Last night I hosted with a friend, and the guests were ourselves. We cooked for each other, together. This particular friend is an excellent cook, our friendship being formed through the accumulation of instances in creative home cooking with one another, each delicious outcome cementing our friendship further, in a series of alchemical bondings in the…
If you’re on Instagram then there’s a large chance you’ve come across a user named @byashleyenglish one of those who broadcasts her ‘everything I eat in a day’ reels from an idyllic pastoral location in America. While stroking ponies and walking barefoot on the beach, she’s seen sipping raw milk, smiling eerily at the camera…
It’s a heatwave and I’m sitting in Bungee Space in Nolita drinking a guava cold brew from a glass with a rim coated with salted plum sugar thinking, why is New York so cool? So cool that this heatwave feels soothing. As I drink my cool coffee I’m thinking about the Matrix, and how this drink…
Zucchini, orecchiette, bottarga. Where’s the problem? Buying seasonal vegetables in shops when they look particularly nice is always a good idea, even if you have nothing in mind for any of them in that moment. I bought this zucchini for example, it was round – the kind you would stuff, and on a random day…
Writing these recipes often forces me out into the city to ingredient-gather, usually beginning with a Lime (bike) and often with a very loose idea in my head of what I want to eat, but without any real clear direction of where it’s going to go. I’ll let the particular bounty on offer across a…
This came to me as a breakfast suggestion from one of my good friends, Jemima. She’s over 60, though by some real trickery, looks no older than 42. So when Jemima offers up nutritional life hacks, I listen. She framed this one to me via the idea of a morning smoothie in reverse, aka all the…
This week two dishes emerge from a scallop shell. Both fork from an iconic scallop dish from Beijing. Reminiscent of the birth of Venus, a single scallop sits in shell adorned with a flowing mane of glass vermicelli. On a Marco-Polo tip, the dish is given the Botticelli treatment via the addition of every Italian’s…
Lotus root is my spirit vegetable. Its little holes look like portals into eternal happiness. We all watched in awe at that episode of Chef’s Table when zen chef Jeong Kwan tinted the holy discs while in a deep meditative state, with natural hues of turmeric and beetroot, laying them out in little bowls for…