“Never wash mushrooms. They’ll be a soggy, gelatinous mush.” So goes conventional wisdom about handling fungi in the kitchen. “Ridiculous,” Chris Czarnecki scoffed. “Of course you should wash mushrooms. “I have a picture of my grandfather in a bathtub of cold water filled with mushrooms. He washed mushrooms every day.” Lest you wonder why Czarnecki’s…
Have Pizza, Will Barter: The Irregular Story of Unregular Pizza
What would you give for a fresh-baked pizza? For some people, anything from homemade cocktails to caviar to a night in a hotel penthouse, Gabriele Lamonaca discovered. The 31-year-old Rome-born, New York City-based pizzaiolo is the creator of Unregular Pizza, a new pizzeria built on an age-old idea: bartering. When the pandemic hit, putting Lamonaca…
Family Traditions: A Warm Indian Pudding to Brighten Cold Days
For Maneet Chauhan, the India-born, Nashville-based James Beard Award-winning chef, restaurateur, and TV personality, winter weather calls for her family recipe for gajar ka halwa, a sweet and creamy carrot pudding served warm. The traditional Indian dessert is often served at temple festivals and during Diwali, the five-day festival of lights. This year, the main day…
History Is on the Menu at ‘Hemings & Hercules’ Dinners
The first thing you need to know about the “Hemings & Hercules” dinner at Post and Beam in Los Angeles is that it’s an eight-course tour de force of open-air, wood-fire, cast-iron cookery dedicated to two of America’s first celebrity chefs—James Hemings and Hercules Posey. The second thing you need to know is that both…
Slow and Steady: Rodney Scott on Going Whole Hog
The first step of cooking a whole hog, says Rodney Scott, “is to get you some patience. Because you’re gonna need it.” Scott would know. The James Beard Award-winning pitmaster, owner of Rodney Scott’s BBQ in Charleston, Birmingham, and Atlanta, has been perfecting the art of whole-hog barbecue for nearly four decades—since he cooked his…
Stirring the Pot With Frank Brigtsen
One of New Orleans’ most beloved chefs, Frank Brigtsen is recognized for revitalizing Creole Acadian cooking at his namesake restaurant Brigtsen’s, now celebrating 35 years. Located in a Victorian cottage on a quiet street in the city’s uptown Riverbend neighborhood, Brigtsen’s Restaurant pays tribute to traditional Louisiana cooking and local ingredients, with dishes such as…
Mango and Peppercorns: The Unlikely Flavors of the American Dream
Katherine Manning was a graduate student when she began taking in refugees. She had a degree in sociology, but left career social work due to dissatisfaction with what she saw as the government’s wasteful habits. An Iowa-born Miami transplant, she had hosted Vietnamese friends in her Miami home before, but in 1975, when she saw…
A Chef’s Love Letter to Crete
Author and poet Mary Ann Evens, under the pen name George Eliot, once wrote, “We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.” For chef and cookbook author Marianna Leivaditaki, the love she developed for the food of her culture as a child set the stage for…
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