Gourmet Magazine

I first heard about a cookie table when my niece was planning her own wedding in Pittsburgh. Family members and guests, I learned, were expected to show up bearing boxes of their favorite home-baked cookies, all to be displayed on a long banquet table. Everyone would help themselves after the ceremony and also take some cookies home as party favors. It all sounded charming but also a bit humble, like a card table laden with Snickerdoodles trying to upstage the fancier wedding cake.
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When you live in the north, the longest season isn’t winter; it’s the bridge between winter and spring, when our chlorophyll reserves have fallen perilously low and we begin to exhibit hypothermia-like symptoms of peeling off clothes even when it’s not actually warm enough to do so. To hasten the arrival of warmer, brighter days (inside, at any rate), assemble an array of rosés. Their cheery pink hue puts the fridge in a party mood, damn the lack of green vegetables; their flavors are just rich enough with red fruit to take the edge off a cool night while they have the bright, sense-awakening snap of spring’s first sunny days. Read More »

Gourmet’s research chief learned the hard way that baking a friend’s wedding cake is no piece of cake.

Are you insane?” asked Gina, the Gourmet test kitchen’s resident pastry wizard. “I’d never do it,” chimed in her colleague Paul, an erstwhile protégé of Simone Beck. “And she’s letting you?” Gina demanded.

“Actually, um… she asked me to.” The cooks were aghast. “She asked you to?” Gina’s voice rose half an octave. “Really?” Make that a full octave.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread, and novice bakers blithely agree to make their friends’ wedding cakes. “What’s the big deal?” I asked nonchalantly.

I’d find out soon enough.

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How do you make your broccoli rabe?” asked my babysitter one afternoon. “I saw a chef on the food channel blanching it in hot water first, then putting it in an ice water bath, then sautéing it…”

I sighed. Granted, this is the proper way to get gorgeous, emerald-green broccoli rabe, and I appreciate the position TV chefs are in, with all that time to fill. Still, I couldn’t help noticing that all these steps set up more obstacles for home cooks who are curious to try new things but don’t necessarily have time for the work involved. It’s intimidating—doubly so for parents, especially new parents, who can barely keep their carpets clear of tiny jingling toys. As a new mom, I’m not about to voluntarily fill my countertops with nine bowls and pans, no matter how appealing the recipe.

So here, parents, and everybody else, I’m throwing you a bone. Here are five things you don’t have to do in the kitchen.

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A major new study links consumption of red meat to premature death. But is beef really to blame?

This week, results from one of the largest studies of red-meat consumption and premature death ever undertaken were published. Writing in the March issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, the researchers come to a grim conclusion: “Red and processed meat intakes were associated with modest increases in total mortality, cancer mortality, and cardiovascular disease mortality.” Read More »