Author: Chef M

This is one of my go-to loaves for entertaining. Soft, sweet, and caramelized to perfection, roasted garlic adds beautiful depth of flavor, intensified with hints of fresh rosemary. This bread needs nothing more than a pool of rich, silky olive oil for dunking. Any leftovers make brilliant toasted cheese sandwiches with a crunchy green salad on the side. About the Dough: To make the most of your time, you can roast the garlic while the dough is resting, or you can make it in advance and freeze until ready to use. The natural sugars might boost the dough’s rise time,…

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I like to bake my veggie curly fries because it’s a little easier, but sometimes I’m really in the mood for actual fried fries. For this recipe, turnip noodles are trimmed into curly fry–size pieces and then fried in a shallow pan with ghee. Ghee is clarified butter with a high smoke point, so it’s ideal for frying veggies. Plus, it’s absolutely delicious and adds a great nutty quality to the dish.

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When the divine Queen of Sheba asks the djinni Bartimaeus to take her magician Asmira across the vast desert to spy on the great King Solomon—hallowed be his slippers—she doesn’t think about how her companion will eat. It is always the same with the great and the good, they don’t think about logistics and detail! And who saves the day by cooking up a good restoring and comforting soup? Bartimaeus!

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When you are a professional baker, most people shy away from baking for you, because they think that there’s no way they can impress you. The truth is I love to be presented with a homemade dessert or pastry. That’s why I got into this business in the first place: I love spreading (and receiving) the joy that sweets bring to people. Denise Drower Swidey, a dear friend, former coworker, and amazing cook, is always baking and sharing, and I’m the lucky recipient of many a scrumptious treat. She had Christopher and me over for brunch one Sunday and served…

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Again playing with the American cookie idiom, Sebastien, well aware of my love for Oreos, devised this cookie in my honor. It uses a special cocoa powder, Guittard Cocoa Noir, which results in a very, very dark dough. The white chocolate filling is piped onto each bottom cookie in teardrop shapes, rather than simply spread, and these become an elegant pearled border when the cookie is topped with a second one. The chocolate wafers are excellent cookies even without the filling, by the way. They can be cut into seasonal shapes, like bats for Halloween, or they can be pulverized…

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Grilled Cheese, with its two slices of bread binding ooey-gooey cheese, is perfectly suited to the dark black surface of a cast-iron pan. The light coating of mayo on the outside of the bread makes the sandwiches extra golden. Serve with tomato soup.

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Arroz con pollo may sound quite plain since its name translates as “chicken with rice,” but it is the very definition of hearty comfort food, not just in Puerto Rico but throughout Latin America. This is Milagros’s family recipe for this classic dish. Even though rice is a grain, I think and many Paleo diet advocates agree—that it is fine to eat white rice on occasion, as long as you don’t have any negative reaction to eating it. I just couldn’t leave this traditional dish out of this cookbook, but I have also included a strictly Paleo version that is…

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We wanted to refine the standard oatmeal cookie recipe to create a crisp, delicate cookie in which the flavor of buttery oats would really stand out. Scaling back the sugar reduced moisture so that even the center of the cookies was dry enough to develop a pleasant crunch. Increasing the amounts of baking powder and baking soda gave us cookies that were crisp but not tough. To ensure that the cookies baked evenly and were crisp throughout, we pressed them flat and baked them 1 sheet at a time until they were fully set and evenly browned from edge to…

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