Writing about food since 2004.
Category
mushrooms
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Oma Grassa
[From the 4/14/25 Amateur Gourmet Newsletter] On Saturday, we met our friends Jeremy and Jason for pizza at Oma Grassa in Fort Greene. Eric Kim was raving about it the other night at drinks and since I love pizza, it was kind of a no-brainer. (Though I did realize, after I made the reservation, that…
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Noodles with Mushrooms, Chiles, and Lime
When you cook a recipe with lots of ingredients, you expect a big impact. So it would follow that cooking a recipe with just a few ingredients would be less impactful; that it would be simple in the way mashed potatoes are simple: straightforward, satisfying, but not complex. And then someone sends you a recipe…
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No-Bacon-Necessary Pasta with Porcini Rosemary Tomato Sauce
Every so often, I think about my dog and the fact that I could never eat him. Then I think about how he looks like a piglet and how I do eat pigs by way of bacon. But if I do eat bacon and bacon comes from a pig aren’t I eating a version of…
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Delicata Squash and Mushroom Risotto with Parmesan and Saba
There’s a certain type of cooking that I excel at and it’s called “I just got back from a trip and what do I have in my fridge?” cooking. Usually, when I get back from somewhere, I’m too fatootsed to go food shopping, so I either (a) give in and order take-out from Pine and…
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I’d Like To Propose A Toast For Dinner (Creamed Mushroom Toast with Little Gem Salad + Baba Ganoush Toast with Scarlett Runner Beans)
On Monday and Tuesday of this week, we had toast for dinner. Now when I say “toast for dinner,” you may be imagining a stale piece of bread, smeared with a little butter and jam. That wouldn’t be a very filling dinner, now, would it? No, the toasts that I made for dinner were hearty…
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French Green Lentils with Bacon, Red Wine, and Mushrooms
Speaking of being shattered, did I tell you that I shattered my favorite Italian pasta bowl a few weeks ago? Well, someone suggested I go on Replacements.com to find its doppelgänger. I looked at the name of the designer, Richard Ginori, and didn’t find my beloved bowl, but I found so many cool ones, including…
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Meaty Mushrooms on Cheesy Polenta
Mushrooms are scary. Eat the wrong one, and it can kill you or make you think you’re Jesus (luckily, if you think you’re Jesus and it kills you, you can raise yourself from the dead). As a child, I absolutely loathed raw mushrooms in salads at pizza restaurants. That was my first impression of mushrooms:…
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Chanterelle Risotto with White Truffle Salt
Here’s a friendly tip: make yourself buy an exotic ingredient even if you’re not sure what you’re going to do with it. For example, a few weeks ago I was at the Spice Station in Silverlake and I bought a little bag of white truffle salt. I bought it because after sniffing from the giant…
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My First Chanterelles
It’s a known fact that chefs prize chanterelles more than any other mushrooms. In one of the cookbooks that I own (I forget which one), the chef/author instructs: “If you ever see chanterelles, buy them.” And so it was that when I first saw chanterelles at the Hollywood farmer’s market more than a week ago,…
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How To Make Risotto
Here’s our latest video from Food2, featuring beloved Italian chef Cesare Casella (of Salumeria Rosi). Chef Casella (who’s also the dean of Italian studies at the French Culinary Institute) teaches us a technique so effective, I’ll never make risotto any other way again: For those of you who can’t watch the video, here’s the recipe…
