My seasonal go-to for a vegetable that’s not my favorite

For the last few years, every time winter squash appears, I’ve pretty much immediately made Bittman’s Pasta with Winter Squash and Tomatoes recipe. Aside from delicata, which I absolutely love, I’m not the biggest fan of squashes, so I’m always looking for new, inoffensive ways to incorporate them.

This recipe is easy — the peeling and chopping of the squash is the most tedious part, as it tends to be for squash recipes — and super hearty; plus, the pasta-to-vegetable ratio is kinda crazy, and it works. It’s 2 pounds of squash, plus a couple of cups of chopped tomatoes, for just a half a pound of pasta, and it easily serves four. …

Vegan icon Isa Chandra Moskowitz gets inspired by her punk past with a Covid-era cookzine

On September 21, Isa Chandra Moskowitz dropped an earnest note into the rotten narcotic of election-season Twitter: “Hey journalists, I have a really good story about a restaurant that stayed in business during covid by doing a cookzine and switching to a delivery friendly menu. Pls reach out. Oh ps it’s my restaurant.”

Effective. I DM’ed her.

Moskowitz, the vegan cookbook author, chef, and restaurateur, was tweeting from Omaha, Nebraska, where she opened her first restaurant, Modern Love, in 2014. …

It’s time to talk more candidly about Covid coping

When Lauren Paylor, a mixologist at the Silver Lyan in Washington, D.C., was laid off at the end of March, she began feeling lost, aimless, and untethered.

“It was really difficult,” said Paylor, who had dealt with anxiety and depression before. “I didn’t know what to do with myself or how to keep myself occupied and I was getting depressed. I knew I needed to figure it out.”

According to the National Restaurant Association, nearly 2.5 …

Shit! What’s for Dinner?

Soy-marinated flank steak with cherry tomatoes, fast chicken parm, and unstuffed cabbage for the win

Paying more attention to how we feed ourselves is one of the good things that can come out of the pandemic. But it’s inevitable that some days you haven’t planned and the day sneaks up on you, which leads to the “Shit! What’s for dinner?” response. So we’ve decided to name our suggestions accordingly, where we’ll offer a few selections of what to cook every week, whether it’s a spin on one of my favorites, something seasonal, something super fast and delicious, or a weeknight project worth the time.

This week’s come from How to Cook Everything Fast and hit a couple of notes: the end-of-season cherry tomatoes at the farmers market; the nostalgia of an Italian American classic (but fast); and an Eastern European favorite without meat and all the work that cabbage rolls can entail. Read on for more. And if you have requests for future columns, let me know in the comments. …

Observations on an autumn hunt in France

The day before the wild boar hunt, we’d eaten horse meat, which was the traditional weekend lunch of chef Olivier Desaintmartin’s childhood. Olivier had earlier taken me along to visit the village horse butcher, who complained that the younger generation of French didn’t eat so much cheval anymore. The butcher blamed it on inferior supermarket horse meat, which he said came — like everything else — pre-packaged from America. “There’s also this idea that the horse is the friend of the man,” said the horse butcher, who also happened to be an old friend of Olivier’s.

That night, in Charleville-Mézières, near the Ardennes Forest, we drank champagne with Olivier’s uncle Jean, who proudly showed off a local hunting magazine that had published his snapshot of a huge, bloody, dead boar he’d recently killed. “That’s what you’ll be flushing out of the bushes tomorrow,” Olivier said to me with a laugh. …

This cake is easy, delicious, and not purple

I’d planned to made ricotta carrot cake. That’s what I thought the recipe said. I didn’t read the instructions. I read the ingredients and didn’t consider the organization because I was so excited by the idea of ricotta and carrot together in a cake I imagined to be light yet rich. Light-ish.

I had cake flour. I needed almond flour. And ricotta. And lemons. Acquiring these ingredients required multiple market trips. …

With great advice from a favorite collaborator

I pulled out some of my favorite tips and takeaways (with quotes) from the audiocourse I just launched on Knowable, called How To Eat Now. Most of these things are so ingrained in my day-to-day cooking, shopping, and eating that I hardly even think about them anymore. Like anything, it takes some time to make them habits, but probably less than you’d think. Toward the bottom, there are also a few tips from the wonderful Holly Haines, — including her “Thanksgiving tray” revelation, which, honestly, blew my mind. I hope you find this useful.

Shop local — or, how to work within our broken food system.

What can you do to get good food into the house when the system is conspiring against you doing that? It depends on how much time and money you have — if you have plenty of both, you can do an awesome job of this. If you’re limited in both, then it becomes trickier. But anything you can do to shorten that supply chain is positive. …

Trade shaming for moderation

If you type into the Google search bar, “What is the healthiest prefecture in Japan?” one spot comes out on top in big, bold letters: Nagano Prefecture.

Some people might be surprised, expecting Okinawa to be the healthiest prefecture. The Okinawan diet is famous around the world and its people are known for living long, healthy lives. While this is true, especially among traditional Okinawan communities that continue to adhere to old ways of living, Nagano has surpassed it.

In 2015, the people of Nagano had a life expectancy of 84.72 (81.75 for men, 87.68 for women), an average that put it at the top in terms of longevity in the country (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare). The prefecture also has the lowest rate of deaths due to illnesses such as heart disease, liver disease, cancer, and pneumonia in the country. …