Making the perfect couscous is kind of like doing laundry. It requires washing, drying, steaming, and sorting. Just boiling a pot of water is not going to cut it. The same way wrinkled sweat pants don’t quite compare with creased slacks, instant couscous has nothing on old-fashioned Moroccan-style couscous.
And just as dressing well takes effort, so does making the perfect couscous. But if you have the time, it is well worth the effort. You will need …
From a Croque Norvegien to an ABB&M, I’ve been in sandwich mode recently. Which got me thinking. Instead of running out and grabbing a new loaf of bread, maybe I could make my own.
I settled on brioche, a butter- and egg-enriched yeast bread, French in origin. Yet, despite its French origins, the French put their brioche in the viennoiserie basket. Unlike something in the bread basket, a viennoiserie (meaning “in the Viennese style”) boasts the addition of eggs, butter, milk, cream, or sugar, which gives it a pastry-like character.
Viennoiseries are leavened, often layered, and commonly served in the morning. Beyond brioche, …
If you’ve ever been in a Parisian café, you’ve seen Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle at work. In this environment, waiters move about like errant electrons, brushing past you with little care for their momentum, their movements, or their duties. To a stationary observer, it is impossible to know both the location of a server and the speed at which he is ignoring you.
The croque-monsieur made its debut in 1910, in a café on the Boulevard des Capucines. The origins of the name are unknown, but I suspect the etymology is quintessentially French. An exasperated Frenchman …
As I’ve mentioned previously, chicken salad is one of my lunch-time staples. Almost without fail, Sunday nights are devoted to preparing my tried-and-true chicken salad for the work week ahead. That said, everyone can use some amount of variety. So, in the spirit of variety, I decided to try a different type of chicken salad. My sense of lunch-time adventure obviously knows no bounds.
This recipe, like the other chicken salad, comes together very quickly, and is perfect served cold. But unlike the other recipe, this Asian version has a little more punch to it…
Like the Camry, the Walkman, and the Wii, broccolini is one more Japanese product making its way into the American household. And like its predecessors, the vegetable is one part engineering and one part marketing.
Broccolini was developed in 1993, when the Sakata Seed Corporation crossed broccoli with gai lan, or Chinese broccoli. Sakata originally marketed the green as “aspiration,” perhaps a not so subtle allusion to its hopes for the product. The name may have also been designed to suggest a connection to asparagus. Indeed, Sakata also tried calling it asprobroc and asprospeer – never mind its misleading nature. Crossing broccoli with asparagus, one article noted, would be like breeding a chipmunk with a tree: it can’t be done.
Ultimately, the more accurate broccolini prevailed, though brocoletti was in the running for some time.
Broccolini is basically …
