Even without the red micro amaranth garnish, this is clearly a ‘red meat’. I was more than a little intimidated. I had been offered, and had purchased, a frozen  Mangalitsa collar steak one week before, but I had no idea what to do with it. The breed of pig was very different from any known …

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Mischling Deutsch. Sure there was Kassler, but the meal was more ‘free’ German than ‘serienmäßig‘ German. It was also very allium-y, spring allium-y in particular: Each of the entrée’s 3 elements included a different local mild spring ‘onion’. The vegetables were superb; both potatoes and chard, like almost everything else, were from the Union Square Greenmarket, …

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Yesterday I tweeted that our New Years Day dinner would be “Germany with some Italian, and, as always, New York too”. I followed through later in the day, and this post describes what it looked like, as prepared for four. We began with bread sticks and a sparkling wine, to toast good friends and the new year …

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filet after being rubbed with the sugar and spices, before it was refrigerated   Thinking of the arguable thesis that an artist’s best work may often arise from working with constraints, I will make the modest proposal that the same thing can work for the creative output of an ordinary cook. I was unable to get …

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We’re almost in German lands here. six or eight ramps from Mountain Sweet Berry Farm, their white portions only (the green leaves reserved), chopped and swirled around for a minute in a small amount of equal parts of bacon fat, duck fat, and butter which had been heated inside an oval copper au gratin, two smoked loin pork chops [‘Kassler‘] from …

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