The best thing you can do to bring in the new year with some luck is... eat! So, since you were probably planning on eating anyway today, why not make it one of the below foods (and if you want to spend some time in the kitchen, Saveur offers up some good luck recipes for today). There are very specific foods that are believed to bring luck for the year if you eat them on January 1st, and they vary culture to culture—Epicurious notes that the six major lucky food categories across the globe are grapes, greens, fish, pork, legumes, and cakes.
Wanna Get Lucky? Here's What You Should Eat Today
Mid-Century Gluttony: The Mad Men Cookbook Is Almost Here
Casseroles, Cocktails and more mid-century concoctions await you!
Getting Drunk With A Healthy Twist: Kombucha Cocktails
This week Veg News suggests you Spike Your Spore, which basically means you add alcohol to your already slightly alcoholic (0.5 percent) kombucha. This sounds counterintuitive, but we like to spike everything, so we're in. While the site declares the drink is "a natural choice for subbing" in for real alcohol, they also seem to give the all clear on mixing it with the hard stuff. So let's skip over the PG-rated stuff and get right to the kombucha cocktails that can get you drunk:
Don't Drink That Beer—Use It To Make These 3 Desserts!
October is beer month at Gothamist, and our mission is to bring you a new beer-related post every day, until our hangovers become so crippling we wind up forgetting what we promised halfway through the month. For today's beer-related report, we're diving into the enticing world of beer-infused baked goods.
Nudie Foodies: Food Bloggers Peel for Japan
In one of the more, uh, cheeky fundraisers we've heard of to raise money for Japan post-earthquake, a coalition of food bloggers have banded together to take it all off for charity. The project is called Nudie Foodies, and they seem to have a good thing going, or, if nothing else, a very attention-grabbing thing.
Cooking With Ramps: Pasta, Cornbread, Cocktails
Now that ramps are starting to show up in markets (soon to be replaced by less weedy crops like asparagus)—so what to do with them? While Dirt Candy's Amanda Cohen wasn't interested in sharing any recipes with us Mario Batali and Elena Balletta (of Counter) were. So if you've been itching to try your hand a ramp pasta, or even better, ramp cornbread, read on!
Behold: The Sandwich Cocktail
Ever had the urge to drink a liquified Double Down? Well, this is as close as you're going to get. Flor de Caña rum recently gathered some brave press folk in midtown for a liquid lunch, or as they put it, "savory carnivorous cocktails that invoke meat lovers favorite meals." We stayed a safe distance, but received photos of the drinks today. Here's what we "missed" (recipes below). Wonder what would be in cocktails created after classic New York City food (pizzas, knishes, bagels).
Spaghetti Tacos Get 4-Star Treatment
Well, that didn't take long. New York City restaurateurs are talking tacos... spaghetti tacos. Joseph Bastianich, of four-star Del Posto, told Grub Street that he thinks the new trend—started by an episode of iCarly—is brilliant. He added, "If I didn’t have to come to this event tonight, I was going to go home and make my kids spaghetti meatball tacos. I would put a bolognese with lots of tomatoes and mini meatballs. I think soft taco, not hard. If I wanted to do a Mexicali riff, I’d do soft tacos." For those with a more adult palate, he suggests "you could riff and do branzino tacos with arugula salad, Tuscan olive oil and avocados." But those sound less fun.
NYC Wine & Food Fest: Alton Brown Gets Goofy with Jerky
Alton Brown has been on the Food Network since waaay back in the early days of its existence, teaching viewers about the science behind food and cooking with his hit show, Good Eats. His cooking demo at the Wine and Food Fest on Saturday had the air of a stand-up routine, and not just because of the venue (Comix comedy club).
A Bounty of Blueberries
Enjoy it folks -- blueberries are in peak season. Although technically they are in season from May to October, they've exploded recently. They're showing up in farmers' markets (here's a map of map of NYC Greenmarkets), CSA shares, and even the New York Times magazine's sunday recipes.
A Sweet to Savor: Crispy Salted Oatmeal Cookies
Many people have a strong preference when forced to choose between sweet and savory -- french toast or eggs, cupcakes or french fries, chocolate or cheese? These days, however, the line is getting blurred, with more pastry chefs entering the savory fray, like Sam Mason's Tailor and Pichet Ong's P*ong, both with menus that bring sweetness into entrees and a savory edge to desserts.
Recipe of the Week: Pumpkin Seed Tuiles
These thin, crispy cookies are the perfect garnish for any creamy dessert and, fair warning, they're absolutely addictive on their own as well. Try them with chocolate mousse, perhaps, or shape them into tiny cones to dish small bites of ice cream as an hors d'oeuvre.
Cooking Up Some Romance
Forget going out to a restaurant -- the way to woo your sweetheart (or potential sweetheart) is by cooking. Before the fear courses through your veins, don't think that "cooking a romantic meal" needs to be overwhelming or complicated. The simple act of cooking a meal for someone, no matter what the menu, is romantic and special in and of itself. Perhaps the most romantic meal possible is breakfast in bed, and it doesn't have to be as elaborate as this delicious sounding menu from epicurious; if someone's cooking you breakfast, odds are they were there the night before, which is always (hopefully) a good thing.
