Latest news with #AlexaWeibel
New York Times
27-02-2025
- Lifestyle
- New York Times
Crispy Rice, Twice as Nice
Every refrigerator has furniture. You know, the items that are virtually always there, fixtures of the 40-degree landscape that you may take for granted. In mine, it's eggs — or was eggs, in any case — over in the left corner of the top shelf; the Persian cucumbers in the crisper; the Mason jar of herbs in water on the right side of the bottom shelf; and the quart container of leftover rice smack in the middle of it all. Sometimes the rice is plain; sometimes it's seasoned with salted butter and thinly sliced scallions. But it is always there, waiting for me, like a sofa in the living room. What is not part of my wider kitchen landscape, however, is a microwave. But like any scrappy New Yorker maneuvering about her tiny kitchen, I find a way. And that way is crispy rice. Crispy rice — or leftover rice that is cooked again in fat until it's singed and crunchy, yet still soft and chewy in spots — can add pops of texture to salads in lieu of croutons or nuts. My platonic ideal looks a lot like Alexa Weibel's crispy rice salad with halloumi and ginger-lime vinaigrette: crispy rice stained marigold by turmeric, pickly red onion, squeaky cheese, baby greens (or better yet, arugula) and plenty of acid. View this recipe. It is easy to make this dish vegan: 'If you don't eat dairy, sliced or chopped avocado is a suitable substitute for the halloumi,' Alexa writes. 'It's not quite as textural, but it will provide great richness and heft to the salad.' I'd even add in some seared tofu in addition to avocado, if you go that route, to add some protein to the mix. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
14-02-2025
- Lifestyle
- New York Times
Steak au Poivre for Two? Don't Mind if I Do.
Good morning, and Happy Valentine's Day. It's a night for awkward moments in public spaces, fumblingly shared entrees, Champagne that's not as good as you imagined it would be, with cold, chocolate-covered strawberries for dessert. Or is that just me? I've never liked performative restaurant meals. I don't want to celebrate romance at a two-top at the one place I was able to get a reservation (at the last minute!) and to depend on others for the success of the meal. One exhausted line cook, one overstretched server, one bad song on a playlist and now I'm in a beef with my wife? I don't do well on that sort of stage. Instead: home cooking. A controlled environment. A meal I know I can serve to smiles over candlelight. Steak au poivre (above)! Alexa Weibel's recipe is a stunner, using one large, super-marbled rib-eye steak to deliver an incredible dish of crusty, seared and peppery beef in a pan sauce rich with brandy and heavy cream. Lex makes like a chef and fans thick slices of the steak out over the sauce instead of napping the meat with it, which somehow makes everything look more lavish. Featured Recipe View Recipe → Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
13-02-2025
- Lifestyle
- New York Times
May Arugula Always Find Me
Happy Valentine's Eve. It's time to tell you about my situationship. We've been on and off for years. There was a time when I couldn't get enough of their fresh, edgy nature. Every room they entered grew brighter, so I'd include them wherever I could, bring them up to whoever would listen. And then, one day, I grew, well, bored with their antics. They seemed more cutting than fresh, more bitter than edgy. We grew apart. But, with time and distance, the hard edges of resentment soften into apathy, and then further still into a nostalgic fondness. So when you finally run into them in the grocery store — and run into them you will — you can recall only the reasons you were obsessed with them in the first place. So anyway, I'm back with arugula in a big way. Its peppery leaves add unmistakable verve to simple salads, grain bowls, pastas and so much more. In Melissa Clark's roasted cauliflower and arugula salad, they mellow ever so gently against a mixture of slightly cooled florets, pickly red onions and golden raisins, and robust capers and cumin seeds. (For a version with just a tad more heft to it, look to Alexa Weibel's roasted cauliflower salad, with chunks of halloumi and avocado.) View this recipe. Arugula is especially lovely when wilted by the warmth of fresh-from-the-pot pasta, but why not pulverize it into something unrecognizable, but no less delicious, like arugula pesto? Yotam Ottolenghi dresses short twirled noodles and cannellini beans in such a zippy sauce, and then showers it all with grated halloumi for an unexpected but delightfully tangy finish. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
11-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Simple Salmon to Tell Someone You Love Them
Can you 'Marry Me' anything? A number of 'Marry Me' recipes, a protein draped in a creamy sun-dried tomato sauce ('Marry Me Chicken'; my colleague Alexa Weibel's tomato beans, which readers are calling 'Marry Me Beans'), made my editors and me wonder: Just because you can drench something in that dreamy '90s pink sauce, should you? You should. How else would you find out that crisp-skinned salmon is spectacular with 'Marry Me' sauce? Lindsay Funston's Tuscan-style chicken recipe raked in millions of views after it was published on in 2016 and found new life on TikTok years later. 'Marry Me Salmon' is a fantastic riff, a fish dinner you can cook for yourself and the love of your life any day of the week. It's also nothing new. In 2023, Alyssa Rivers of the Recipe Critic blog published a version with lemon zest, which helpfully brightens fatty fishes, as did Hajar Larbah, who runs the blog Moribyan. As Ms. Larbah describes the salmon, it's 'so good it will make you say 'Marry Me' to whomever makes it for you!' Hers omits the sun-dried tomatoes but maintains the dish's lush, creamy essence. There are others, too, that vary in ingredients, but all bear the title of 'Marry Me.' For weeks, I was on the hunt for one of those old-fashioned red-sauce-joint emulsions, light on the palate, almost brothy but rich. While eating as many pink sauces as I could out in the world, I realized that what makes the best ones stand out is simplicity, with nothing competing — and lots of yellow onion, sweet, mild and familiar. You could add garlic, but salmon isn't chicken, so its sauce needs a lighter touch. Chicken broth works, but bottled clam juice (a smart tip from my colleague Genevieve Ko), readily available in most grocery stores, gives you a clean seafood taste. A splash of heavy cream takes you into blushed vodka-sauce territory. Sun-dried tomatoes make it 'Marry Me.' By pan-searing the fish, mostly on the skin side, in sun-dried tomato oil, then gently (and briefly) poaching the flesh side in the 'Marry Me' sauce, you get shattering skin yielding to plush salmon. There's something beautiful in how even the most simple treatment can bring out an ingredient's best qualities. No one told me that when I got down on a knee last August and asked my partner to marry me, that nothing would change; there would still be dishes to do, bills to pay and laundry to sort. But having fit this dish into our busy lives time and again, I realized that marriage is the everyday parts, the parade of weeknight dinners over the occasional date night. 'Marry Me' truly can mean anything, but above all, it's when the ordinary becomes transcendent. Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.
