Twice-Baked Potatoes with North African Spices

A few months back, I read a post from the Nerds with Knives blog about Yotam Ottolenghi’s Chermoula Roasted Eggplant. The recipe looked great — roasted eggplant drenched with a piquant spice paste (the chermoula) — and since it was eggplant season, I tried it a few times.  Finding the right eggplant proved challenging, but when I found […]

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A Rare Sighting of cooked Cucumbers

Cucumbers are one of those vegetables — like lettuce — that are almost never heated. And so, when I ran across a recipe that calls for sauteing cucumbers in oil, I had to give it a try. The recipe is in New Salads: Quick Healthy Recipes from Japan, a thin book that contains a wide […]

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Recipe: Straw Potato Cake

While planning a somewhat elaborate breakfast on a recent visit to my parents’ house, I remembered a once-favorite potato dish, the “straw potato cake.” The cake, which has few ingredients but requires care in preparation, gets its name from the similarity between the potato pieces and straw, and offers crispiness and softness in a golden […]

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Embracing the Bitter: Putting Radicchio on Center Stage

Radicchio makes a supporting appearance in most salad mixes as a color counterpoint and additional flavor component, but rarely has a starring role. Some reasons for this are probably related to its bitterness, unavailability, high price and the idea that salad greens shouldn’t be cooked. But it’s actually a very flexible vegetable — a 1997 […]

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