Honest Cooking and Travel

Pozole rojo is a dish that rewards patience. The chile base, built from guajillo, pasilla, ancho. Arbol chiles toasted on a comal with garlic and onion, takes some time to prepare, but it produces a broth of genuine depth that no shortcut can replicate. In Mexico, pozole is tied to celebration: it appears at birthdays, holidays. Gatherings where a large pot on the stove signa...

Red lentil dal is what I make when I want something nourishing, cheap, and ready in under thirty minutes with no advance planning. The lentils require no soaking and cook down naturally into a thick, creamy porridge. On their own they are mild and starchy. What turns them into dal is the tadka: a separate pan of ghee with cumin seeds, mustard seeds, onion, garlic, ginger. Tom...

I had this in Wroclaw, at a restaurant where the tartare arrived on a wooden board as a flattened mound with an egg yolk nestled on top. It was not the French version I was used to. No capers, no cornichons. Instead: pickled red onion, fresh lovage, pumpkin seeds, and a smear of French mustard mixed into the raw sirloin with canola oil. The lovage was the surprise. It has a f...

I learned to blind bake tart shells from a pastry chef who treated pie weights like a personal insult. She used dried beans, saved in a jar labelled ‘tart beans,’ reused for years. This recipe asks for the same thing: beans, rice, or pie weights pressed into foil-lined shells, baked at 400°F (204°C) until golden, then five to seven more minutes without the weights.

I h...

Chocolate-covered pretzels from the store are always too thick. The chocolate coating overwhelms the pretzel and you lose the salt. This recipe drizzles melted chocolate over thin pretzels using a squirt bottle, and the result is completely different: mostly pretzel, thin streaks of dark chocolate, enough sweetness to notice but not enough to take over.

The process is ...