onions

Roasted Honeynut Squash Soup with Apples, Ginger, and Yellow Miso

One of the biggest clichés in food writing is the idea of cooking with love. It’s abstract, vague, overly sentimental.

And yet, there’s something about it that makes sense to me, especially when I’m making soup. You can cook with a lot of love when you’re making soup. You can take the time to strain it, for example, to make it extra smooth. You can take the time to make stock from scratch, instead of using stock from a box. Most people won’t notice the difference, but you’ll know that you took the time to do it. So what else to call that except cooking with love?

Chopped Liver!

It’s time for chopped liver to make a comeback. I mean think about it: chefs flaunt their charcuterie and pâtés at places like Bar Boulud in New York and Salt’s Cure here in L.A. And what is chopped liver if not liver pâté’s chunky Jewish cousin? I grew up eating the stuff–my grandmother used to warn (as I mentioned in this old post), “Don’t eat that, it’s an organ meat!”–and to this day I’m not quite sure what she meant by that. But you’ll be surprised–if you put this on your coffee table with some crackers and a few whisky drinks (Craig made Manhattans) it’ll get quickly gobbled up.

February = Onions

Popping into Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks in the West Village is a dangerous proposition: Bonnie is so likable and easy to talk to and the store is so charming and packed with fascinating vintage cookbooks, you can’t leave without buying something. In fact, I have a souvenir from every visit I’ve made to Bonnie’s: there’s Claudia Roden’s “Middle Eastern Food,” Craig Claiborne’s A Feast Made For Laughter, and–most recently–the calendar you see above.

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