Recipe: Tea Cookies
We recently went to check out Amai Tea & Bake House, because we love tea and because we are big on supporting food bloggers in their endeavors (Amai is run by the blogger behind Lovescool).
Feed Your Mind: A Baker's Odyssey
might do to you. Other traditional bake-books operate within the wholly confined orbit of strudel and streusels; A Baker’s Odyssey has strudels galore but is also about forgotten or esoteric American immigrant recipes, so it also covers kulich and chin chin cookies, shoofly pie and puran poori. Recipes involve techniques and ingredients that have sort of fallen by the wayside in an age of 30 minute meals: The book’s cannoli shell dough is made with Madeira, and ANZAC cookies are made with Lyle’s Golden Syrup.
Battling the First Hangover of '08?
Was your New Year's Eve a recipe for a hangover? Luckily there are a few recipes to cure what ails you, too. Last year we found some facts about hangovers, but learning isn't going to make that first headache of '08 go away.
Tidbits: Death of a Salmon Edition
Attention Pacific Northwest: New Yorkers don't care about your cuisine. None of Jeffrey Chodorow's blogging, full page ads in the Times or other theatrics could save Wild Salmon from its imminent closure. After Eater circulated news of its potential doom, Chodorow issued a statement, published on Grub Street, "Regrettably, we will be closing Wild Salmon after the new year. We were excited about bringing the food and wine of the Pacific Northwest to New York,...
Feed Your Mind: The Art of Simple Food
Alice Waters is considered by many to be a revolutionary. She opened Chez Panisse in 1971 and began awakening America to the benefits of local, sustainable agriculture by changing her menu according to what was available seasonally. She has taken this charge beyond her restaurant through her books as well as through her Edible Schoolyard program, which enables public school children to explore the connection between what they eat and where it comes from through...
Pencil This In
MOVIE: BAM pays homage to the late Barbara Stanwyck tonight with a screening of Forbidden. The 1932 Frank Capra-directed film (which tells the tale of a librarian who has fallen for an unobtainable/married man) was supposedly influenced by his real-life affair with the leading lady. Critic and historian Elliott Stein will discuss the film after the 6:50 screening. 4:30, 6:50 and 915pm // BAM Rose Cinemas [30 Lafayette Ave., Fort Greene] // $11 Meanwhile, the...
Giving Thanks for Good Recipes
Are you playing host this year and still trying to decide what to make for Thanksgiving? We've pulled together some of our old and new favorite recipes for traditional, and not so traditional, Thanksging fare. First, the turkey. We firmly believe that brining is best. This cider-brined and glazed turkey is a simple brining recipe -- you just need to make sure you've got a big enough vessel for the turkey and plenty of room...
TV Dinners: November 19-25
What’s worth watching on food-TV this week? Martha Stewart’s all about Thanksgiving this week; she even has a hotline up T-Day emergencies (email thanksgivinghotline@marthastewart.com). Her mashed potatoes tip? Use buttermilk instead of heavy cream or cream cheese—“Delicious,” she says. On Monday, she’s making sides and teaching people about heritage birds and how to find the perfect turkey. On Wednesday, she’ll be answering people’s last minute holiday questions—sent in via the hotline--throughout the show (Monday-Wednesday, Friday,...
TV Dinners: November 12-18
What’s worth watching on food-related TV this week? This Wednesday on Kitchen Nightmares (9pm on Fox), Ramsay does his thing on Finn McCool’s in West Hampton. Are we the only ones who wonder if his advice actually does any good? Most places that he revisits after his makeover revert—at least in part—to their prior ways. But if you own a restaurant you want Ramsified, now’s your chance. Download an application to be featured on the...
Feed Your Mind: The Vegetarian Option
The folks over at the all delicious, all the time site Serious Eats rounded up and presented a bumper crop of recipes from the newly released Mark Bittman cookbook last week, the 996-page How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food. The latest in Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything” series, this giant book is exactly what those omnibus, fried-shallot-and-butternut-squash glossy vegetarian porn books strategically posed on chain bookstore discount tables purport to...
TV Dinners: November 5-11
What’s worth watching on food-related TV this week? Next Sunday is the finale of The Next Iron Chef (9pm on the Food Network). Michael Ruhlman has a comment from Chef Chris Cosentino on his blog about the airplane episode—he was clearly getting crowded by cameras, but for him the crowding was to the degree that he couldn’t work, and he wanted to clarify that fact “now that 1/2 the country thinks i am an asshole.”...
Fun Facts about Bacon
by James Villas. Villas calls bacon “the greatest and most beloved food on earth,” and while we’re not sure we’d go that far, there are moments when we have to agree there’s nothing better.
Feed Your Mind: Adventures of an Italian Food Lover
, a whirlwind guide through the culinary delights of Italy. Willinger has spent 30 years traveling through and living in Italy, settling in Tuscany, a gastronome's playground. The book guides you to shops, markets, and restaurants by way of "introductions" to the people she has encountered throughout her journeys followed by the recipes they have either created or inspired.

