly had any memory and it couldn’t even play a movie. But it had an ethernet port, and so, it had potential.
When I got to college, Firestone library was only a few hundred yards from my dorm room. But on a cold, wind-swept winter day, its collection and online database couldn’t have seemed farther. Fortunately, with a few keystrokes, and mouse clicks, its newspaper articles and scholarly journals were within reach. From the university network, I could also stream my Russian language files and download my French politics assignment. Early into freshman year, my laptop had become the epicenter of my college education.
Ten years later, …
Tomatoes have long been a source of suspicion and derision.
Tomatoes were first cultivated by the Aztecs around the 8th Century, who had given the fruit the name “tomatl.” A few centuries later, the Conquistadors brought tomato seeds back with them to Europe. But despite its arrival in the Old Continent, the tomato was not yet for eating. European botanists placed the tomato alongside the Solanaceae family, a group of poisonous and narcotic plants, and came to view tomatoes as poisonous and hallucinogenic.
Even once edible, tomatoes still served as a source of derision. During the days …
I wasn’t quite sure what to name this dish.
After making my three-cheese risotto, I ended up with several servings of left-over, cold risotto. Cold risotto, it turns out, is perfect for making fried risotto balls, alternately known as suppli or arancini.
Suppli is short for “Suppli al Telefono,” which translates as “telephone wires.” Traditional suppli is fried risotto that has been stuffed with mozzarella cheese. The idea, of course, is that biting into a good suppli produces a low-hanging mozzarella string, reminiscent of telephone wires.
Arancini is Italian for “little orange,” because …
If you were thinking about making my seven-layer spinach lasagna from the other day, grilled garlic bread would make the perfect appetizer….
