Northern Virginia writer Monica Bhide gives Indian cooking a fresh spin.
Food writer Monica Bhide has lived around the world, and her new cookbook, Modern Spice: Inspired Indian Flavors for the Contemporary Kitchen (Simon & Schuster, $25), gives readers a peek into her travel diary. Born in New Delhi, Bhide grew up in the Middle East before settling in Northern Virginia. While her childhood memories are scented with the perfume of cardamom and the tang of tamarind, these recipes reflect the needs of a modern cook who’s usually crunched for time.
The book calls itself “inspired Indian,” and indeed many dishes have a subcontinental bent, such as the appetizer section’s delicious peanut tikkis. Tikki means “patty” in Hindi, and Bhide’s pan-fried, bite-size disks of smooth mashed potato are heightened by the sweetness of corn and delicate crunch of crushed peanuts. Drizzled with sweet-and-sour (and store-bought) tamarind chutney, they’re the perfect cocktail snack.
Is there a restaurant dish you’d love to get the recipe for? We’ll track it down.
The dessert menu at Blue Duck Tavern in DC’s West End is filled with upscale sweets such as hazelnut-Amaretto cheesecake and apricot-toffee bread pudding. But it’s the freshly baked sugar cookies, served in $7 tins of six, that caught one reader’s attention. We tracked down pastry chef Laurent Merdy to find out how you can get your sugar fix from home. Merdy says the cookies were on the menu before he arrived, and he’s tweaked the recipe to give them a chewier center. Now they’re an irreplaceable item on the dessert menu. “We can’t take them out,” Merdy says. “It’s like apple pie. It’s going to be there forever.”
Victor Albisu was born to grill. Learn his secrets to perfect grill marks and juicy steaks.
Need help grilling this Memorial Day weekend? We asked BLT Steak chef Victor Albisu for some tips that’ll turn you into a lean-mean-grilling-machine. In this video, he’ll demonstrate how to grill the perfect New York strip, bone-in rib eye, and hanger steaks. Albisu grew up around meat—his mother owns a butcher shop in Tysons Corner. “I’m half Cuban and half Peruvian,” he says. “So that’s quite a bit of meat between both families.” Watch the video to see how a meat pro grills it.
Baking bread may seem daunting (and we’d never call it easy), but 2941 bread master Patrick Deiss helps demystify the process as he demonstrates how to make a French baguette—with a yeast starter called poolish—in the video below. The chef de cuisine-turned-baker recently overhauled the French/American restaurant’s bread program and now bakes fresh loaves twice a day.
Need to make a killer guac recipe for Cinco de Mayo? We show you how to make Surfside's version.
The search for the perfect guacamole recipe is an epic one. How much jalepeño is too much? Should you use lemon or lime? Will onion overwhelm the mix? What about cilantro? Whatever that perfect combination may be, the guac at Surfside (2444 Wisconsin Ave., NW; 202-337-0004) in Glover Park comes pretty close. Chef/co-owner David Scribner shows us how to make his version, drizzled with olive oil, heavy on cilantro and lime, and mashed by hand. Check out the video for his tips on using zest, chopping onions, and getting out those darn avocado pits.
Spicing things up in the kitchen doesn’t mean overheating your budget. Cookbook author Monica Bhide shows us how to make an Indian dinner for four for less than $15.
Monica Bhide studies a row of jars filled with things like fig chutney, tamarind curry and tikka masala sauce. Aditi Spice Depot, an Indian grocery store in Vienna, is packed with these premade foodstuffs that Bhide, a food writer and cooking teacher, calls her “helpers.” She often buys the chutneys, spice mixes, sauces, and pickles as time savers and thinks they are perfect for the many home cooks who find the plethora of spices and ingredients typically called for in Indian dishes intimidating.
On this day, however, the only thing that’s intimidating Bhide—author of the new cookbook Modern Spice: Inspired Indian Flavors for the Contemporary Kitchen—is her budget. For this Frugal Foodie challenge, she’s agreed to cook dinner for four for less than $15—not including standard pantry items such as sugar, flour, and olive oil.
Community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs bring farm-fresh fruits, veggies, and more right to your table. Here's a list of CSAs that are ripe for the pickin'.
We’ve exhausted our recipes for root-vegetable dishes and hot soups and polished off our fruit preserves from last season. And it seems like ages ago that we last bit into a summer peach or stained our fingers red eating a pint of fresh strawberries. But we know that spring asparagus, sweet corn, and juicy tomatoes are just weeks away (so what if a lot of the trees are still bare and it’s freezing at night?). How can you take full advantage of all of that soon-to-come produce? Sign up with a farm to be part of a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program.
At the beginning of each season, CSA members pay farmers a set fee for a regular share of their harvest, which translates into weekly or biweekly boxes of fresh produce. Shares typically feed a family of four for a week, and many farms offer half shares that can provide fruits and veggies for a couple or a hungry single person. Although each farm runs its CSA differently—some ask you to pick your box up at the farm, others have drop-off locations in and around DC—most programs run for 20 to 24 weeks beginning in May. Some farmers post the available fruit and vegetables on their Web sites each week and allow customers to custom-design their selection, while others pack the boxes themselves with whatever comes up that week—consider it like having a personal shopper.
The demand for CSA shares has grown considerably, so lots of farms sell out early—and have waiting lists for 2010. But we found some programs with remaining shares. If you’re interested, act quickly—most of these farms have only a few slots left.
Tons of Fourth of July parties, fireworks, pool parties galore, a pig roast, the closing of the Folklife Festival and Artomatic, and lots more in this jam-packed weekend guide.
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Though Ann Limpert graduated from Connecticut College with a degree in art history and creative writing, she spent most of her time in New England debating the merits of warm, buttery lobster rolls vs. cold, mayo-y ones. She spent two years covering the internet for Entertainment Weekly magazine (highlights include interviewing the Beastie Boys and dancing to "Livin' la Vida Loca" with Penn Jillette), then left to hone her kitchen skills at the Institute of Culinary Education. She has worked as a cook at several New York restaurants, researched and edited cookbooks, and now writes about food and restaurants for the Washingtonian.
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Kate Nerenberg
Kate Nerenberg started as an editorial intern at The Washingtonian in January 2008 and became an assistant editor in September 2008. A native of West Hartford, Connecticut, she spent the first half of her writing life as a sports reporter, and was the editor of the athletics section for the newspaper and student-run magazine while at Middlebury College. A joint Spanish and Art History major, Kate graduated in 2005 and took off on a year-long journey around the world. After tasting everything from fried crickets to lavish Turkish breakfasts, she realized she wanted to devote herself to writing about food, a lifelong passion. She lives with three roommates just east of Logan Circle in a house that's often filled with the smell of sauteed garlic, warm banana bread, or fried bacon and eggs.
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Rina Rapuano
Rina Rapuano's English degree from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond put her on the path to becoming a managing editor of a weekly business magazine; a freelance copy editor; and assistant managing news editor—and later the lifestyles editor—at a weekly paper in Maryland. But she realized her true calling when her descriptions of meals to friends and colleagues always seemed to end with the same statement: “You're making me hungry.” Frankly, it was making Rina hungry, too. She chucked her day job in 2006 to become a full-time freelance writer focusing mainly on food, and now works as assistant food and wine editor at The Washingtonian.
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- Cooking at Home
