Thomas Jefferson may not have been around to sample my mom’s yellow rice. But if he had been, I can only assume he would have found this dish a perfect side for his chicken fricassee….
Steaming
Marinated Broccoli
Broccoli hasn’t had it easy in this country.
Broccoli was first cultivated in Italy, and came to the United States in the late 19th Century, with the incoming crop of Italian immigrants. Albert Broccoli, the producer responsible for putting Ian Fleming’s James Bond on the big screen, boasted that his uncle brought the first broccoli seeds to the States in the 1870s. By the 1920s broccoli had become a commercial crop, with the D’Arrigo Brothers Company shipping the product to Boston’s growing Italian population.
But despite its loose association with the debonair spy, broccoli has never been all that popular.
Early in his presidency, …
Sweet Almond Milk Couscous
Not every couscous recipe has to be served with dinner. Seffa, a couscous sweetened with cinnamon, sugar, and rosewater, is one of the more common couscous-based desserts. This recipe …
Moroccan Couscous
Couscous is not a grain, as you might think, but a semolina paste. In fact, couscous is made from the same wheat semolina flour used to make commercial spaghetti.
Couscous originated in the Maghreb, today’s North Africa, and owes its origins to the Berbers, an indigenous people of the region. The Saracen conquest of Europe in the 7th and 8th Centuries is believed to have introduced the dish to the Western world.
Owing to its origins, couscous is often served …
Cheese Grits
Not every great recipe requires seven steps and several stopwatches. Cheese grits are one such example.
Grits are crushed kernels of dried corn. The dried kernels are crushed between millstones and the resulting fragments are sorted according to density. The dense shards are grits, and the lighter shards are cornmeal. Polenta is an even finer grind of yellow corn, with all the particles of flour later removed. These stone-ground grits can be made from either white corn or yellow corn, with little difference in taste between the respective varieties.
Stone-grounds grits are coarser than …