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Hi. I'm Ali.

Bread enthusiast. Vegetable lover. Omnivore. If the kitchen is your happy place, you're in good company. Let's hang.

Featured Post

Eggplant Meatballs (A Recipe! 🍆) + Corn Soup, Corn Pasta, and Irresistible Blistered Green Beans

As noted a few newsletters ago, recently my daughter and I dined at a local restaurant whose menu featured eggplant meatballs with Hazan tomato sauce and housemade ricotta. I ordered them, loved them, and began experimenting with various recipes in the days that followed. One method called for sautéing diced eggplant, skin and all, before puréing the flesh with seasonings and binders; another called for roasting the eggplant whole before doing the same. One method called for pan-frying the...

One of the most frequently asked questions I receive is how to add X, Y, or Z ingredients to my loaf of sourdough bread. I have always added inclusions during the stretch and fold phase of the sourdough bread baking process, and as such, I have advised doing so upon being asked. Recently, I saw a recipe for an olive sourdough bread recipe that employs a different technique: lamination. Lamination calls for spreading the dough into a thin rectangle, scattering the inclusions over the top, then...

This week I found myself at home with one child and a broken refrigerator. It felt like the universe was telling me to go out to eat, to go have dinner with my 15-year-old, to go anywhere that won't distract from a conversation with my eldest, who seems happier and happier to slip away to her room for hours on end. And so I did, first to a local sushi restaurant, Wasabi, which we know and love, and last night, to Innovo Kitchen, a place I don't know well at all but whose patio, this time of...

One of the most frequently asked questions I receive on this brioche bun recipe is if it can be used to make hot dog buns. It sure can! is how I always respond, supplying a rough guideline on how to do so. And while these exchanges in the comments section have been sufficient over the years, I thought it was time to give a hot dog bun recipe its own space. Here it is, a no-knead recipe, the dough identical in makeup to these brioche buns, with the mixing process simplified even further. If...

... perhaps we should brush up on our bagel-making? 🥯🥯🥯 Hi Friends, There is a bakery* in Bolton Landing that makes excellent bagels, chewy but light and perfectly seasoned. Every time we visit Lake George, we pick up a dozen and eat them all week, toasted, slathered with cream cheese, and topped with juicy, thick tomato slabs: It's heaven. This week I found myself missing those bagels, so I decided to make a batch. I hadn't made bagels in ages, and I had forgotten how quickly the dough comes...

Friends, hello! As you may know, we've spent the week at Lake George with Ben's family. The weather cooperated, our simple meal plan delivered, and the kids spent every second on the lake, swimming, fishing, wakeboarding. As planned, we grilled every night, until the last, yesterday, when the groceries ran out, forcing us to order pizza instead 🍕🍕 It came from the Hulett's Landing Marina, which has a lovely little shop with all the essentials from coffee and beer to pizza and dried pasta to...

Friends, hello! This weekend we head to Lake George for our annual trip with Ben's family. We are a small crowd of 12, but a crowd nonetheless, and over the years we have learned to keep the nightly mealtime formula very, very simple: something grilled + a salad + bread. Minimal prep, minimal clean up is the name of the game with minimal kitchen space and without all of the tools/gadgets we rely on regularly. This year, for the first time ever, I made a few things ahead of time — some loaves...

Hi Friends, Last month, after finally getting this blueberry crisp recipe to a happy place — where the topping didn't disappear into the fruit below, and the filling didn't taste overly sweet — I began experimenting with other fruit, namely the classic combination of strawberries and rhubarb. The beauty of pairing strawberries with rhubarb is twofold: one, the flavors complement each other, and two, it allows you to use less sugar, as the strawberries provide a nice amount of sweetness....

Hi Friends, Often this time of year, my children spend a long weekend or more with my parents, who treat them to all sorts of goodies, including strawberries and cream while watching Wimbledon. (I know: what a life?) This year, as they find themselves at home with me instead, they've been requesting said berries and cream, and I've happily obliged because it's SO easy: pour a few tablespoons of heavy cream into a bowl, top with sliced strawberries (or other berries), sprinkle with sugar. It's...

Hi Friends, At the start of this week, when summer finally arrived in Upstate New York, I found myself at the grill making chicken souvlaki and had a revelation: while it's hot, why not put it to more use? So I threw some peppers on the grates alongside the chicken, figuring I could use them in this favorite (no-peel) salad dressing or to have on hand for sandwiches or salads: The peppers took much longer than the chicken... ... and because I may have forgotten about them, and because they...