December 2013

Cookbook Giveaway

Sometime in the next two hours, I’m going to give away five signed copies of SECRETS OF THE BEST CHEFS on Twitter. All you have to do is follow me over there, and you may win the perfect holiday gift for friends or loved ones or frenemies who are tired of drab, boring, repetitive recipes and want to step up their kitchen game. 150 exciting dishes! Gorgeous full-color photography! Sidebars full of helpful information! Just think of how happy they’ll be to find this under the tree this year. Or screw those loved ones and win a copy for yourself. Or just buy one by clicking right here. I mean, you deserve it, right? [UPDATE: Contest is now closed!]

My 2013 Holiday Gift Buying Guide

Growing up, I never really made a Hanukkah list. My mom said to me early on, “We can get you one nice gift or eight crappy gifts,” so obviously I’d pick the nice gift and each year beg for something very specific, like a Nintendo or a Super Nintendo or a Nintendo Gameboy or basically anything Nintendo made. Now that I’m adult, I make a very different sort of list when I go with Craig to Bellingham, Washington for Christmas. This is something known as a “Christmas list” and I’m supposed to put lots of things on it that I’d be happy to find under a giant green structure known as a “Christmas tree.” Actually, I really enjoy doing this and in figuring out what food things I want for myself I end up making a list that works very well as a gift-buying guide for all of you. So without further ado, here’s my Holiday Gift Buying Guide 2013.

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Nancy Silverton’s Chocolate Chip Cookies

Cookies, cookies everywhere and not a chocolate chip cookie in sight. Look, let’s be honest about Christmas cookies: they’re fun to look at but are they really fun to eat? Most of them taste like cardboard with over-sweetened frosting slathered on. While everyone tries to reproduce the cover of Bon Appetit (which is, admittedly, pretty stunning), why don’t you do what I’d do and make a batch of these comforting, hot from the oven chocolate chip cookies from one of America’s greatest bakers? As someone who makes a lot of chocolate chip cookies (Martha’s, whole wheat, Eric Wolitzky’s, ones with cranberries and oats) these may be the most wholesome and comforting I’ve yet made, partially because they’re packed with walnuts.

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Spicy Chicken Meatballs with Fusilli

My life in New York was all about the newest and latest cookbooks, poring through them at The Strand and carefully calculating which ones were worth the price of purchase. In L.A., though, I’m all about finding old, tattered cookbooks at used book stores, both at Counterpoint Records in Franklin Village and Alias Books East in Atwater Village. At the latter, recently, I came upon The Campanile Cookbook which was written by two of America’s greatest chefs back when they were married: Mark Peel and Nancy Silverton. The recipe that sold me instantly is the one I’m about to share with you now.

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Sundance Here We Come!

That’s a picture of Craig finding out what was just officially announced: his movie The Skeleton Twins (which he co-wrote with our friend Mark Heyman and which stars Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader) is going to premiere in competition at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival! Needless to say, we’re over-the-moon excited about this; it was a journey seven years in the making. Now we’ve just gotta find some heavy coats and snow boots, it’s gonna be cold in Utah in January. Congrats to him and all of the talented people who worked on this movie. I can’t wait for all of you to see it.

Scallop Chowder

When Rebecca Charles of New York’s celebrated Pearl Oyster Bar first taught me the recipe for her scallop chowder, I asked if it was possible to substitute milk for the cream. She looked at me like I was crazy. “Why would you want to do that?” she asked. Good question.

This recipe (featured in SECRETS OF THE BEST CHEFS, a great holiday gift!) is one of the simplest, most comforting winter foods you can possibly make. Turns out, it’s all about the cream which has the remarkable ability to take on whatever flavors you heat it up with. In dessert, that flavored mixture becomes ice cream; here it becomes chowder.

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When Good Restaurants Go Bad

The first sign was the asparagus. It’s December here in New York and on the breakfast menu at Untitled at the Whitney, a Danny Meyer restaurant which we frequent whenever we’re in the city, there’s an asparagus omelette. “Asparagus in December?” I asked and then Tweeted something about it, prompting a sarcastic response from the very funny Twitter personage BoobsRadley: “Outraged!” Ok, ok, maybe it’s not something to be outraged about, but it is a sign that something’s a little off, especially when a restaurant’s proprietor is at the helm of such season-oriented restaurants as Gramercy Tavern and Union Square Cafe.

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Sweet Potato Latkes and Regular Latkes Too

A lot of people are making a big deal about the fact that Hanukkah fell this year on Thanksgiving. “It’s the first time in thousands of years that this has happened!” someone said to me and I said back, “But America hasn’t existed for thousands of years?” There was an uncomfortable silence. The point is that many people, while eating turkey, were also eating latkes last week. And since we’re still in the middle of Hanukkah, it’s not too late to have a latke party. All you need are some potatoes (sweet or regular), some onion-like things (I’ll explain momentarily) and miraculous vegetable oil that’s capable of burning for eight nights straight.

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