One thing I’ll definitely appreciate after this pandemic ends: restaurants. Turns out, it’s awesome to go somewhere, and have somebody who isn’t you cook the food and clean up after. In our neighborhood, there are a slew of restaurants open for pickup and delivery even now. But, out of an abundance of caution, Jess and I have held off, cooking all of our meals at home instead.

To make meal planning easier, we’ve settled onto a rotating thematic schedule: Italian Sunday, Asian Monday, Taco Tuesday, etc. And then, each week, we choose specific dinner dishes to slot in for given days. Sometimes, we’ll opt for relatively straight-forward options. But, recently, as we’ve increasingly missed restaurant favorites, some menus have become increasingly convoluted.

This past Friday, when we were charting out plans for this week, Jess said that she was craving Han Dynasty’s dry pepper style tofu. So I agreed to make that for her, and a chicken version for me. Plus, I hadn’t had dim sum for months, and so I decided I’d make some pot stickers and siu mai and egg rolls.

As they say, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Fortuitously, about two years back, the Korean grocery chain HMart opened an amazing location on the Upper West Side, about twenty blocks up from us. So, yesterday afternoon, I hoofed it up there, to buy the slew of ingredients needed that aren’t available at our local Whole Foods. Sadly, my work for the day had taken longer than expected, so I didn’t head out until late in the afternoon, and therefore didn’t make it back until 6:30pm or so. At which point, I still had to infuse chili oil, marinate chicken, deep-fry tofu, prep the sauce and ingredients and stir-fry it all up, and make the fillings for and hand-form and steam and fry the dim sum.

Which, not surprisingly, wasn’t exactly quick. By the time we ate, it was nearly 11pm. And though it was delicious, and I even managed to freeze a ton of prepped dumplings for future, speedier use, I was exhausted and overwhelmed by the end of the night. Post-dinner, as I had used pretty much every pot and pan and bowl we own in the cooking process, Jess and I only managed to make it through cleaning half of it, before giving up for the night, and picking up again to finish this morning.

All of which is to say, the next time we get the same meal delivered from Han Dynasty, I’ll be unbelievably thrilled to pay them $60 to do all of that for me while we sit watching TV on the couch. After last night, it would still seem cheap at even two or three times the price.

To keep the theme going, another favorite simple pasta: a refined and authentically Italian spaghetti and tomato sauce.

Spaghetti with Tomato and Basil

Ingredients:

• 28oz can whole San Marzano tomatoes
• 1/4 cup, 2 tablespoons, and 2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, divided
• 1/4 cup grated Parmigiano Reggiano
• 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 2 stems of basil, leaves on, and 4-8 leaves cut into chiffonade, divided
• 6 whole cloves garlic
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1 teaspoon red chili flakes
• 1# spaghetti

Directions:

• In a mesh strainer over a bowl, roughly crush tomatoes, removing seeds with your thumb.  Set aside crushed tomatoes, reserve strained juices, discard seeds.
• Heat 2 tablespoons olive oil over medium heat. When the oil is hot, transfer tomatoes to the pot, add salt, cook 5 minutes, then smash with a potato masher.
• Add reserved juices to the sautéing tomatoes, reduce heat to medium-low, and cook for 30-45 minutes, smashing and stirring occasionally.
• While the tomatoes cook, heat the 1/4 cup of olive oil in a small saucepan over low heat. Add garlic cloves, basil stems, and chili flakes. When the garlic is lightly browned, remove from heat, allow to cool 5 minutes, then strain the oil into the tomato mixture, and discard the browned garlic / basil / pepper flakes.
• Boil a large pot of water, salted enough to taste like the ocean.
• Cook the spaghetti until just short of al dente.  Reserve 1/2 cup of the cooking water, then drain the pasta (don’t rinse it).
• Add pasta to the tomato mixture, along with reserved cooking water and final 2 tablespoons of olive oil.  Cook, tossing, until the sauce coats the pasta.
• Remove from heat, and add butter, cheese, and chiffonaded basil.  Toss, season with salt and pepper, and serve immediately.

Jess and I will often call my parents to check in while we’re cleaning up after dinner. And though my parents are usually jealous of our meal, they have little interest in my passing along a recipe. Like most normal people, they tend to eschew dinners that involve dozens of ingredients and an overflowing sink-full of pots and pans.

Still, last night, I banged out one of my favorite simple spring pastas.  It’s delicious, yet also easy enough that even they’re willing to give it a whirl.  In case you’re similarly looking for something to cook while cooped up at home, voila:

Spaghetti with Rosemary-Roasted Zucchini & Tomato

Ingredients:

• 2.5# zucchini, trimmed, quartered, and cut into 1″ pieces
• 2.5# tomatoes (plum or otherwise), trimmed and cut into 1/2″ pieces
• 3 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
• 1/4 cup olive oil, plus 1 tablespoon more separated
• 1 tablespoon rosemary
• 2 teaspoons kosher salt
• 1 teaspoon oregano
• 1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
• 1/4 cup grated Parmesan, plus more to garnish
• 1/4 cup chopped parlsey
• 1# spaghetti

Directions:

• Pre-heat the oven to 450°.
• On a rimmed baking sheet, mix the zucchini, tomatoes, garlic, 1/4 cup olive oil, rosemary, oregano, salt, and pepper.  Spread into a single layer.  Roast 20-25 minutes, until the zucchini has just started to brown
• While the vegetables are roasting, boil a large pot of salted water.  (It should be salted enough to taste like the ocean.)
• Cook the spaghetti until al dente.  Reserve 1/2 cup of the cooking water, then drain the pasta (don’t rinse it), and return it back to the pot.  Mix in the final tablespoon of olive oil.
• Pour the reserved pasta water onto the baking sheet of vegetables, and scrape up the browned bits.  Stir the vegetables and juices into the pasta, along with the Parmesan and parlsey, and toss to combine.
• Serve garnished with the extra Parmesan.

