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"Like much of what Michael has written, [this book] makes other books on the subject redundant. Filled with history information and great recipes, it will definitely improve your parties." —Ruth Reichl, in her substack newsletter, La Briffe I'm so excited to announce the publication of my new book, The Book of Cocktail Ratios: The Surprising Simplicity of Classic Cocktails. It's based on the idea that if you know a few simple ratios, and some basic techniques, you not only know scores of recipes, but you can also have confidence in improvising your own. The bulk of the book is devoted to isol ..read more

Every time I ate at the erstwhile Mercer Kitchen in Soho, I ordered the coconut soup. I could never get enough of it. When I was writing Jean-Georges's memoir, JGV: A Life In 12 Recipes, I made sure this was one of those recipes, and it's one of my favorite soups on the planet. It's a Thai-style soup that's flavored with all kinds of aromatics, most of which are readily available but some that are not. The soup requires galangal, a woody, tough rhizome, like ginger but gentle and more floral, lemongrass, and lime leaves. They're all essential to this soup. Mise for the soup: from left, shiita ..read more

As I'll note in tomorrow's newsletter, Ann and I tried, somewhat carelessly, two times to make this simple-seeming pasta dish, with recipes we found on line. Both were the same: heavy, clumpy, barely edible caccio pepe, the cheese knotted into chunks, separated fat, insipid pasta. This time, we did some research and found two invaluable sources that followed similar tacks. Lydia Bastianich’s recipe, and Kenji’s serious eats description of what makes it work. We did a version closer to Kenji’s in that we finished the pasta in a Dutch oven, cooking the pasta in a small amount of water (to incre ..read more

A few weeks ago, my wife Ann decided to do something extremely rare. As some know, I have a hard time following a recipe exactly. Ann is the opposite—she’s a devout recipe follower. If I ask her “why” about anything she’s cooking in the kitchen, the answer is invariably, “Because that’s what the recipe says to do.” So when she said she would be making a Thai-style curry for dinner, I asked her which recipe would she be using? She replied, “I’m not using one. I’m making my own.” I felt the ground of West 12th Street tremble. “What?” I asked. She directed a you-heard-me look my way. And so she ..read more

With these last few posts on cooking for groups, it occurred to me that I should post one of my go-to, fabulously easy, always-gets-raves main course that serves a lot of people.  East Carolina barbecue, called pulled pork here up north. When I arrived at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, from Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1980s I knew the word barbecue to be a verb. You did it on a grill. As a noun, it meant a gathering to eat food cooked on a grill—it was something you invited neighbors to. But on the drive back from a place called Jugtown (to get there we’d gone through ..read more

It is that time in summer when the basil starts taking over my yard and local tomatoes are finally ripe, red and misshapen and so juicy that after I cut into one I need to wipe down the counter. In other words, it’s the perfect confluence of ingredients for tomato pie. And not just any tomato pie, but Laurie Colwin’s tomato pie, a feast of tomatoes and cheese and basil baked into a double-biscuit crust. So begin’s Ann Hood’s essay on tomato pie, collected in her Kitchen Yarns: Notes on Life, Love, and Food as well as Best Food Writing 2014. This is a remarkable essay, which I often use in c ..read more

Just as Mac and Emilia and I were trying to decide how best to relaunch our line of spoons and kitchen tools, a young woman named Stacey, from a company called Rush Order Tees, wrote to me asking if I wanted a T-shirt customized for me. I thought this was a splendid idea! A while back, I asked Joleen and David Hughes, of Level Design in Calistoga, to create a logo for my site. They came up with the very clever knife-and-quill logo that tops this page. I love it. And so I put it on a Rush Order Tees T-shirt. I'm really impressed by the quality of the shirt itself and the quality of the design ..read more

Thanks to a gift a new cocktail is created, a variation on the Manhattan, using an amaro instead of bitters. Last week, Tracey Minkin, a friend, roving editor, and writer, passed through Providence to stay with us and brought a Brooklyn-made Frenet-style amaro by a company called Faccia-Brutto. Chef Patrick Miller opened the company exactly when the pandemic hit Brooklyn in March 2020. His Fernet Pianta is strong and dark and bitter, with notes of pine forest and anise. Miller, formerly of Rucola Restaurant in Brooklyn, New York, worked for 14 years at restaurants around the world. He grew up ..read more

Ann made this massive polpettone, meatloaf stuffed with prosciutto, spinach and provolone, for a dinner party and it was fantastic. Adapting a David Tanis recipe from The Times, she uses 1 part each ground beef, ground pork, and Italian sausage. That amounts to three pounds of meat, plus nearly a pound of other ingredients, so we froze the uneaten half for a full dinner later in the week. It can be made ahead of time and served at room temperature. The dish was preceeded by Genovese-style artichokes, also fantastic to eat. Part of what made this meal special was the fact that two of the guest ..read more