Search

The article presents recipes for five holiday roasts including a beef rib roast, a glazed honey ham, and a roast turkey.

The article features fashion designer Steven Stolman, focusing on his recipe of the roasted chicken Provençal. It discusses how Stolman discovered the dish, how he became a clothing designer, and a skilled and accomplished cook in Palm Beach, Florida and New York, and the importance of the look and presentation of the food when serving the meal. A recipe for the roasted chicken Provençal is presented.

Recipes for Fish Stew With Rice, Choucroute of Fish and Pot-Roast Style Braised Fish are presented.

Several recipes featuring lamb shoulder are presented including braised lamb with red wine and prunes, roasted lamb with garlic, dill and potatoes, and stir-fried lamb with eggplant and chiles.

Several recipes featuring beets are presented, including Roasted Beets with Pine Nuts and Parmesan, Braised Beets with Ham and Beer, and Borscht Salad.

Several recipes are presented which include Chicken Liver on Toast, Boiled Lobster With Lobster Mayonnaise and Roasted Root Vegetables.

The article discusses various ways to cook bacon, including roasting, grilling, and broiling in the oven.

There was a time when the only root vegetables anyone paid attention to were carrots and potatoes. (I know potatoes are tubers. Whatever.) Turnips were declasse, celeriac unheard of, beets a pain to clean. The perception has changed, in part because it was all wrong; in part because if you're going to eat seasonal and local, you are going to eat roots in winter, even if you live in California; and in part because roasted root vegetables, which most of us have discovered only recently, are, like, the greatest thing ever, and even the company cafeteria can't ruin them. Here's one more reason: They're interchangeable. Color aside, many of them actually look the same. (Even colorwise, it's confusing, because there are white carrots, yellow beets and purple potatoes.) Their density is quite similar, so they cook at about the same rate. Most contain starchy sugars, so they brown beautifully and become sweet after cooking. (Only carrots and beets are sweet raw.) All of this can be disclosed simply by substituting just about any root vegetable you like in your favorite potato recipe. The treatment won't be identical (the more sugar, the quicker the browning), but it will be similar, and the results will almost always be startling and good. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Here is a truth a chef might tell you three hours after service and a few drinks into a tear: In matters of cooking, authenticity is a joke. There are recipes, yes. There are traditions, sure. But neither is as important as flavor, as the pure taste of a finished dish. You want confirmation? Hail Caesar. There are as many versions of the salad bearing his name as there are neighborhood steakhouses and suburban Olive Gardens. Caesars come with croutons and without and can come weighted down with grilled chicken, grilled steak, fried chicken, fried shrimp, roasted salmon, grilled portobellos, Grecian lamb and chickpeas, either fried or stewed. They come sometimes with bacon, with goat cheese, with yogurt. Your mother makes better, with anchovies. Or she does not, without. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It takes effort to maintain a sense of seasonality with asparagus, given that it has become a year-round product. But right now even the stuff in supermarkets may come from a local source -- so that the stalks snap rather than bend when you apply pressure and the aroma and flavor are fresh rather than simply strong. Still, even the best asparagus needs something, even if it's as little as olive oil and lemon. Hence the following below, with the best cooking methods -- steaming (or poaching; in the case of asparagus, they're roughly equivalent); roasting; grilling (or broiling, which is always an alternative, because the broiler is nothing but an upside-down grill); and stir-frying -- and flavors well suited to each. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lamb traditionally appears on both Easter and Passover tables, though the latter most often in the form of a single symbolic shank bone. (In some Passover traditions, roast lamb itself cannot be eaten.) In my extensive experience, that shank is roasted to death and inedible; it's symbolic, I know, but imagine how much Jews of my generation might have learned about cooking had it been properly braised! In my fewer but occasional Easter dinners, those with lamb -- usually leg -- were somewhat better, but as we all know religious or even quasi-religious meals are rarely occasions of culinary wizardry. On the other hand, it doesn't exactly require genius to roast a leg of lamb well, nor does it require a break from tradition. There are classics with flavors that smack of the Middle East, North Africa and southern Europe, all of which make sensational eating at a holiday table. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This week's recipe is a raggedy Christmas number out of Venezuela called asado negro. It requires a fat roast of beef that is simmered for a long time in dark caramel, its sweetness tempered by vinegar. The result is sticky and unctuous beneath a cloak of peppers, onions and leeks. It looks mysterious and bold on the plate and at the start of a New York winter can conjure some degree of Latin American humidity and joy. Asado negro has its primary home in Caracas, where it is often served during the holidays, alongside fried sweet plantains and white rice, with perhaps a tart green salad for contrast. The meat is napped in blackness that comes not from fire or smoke but from the absorption of all colors into one, a color as deep as space itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aquarter-century ago, the term ''foodie'' denoted a small set of people who lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, lined up at the Silver Palate on weekends and occasionally roasted a chicken breast in a packet of aluminum foil with something peculiar, like raspberries. Now these people are everywhere in America, and they're cooking anything they can get their hands on, around the clock -- tutti foodie. The farmers' market in New York's Union Square, once a sleepy little happening where restaurateurs foraged for chives to tie the tops of their beggar's purses, is now a quad-weekly mob scene so dense you need a cleaver just to get out of the subway exit, let alone hack through the towering forests of purple cauliflower. Midwestern homemakers devote entire blogs to cupcakes. Your Republican father-in-law can pronounce ''quinoa.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]