The margins
Notes
Short bits that don't fit a recipe page: tool I love, pantry staple I keep buying, idea I'm chewing on. Written when there's something to say.
Buying wine under €10 without tasting regret
The wine industry has trained you to be embarrassed about cheap wine, which is a remarkable trick because most of the wine drunk in Europe for the last four hundred years has been...
The three knives that matter, and the seventeen that don't
Most knife collections are a story about hope, regret, and a Christmas in 2019. There is a chef's knife that was a gift, three steak knives, a cleaver someone bought thinking they...
Tinned fish: the cheapest meal you've been ignoring
Tinned fish has been having a renaissance, which is what we call it when something the working class has been eating for a hundred and fifty years suddenly gets a magazine...
Cooking when you're tired: a triage system
On the nights when chopping an onion feels like a betrayal of self-care, most people do one of three things: order in, eat cereal, or open the fridge, look at it for forty...
The kitchen scale: when it saves you, when it makes you weird
There are two kinds of cooks: the ones who have never owned a kitchen scale, and the ones who weigh their morning espresso beans. Both are wrong. The truth, like most truths,...
Olive oil 101: when to spend, when to save, when to just grab what's on sale
The olive oil aisle is one of the great con jobs of modern shopping. There are bottles for €4 and bottles for €40, both labelled "extra virgin," both promising the same things in...
Pasta shapes, ranked by laziness
There are over three hundred recognised pasta shapes in Italy, and twelve hundred regional names for them, and seven hundred years of arguments about which shape is correct for...
Buy seasonal: it's basically cheating, and the market does the calendar for you
Out-of-season tomatoes lead a more eventful life than most of us. They're picked green, ride four thousand kilometers in a refrigerated truck, attend three trade shows, and arrive...
The pan you should buy used (and the one you shouldn't)
Most kitchen-equipment shopping is people paying retail for things their grandmothers paid nothing for. Cast iron frying pans, copper saucepans, enameled Dutch ovens: all of them...
The freezer is not a graveyard
Open most freezers and you will find: half a loaf of bread from August, a single chicken thigh of unknown vintage, a jar of pesto with frost on it, a container labelled "rice?" in...
The five-ingredient rule, and when to break it
Most weeknight meals would be better with one fewer ingredient than you put in them. The instinct, when cooking, is to keep adding: a pinch of this, a swirl of that, the herb on...
How to leave the market with the good stuff (and most of your money)
Out-of-season tomatoes lead a more eventful life than most of us. They're picked green, ride four thousand kilometers in a refrigerated truck, attend three trade shows, and arrive...