Yesterday's birthday boy requested, for his birthday dinner, crab cakes, garlic mashed potatoes and salad. Pretty easy supper, but not cheap. I swallowed my inner cheapskate and hardly looked at the price. Well, it was less expensive than dinner out, at least a nice dinner out. The recipe I use for ...

©iStockphoto.com/JLGutierrez Sometimes I recall that I grew up without hummus and am amazed. It seems like such a natural kid-food, but it just wasn’t around in Houston then (now it is—my childhood, we’re talking decades ago now, people). I discovered hummus in my Yankee college town, at a li...

Today's Cook the Book recipe is for thick, juicy, seared sirloin steaks. Not exactly your typical Mother's Day fare. But why shouldn't it be? Steak dinners are always special, whether eaten out at a swanky restaurant, or off a paper plate in your own backyard. Paula Disbrowe's recipe marries hearty ...

I've been having a lot of fun flipping through The Ethnic Paris Cookbook. It's unpretentious, easy to use, and full of tasty dishes that seem to be entirely too simple, if a little hard to believe. And this one is no different. The sauce is the perfect counterpoint to the broiled chicken—it ta...

It began its life as a pizza sauce, nothing more than some canned tomatoes, a slug of red wine and olive oil, and some salt. After all the dough was used, I poured the bright red liquid into a plastic container and moved it to the back of the fridge. In the old days (probably a year ago) I would hav...

I’ve been dreaming about enchiladas recently. I’m not sure where the hankering came from, but it certainly wasn’t helped after I had some spectacularly bad ones at a local Tex-Mex outlet. I decided to tackle them myself. There is no standard sauce, and some can get very complicated. When I fou...