8 Great Recipes for Holiday Leftovers!

Evan Sung for The New York Times

REPOST | Sam Sifton,  Sunday, April 5, 2015 | NY Times Cooking Newsletter

Good morning. Children across the United States are scampering across lawns this morning, scrambling on hands and knees under pews in church, looking behind grandmothers' drapes, all of them looking for Easter eggs and candy.

Some number of the eggs will be plastic, with candy inside them. But some number of them will be actual eggs, patiently or impatiently dyed beautiful colors by parents and children alike. Soon a question will arise about those: What to do with them?

Cooking abounds with recipes for hard-boiled eggs. Indeed, we have put together a collection of them for your delectation, "What to Make With All of Those Hard-Boiled Eggs." Favorites include Florence Fabricant's recipe for asparagus with prosciutto and egg; Melissa Clark's smoky red-devil eggs; Julia Moskin's recipe for toasts with egg and bacon; and the New York chef Jesse Schenker's light and flavorful recipe for curried egg salad. Cook one or more of those recipes today!

As for the remnants of Passover brisket? I like it chopped fine as a filling for ravioli, as in my recipe riffing off the one served at Babbo in New York. Sauté the meat with some butter, deglaze it with wine, then use that mixture in the recipe as otherwise written. It makes a fine Sunday supper.

Or perhaps you have a lot of ham? Ginia Bellafante's recipe for ham biscuits may be on order for today. Or some croque monsieurs? If you're down to the bone, Melissa's recipe for hambone soup is a must; it'll feed you throughout the week.

Take a look at Cooking for other things to do with your leftovers, and for recipes to cook for the coming week. You can and should save the ones you like to your recipe box. You can rate them on a scale of one to five stars.

If you run into problems - with the site, the app or the recipes themselves - please reach out to us at cookingcare@nytimes.com. We'll get you the help you need. You can also get in touch with me. I'm on Facebook. I'm on Twitter: @samsifton. And you can look at my not-so-great-but-I'm-trying photographs of food and food life on Instagram: samsifton.

Finally, take a break from the kitchen. Head over to The New York Review of Books and spend a little time with our colleague Ligaya Mishan's review of William Gibson's novel "The Peripheral": "the pulpish plot is the golden thread through a maze of strangeness."

Honey, I Messed Up the Kitchen!

HEY, MR. FOOD EDITOR | New York Times
By SAM SIFTON  APRIL 3, 2015

So here is a new feature for this new Men’s Style section: an ask-the-food-editor column that will allow you to pose questions about cooking, recipes and food.

My husband uses every tool, pot and pan in the kitchen when he cooks. We usually do the “you cook, I clean” thing, so it drives me nuts. Advice for him?

Tell him you’re moving to a new methodology: You cook, you clean. Do that a few times and the matter should solve itself, at least for you. Don’t be a dope about it, though. Lead by example. My mantra’s the same as the one the pro chefs stand by always: Keep your station clean.

Should I grill a steak or pan-sear and then finish it in the oven? Depends on the weather. Grilling a big rib-eye over roaring coals is one of life’s great pleasures. But it’s not for every day. Pan-searing is, and you don’t need to finish the meat in the oven. Just salt a really hot cast-iron pan, get the steak in there, cook it for a while, then flip it. And flip it, and flip it again, every 30 seconds until it’s around 122 degrees in the center for medium-rare.

Can you recommend a dish that is “haute” without being pretentious, and relatively worry-free for both cook and diner so that their anxiety can be better used for — or diffused by — that hopeful first kiss?

Date-night cooking’s a drag. You don’t want anything too messy or too hand-held, nothing too complicated, nothing too simple, nothing too grand, nothing lame. The great Jonathan Reynolds gave us a recipe for Chicken La Tulipe about 15 years ago that answers always: The bird roasted in the oven, then napped with a creamy Cognac sauce studded with morels. It’s an easy, stylish win for newish cooks interested in making an impression on a sweetheart or someone who might become one.

Chicken La Tulipe is a good date-night choice: fancy looking but free of any major prep headaches. Cleaning up the mess? Do it together.
Credit Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Small Plates Grow Up

Small plate revolution on the restaurant scene.

Danny Ghitis for The New York Times | MARCH 31, 2015

We live in a messy revolutionary period for restaurants. The old rules for going out to eat, under which Mom and Dad ambled down a predictable path from appetizer to main course to dessert, with Mom pausing halfway through dinner to ask about Dad’s veal chop, were repealed some time ago. In place of rules, we got small plates, and anarchy. The last decade has been the era of messy tables, of gonzo pacing, of menus that came with a spoken introduction, of senseless plating, of endless instructions to share dishes that collapsed into rubble when you tried.

Charred octopus with citrus, caramelized endive and chorizo vinaigrette at Colicchio & Sons.

Danny Ghitis for The New York Times

So, when the news came in February that Colicchio & Sons, Tom Colicchio’s five-year-old restaurant near the meatpacking district, had eliminated large plates in favor of an all-appetizer menu, those who longed for order and stability may have groaned, “Not you, too, Tom.” Yes, him too. When his next project, Beachcraft, opens in Miami in the next few weeks, it will follow the same format, and he is mulling over a similar change at some of his other restaurants.

Mr. Colicchio is not exactly the voice of the old guard, but he is, in his restaurants and “Top Chef” appearances, the voice of reason, of a sensible approach that resists wild experiments for their own sake. When Mr. Colicchio says now that he has lost interest in cooking or eating main courses, it’s like hearing that Wolf Blitzer gets all of his Middle East news from Upworthy.

But his decision is promising, too. Now that the revolution has been won, there are signs that new rules are finally being written. Small-plates are growing up, and one of the ways we know this is that some grown-ups are starting to enter the fray. 

[....]

Greeting these shrunken portions was a new generation of eaters who saw restaurants as a game. The object was to taste as many OMG dishes as possible, and sticking to two courses and dessert was no way to win. Momofuku Ssam Bar and its imitators catered to this audience, with menus of flavor-charged plates and no appetizer-main course barriers to slow things down. The only limitation was the size of the table.  [ read the entire article ]