Easy Archives - Page 16 of 34 - Nerds with Knives

Frittata with Bacon, Corn and Gruyere

June 15, 2024August 9, 2016 by Emily

Sweet corn and smoky bacon make a delicious filling to this quick cooking frittata. Studded with cheesy nuggets of gruyere and spicy jalapeños, this is the type of quick dinner you’ll want to make all the time.

***Note: Matt and I are thrilled to announce that we are now contributors at one of our favorite food blogs of all time, Serious Eats! I’m sure most of you are familiar with them but if you’re not, definitely check them out. I love their approach to cooking because they question everything (and just because something is always done a certain way, doesn’t mean that it’s always the best way). They test and test to make sure that recipes result in the best tasting dishes, with the most efficient and fool-proof techniques.

TL;DR[note]”Too long; didn’t read”, grandpa[/note] They’re even nerdier about cooking than we are!

If the egg is the versatile gymnast of the culinary world, the star of a thousand different techniques and dishes, the frittata is probably its signature move. It’s quick, it’s easy, and you can throw almost anything into it and come up with a winning recipe. You can whip one up in under 20 minutes, so it’s ideal for a quick weekday breakfast or weekend brunch, but we’re betting it will score a place in your dinner rotation, too.

Basil Green Goddess Dressing

July 5, 2024August 5, 2016 by Emily

While you can’t throw a carrot without hitting a bottle of ranch dressing these days (seriously, Americans are obsessed with the stuff), in the 1960s and 70s, Green Goddess was king. Or Queen, I should say.

Invented in California and named after its distinctive color, the original version was a mix of tarragon, parsley, chives and scallions. It really took off in the 60s, the era of wedge iceberg salads and cream cheese stuffed celery sticks. Eventually, as trends always do (sorry kale, your time is almost up), it fell out of favor. I can’t even remember the last time I’ve seen it on a menu.

And that’s a real shame because when made well, it’s absolutely delicious and so much better than ranch.

Garlic! A garden success story (with Easy Roasted Garlic)

February 17, 2021July 15, 2016 by Matt

A successful garlic crop in the urban backyard depends on a lot of factors. We tell you what went right this year for us, what we might do differently, and one option for roasting your garlic once it’s harvested.

There’s a line early on in one of those first-generation text computer adventures – Colossal Cave or Zork or Adventure itself, I think – where the game asks you if you’re a wizard and what the secret incantation is, requiring that you’ve played the game already, or you’ve been told the secret by someone else who has (this was way pre-internet, remember, and this wasn’t the sort of information that libraries tended to know). If you do answer that you’re a wizard, and you get the code wrong, the game scoffs at you and tells you you’re a charlatan.

Gardening is a bit like that. Some years you feel like a wizard and some years you feel like a charlatan, like an actual wizard left you in charge of their garden and you’re just randomly throwing things into the ground and seeing what comes up. I wouldn’t say that I have an innate skill by any means, but I do have an immense amount of fun getting things to grow and gradually, slowly, learning by my mistakes and the variations of the growing season. Last year we put up straw bales for the first time, and had great success there with most of our seedlings. At the time, the raised beds that I’d been relying on were retarded by the branches and roots of nearby maples, which I took down at the end of the summer. This year, the raised beds are going gangbusters, but the straw is not so successful. On the one hand, shazam!!!, but on the other hand, ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

Miso-Butter Chicken with Garlic Pan Sauce

June 10, 2024July 8, 2016 by Emily

Miso Garlic Butter Chicken — Miso Butter Chicken with Garlic Pan Sauce

If you’ve never cooked with miso before, this is the perfect recipe to start with. If you love it and cook with it all the time, this is probably going to end up on your monthly recipe rotation. It definitely has for us.

There’s very little work involved so when you pull it out of the oven and find perfect, crispy bronzed chicken skin, tender meat and a delicious sauce, it almost feels like cheating. “Did I really do that,” you might be tempted to ask yourself. Yes, you did. Now go eat your dinner before any goblins attracted by the glorious smell of chicken, miso and garlic steal it from you.

Tartines with Herb Cheese and Smoked Salmon

June 15, 2024June 24, 2016 by Emily

A stellar, top notch brunch doesn’t need to take hours to prepare. These Tartines (toasts) with Herb Cream Cheese and Smoked Salmon and Salmon Roe take only 15 minutes!

I’ve mentioned before that, though my mother is a fantastic cook, both my grandmothers were truly, ridiculously bad in the kitchen. Vegetables were boiled until they begged for mercy. Meats were blasted in the oven until they were unrecognizable. Even bread somehow managed to become disks of solid brick. (And I’m not talking about homemade bread. Store-bought. And this in the heyday of Wonder bread). It was grim.

So my brother and I always breathed a sigh of relief when our parents stopped at Zabar’s before the family trip to Queens (where we assumed every grandparent in America lived). Zabar’s, to those who are unfamiliar, is an Upper West Side institution. Open since 1934, it’s one of those places that’s almost impossible to describe. It’s a gourmet store but only because it sells things that are now considered “gourmet” but used to just be “food”, albeit for immigrants. Smoked fish, cheese, baked goods like bagels and babka. Items that turned my German-Austrian grandparents positively verklempt.

Herb Cream cheese with Cucumbers, Radishes and Salmon Roe — Herb Cream Cheese with Cucumbers, Radishes and Salmon Roe

So we would pick up some smoked salmon, a little sable. Some whitefish salad. Pickled herring that no one ever seemed to touch. Along with cream cheese and a dozen bagels (from the dearly departed H&H, of course), off we drove to the outer boroughs where we’d set everything out on my Nana’s dining table and eat off of styrofoam plates. Even I, a known fish-hater and infamously grumpy child, would schmear a bagel with cheese and lay on a slice of nova.

Chicken Piccata with Fried Capers and Roasted Tomatoes

June 15, 2024May 30, 2016 by Emily

Fresh tomatoes, fried capers and butter-lemon flavors combine with chicken cutlets to create this perfect zingy summery piccata recipe. We served it over linguine, but grilled bread would also be a good option.

Very early summer can be frustrating for a cook. The garden beds are filled with all our favorite vegetables. We planted six different kinds of tomatoes, chard and kale, loads of garlic, eggplants, tomatillos, jalapeños, broccoli rabe.But nothing is even close to ready yet. They’re all just beginning to sprout and bloom, so it will be at least a month before anything can be harvested, except for the herbs which are happily taking over the back deck. So while our bounty is bounty-ing, it’s back to the grocery store to see what looks good.

We found pretty, if not very sweet, tomatoes, still on the vine and perfect for a quick roasting. Just 15 minutes in a hot oven concentrated the flavor and turns them jammy and soft. A perfect accompaniment to bright, zingy Chicken Piccata.