A few minutes and a splash of caramel sauce delivers a savory supper.
One of my favorite ripoffs of Vietnamese home cooking is a technique called kho. It’s comfort food, like an Irish lamb stew of a French coq au vin. In kho, proteins like chicken, tofu or catfish are stewed in a mixture of caramel [...]
Roll cubes of extra-firm tofu in corn starch, fry them in a little vegetable oil, and you can swap out the chicken breast in many Chinese stir-fry recipes.
Tofu is much ridiculed in certain kitchens, but it remains worth learning about. In hardly any time, a hunk of no-cholesterol vegetable protein can be soaking up any [...]
KFC’s Famous Bowl, by Flickr user cbg_rocketfever.
Normally, my relationship with fast-food drive-thru cuisine is pretty healthy.
I don’t eat it.
Mostly. Except for succumbing occasionally to a particularly potent advertising campaign, like that thing Wendy’s has that tops burgers with cheese sauce, bacon and jalapenos. I can’t be the only guy that hears myself talking in Homer [...]
No question which patty is the curry chicken.
I don’t know much about Jamaican food. But if it’s all as good as the jerk at Richie’s Place, I have a trip south penciled in on my agenda.
This little place at 1595 Elmwood Ave. (447-1340), by the corner of Amherst Street, was filled with smoke when [...]
Browning the edges makes it crispy.
Before I met my husband, he says he had never eaten scrapple, a porcine delight that crops up in East Coast diners everywhere. Nor had he tried pork roll, a salty, savory log of coarsely ground pork shoulder that’s been around since the late 19th century.
I married him anyway.
Pork roll, [...]
The roast pork sandwich was the pick of the litter, if you ask me.
I wasn’t looking for anything fancy when I ended up at Steve’s (951 Ridge Road, Lackawanna, 824-8601).
Good thing, too. Because the place specializes in sliced meat on rolls, period. No sauces, no spices to mention, less you count the caraway seeds on [...]
Alton Brown grinding out some “arrrrs” in pirate mode.
I’ve been enjoying Alton Brown’s work for years, because I nearly always learn something from episodes of his show, Good Eats. Even when his MacGyver-Mythbusters cooking hacks go a bit too far, it’s at least entertaining television.
Last week, I got a chance to talk to Brown, [...]
You can sort of see the ginger juice glistening on the place here, but it comes across better on video.
The News has asked me to start making cooking videos to go with my Elements column that runs every other Sunday. The articles can be found on Page 4 of the Spotlight section.
There’s some [...]
No one hesitated to grab a slab of scallion pancake.
I’m trying to remember why my family and I ended up at Golden Duck (1840 Maple Rd., Amherst).
Chang’s Garden hadn’t burned down yet, so that wasn’t it. Maybe it was the memory I had of a waiter expertly cutting a Peking duck in the [...]
My personal bacon cheeseburger is not in the running. Because if it was, it would be a short hunt indeed.
There are probably more hamburgers on Western New York menus than anything else.
In my experience, that has made it the most sinned-against item in the Western New York restaurant repertoire.
So the News has commissioned [...]