Bon appétit!

A few years back, mid-apartment-move, I unloaded my kitchen cabinets, and discovered I owned no fewer than a dozen different devices for making coffee. From Nespresso to Aeropress, Chemex to Bialetti, with French Press, vacuum brewer, SoftBrew, and even more obscure options between.

But what I didn’t own was a coffee grinder. Which, as a reluctant coffee snob, was sort of sacrilege. Sure, I knew that coffee ground moments before brewing was far better than a bag ground in-store left to oxidize on the shelf throughout its days of use. But I was also (perhaps penny-wise and pound-foolishly) cheap.

At one point, I purchased an inexpensive blade grinder, but the results were a bit of an abortion. Insert whole beans, pour out an inconsistent mess, a potpourri that ran from large unground chunks to fine silt. A consistent grind required a burr grinder, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to spring the $200 for a Baratza or any of its competitors. So, for years I subsisted on in-store-ground beans.

Until, that is, a few weeks ago, when I stumbled across a fairly excellent review for the Secura 903B. A bit of Googling confirmed: while not anything unusual, it was perfectly capable – an automatic ceramic burr grinder that reliably makes uniform grounds. And at just $40, cheap enough that I almost couldn’t justify not buying it.

The grinder arrived on Friday. Jess and I picked up freshly-roasted beans yesterday afternoon. This morning, I (Chemex) brewed a first test run batch.

The result: why the hell did I wait so long to buy a burr grinder?

If you make coffee daily, there’s no way in the world this sucker isn’t worth the ten cents a day it will cost you to make far better cups through the rest of 2020.

Recently, I was talking to a friend who is trying to improve his cooking skills. Knowing that I attended culinary school, he asked if I had any tips. First and foremost, I told him, he needed to cook using ‘mise en place.’

A French term that roughly means “everything in its place,” mise en place is about setting up all of the ingredients needed before you start to cook. Like on a television cooking show, it’s placing all the prepped ingredients – peeled, chopped, ready to go – in little bowls and containers you can pull from when the time is right.

More than anything else, cooking well is about paying full attention to the food. Watching, listening, and smelling as food cooks, tasting and seasoning along the way.

If you go the route of most home cooks, you toss in the first ingredients right away, slicing and assembling the rest in parallel as you go. And though experienced chefs can make that work in a pinch, it’s far too much distraction for anyone still honing their skills.

Setting up your mise first adds only a few minutes to the total cooking time, but it pays huge dividends in the quality of food you can produce. So if you want to improve your cooking, try it out yourself. Prep first, then cook. Mise en place.

First, an admission: I hate iced coffee.

I love – love! – the hot version, whether a lovingly pulled single-origin double espresso or the cheap crap bodegas sling in paper cups.

But, for whatever reason, the cold stuff doesn’t do it for me. Nonetheless, I realize I’m an outlier, and therefore spend the summer watching my friends and family suck it down. In the past few years, the iced coffee trend has been towards cold brew. Yes, it’s smoother and sweeter than hot-brewed coffee, with less than half the acidity, and more caffeine kick. But, at most joints, it’s also upwards of double the cost of a hot coffee.

In part, that’s due to additional expenses on coffee shops’ part: plastic cups, straws, ice machines to crank out ice. But in larger part, it’s also due to the hipster factor; people really want cold brew these days, so shops up the price because they can.

But here’s the dirty secret: cold brew coffee is super-duper easy to make, dirt cheap, right in your own home.

Here’s what to do:

1. Buy some coffee beans. Go medium or dark roast, and ideally not crap.
2. Grind them coarsely; fine and medium-fine grinds will end up cloudy and silty.
3. Find a big pitcher, and add the grounds and water in a 1:5 ratio. I.e, 1 cup grinds, 5 cups water.
4. Leave the pitcher somewhere out of the sun for 12-24 hours (any less and the beans won’t properly extract), stirring occasionally during the first few hours.
5. Strain out the grinds. You can use a French press (pour in the mix, affix and press down the top, pour out the cold brew), pass it through cheesecloth (or, if you’re ghetto-fab / in a pinch, a paper towel), or (for the clearest coffee) put it through a coffee filter lining a funnel or the swung-out body of a drip coffee machine. Really, you should probably just get a Chemex, as it’s perfect for this, and makes truly excellent hot coffee, too.

Voila. You now have cold brew concentrate that will last a couple of weeks in your refrigerator (or, thanks to Jess, about 48 hours in mine).

To serve, fill a glass completely with ice (as the concentrate is strong and needs the ice to properly dilute), pour in the coffee (and milk, if you’re weak), and enjoy.

For bonus points, collect the money saved over time, and fill a swimming pool with it a la Scrooge McDuck; the cold brew makes a perfect poolside drink.